Instagram story viewer> @botanarchy> Posts

Carolyn Barron, L.Ac

@botanarchy

4.7K

followers

1359

following

𝘌𝘤𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘢𝘭 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘎𝘶𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘉𝘺 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘖𝘧 𝘕𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦
❁ Botanarchy Herbs + Acupuncture
❁ The Botanarchy Hotline
❁ Call 833-Eco-Poem

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

254

21

a year ago

📻🌱

On the Spring Equinox last year, I quietly launched a secret number from the hills across Mount Lee.

(833) ECO-POEM.

A hotline for those who suspect the body is a landscape keeping time.

Over the past year the Botanarchy Hotline has followed the turning of the Taoist solar calendar, tracking rain, frost, moss, wind, and fire through both the hills of Los Angeles and the interior landscape of the human body. Each transmission was recorded in ham radio mono and sent out into the world like a small ecological spell:

Mystery first.
Poetry as medicine.
Listening as practice.

What began as an experiment has quietly grown into a mycelial network of callers, poets, herbalists, wanderers, and mountain gazers tuning in from all over.

And now, as the equinox turns the page on another year of seasons, the project is entering its next phase. After this episode, the hotline will be going underground for a spell while I begin writing The Botanarchy Almanac, a book rooted in the same practice of listening to the body and biome together.

While the line grows quiet, the archive will slowly surface elsewhere. Over the coming year I’ll begin releasing past transmissions onto Spotify so the spores can travel farther than the telephone wires ever allowed. In the meantime the number will remain active with spontaneous updates, and the practice continues exactly the way it always has:
by noticing.

Thank you to everyone who has dialed the number, left a field note, shared an episode, or listened with the patience of an enraptured slime mold. The Botanarchy Hotline was always meant to behave like a living organism. Sometimes organisms bloom, and sometimes they compost. The earth said “begin again,” and I listened.

Until next time, dear caller —
Avoid gurus. Follow plants.
Become as untranslatable as the language of a river.
And always remember: You are not outside the season. You ARE the season itself. by @botanarchy

3

7

6 months ago

Botanarchy Plant Dojo Spring Look Book

📸 the illustrious @jessicachanensmith taken in Botanarchy Herbs + Acupuncture by @botanarchy

202

20

4 years ago

My father Chick Barron died at 11:55 pm on 9/9. It was the hottest night of the year, LA sunk inside what we call Earthquake Weather: the air charged with a pressure less meteorological than oracular, as though the animal body still knows when rupture is gathering in the invisible field that holds us.

There was earthquake weather, and the rupture was my father.

I wrote about losing him in Grief Is a Form of Adoration on the Botanarchy Substack.

After months of hospitals, a feeding tube, pneumonias, and the relinquishment of ordinary sovereignties, he entered hospice at Saint Joe’s and became free. With nothing left to cure, manage or fear, the worry fell away and his Shen illuminated him. He died peaceful, sovereign and brave.

My father was not a fancy man. He was working class to the marrow, uninterested in spectacle and possessed of that rare virtue of having no desire to be witnessed being good. Orphaned young, born into a Ukrainian refugee family tempered by famine and the steel mills of Johnstown, he came to California in 1962 and built one steadfast life: one assembly line job, one family, one great devotion. He loved my mother the way devotees tend a goddess.

What he practiced, without ever calling it a practice, was the Art of Being a Mountain: the old mineral discipline of remaining; of becoming quiet and spacious enough that another creature may come trembling into your weather without having to manage yours.

I understand now this was my first medicine. Before needles, herbs or the Neijing, there was my father practicing blue collar American Taoism without knowing the word Tao. If you have ever been my patient and told me the thing you feared would bring ridicule or damnation, and I simply nodded, took your feet into my hands and stayed - that was him. His qi traveling forward through mine.

And now the mountain has gone back into the mountain.

I will look for him in granite holding the day’s heat, marine layer pouring over the mountains, oak roots gripping an impossible hillside. Love makes an afterlife. This is love’s oldest magic: to adore a mortal thing so completely that when its form is taken from us, the whole world begins giving it back. by @botanarchy

3

153

a month ago

I started my healing practice in order to offer care and belonging to the sensitive, artistic souls trying to thrive in this society that often overlooks the wisdom of the body and gifts of the tender-hearted. I want all people to feel safe, loved, worthy and held throughout all cycles of life. In a culture that is becoming less and less embodied, it feels vital to let the body lead and express its stories, feelings, and sensations in order to find a dynamic balance of health. I allow the body reveal possible transformations and paths rather than try to mold it in a particular way. We come into this world speaking the language of the senses. Inside the womb, we are deeply attuned to movement, vibration, and touch, but as the years go on in this society, our minds start to dominate and can lead us away from an embodied intelligence. Bodywork is so much more than massaging sore muscles; it’s a way to explore our inner terrain, tend to all systems of the body, process life, and feel held in your unique wholeness. I feel lucky to be doing this work that gives my expansive love a place to land.

Book with me:
On Mondays at @botanarchy
On Thursdays @sacredfortune.la
On Wednesdays, Saturdays, & Sundays at @hotelbelair

Photos by @abigailfjohnson
Model @franngonzalez taken in Los Angeles, California by @botanarchy

36

9

a month ago

Late Summer At The Institute of Anarcha Taoist Poetics

1. 🦪
2. 🌊
3. Adrift on What-If River
4. Chet
5. 🪷
6. Adrift on A Summers Day
7. Ojo Caliente, NM
8. Venusian Splendor
9. A Perfect Rose
10. Searching Incense Mountain
11. Sunbeam
12. Leo Season
13. Wandering The West Ridge
14. ☁️
15. Saunter
16. Overnight At Cypress-Peak Monastery
17. Dad 💘

Poems from The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-Jan, translated by David Hinton by @botanarchy

157

12

2 months ago

Late summer has loosened its hair and wandered barefoot into the river.

In Episode 11, we follow Hsieh Ling-yun — 5th century mystic aristocrat, political exile, wilderness poet, and patron saint of getting extremely lost on purpose — across mist slick ridges and crystalline streams in search of a beauty that cannot be taken home. Often called China’s first wilderness poet, Hsieh abandoned the choking silks of court life for the older intelligence of mountains and streams.

This is a transmission on adoration as ecological practice: the ancient art of looking at something beautiful without immediately trying to possess it, photograph it, monetize it, optimize it, identify it, heal it, make out with it, or turn it into content.

At the molten hinge of Late Summer, when the Heart’s fire begins banking itself toward autumn, we wander into the Chinese poetic practice of shǎng, a kind of sensorial appreciation, aesthetic attunement, and reverence before the ungraspable.

In this episode, Taoist wildness meets Chinese medicine and wilderness reverie becomes a practice of porosity, the delicious undoing of the border between the one who beholds and the thing beheld. The Heart slips its little anatomical moorings and remembers its larger body in river, ridge, insect, mist, stone. Adoration becomes medicine for Late Summer: attention ripened into intimacy, eros without capture, the exquisite discipline of loving a thing so completely you no longer need to call it yours.

Expect mountain gnosis, Buddhist nepo babies, feral Chinese poets, imaginary mountain spirits, medicinal weeds, and a five step beauty routine requiring absolutely no products and only one piece of equipment: your unhurried attention. Call it shǎng. Call it sensory rewilding. Call it training the heart to survive a world it cannot keep.

Up now on Spotify and (833) Eco-Poem for the Dangerous Poets! by @botanarchy

45

0

2 months ago

Last year I got to interview one of my great heroes: Bill Porter, better known as Red Pine.

As someone whose life is dedicated to the gloriously arcane - 5,000 year old medical texts, forgotten mountain hermits, poets who deliberately disappeared into cliffs two millennia ago - there are very few living stewards of this tradition left. After David Lynch died, I found myself feeling strangely protective of that endangered species I love so much: people who spend an entire lifetime translating hidden worlds for the rest of us.

With a little help from my old friend, the poet and translator @boris_dralyuk, I eventually found Red Pine.

And I was absurdly nervous.

Why? Because I speak abysmal Chinese. I grew up in the Valley, and despite ardency, rigor, and fancy education, I still have a certain mall-girl cadence that permeates my patois. All my insecurities arrived for the interview before I did.

So the first thing I blurted out was:

“You’ll have to forgive me, I speak Chinese in a valley girl accent.”

Without missing a beat he laughed and replied:

“Me too. I’m from Van Nuys!”

What are the chances? Two people obsessed with ancient Taoist mountain recluses, both exported from the San Fernando Valley.

We ended up talking about why Classical Chinese is so wonderfully ambiguous, how translation is less like decoding and more like performance or shamanism. Chinese doesn’t rush to explain itself. It leaves room for mystery. It trusts the reader to meet the poem halfway.

We talked about the best incense (agarwood, duh), poet-herbalists, physician-poets, the Hollywood Hills as a perfectly respectable sacred mountain range, and he was delighted (and slightly bewildered) that some moldy old translations he’d made decades ago were now being broadcast on a tiny pirate hotline devoted to ecological perception and wilderness poetry.

If you’ve been listening to the summer reruns of The Botanarchy Hotline, you’ve already been spending time with him. His translations of Stonehouse, Wei Ying-wu, Han Shan, and so many other Chinese poets have quietly shaped the way I understand wilderness, medicine, and what it means to inhabit the Earth. by @botanarchy

128

20

3 months ago

Spring has gone full Dionysian and the trees are speaking in tongues. In Episode 5, we follow Meng Haoran through a flowering portal into the Dwelling Place of the Red Pine Genie, where Taoist ecology, tree mysticism, Chinese medicine, and ecstatic woodland initiation all start twining together like roots beneath wet soil.

This is a transmission on the Wood Element as greening force, forest intelligence, underworld sap surge, and the sacred impulse toward growth that keeps splitting the world open each spring no matter how much grief tries to harden it shut. Expect peach trees magical with buds, mycelial revelations, mushroom-lit encounters with the spirit of Viriditas, tree-hugging qi circulation rituals, and a field guide to becoming hollow and rooted enough for the living Earth to breathe through you again.

Here, Chinese medicine anatomy dissolves into wilderness cosmology, tendons become forest pathways, qi moves like pollen on warm wind, and eco-somatics means remembering your body as a temporary extension of the landscape itself.

Dial (833) ECO-POEM if you’re old school, stream on Spotify if you’re thoroughly modern, the Red Pine Genie does not judge.

📡 by @botanarchy

54

1

5 months ago

Spring is getting louder and the wind has started acting possessed. In Episode 4, we drift midstream with Su Tung-p’o, raise a toast to boundless wandering, and exchange greetings with the invisible force currently rearranging the trees, the pollen, the psyche, and your entire nervous system.

This is a transmission on wind as trickster, teacher, pathogen, poet, and weather-drunk sage. Expect Matilija poppies pirouetting along the LA River, Santa Ana dread, Chinese medicine wind lore, Taoist springtime chaos, and a field guide to the unseen forces that shape bodies, biomes, moods, migraines, wildfires, and wandering boats.

Here, wilderness poetry becomes eco-somatics, the Five Elements start gossiping through grasses and trees, and nature therapy means learning how to be strummed by the world without snapping in half.

You are already weather’s plaything.
The question is whether you know how to bow back.

Dial (833) Eco-Poem if you’re old school, stream on Spotify if you’re lazy, the wind does not judge. by @botanarchy

74

4

5 months ago

Your favorite eco-poet pirate radio station has entered the streaming industrial complex!
The hotline is crawling out of the hills and onto Spotify…same feral transmissions, now streamable.
Dial if you’re old school, stream if you’re lazy, the mountain does not judge.

Spring is deepening and the mountains are already holding court. In Episode 3, we sit in stillness with Li Po, eye-gazing across the valley until the landscape begins to speak. This is a transmission on the secret names of mountains—on intimacy with place, on the politics of naming, and on the quiet, ecstatic practice of learning to listen until something answers back.

Expect sandstone paramours, chaparral psychogeographies, and a reorientation to Mountain Standard Time. Here, Taoist mountains breathe through the Five Elements, poetry becomes a method of perception, and the local terrain—Tongva homelands, Griffith Park ridgelines, the Santa Monica range—reveals its layered histories beneath the names we’ve inherited.

The mountain already knows who it is. The question is whether you know how to ask.

📡 by @botanarchy

79

8

6 months ago

Spring At The Institute of Anarcha Taoist Poetics

1. 🌞

2. Song Of The Spring Wind - Chi’i Chi

3. Poppies

4. Early Plum Blossoms - Chi’i Chi

5. Mulberry Splendors

6. The Solitary Peak Stands Alone - Shih Shu

7. Gentle Ben

8. Against The Gently Flowing Spring Morning - Shih Shu

9. 🌼

10. Perfumed Springs Ripple - Shih Shu

11. Chet

12. Mountain Sounds Carry - Shih Shu

13. Bachelor Button Twinning

14. Study The Way and Never Grow Old - Shih Shu

15. Lily Pads

16. On The Road A Spring Day - Ching An

17. ☁️་༘

18. Suncatcher

Poems from the majestic tome: ‘The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks Of China’ by @botanarchy

3

10

6 months ago