The Gilded Leaf 🌿

The Root That Grew From Tears

Elecampane: a cold-season root for the cough that lingers, and for the grief we carry in our chests

This week I sat down with a root I suspect most of you have never tasted. You may have eaten a little piece of her story without knowing it.

Her name is elecampane - Inula helenium. It sounds like a spell, and in a way it is.

The…

Keter: The Crown That Is Also Nothing · The Living Tree, Episode 13 · Season Two Finale

We’ve reached the top of the tree. ✨

In this final episode of The Living Tree, we arrive at Keter, the Crown — the first and highest sephirah on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Keter sits closest to Ein Sof, the infinite source, so far beyond ordinary language that the tradition sometimes calls it Ayin: Nothing. Not emptiness, but a fullness too vast to be named.

A note on direction: traditional Kabbalah teaches the Tree from the top down, as light flowing from Keter into the world. This series climbed from the ground up instead, the way a seed grows toward the light. We did it on purpose, and with deep respect for a sacred Jewish tradition I come to as a student.

🪴 In this episode:

✨ A thank-you to everyone who made this climb, from the first step to the last.

✨ The whole tree, one last time, with a treasure from every stop: Malkuth’s four colors, Joseph the dreamer at Yesod, the prophets of Netzach and Hod, Tiferet’s eight paths, Da’at’s dashed circle, the Fear of Isaac at Geburah, the ancient verse still sung for Chesed, the tiny Yod of Chokmah, and Binah’s fifty gates

✨ Keter’s teaching: the Hidden Light, the number 620, and why the crown and the kingdom may be the same point seen from two directions

✨ Sahasrara, the crown chakra: the one pairing every source agreed on

✨ Chamomile, a sacred sun-herb and the most ordinary cup in the world

✨ A simple practice, a celebration at the summit, and a first glimpse of Season Three

Today’s steeping: chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla). Pour water just off the boil over a tablespoon of dried flowers, cover, and steep for eight to ten minutes.

A gentle safety note: chamomile is one of the gentlest teas there is, but she belongs to the daisy family, so anyone sensitive to ragweed or daisies should go carefully. If you’re pregnant, nursing, taking blood thinners, or managing a health condition, check with your healthcare provider before making her a daily habit. This episode is for reflection and education, not medical advice.

Coming next: after a restful pause, Season Three follows the 🟡 full moons of the year, with plant allies, folklore, and moon wisdom for the darkening months. The Harvest Moon rises full this weekend. Go say hello. 🪬

🌿 Sources for this episode’s fun facts: Sefer Yetzirah 1:4; 1 Chronicles 29:11; Genesis 31:42; Proverbs 10:25; Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 21b; Chabad.org, “The Sefirot” and “Prophecy from the Hip”; inner.org on Keter.

Thank you for climbing with me ✨

As always this is Bridget signing off,

Steeped in intention and offered with care! Enjoy.

Cheers! ☕️✨

Last week we crossed the Abyss into Chokmah — the lightning flash of wisdom that arrives whole, before it has words for itself. This week, we meet the one who was waiting on the other side to catch it.

Binah means understanding, though that word undersells her. She’s the Supernal Mother, the Great Sea without a visible shore — the one who takes a shapeless flash of insight and does the slow, unglamorous work of giving it edges, dimensions, a form you can actually live inside. Where Chokmah is instant, Binah is patient. Where Chokmah is force, Binah is structure. Neither one works without the other.

Today’s herb is marshmallow root — Althaea officinalis, no relation to the campfire treat, though the plant is exactly where that name came from. Marshmallow is a demulcent: steeped cold and slow, she turns silken and thick, coating and soothing whatever’s gone dry, parched, or worn thin. It’s one of the clearest matches in this whole series — a root that does, quite literally, what Binah does on the tree: she doesn’t rush what’s raw. She surrounds it with enough gentle substance to settle.

We talk through Binah’s astrological home in Saturn, her shared third-eye correspondence with Chokmah, and the honest tension in the old texts between Binah-as-severe and Binah-as-tender — and why both can be true in the same mother at once.

Then a personal one: where I’ve historically rushed my own flashes of certainty into finished things before they were ready — and what it’s asking of me now to trust the slow shaping instead.

This week’s practice: steep something — marshmallow root, or anything else — far longer than feels efficient, and let one of your own unexamined certainties sit in the water with it.

Steeped in intention — offered with care. 🌿

Just a quick note, Sorry that this episode is delayed, It was a very special weekend for my daughter so I am a little late on getting it out— thank you for your patience!!

In this episode, we cross the Abyss for the first time in the Living Tree series — out of the sephirot we can work with directly, and into Chokmah, the flash of wisdom that arrives whole, before it has language for itself.

Today’s steeping is bay laurel, the same leaf in your spice cabinet, and, according to legend, the same leaf once chewed by the Oracle at Delphi before she spoke.

In this episode:

* What Chokmah actually means, and why it isn’t the same thing as “wisdom” in the way we usually use that word

* Chokmah and Binah — the Supernal Father and Mother at the top of the tree, and why neither can do their work alone

* Ajna, the third eye, and how Chokmah’s flash differs from the mind’s slower, structural third-eye work we met back in Hod (Episode 4)

* The real story behind bay laurel — Daphne, Apollo, and the Pythia’s leaf

* A personal reflection on trusting a certainty before you have the argument to defend it

* This week’s practice: sitting with a flash of knowing, unexplained, for the length of one cup of tea.

Last week we sat with Geburah, the sword that prunes, the necessary no. This week we rise to her opposite — Chesed, the sephirah of mercy and boundless lovingkindness, the open hand that gave last week’s sword something worth balancing in the first place.

Chesed means kindness, or lovingkindness, though no single English word quite holds it. She’s also called Gedulah, greatness, and in this tradition, greatness isn’t measured by power or achievement. It’s measured by how freely you’re able to give. The tradition’s figure for Chesed is Abraham, remembered not for his power but for a tent kept open on all sides, so a stranger could find welcome from any direction.

Today’s herb is motherwort, Leonurus cardiaca, the lion-hearted one, named centuries ago for a mother’s devotion. She’s tall, scrappy, and easy to overlook in a hedgerow, which feels fitting for a plant carrying this much heart. In Traditional Chinese Medicine she’s Yi Mu Cao, the benefit-the-mother herb. But she’s also one of the only herbs in this entire series that comes with a real caution label attached to her generosity, a reminder that even the most open-hearted giving needs a boundary to stay healthy, which is exactly the conversation Chesed and Geburah are having with each other this week.

We trace Chesed through Kabbalistic tradition and its yogic cousin, Anahata, the heart chakra, two traditions, worlds apart, both landing on the same open, generous center of the chest. And we sit with a small, honest practice: naming one person you give to freely, and asking honestly whether that giving still comes from abundance, or has quietly started running on empty.

This is the “Living Tree Series”, Season 2 of The Gilded Leaf Podcast, a slow climb through the Tree of Life, one cup and one sephirah at a time.

Steeped in intention, offered with care.

~ The Gilded Leaf 🌿

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We’ve been climbing the Tree of Life together this season, one sephirah and one herb at a time — starting at the ground, at Malkuth, and working our way up. After a well-earned summer pause, we return to the climb at Geburah, the sephirah most people would rather skip.

Geburah means strength, or might — the ability to say a true, difficult no. She sits on the Pillar of Severity, directly across the tree from Chesed, the sephirah of open-handed mercy we’ll meet next episode. Where Chesed gives and gives, Geburah is the discipline that gives that generosity its shape — the boundary, the closed door, the necessary limit that keeps love from spilling into self-erasure.

Today’s herb is nettle — a plant nearly all of us have brushed against by accident, usually near a garden fence, and rememberd mostly for the sting. But that sting isn’t a design flaw. It’s the plant’s own boundary, the same lesson Geburah is teaching us: sometimes the thing that protects what’s tender has to have an edge.

We trace Geburah through Kabbalistic tradition and its yogic cousin, the solar plexus or the third charka is the seat of fire and discernment, two very different traditions that independently landed on the same territory of the body. We sit with nettle’s long history as food, medicine, and folk protector, and close with a small, honest practice: naming one door in your own life that’s still open past the point of generosity.

This is Episode 9 of The Living Tree Series, Season 2 of The Gilded Leaf Podcast, a slow climb through the Tree of Life, one cup and one sephirah at a time.

Steeped in intention, offered with care.

The Gilded Leaf 🌿

This week at the tea table, I’m confessing something I suspect a lot of you know quietly in your own bodies: I have been exhausted, and instead of resting, I kept finding busywork to hide behind. It took my cat Jack — utterly shameless, completely feral with joy over a sprig of catnip — to show me what unearned rest actually looks like.

Catnip is our herb this week, and it turns out it has a very different job for us than it does for him. For humans, it’s a gentle nervine and mild carminative — something herbalists have reached for over generations to quiet an overactive mind and ease the knot stress leaves in the stomach. We talk through what it actually does in the body, how to steep a cup that settles rather than sedates, and a few gentle notes on who should skip it.

It’s a short one this week, more confession than lecture, built around a single question I want you to sit with at your own table: where have you been forcing yourself to earn rest instead of just taking it? There’s a small ritual at the end, as always, to help you practice the answer rather than just think about it.

🌿 A quick note before I go: I’m stepping away from the table for the next two Sundays for some real, unplugged summer rest of my own. I’ll be back pouring and confessing the week of August 21st. Until then, steep something calming, and let an afternoon be unproductive without needing to earn it first. 🌿

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Da’at is the strangest, most contested point on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life — a “hidden” sephirah so debated that even her existence is questioned within the tradition. This episode addresses that debate directly: ten sephirot appear across the historical textual tradition, with Da’at as a real but structurally unusual eleventh, the point where Chokmah (Wisdom) and Binah (Understanding) meet.

Her name shares a Hebrew root with yada, the verb used for the most intimate kind of knowing — not information held at arm’s length, but knowledge that changes you the moment you have it. In the body, she lives at the throat: the narrow last passage before an internal truth becomes a spoken one.

Today’s herb is vervain, the ancient “altar plant” sacred to Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Druids alike, once carried by Roman peace envoys as a guarantee that their words could be trusted. We close with a practice built around a single true sentence — the thing you know from lived experience that you haven’t yet fully said out loud.

Last Friday, we sat with Netzach — hibiscus in the cup, endurance in the legs, the quiet stubbornness that keeps a person, or a seed, or a small tea company, showing up without proof it’s working. At the end of that episode, I made you a promise: that we’d come back to the heart. Reworked. Released properly this time. This is that episode.

Some of you may remember that Tiferet actually aired once before — out of order, before Hod and Netzach had done their work. I pulled it back down. Not because the writing was wrong, but because the ground underneath it wasn’t ready yet. This series hasn’t moved in a straight line, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. We started at the root with Malkuth. We moved into the dream with Yesod. We wandered into the mind with Hod. We crossed into the wanting with Netzach. And only now, with all of that underneath us, do we arrive back at the center. At the heart. At Tiferet.

I also promised you rose, hawthorn, linden, and motherwort — the four herbs I return to most often for the heart. They still matter, and you’ll meet all four of them again as this series continues. But sitting down to actually write this episode, a different plant kept pushing her way to the front of the cup, insisting she belonged at this table too. So today, we’re slowing all the way down around just one herb, and letting her have the whole room.

Her name means, quite literally, “I bring heart.” Roman soldiers drank her before battle for exactly that reason. Medieval knights carried her stitched into the scarves given to them by the women who loved them. She is small, star-shaped, and a blue so bright she looks like she wandered out of a stained-glass window — and she is nothing like the soft, familiar heart herbs I usually reach for.

Let me tell you her name. Borage — Borago officinalis, star flower. The most-cited origin of her name is the Latin cor-ago, “I bring heart.” The Celtic word borrach means courage. Pliny the Elder wrote that borage steeped in wine banished sorrow and dullness of spirit. In Western herbalism, she’s long been used as what some herbalists call an adrenal restorative — a plant for people who’ve been running on reserves they don’t have anymore. Not anxious exhaustion. Depleted exhaustion. The kind that comes after you’ve already done the hard thing, and your whole system is asking to be replenished before it’s asked to be brave again.

.Tiferet’s teaching this week is about the heart as function, not just feeling — the pivot point of the entire tree, gathering the clarity Hod worked so hard for and the wanting Netzach refused to let go of, and weaving them into something whole enough to actually live inside. We walk over to Anahata, the heart chakra from Season One, and I tell you something I didn’t expect to say out loud when I sat down to write this: that this episode is proof of its own teaching. It didn’t bloom on the first try either

.We close with a simple practice — a cup held in both hands, an honest question about what your heart needs tended this week, and the reminder that sometimes the most advanced spiritual work looks exactly like sitting still.

The full episode, including the personal reflection, is linked below.

Steeped in intention — offered with care. The Gilded Leaf 🌿

In this episode:I took last week off for the holiday and I’m back refreshed, with some insight into what I needed that weekend, and got. It’s been two weeks since our chrysanthemum chat; last week’s steep was lavender (go check that out), so I’m playing catch-up. Some weeks the confession isn’t dramatic, just quiet: three podcasts a week, and somewhere between shower-thoughts and script pages, I’d gone tender at the edges without noticing I’d stopped sitting still.

Enter chrysanthemum — cool where I’d been running hot, moving into the Lung and Liver meridians in TCM to clear heat the gentle way. She didn’t clear a single deadline off my plate; she gave me a quieter mind to meet them with. This is burnout that doesn’t look like burnout, and draft-stage living: slow, unfinished, still becoming.

A question to sit with: where are you gathering so much that you’ve forgotten to hold a cup and let your mind be quiet? Pour something warm, come sit with me and chrysanthemum.