Thoughts on hydrosols in winter: evergreens & moments of holding
- Jan 30
- 3 min read
by Emma Patsey
Editor’s note: This post highlights Emma's final project on the creation and use of hydrosols. It includes the pamphlet she created that further details the practice.
Water is in near constant collaboration with its vessel and the multitude of imposing influences around it. The great magician. Formless shapeshifter. Using the unseen to manifest its physicality. It falls and fills. It rises and hovers.
A snowflake then, as you see it, is really the briefest moment captured. A tight cluster bringing together of forces unseen. Uniquely frozen in form for the smallest second; the imprint of the world written in the language of its momentary expression.
What is the value of holding a moment tight? Of revisitation?
I’ve always thought of winter as a time of sentimentality. A holding. A moment in pause so we can be retrospective. We often invite items to “remember” what the world is like when it’s lush and green-invite whole trees into our home spaces. Light candles to remind of the sun.
Hydrosols are unique in the way that they can be both physical and energetic medicine. As a form of water based extraction, they carry both the water soluble constituents of the plant while also having the capacity to capture the subtle, energetic essence of plant, place and circumstance. Hold a moment. Become a physical and energetic whispers of the moment they were made.
Despite being one of the oldest forms of plant medicine, hydrosols have been largely forgotten and/or underutilized in modern herbal practices. Over the past few years, I have found myself making hydrosols for work, when I’m called to in my personal practice, and teaching hydrosol making demonstrations and workshops. However, it feels like the more I try to grasp all the potential of its use – hold my hands outreached to show others – the more its liquid illusively drips through my fingers. I can only hope that by continuing to share about the making of hydrosols and my personal experience trying to find meaningful use of their unique medicine, that those interested can apply their unique perspectives and practice to find new and innovative ways to integrate the wide range of potential uses of this beautiful medicine into clinical practice.
This year I have found myself clinging to anything I know is true about myself, like needles on a bendy twig of pine. It has been one of rapid and immense shifts, of holding on and releasing fully. It has felt too fast and too slow moving, simultaneously dizzying and paralyzing. For the first time in my life, winter was met with so much gratitude, rather than longings for warmer and sunnier days. The layers of clothing and walls one uses to invite only enough of the cold outer world in has felt like a great reprieve. Inward, inward, pause - sit - wonder - as I try to process the beginnings of my Saturn return. Revisit past timelines. Release - let go - try not to be terrified at what will come to fill an empty vessel. Saturn, in turn, directed me to the evergreens.
My personal saturnalia was a tri-pine hydrosol, made from needles and tender branches collected creekside in the place I currently call home. I found myself child-like, shimmying up white pine to collect limbered branches, lost in the shrubby maze of a juniper stand, and draped in cover beneath wide outstretched branches of red spruce. The distillation filled my home, but really filled it, held it stronghold and lifted it head high, chin up. Evergreen. Sometimes you just need to be. Sometimes things just are and you have been put here to pay witness. Stand in awe. Move when it feels right. Not everything requires action, sometimes just dignity in indecision. There is some comfort in holding as long as it’s integral.
The evergreen hydrosol itself demands presence. Its resinous, pungent scent shifts you into winter’s pause - but awake, aware. Clears the dust of cabin fever. Helps you find the present, immediately unchanging now; where you stand in the larger picture. Provides fortitude to continue on. For some, it evokes celebratory memories with family when there was nothing more to do then be with each other in the familial stronghold of togetherness and continuity. Internally, when boiled on stovetop- it fills, really fills the lungs moving what’s been stuck up and so you can inhale the present.
This is pine speaking, distilled imprints on water. Like winter’s cold on a snowflake.
An ArborVitae alumni, Emma is currently the resident herbalist and medicinal gardener for a tallow based skincare business in Hudson, New York. She has an emerging practice as a clinical herbalist where she continues to offer her unique abilities to serve as an intermediary between the innate healing capacity of plants, people and landscape. Additionally, she is an artist, dancer, and occasional writer. Find her on Substack https://substack.com/@emmativoli.
