Medicine Wheel GardenI had a great birthday. For one thing, my favorite former employer, GladRags, asked me to blog for them (joy of joys). Secondly, we have a fantastic new tradition in our multi-generational house (I live with my parents, husband and two children in Vermont—I know it wouldn’t work for everyone but it’s working out really well for us). Instead of buying each other gifts for all the birthdays and holidays, we decided to put that money toward a project that the birthday person gets to choose. For my birthday this May I chose to make a medicine wheel garden in the front flowerbed. I spent the weekend digging in the dirt, mending the rock wall, and preparing the flowerbed for all the cool new plants I got to buy with my birthday gift certificate to the local plant store. My shopping spree included a bird bath, gazing ball and all my favorites: lavender, lemon balm, sage, strawberries, roses and thyme. Hoo-ray! Medicine wheels or shields are a Native American tradition used to create sacred space. I built mine on the principles found in The Medicine Wheel Garden: Creating Sacred Space for Healing, Celebration, and Tranquility by E. Barrie Kavasch. I associate them mostly with safety and have built small ones out of stones on my dresser to symbolically represent one that would surround my home or me.

I happened to read New Moon Rising: Reclaiming the Sacred Rites of Menstruation by Linda Heron Wind around the same time as I was working on this garden. Wind describes how to make a belly shield, which I quickly noticed was the same concept as a medicine wheel garden. Belly shields can be made either physically or mentally as a way to protect your belly from the negative energies in life. She also said something that struck me: that women also need a space to go to during PMS time where they don’t need to have their belly shields up, a place and time to be open to what I think of as the higher calling of menstruating: inspiration and understanding. Maybe my medicine wheel garden can be a place like that for me…although it is in the front of my house where all the neighbors can see as well as traffic going by. Do you think they’d mind me washing out my GladRags out there?

Michelle