Seeds Interviewed
a video conversation with Andrew Mason of Netera Alchemy
Here in the American Southeast spring is the most ephemeral of seasons: a blissful window apt to slam shut with hardly a moment’s notice. Already the heat’s too ferocious to venture into the open in the afternoon: it’s time to make hay before the sun really starts to shine.
Outside of clinical work and astrology, I’ve been out gardening and deck-painting in a kind of vernal frenzy. Which is all to say I haven’t been making much time to write these last few weeks.
But if you’ll indulge a bit of chatty repartee, I’d like to use this opportunity to work the rust out and get back in the scribbling game. And I’ve got something to share besides, more on which in a minute, after some more seasonal kvetching.
Or perhaps it’s more like savoring with a tinge of foreboding.
You see, there’s a beautiful optimism to April and the first half of May around here. The peonies and roses and apple blossoms seduce you into shedding any lingering soul-crust held over from winter, while the chiggers and other minions of itchy hell haven’t yet emerged to make every forest walk a gamble with torment. (The ticks have been out for a month already, true, but at least they have the grace to be visible.)
For a fleeting few weeks, it seems possible to turn one’s patch of garden into bastion of order and beauty, as if the tiny sprouts of grass and weeds aren’t about to turn almost overnight into an impenetrable jungle; as if the nematodes aren’t about to gnaw through the roots of your pepper plants and the squash borers to devour your vines in a shameless writhing orgy.
Unless you’re submerged in cool water, summer’s apt to be an ugly season in North Carolina. And once the season gets going, the water ain’t cool. But for a few short weeks, we can pretend.
Today’s share is a video interview from a couple months back, when I had the pleasure of chatting with Andrew Mason from Netera Alchemy. Andrew learned rasa shastra, Vedic practical alchemy, years ago in Sri Lanka; he’s now back in his native England where he makes a variety of Ayurvedic medical preparations from minerals and metals the old-school way and documents the processes involved. He’s a published a several volume series on the subject, along with titles on Vedic astrology and palmistry, and he maintains a highly informative Substack on alchemical medicines and materia medica: recommended for the true herb nerds among you.
Andrew and I chat about my formative time in Nepal, how I found myself on this path of practicing old-school herbalism, and the connections between medicine and astrology. Feel warmly welcome to give it a listen as you potter about your own spring tasks.
Where’s the link, you ask? Well, due to a glitch it seems I can neither embed the video here nor link to it directly, but for those willing to brave a couple of clicks, you can visit Andrew’s Netera Alchemy Youtube channel here and scroll down to the third video, titled “Seeds from the World Tree.”
Hope you enjoy.