In 2016, my partner and I packed our bags and moved to an uninsulated (literal) shed on a lady named Carol’s property in southern Vermont. We wanted to farm. We had big dreams, and a very loose plan of how to achieve them.
This was an exciting but volatile time in my life. I was high off of a couple of years farming full time on other large biodynamic farms, which was an experience that was both exhilarating in the absolute certainty it gave me in knowing what kind of life I wanted to lead, and exhausting in the physical toll it took for even a fresh young twenty something. As much as I felt like I’d found my ‘tribe’ for life in that experience (to this day, those I farmed with are still some of my closest friends— something that college for some reason did not fulfill for me), I’ve also never been good at taking orders from anyone. Ever. It has always been a problem, and this is perhaps something that most people who end up starting their own businesses have in common, for better or for worse (though I think for many of you and your sweet glowing skin, in this instance it was ‘for better’. ;)
So I needed to try farming on my own. This was the place where the first iteration of Apis was born (have any of you been here long enough to remember our very first products 3 rebrands ago? I wonder.) Our uninsulated shed had no other heat source but a tiny one-log wood stove, no bathroom, and we were sleeping on an air mattress that slowly deflated throughout the night. These things are minor details in your early 20s, and we carried on building up a very beautiful garden and living on this lady Carol’s property, in exchange for helping take care of her chickens, growing some produce for her, helping with landscaping and weeding, feeding and watering her horses… looking back, it was quite a long list of things Carol was asking of us, in exchange for living in a space that was not really safe to live in. Again, in your early 20s, you don’t really know what is and isn’t ok.
Something that was wonderful and magical about the land, however, was that there were one million cats. These cats were special. One named Butters let me put him in a backpack and take him hiking, and would complain if I tried to make him walk. Another named Jimi Hendrix would follow us for miles into the woods and cry out if he got too far from us, and would find us as we called him back. Another named Nancy would groom my partner as though he was her baby. This is where I learned to love cats, and not be afraid of them which I was growing up simply from lack of exposure. I can safely say it was one of the Great Awakenings of my life.
We also worked on a sweet potato farm nearby for extra cash— these were extremely long days in the pouring rain, riding a water wheel transplanter and getting covered in mud while doing the same repetitive planting motion over and over again (kind of like a russian twist but only on one side so one side of your abs got really sore and strong and the other didn’t). The guy who ran the sweet potato farm was very nice, and I have no bone to pick with him.
Carol, on the other hand, felt like a potential and disturbing window into my future if I was not careful. We share two of the three same BiG ThrEE in astrology (as welll as Beyonceee just saying). She was fully isolated in her mountain kingdom, bred jack russell terriers, was hell bent on building a glass cabin on top of her mountain JUST for herself and her jack russells, and nothing we ever did was up to her standards. The relationship gradually deteriorated, until one day she told me very seriously that she thought my partner was mentally lacking (this is the very smart, sensitive person I’m marrying in October) and that collectively our work had not been as good as the last person who stayed in the fire hazard shed—that we weren’t ‘hard workers’. For a virgo to say this to another virgo and a virgo rising…. it’s simply the last straw.
Tiny babies in 2016 with our Reishi harvest
So, we left. We left our cabin, and the amazing glass greenhouse we had built adjoining it. We left the garden overflowing with food and medicine. It hurt, but it was necessary.
Before leaving the state, we decided to wander the woods nearby, in a national forest next to my grandmother’s place, looking for Reishi.
I had read about Reishi but never worked with it before. Called ‘the mushroom of immortality’ in Chinese Traditional Medicine, it is something of a Panacea. It gently supports immunity, the adrenals, the heart, the endocrine system— it is so useful in so many ways that it’s hard to characterize. But it makes things a little easier, for a little longer, easing the flow of life.
We found more Reishi in those woods than I would have ever thought possible. It doesn’t fruit every year, as mushrooms have their own mysterious schedule, but for some reason we wandered into those woods at the exact time in the exact year that the abundance was almost incomprehensible to me.
After such a difficult summer, this felt like a gift. It felt like the woods telling us ‘be happy. you’re supported’.
So Reishi has come to mean to me, above all else, that you can choose joy. It means so much to me that I named my cat, my true love and mind reading familiar, after it.
Every year we make the pilgrimage to those woods to check and see if we will be blessed with a harvest— sometimes there is nothing, but this year, there was a bounty, and we are so happy to be able to share this liquid joy, balance in a bottle tonic with you. Triple extracted in organic cane alcohol, water, and glycerin, it is one of the best extracts we’ve ever made.
For skin, reishi can be a wonderful ally for acne because it inhibits certain enzymes that alter the conversion of testosterone to DHT, a form that creates excess sebum and inflammation. Reishi is also a wonderful liver tonic, and that organ is especially important to support for clear healthy skin. We also infuse the reishi we harvest into our formulas for Golden milk, Resin and Dragon Balm.
Since you joined as a member and made it all the way through this, use code REISHIFTW for $5 off. It can be found here.
