Ask Circe

Letters from Other WomenYou are not alone

I inherited my grandmother's garden journal. 113 plants, hand-drawn. None of the names are in any language I recognise. +

The script your grandmother wrote in is not meant to be read with the eyes. It is meant to be read with the hands. Those 113 plants are not a botanical guide — they are a transmission. Women have kept this knowledge for thousands of years, passing it from hand to hand, grandmother to granddaughter, because the institutions that burned women for knowing things could not burn what was never written in their language. Your grandmother's journal is a cipher. Not to hide. To protect. The plant that looks like a sun with roots reaching down — boil its leaves for seven minutes. That tea will stop a cramp faster than any chemist's pill. You already know this. She already taught you. You just didn't know you were learning.

Do. Take one drawing each week. Find the plant. When you do, you will feel it before you see it. Eat. The small blue-flowered herb on page 17 — three leaves in a salad. Roman women called it the thinker's leaf. Drink. The root on page 42 — dried, ground, steeped in hot water with honey. For days when your body feels like a battleground.

My mother kept a wheel. Twelve sections, hand-painted, women holding stars. She used it to decide everything. +

Before the Gregorian calendar — imposed by a pope who needed to control Easter — women followed a different wheel. Thirteen months. Twenty-eight days each. Plus one day out of time. Your mother's wheel with women holding stars maps the female body onto the sky. Ovulation matching lunar phases. Planting seasons matching rising constellations. The body is a calendar. The sky is a mirror. You are not missing her. You are remembering what she taught you before you had words for it.

Do. Track your moods against the moon for three cycles. The pattern is not coincidence. Eat. New moon: dark greens and seeds. Full moon: celebratory foods, shared with women. Drink. Dandelion root during the waning moon. Raspberry leaf during the waxing.

I dream of women in green pools, connected by channels. They are all ages. Just... there. Together. Soaking. +

You have seen the bathing women. The pools are not baths — they are transmission. Knowledge flows from woman to woman through water, through touch, through shared time. The green colour is infused with herbs your grandmother grew. The channels are the lineage. Find your water. Find the women. The instruction will come through your skin, not your ears.

Do. Run a bath with rosemary, lavender, and sea salt. One candle. No phone. Once a week. It is not indulgence. It is maintenance. Eat. Warm bread, olive oil, salt. After the bath. Feed what you have opened. Drink. Warm water with lemon and a drop of rosewater. Before and after. The water inside meets the water outside.

I found nine clay jars in my great-aunt's cellar. Sealed with wax. Labelled in script I cannot read. +

Your great-aunt was an apothecary. The nine jars are preparations — not recipes, but formulas. Sequence. Temperature. Timing. The phase of the moon when the root was pulled. The women who made these knew: the plant is alive. The water is alive. Start with the jar that smells of honey and smoke. A quarter teaspoon in warm milk, at night, for seven nights. For inflammation of the spirit — what they now call anxiety, depression, burnout.

Do. Open one jar per month. Not faster. She took years to fill them. Honour that pace. Eat. The dark resin (jar three) — grain-of-rice piece, chewed slowly. Tastes of pine and regret. Settles a stomach anxiety has tied in knots. Drink. The dried white flowers (jar seven) — three in boiling water, covered, four minutes. For the 3am thoughts that have no business being at 3am.

I am afraid everything my mother knew dies with me. I have no daughters. The garden is overgrown. The recipes are in a script no one taught me to read. +

You are not the last. The line does not require daughters. It requires witnesses. Knowledge that was burned, buried, and erased survived because women passed it sideways — to nieces, to neighbours, to the girl at the market who looked at dried herbs with recognition. Write it down. In whatever script feels natural to your hand. Leave it where a woman will find it. She will. She always does. That is how the line continues. It has never been about blood. It has always been about recognition.

Do. Start your own book. Write to the woman who will find it in fifty years. She is real. Eat. Share a meal with a younger woman. Tell her one thing your grandmother told you. Just one. Drink. Elderflower cordial, homemade. The elder tree keeps women's secrets. Every part heals. Every part remembers.

Tell Her How You FeelShe is listening

Letters from Other WomenYou are not alone