Wormwood

Wormwood belongs to the daisy family. It thrives in the valleys of the Central Alps in sunny locations. This stately, perennial plant can grow over two metres tall. The thrice pinnate leaves are grey-felted on both sides and feel very soft.

The also felted stem is strongly branched and traversed by longitudinal grooves. Wormwood’s form hardly reveals any segmentation; it creates no clear contours or boundaries. It appears continuous from outside to inside, from top to bottom; the air element (outer leaf) gently transitions into the water element (inner leaf). Members of the daisy family are characterised by radiant, mostly relatively large flower heads that turn towards the sun.

The sunflower, dandelion, and daisy are typical representatives of this diverse plant family. When we observe the flowers of wormwood with this knowledge in mind, the small blooms that all face downwards, towards the earth, seem strange. Even when wormwood is in full bloom, one must look closely to recognise this in the pollen. There is no splendid unfolding of flowers in bright colours and expansive gestures; they remain as if closed, withdrawn into themselves, seeming to bloom "inside".

The wormwood flower does not strive to emanate forms, colours, and scents; there is no exchange with light and air, as is inherent to the floral being itself. The form reveals an inward-directed signature. Wormwood unites extreme bitterness with an intense, penetrating aroma. We know that scents and aromas immediately place us into a certain mood.

Through fragrances, our emotional state is influenced and moved directly, without detour via thoughts. Each aroma corresponds to a particular quality on the vibrational scale of emotional energies. Bitter substances stimulate bile flow and gastric juice production. They thus influence the autonomic processes, events that elude our conscious control. The union of these two outstanding characteristics (aroma and bitterness) is rare.

Most bitter medicinal plants have a rather weak, flat aroma so that the bitterness predominates undisputedly. In wormwood, however, both properties are strongly pronounced. The various levels of the human being penetrate and promote each other. Thus, the emotional energy, the strength of our feelings and desires, forms the most important source of the vitality of metabolism and therefore of our health.

The life processes of our cells are guided and nourished by the emotional energy potential. It is therefore understandable that every illness has a psychological cause. For a vital metabolism, it is crucial that emotional energies serve the life processes. However, it often happens that feelings take on a life of their own.

We observe this when a person surrenders so completely to their feelings and desires that they see self-purpose in the "feeling of well-being". Then hardly any interest is shown in the world and other people. The energy is lacking because the emotional energy is no longer converted into life energy. The feelings (the air element) are closed off, held captive within themselves, and can no longer penetrate and kindle the life processes (the water element).