Life lessons from a stinging nettle.

It was a beautiful sunny morning yesterday; the perfect weather for taking a slow meander along a Devon country lane. Armed with wicker basket and two good friends, I spent the morning wild food foraging. Little did I know that those four hours in that little quiet lane would profoundly change me, my understanding of the world, my connection to the past and the way I see the future unfolding around me.

I’ve always wanted to be able to forage. However, I’ve a brain like a sieve when it comes to facts and figures and have struggled to engage and retain much when reading books and then trying to teach myself.  I’ve also had that conscious awareness that the plants in the hedgerow can either taste good or kill me…and all felt a bit too risky for a DIY hobby.

Which is why I jumped at the chance to take a walk this weekend with an extraordinary woman called Ffyona Campbell and to explore what she calls “the hunter-gatherer” way.

Born in Totnes (where I live), Ffyona is someone I would call a true elder; not because of her age but because of the deep wisdom she holds; the deep reverence she holds for this knowledge and the way she abundantly shares this with others. Her own journey is a fascinating one. She was the first woman to walk around the world, and has been taught by Aborigines, Bushmen and elders from cultures right across the world. As she’s journeyed (mainly on foot), she’s spent time listening, learning and connecting to our indigenous ways of being and brought this knowledge back to her own homeland and ‘indigeneity’. In her walks, she uses ancient methods of passing on ‘the knowledge’ about the abundance of food and medicine in our hedgerows, forests and shorelines, so that the vital information stays alive and stays within us.

I knew within a second that she was someone speaking to me in a very different place to one I’ve ever been spoken to before.

Over the course of the morning, we learned to identify 20 plants in the hedgerow. However, what I hadn’t expected was how we were being taught was so much more than how to identity plants. We were being shown through a portal into how to be more fully present and living in symbiotic relationship with the rest of the natural world.

The depth of what she was sharing really struck me when I munched on a stinging nettle. Whilst not my first-time eating nettles, I’ve previously picked them at arms’ length with gloves and trepidation, to later brew them up in tea or soup. However, yesterday was all about bare fingers and immediate tasting.

Ffyona showed us how nettles grow to allow us to pick them painlessly. Their slightly extended neck offers a perfect space for fingers to reach in and pick and, when plucked in this way, there is no sting. We then pinched one of the leaves between our fingers, folded it and ate it; again without a flicker of pain. The difference was the attention I paid, the care I took and the understanding I was developing. By understanding the ways of the nettle, I was beginning to understand my relationship with it.

Picking the nettle is actually what the nettle wants to happen. By picking from this spot, in this way, we were actually allowing the plant to re-shoot up to five new heads and grow even stronger. Here landed a moment of magic – and an understanding of reciprocity in action. By eating a nettle, the nettle was giving me strength and vitality (for those unaware, nettles have extraordinary medicinal properties) and by me picking the nettle in this careful way, I was giving the nettle strength and vitality to grow new shoots and to become healthier in the process.

This simple reciprocity and welcoming relationship blew my little mind.

For so many years, I’ve been on a journey to get to the heart of what it means to be human, to live well, in balance and in healthy relationship with myself, with others and with the wider natural world. I’ve journeyed down so many beautiful paths, each of them helping me to better understand the qualities, values, behaviours and mindsets of a balanced way of living. And yet this little stinging nettle taught me one of my most profound lessons – that reciprocity is our natural state.

The narrative of what good the human species in general is bringing to the rest of the world has bothered me for years. In so many ways we’ve become something of a scourge on the landscape, with our behaviours tipping so much out of balance and causing destruction and devastation to natural ecosystems right across the world. 

And yet here, in the hedgerows of Devon on a Saturday morning, I found a story of where humans belonged, and were both a welcome and essential part of the story.

For every plant that we learned, we connected with its story through this careful, conscious approach. We learned where it liked to grow and what it needed to grow well. We learned what it could offer us in terms of nutrition or medicine (offering another mind-blowing realisation of how much nutritious abundance grows within metres of my house). Most significantly, we learned how to pick each plant so that the very act of taking was also an act of giving back.

As we expanded our knowledge of the hedgerow, my own understanding of who I am and what life is all about also began to expand. The hedgerow suddenly turned from a bluster of green weeds into an abundance of life-giving wonder, and I was left with such a deep sense of joy and gratitude.

Through learning about the hedgerows of Devon, I was receiving a story of my heritage and a story of my legacy, for this learning is something I can now pass on; both in the teachings of wild foods and in the continuous practice of living a life of reciprocity, care and abundance.  This is knowledge that we can all carry in our DNA, that our ancestors have carried for thousands of years and that can be carried forward to our children – it is a knowledge of balance, of reciprocity and of care.

All learned from an encounter with that little green nettle.