I sometimes think that I have the perfect job.
Any day of the week, I could be harvesting chamomile, digging up dandelion roots, dehydrating leaves, making tinctures, weighing out teas, seeing patients, writing articles, teaching students, researching, and from time to time, doing courses to stretch my mind.
After I qualified, I took two years to do post-degree teacher training, two years studying with the RHS, a short course on Medical Neuroscience, and am currently finishing an MSc and continuing with Endobiogenics.
I have had a veritable feast of study.
The School of Herbal Medicine is a brilliant place to work, Growing Medicine is a satisfying business to have, and HerbWorks fun thing to run. And yes, there is a ‘but’ coming…
How I wish I had started earlier.
When I started my degree in herbal medicine I was in my forties, and that was nearly twenty years ago. And now in my late sixties I feel that there is so much still to learn, so much to do. I regret that I didn’t find my niche till middle-age.
Not because herbal medicine is a young person’s game [it isn’t] but because I now understand how long it takes to become truly fluent in this craft. Herbal medicine is not a discipline you actually ‘finish’. It is a lifelong apprenticeship to plants, physiology, ecology, and human nature. Twenty years in, I feel I have only just reached the foothills of what is possible.
If I had begun in my twenties, I would have had decades more to explore the corners of this field that still surprises me. I would have had more time to refine my clinical instincts, to deepen my materia medica, to understand the subtleties of pattern recognition, to grow more plants, to make more mistakes, to learn from more patients, to read more research, to teach more students. I would have had more time to build the kind of intellectual and practical breadth that herbal medicine quietly demands.
Because herbal medicine is not simply learning herbs. It is learning people. It is learning how bodies compensate, how systems adapt, how physiology shifts under pressure, how chronicity develops, how resilience is restored. It is learning how to listen [properly listen] to what a patient is saying, and also to what they are not saying. It is learning how to think in networks rather than silos, how to see patterns rather than symptoms, how to work with biology rather than against it.
And that takes time. Years. Decades.
Starting late meant that I had to compress an enormous amount of learning into a shorter window. I have loved every minute of it, but I am acutely aware that I am still gathering threads that others my age have long since woven into tapestries. I sometimes envy those who found their calling early, who have had forty years to grow into their craft. I imagine what I might have built by now if I had begun at twenty instead of forty…
But regret is only one side of the story. The other side is gratitude.
Beginning later meant I arrived with maturity, discipline, and a seriousness of purpose that I doubt I would have had earlier. I was ready to work hard. I was ready to study deeply. I was ready to commit. And perhaps most importantly, I was ready to understand the privilege of doing work that feels meaningful.
Still, the regret remains; a quiet awareness that time is finite, and that the work I love could easily fill three lifetimes. But I keep going. I keep studying. I keep teaching. I keep harvesting, making, writing, researching. I keep learning as if I have all the time in the world, even though I know I don’t.
And perhaps that is the real lesson: herbal medicine teaches you to work with what you have, including time.
