The Botanarchy Hotline is a practice in deep listening. Not the kind of listening that tunes you out, the kind that tunes you in, to the small, wild, shimmering things you might otherwise miss. At its core is a much older medicine, practiced long before it had a name: learning by watching weather move through bodies, by letting the senses be educated by land, season, and silence. The work is simple and exacting. It begins by noticing:

the drifting plum blossom,

clouds snagged on the ridge,

the mountain unmoved.

Whether you call 833-ECO-POEM from a rotary phone in a tuft of moss underneath a sequoia sempervirens, or you listen to the archive on this site while eye-gazing with your favorite mountain, you are invited to contribute a field note by leaving a message on the hotline voicemail.

The voice at the end of the telephone line belongs to me - Carolyn Barron - a Chinese Medicine Physician, poet, and ecological storyteller in private practice in the wilds of Los Angeles. I work with bodies the way landscapes work: through cycles, relationship, awe, and reverence. My work is for those who long to end the corporate co-optation of the body, know and embrace their unique inner ecosystem, and re-wild medicine for full aliveness. 

This project was forged during wildfire season, when the hills were burning and it became impossible to ignore that what we call “wellness” does not come from products or protocols. It arises from relationship - to place, to season, to element, to our human and more-than-human neighbors, and the cosmic processes we are all embroiled in together. 

Wellness moves by practice, not purchase.

Through poems, stories, and small acts of attention, The Botanarchy Hotline invites you to walk yourself back into intimacy with the living world. You’ll find yourself wandering and meandering, not toward an endpoint, but toward a way of being. A way of listening. A way of remembering that you are not separate from the seasons.

They pass through you, too.