A Community, A River
There are some seasons of life that feel like standing in the middle of a river. The water is moving quickly around your knees, then your waist, and you are doing your best to keep your footing while carrying everything you can in your arms. That’s a little bit what this summer has felt like. I have wanted to sit down and write to you for weeks now. Months, if I am being honest. There have been so many things happening that every time I think, I should write about this, another day passes, another box needs unpacking, another batch of tincture needs bottling, another shelf needs restocking, another person walks through the shop door and I find myself completely absorbed in a beautiful conversation about plants and life.
And now, somehow, we are here. The first couple months being open in my new brick-and-mortar space have flown by, and so has summer. The shop is open and thriving, my doors are open and welcoming new faces every day. I say goodbye to my littles at the farm each morning and make the drive into the city to turn the lights on, get the kettle is warming, and make sure the herbs are neatly lined up in their jars for the day. There are tinctures on the shelves and tea being scooped into little bags and drinks being made behind the bar. People come in curious, sometimes hesitant, sometimes already knowing exactly what they are looking for. And I am still having moments where I look around and think, Oh. This is real.
After saying goodbye to my community in Michigan and locking the shop doors behind me for the last time, and more years in Portland searching for a new apothecary home, dreaming about a place like this, after all the planning and spreadsheets and permits and construction dust and long nights and second-guessing and making lists of lists, there is now, once again, a physical place where all of these pieces of Wilderness Maven have come together. A place where you can actually walk through the door, where we can talk about plants face-to face, a place where I can hand someone a cup of tea. A place where I can watch a person smell an herb they have never encountered before and see their whole face change. A place where the work that has lived primarily behind a computer screen, inside a production space, or in the quiet corners of my home has suddenly become something we can share together.
And it has been beautiful. It has also been exhausting. There is a particular kind of tired that comes from building something you love. It’ s not the same as the tired that comes from work you don’t care about. There is something strangely nourishing about exhaustion when you know exactly why you are tired. Some nights I come home and realize I have been on my feet for twelve hours. My brain is still running through inventory counts and payroll and wholesale orders and what needs to be made tomorrow. I think about whether we have enough packaging, whether a particular tea needs to be blended, whether the shelves need restocking, whether I answered that email, whether I remembered to order the thing I absolutely cannot forget to order but I’ve been forgetting for a week now. There are days when the romantic picture of owning an apothecary is replaced by hauling boxes, cleaning counters, washing dishes, answering questions, troubleshooting equipment, folding shirts, sweeping floors and trying to figure out why something that worked perfectly yesterday has decided to develop a personality today.
There is a lot of beauty in running a small business. There is also a lot of mopping.
But then someone comes in, and suddenly none of that matters quite so much. Someone tells me that a tea helped become part of their morning ritual. Maybe someone brought a friend in because they want them to experience the shop they discovered yesterday and fell in love with. Someone stands at the tea blending bar and asks questions about lemon balm or tulsi or oatstraw, and we get to spend fifteen minutes talking enthusiastically about plants. Someone walks in simply because they saw the sign outside and were curious. I’ve even had days where someone comes in the door who’s been following Wilderness Maven Apothecary online for a decade and says, “I can’t believe I’m actually here.”
Those moments are the ones that remind me why I wanted this physical space in the first place. It’s not simply to sell things. This space is to create a place for relationship, for people to slow down, for plants to become familiar again, and for someone to be able to walk in carrying the invisible weight of their day and leave with a cup of something warm in their hands and perhaps a little more steadiness in their heart.
I think I underestimated how much I would love the people part of having a storefront again. I knew I wanted community and I knew I wanted Wilderness Maven to become part of the fabric of Portland, where I started all those years ago. But knowing something intellectually and experiencing it are two entirely different things.
I love getting to know the people who live around us, the shop owners nearby, the neighbors who began getting excited when they saw the construction start, the people who walk their dogs down Milwaukie Avenue. Every day I meet people on their way home from work, and people who have just moved to Portland. People who have been looking for a place exactly like this. Having a storefront again with an “open” sign on the door demands my participation in a new way. I’ve become one small thread in the larger tapestry of a place. I’m beginning to recognize faces, remember names, and ask about the outcome of events they mentioned last time they stopped in.
When someone walks through our door and tells me they have been watching the shop come together for months, they have their own story of this place too. They watched the windows change, watched the signs go up, and wondered what would eventually live inside. And now they are part of what is happening here. That feels sacred to me. I have always believed that plants teach us about relationship. Not extraction. Not taking without listening. Relationship. You plant something, tend it, grow it. You observe it, learn its habits, learn what it needs. You learn what it gives freely and what it asks of you in return. Eventually, something begins to grow between you. Community is much the same. It cannot be rushed. You cannot force belonging. You simply show up again and again. You open the door, make the tea, learn people’s names, listen, and participate. You tend the place. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, roots begin to form.
At home, meanwhile, my garden is telling an entirely different story. If you know me, you know that my garden has never been what anyone would call orderly. It is feral and wild. A little unruly at the best of times. There are plants that have volunteered themselves where I certainly did not put them. There are things that have gone to seed. Things that have climbed over other things. Things I intended to transplant months ago that are still sitting exactly where they landed. It’s not a garden that obeys. It is a garden that insists on becoming what it wants to become, and I love it for that. But now as I look at it in it in the mornings, I can feel the season beginning to turn, and I feel a heaviness inside for what I didn’t accomplish this year in the garden. The light is changing and the mornings are cooler. The evenings arrive just a little too soon. Leaves that were once impossibly green are beginning to yellow and crisp at the edges. The bees are still busy, but their movements feel different. There’ s a tiredness in the garden now, but it’s not a sad tiredness. It’s a fulfilled one, despite my own feelings on the matter. The garden grew and grew and grew, gave and gave and gave. I didn’t have the time this season to harvest everything I wanted to, or weed as much as I should have. But the garden was thriving and bountiful even without me there to witness every moment of it. The garden is tired after giving everything she had, mostly to the delight of birds, bees, and bunnies, and she’s getting ready to rest now. Instead of feeling like I failed my garden, and failed to harvest and restock the way I could have, I’m letting the feeling I sit with be more akin to how a proud mother feels watching her children flourish. My garden flourished indeed, I just did not partake in the flourishing like I have in the past. But I’m proud of her, and I spent my summer entranced by her lushness even as the field around the garden turned dry and brown.
I find myself standing there and thinking about how strange it is that the garden can begin preparing for the death of a season while the shop is still so deeply in its beginning. One world is opening, one world is closing. And I am standing between them. At the shop, we are learning how to be. At home, the garden is teaching me how to let be. There is something I desperately need to learn from that distinction. Beginning something new makes it very easy to believe that everything depends on constant motion.
More. More ideas. More products. More events. More people. More hours.
More.
More.
More.
The garden does not believe in this. The garden knows when to stop. The garden knows that there is a time for flowering and a time for fruiting and a time for seed, a time to grow upward and a time to retreat underground. A time to be wildly abundant and a time to become quiet. Nothing in the garden apologizes for changing, and nothing in the garden looks at the fading flowers and thinks it has failed. The flower has done what it came here to do, and now it becomes something else.
This is perhaps the lesson I am carrying most closely with me into autumn. A season does not have to last forever to be worthwhile. This new season, the first couple months at the shop, has already given me more than I could have imagined. It’s given me long days and tired feet. It has given me beautiful conversations and new friendships. It has also given me moments of deep doubt, side-by-side with moments of enormous pride.
And perhaps most importantly, it has reminded me that Wilderness Maven was never really about the products. The products are the vessels. The little glass bottle, the paper label, the herbs inside the jar, the cup warming your hands. They are all ways of creating a point of connection between person and plant, between one season and another, between the wild world and our increasingly indoor lives. Between the knowledge we inherited and the knowledge we are still learning. Between one human being and another.
That is what I hope this shop becomes. Not simply a place to purchase something, but a place to remember. To remember that plants are still here, that the seasons are still turning, that our bodies are part of the natural world, whether we remember it or not. There is value in moving slowly enough to notice.
I think about that often when I am standing behind the counter late in the afternoon. The shop is quiet for a moment. The light comes through the front windows, lighting up jars on the shelves. There is a faint scent of herbs in the air. And for a moment, I can see all the versions of Wilderness Maven that came before this one. The rough early years with the first formulas. The tiny production space in my tiny kitchen in my tiny house. The orders packed late at night after getting home from my full-time job. Oh how I packed those orders with the eagerness of a new business, gleeful that someone, somewhere in the world wanted to experience one of my products for themselves.
The gardens. The wild places I foraged for my first handfuls of ingredients. The mistakes, the experiments, the products that didn’t work. The products that somehow became beloved. The seasons when I wondered if this business would ever become what I imagined.
And then I look around, and I feel astonished that it’s here. No, it’s not finished. It’s certainly not perfect. But it’s here. There is a profound difference between finished and alive. A finished thing can be admired. An alive thing asks something of you and still promises change and growth. There will be plenty of time for the next thing. For now, I’m so grateful to be here.
Thank you for being here with me. Whether you have been following Wilderness Maven for years or you have only just discovered us, whether you have walked through the shop doors or are reading this from somewhere far away, you are part of this story. Every order, every visit, every conversation, every cup of tea. It all helps this little ecosystem continue to grow.
And as the garden begins to quiet and the evenings begin to cool, I am finding myself incredibly grateful for the season we have just lived through. It was long, messy, exhausting, and beautiful. I’m looking forward to welcoming autumn. Until then, perhaps take a moment to notice what is changing around you. The first changing leaves at the crown of a tree, the plants going to seed, and the fading flowers. The things in your own life that are beginning, and the things that may be asking you to let them go.
There is medicine in all of it.
With love, wildness, and a very full heart,
Jenn