A Rose By Any Other Name
Welcome to my sandbox.
It is with joy that I return to my first written public medium: the blog. This is a space where I will share raw, unrefined creative material, channeled transmissions, ethnobotanical connections, cosmological musings, and whatever wants to come through.
This is a space where I will play, process, and above all, try not to try to produce—but merely to transmit and share. xx - RR
Rose on UCC campus.
As I prepare to return, in September 2026, to academia in my first on-campus program in 25 years (I will be studying Irish Folklore at University College Cork in Ireland, my ancestral lands), I continue to deepen in to what I now realize I’ve been weaving for the past six years, since the pandemic changed everything. I am apprenticing in the healing arts, those esoteric, subtle, ancient ways of knowing, being, doing, communicating, and remembering that span the realms of consciousness and experience.
Currently, I am part of a mentorship program with ethnobotanist, herbalist, and consciousness explorer Ash Ritter, founder of Black Sage Botanicals: an ethnobotanical classroom, co-created container, and living practice of attunement and listening. Made of all of us in the cohort and our more-than-human allies, it is deepening my relationship with place, plants, and subtle frequencies in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.
It is part of my current path to rediscover, reclaim, and heal for, from, and alongside my own ancestry and indigenaeity, one given to me in the jungles and mountains of Guatemala and Peru last winter. As my bones remember the place where my body came from, reacquaint themselves with the ancient place-based deities and sacred spaces, part of how we remember is through reconnecting with our botanical allies.
I learned this month that the Rose family is much broader than i realized, including berries and my ally in my healing journey since i broke my pelvis and remembered my transness: Hawthorn. It turns out we can trust some of those bodily cravings and persuasions after all: it's information about the nourishment we need.
I recently discovered a YouTube channel where you can listen to the actual music created by plants. Because, as I’ve learned in another apprenticeship with master astrologer Rick Levine, everything in the universe, from planets to plants, is just frequency vibration. The key is finding the allies you resonate with.
I listened to the song of the Rose today, and she told me to create a new space to share my more experimental work: a blog to showcase a combination of art, poetry, and channeling around the themes of storytelling, consciousness, identity, holistic healing, communication with the more-than-human realms, sacred space, seasonal ritual, and astrology. I won’t send the full post to your inbox, but you can sign up for updates.
Now, my first poem, which is live on the blog, on releasing my former identity through plant frequencies with love. For as long as I fear it, resist it, want it to go away, it shall haunt me like a ghost, forever hungry.
Thank you immensely to my teachers Ash Ritter, Rose, Hawthorn, and Holly.
A Rose By Any Other Name
Channel/Poem/Plant Frequency Transmission
Listening to plant vibrations I love the Hawthorn and Cork Oak but I don’t like the Holly, it sounds like it looks: the doctrine of signatures even applies to sounds!!
It sounds spiny and prickly like stay away from me sounds familiar I always want to be different and keep people at a distance even as I long for them I just want the ones who understand without me having to say anything at all
Watching the smoke of my incense curling in these intricate ways it looks like the Gaelic designs that are carved on the circles of stones and appear everywhere in my consciousness
I hate the sound of Holly frankly and I yes do resemble it I resemble all those First-House personas of aversion, Scorpio Pluto and Saturn on the South Node, prickly and angular, a walking skeleton that broke and grew back all wrong
So we’re back to Irish scarcity housing insecurity the English chased us off our land colonized us in our own country so of course we have complexes about not having housing
They say it’s a crisis but I choose not to be seduced by these pessimistic visions yes there are obstacles but we create the suffering everyone here is living somewhere so it’s not impossible why do we have to make things so hard for ourselves all the time
I’m going back to Hawthorn Holly is too hard
