Wild Cherries – Homework

Check back on this page for monthly homework assignments for our 2023 Intro to Herbal Medicine class.

Turning in Your Homework

Homework can be turned in in person, emailed to homework@wildcherries.org (to share privately with the teachers), or uploaded to the shared google drive (to make it available to the whole class).

For April

Change Work

  • Revisit the intentions you wrote in class. Spend some time with them, daydream about them, change them or add to them if you desire.
  • Tend to your class altar.

Wildcrafting

Cultural Appropriation

Reflection

Write ½-1 page about a family healing tradition you grew up with.

Pick two or more questions from these suggestions that you feel drawn to to answer:

  • What parts of these articles/recordings feel painful for you?
  • What parts make you want to act differently?
  • What parts left you with more questions and things to you want to think more about or spend more time with?
  • Are there parts that you had a hard time with or disagree with?
  • Wildcrafting:
    • What ways do you strive to or want to practice a culture of gratitude?
    • What are ways you want to have relationships with wild plants that don’t involve gathering them?
    • The “Leave it for Native People” video talks about why non-indigenous people shouldn’t harvest white sage. Are there plants in your area that you think should not be wildcrafted, for ecological, spiritual or ethical reasons?
  • Cultural appropriation:
    • Write ½ to 1 page about a family healing tradition
    • What are the impacts on us when our cultural practices are appropriated? What healing do we need around that?
    • What are the impacts on us when our cultural practices are lost, and what healing do we need around that?

Materia Medica

Seek out wild cherry! Spend time with this tree, visit it, sit with it, smell it, hug it, make a tea of it, climb it, run your fingers over its bark. What do you feel and notice when you spend time with it? What features do you notice? What other creatures do you notice interacting with cherry? What role does it play in its interspecies community?

Energetics

  • For one meal, think and write about the energetics of each food in your meal –
    • What are the flavors you notice, thinking about the five basic flavors (sweet, salty, bitter, sour, pungent/spicy), and any others you want to describe
    • Is the food hot or cold? Dry or damp? Does it seem slow or fast?
    • If it feels ok, spend some time noticing how the food feels in your mouth.
    • Where do you feel the food in your body? How do you feel 15 minutes after eating? An hour? (Set a timer!)
  • (Optional) Do this for a breakfast, a lunch, a dinner, a snack (it doesn’t have to be all in one day)

Plants and Botany

Go look at trees, choose two trees and spend 15 minutes with each tree.  Observe. Write down all the observations you make of the tree so that someone else could go find that tree.  

Anatomy & Physiology

  • In april we’re talking about skin! Think about:
    what is the energetics of your skin?
    what does your skin do for your body?
    what are ways your skin gets injured?
  • Do something nice for your skin! (eg. oil it, lotion it, soak it, appreciate it, say loving things to it)

Miscellaneous!

  • Get on the slack! Find the #introductions channel and post an introduction!
  • Try connecting to the google drive

Past Homework Assignments from Bygone Years

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