Our Core In-Person Offerings:
Tea and conversation about the planetary transits and seasonal plants that are guiding the qualities and energies of the current moment.
Community, networking, friendship, and a robust “third house” culture around the trials and joys of raising your kids.
Accessing Care, Energy and Nourishment Without Spending Money
Plants & Planets Salon
Join us for tea and a conversation about the planetary transits and seasonal plants that are guiding the qualities and energies of the current moment. Facilitated by clinical herbalists Meg Madden and Sydney Baston and writer and astrologer Dr. Cameron Steele, the plants and planets salon will offer opportunities to learn, discuss, and work with the energetic, physical, and creative correspondences of the vegetative and stellar worlds around you.
We’ll serve seasonal tea, open with journal prompts and a tarot reading, and lead an engaging, informative, and fun conversation about the themes of the evening. Also includes access to our Plants and Planets Discord server and special meetups for those in the group around key moments such as solstices, equinoxes, planetary ingresses, retrogrades, and more.
Mother’s Salon
It’s no secret that both cultural and institutional support systems are failing contemporary parents. We can’t wave a magic wand and offer you subsidized childcare, a national parental leave program, and a living wage no matter what kind of work you do, but we can offer you community, networking, friendship, and a robust “third house” culture around the trials and joys of raising your kids.
We’ll meet for casual conversation, honest dialogue, ritual and ceremonial support, and connection through, beyond, and in spite of the nitty gritty, fluid-covered lives we lead as parents. Inclusive of all stages of motherhood. Dr. Cameron Steele, mother, writer, astrologer, and former women’s and gender studies professor, will guide our Mother’s Circle, opening each group with creative prompts, a brief meditative or divinatory exercise, or whatever participants seem to want or need that evening.
Well-Being is Free
At a time when wellness and accessibility seem increasingly at odds, it can feel overwhelming to discover the basic tools, routines, and strategies to support a daily sense of being OK, never mind being well. At the same time, the self-care and technology industries have run roughshod over long-standing human traditions of caring for oneself within the context of one’s home, relationships, and wider communities; transforming the self-generosity of those traditions into multi-billion dollar ventures that stoke and prey on individual fears around failure, illness, and isolation.
Despite this, there continue to be deep seams of abundance and support that run through all of our lives, if only we’re able to notice, identify, and interact with them. The word “well” comes from the Latin root “velle,” meaning to wish strongly and related to the word “volition,” to exercise one’s will; well-being, from this perspective, reminds us that taking care of oneself involves what we always already have on hand, with a little bit of spiritual wishing and practical effort thrown in for good measure.
In this class, we will shed light on how to better engage with the mundane and hidden realities of a given day in order to better access, define, and build well-being in your life, day by day, week by week. We’ll provide new frameworks for food and meals, sleep and rest, work and activity, drawing on our combined trainings in herbalism, astrology, tarot, women’s and gender studies, and philosophy.
This is not a manifestation class; students will leave with practical, tangible information about how to build a weekly schedule that centers well-being and provides access to foundational wellness.
Our Venue
The Elderberry Apothecary
A woman-owned & women-run apothecary offering herbal medicine to the Charlottesville, VA community and beyond.
