In 2015, a car accident left me with chronic pain the doctors said I’d simply have to learn to live with. I might never carry groceries normally again, they told me. The medications barely touched it — and the few that did took more from me than they gave back. I was in my twenties, quietly grieving the body I used to have.
Then a friend handed me turmeric. Just turmeric. It eased what the opioids couldn’t — and something in me cracked open. If a single root from the spice cabinet could do this, what else had I been taught to overlook? That one moment became a decade of study, and eventually became Lunar Clover.
Chronic pain has a way of stripping everything down to what matters. It made me a careful listener — to plants, and to bodies. I don’t chase symptoms; I look for the pattern beneath them — heat or cold, damp or dry, tension or depletion — and the plants whose energetics answer it. It’s Western Herbal Medicine read through tissue states, in the Matthew Wood tradition, and it’s grounded, every step, in my formal training as a nutritionist: an Associate of Science in the Applied Science of Integrated Health Sciences, with a specialization in Herbal Medicine, from ACHS.
These days you’ll find me in the garden, teaching, blending oils by hand, and pouring tea at recovery events. The work is the same as it has always been: helping people find their way back to the wisdom their own bodies never stopped speaking.