The month of June (or rather, the time of early summer between June and July's moons) is also called the Strawberry Moon ✨️🍓✨ and in many Indigenous and First Nations cultures, wild strawberries are known as heart berries 🍓❤️🍓 Shaped like a heart, her fruit is connected to her leaves, runners and roots, like our hearts are connected to all parts of our body and spirit, and to our family and community 🍓❤️🍓 To some, she represents a nurturing love, femininity and renewal, mothers and mother earth, the power of women to create and sustain life 🍓❤️🍓 She is central to so many beautiful stories and teachings, I encourage you to hear them directly (just a search away) from Potawatomi, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Cherokee or Mohawk voices~ in particular, "The Gift of Strawberries", a chapter from Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass 🍓❤️🍓

W️hile researching strawberry/heart berry wisdom for this berry-hued ribbon skirt beauty, I wondered my own place in finding and carrying it, and found this poem by Pastor Maren C. Tirabassi~

It is June, heart-berry moon,
not that I have any right
to the old story
of the healing ways of Ode’imin,
the wisdoms of Nookomis,
except to learn,
to be one who sits in the circle,
not at its center,
to hear the storyteller.

European American born,
I listen to new strawberry wisdom –

We who have been takers
can no longer reach out and grab
whatever we want,
but, bending very low,
find and pick what heals us all.

And things most precious
will be brief.
They come silently
and, no matter how busy we are,
and we are a busy people,
they must be tasted
now, in the season they are ripe.

And this, too, perhaps,
we learn —
to call summer by our neighbors’ names –
not July and August, but
miskomini-giizis,
red-raspberry moon and
miin(ikaa)-giizis, blueberry moon,

for days are best lived
not under the names of conquerors
but by fruit of the spirit.
🍓❤️🍓