21: Vetiver - the roots that held me when everything fell apart

The day after I conceded to giving my husband the divorce he was asking for, I began working with Vetiver - a grass whose deep roots are used to stabilize land that is falling apart.

The timing was impossible to ignore.

For the past nine months, Vetiver has been my anchor through grief I could not have imagined, unexpected moments of hope, and the slow, unseen work of discovering what may still be possible.

This is the story of what has held me while the life I knew was coming apart — and how scent reached me on the days when I had no energy left to work so hard at being okay.

At the center of this episode is a realization that feels radical to say aloud:

The destruction of my marriage could possibly be the best thing for my marriage.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• The serendipitous timing Vetiver entered my life
• What it means to be a Temple Keeper of a holy oil
• How Vetiver taught me that patience is action as roots move slowly, but not vaguely
• How the Great Mother holds creation, destruction, death, and rebirth within the same sacred cycle
• Why the ending of a form does not always mean the ending of love
• How scent supports me when words, analysis, and effort cannot

Being held does not mean that nothing falls apart. It means that when it does, we remain connected to something deeper than the form we are losing.

Listen if you are living through a rupture, standing inside an uncertain transition, or learning to trust the roots growing where you cannot yet see them.

Transcript

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The day after I conceded to giving my husband the divorce he was asking for, I began working with Vetiver the very next day. And if you know anything about Vediver, you understand why that timing still makes me pause. Vediver is a grass with an extraordinary deep, dense system of roots. Those roots can reach ten feet into the earth. They are used to stabilize soil, slow erosion, and hold together land that is beginning to fall apart. I was being given the medicine of roots at the exact moment the ground beneath my marriage and beneath the life I thought I knew was separating. You really can't make this up. It's wild. And for the past nine months, Vedivare has walked with me through some of the lowest lows I could have imagined, and it has also been there for the highest of highs, the hopes, the beauty, and the amazing moments I never thought would still be possible. This is the story of the scent that has held me when I didn't know how to hold everything myself. Welcome back to The Wild Hall. I'm Elise Bowerman, and this episode is about Vete Ver, but it's also about marriage, grief, scent, darkness, and the great mother, and what can begin beneath the surface while a life appears to be falling apart. There is so much I am still living through, and so much I'm not quite ready to share. Some of it belongs to me, and some of it belongs to my husband, and some of it belongs to our family of four. But I'm ready to share what has held me and what has held me as Vedivare. As I shared in a previous episode, all of 2026 I have been moving through the Rosa Mystica Sent Priestess program through Priestess Presence. And as part of that path, I was given a temple keeper oil. Everyone is given a temple keeper oil. And being a temple keeper is more than setting an oil or learning a list of its properties. It's an embodied path. You live with the oil, you anoint with it, you listen to it, and you begin to recognize its qualities inside your own life. You are honing your relationship with its frequency until eventually you begin carrying that frequency into the world. Not because you memorized it, but because you lived it. We can think of this similarly to affirmations. When we are saying an affirmation, it is said in the present tense, as if it's happening or even already happened. So it's being in a vibration that is not currently within us when I'm talking about affirmations. Sometimes Vediver feels like home, and then sometimes Vediver is helping me to descend and to root myself and to remind myself that I'm not alone because loneliness has been a big thing for me throughout my whole life. So my temple keeper oil is fediver. And the day after I conceded to the divorce, my work with Vete Ver began. And I don't believe that timing was an accident by any means. Vediver is counsel for land that is disintegrating. And I was being initiated into the medicine of a plant whose roots holds disintegrating land together, while the landscape of my own life felt as though it were coming apart. Vediver's roots are not a bulb. They are fine, fibrous, string-like roots that grow densely and deeply into the soil. They reinforce steep slopes, they slow the movement of water, and they trap sediment. They help the land remain in relationship with itself. And so much of their work happens where no one can see it. There's something about that that is so valuable to me because when we are in a season of rupture, we tend to look at the surface for evidence. Is anything changing? Is anything healing? Are we closer or further apart? Is this working? Where are we going? We search for what we can see because uncertainty is excruciating. But roots do not offer immediate proof. They move slowly, but they do not move vaguely. They know where they are going. They go down. I begin anointing myself with fetair every day, and often more than once a day. I could receive the fragrance through my nose and place it on my skin as a way of reminding my body, my heart and my soul that I am still connected, I am still held, I still belong to the great mother. Over time the scent itself became an anchor. My nervous system has been deeply unsettled during this season. My thoughts can spin like a hurricane. There are times when I feel as placid as a calm lake, and there are times when everything inside me feels like a tornado. Vediver has been with me through it all. It did not demand that I become calm before I approached it. It did not ask me to turn the hurricane into a lake. It simply met me in the weather that was already there. That has to be one of the greatest teachings. Patience is action. When land is coming apart, roots need time to travel downward. They need time to spread. They need time to enter the soil and begin forming new relationships beneath the ground. The surface may still look disrupted while something intelligent is already happening below it. Vediver has asked me to respect that kind of time. And this is different from passive waiting or putting my life on hold or pretending that ambiguity does not hurt. It's rooted patience, the kind of patience that continues to tell the truth, tend what is alive, and allow what cannot be rushed to take the time that it takes. When I say that I am anchoring into the Great Mother, I'm speaking about an archetype, something universal and far older than any one religious tradition. The Great Mother is Mother Nature. She is the force that produces fruit and green life, and she is the force of the storm, the fire, the decay, and the winter. She appears through Gaia, Demeter, Isis, and the goddesses across cultures who have been worshipped and praised, feared and demonized. Psychologist Carl Jung wrote about the mother archetype, and the Jungian analyst Eric Newman later developed the fuller image of the great mother. She carries what we might call the loving and terrible pulls of motherhood, nourishment and containment, but also disillusion and reclamation. She gives life and she receives life back into herself. She holds birth, death, and rebirth as parts of the same cycle. For much of my own healing, I have focused on the good mother, the mother who nourishes, protects, and holds. I needed to discover that kind of holding within myself and beyond myself. But this season has brought me into relationship with another face of the great mother, the one who allows a form to be destroyed when that form can no longer carry the life trying to emerge through it. And this is where Vediver has brought me to a truth that still feels radical to say out loud. The destruction of my marriage could very possibly be the best thing for my marriage. I say that with reverence for what this season has cost. Pain does not become beautifully simple because we can eventually make meaning from it. Every relationship has its own truth, and safety matters, and some relationships are meant to end. There have been moments of grief during this season that I could not have imagined before I entered them. And what I mean is that the ending of a form and the ending of love are not always the same thing. The marriage we had known it could not simply be put back together in its old shape. The patterns, protections, expectations, and the ways of relating that brought us here cannot become the foundation for what comes next. That's impossible. If there is another version or a next version of our marriage, the old architecture has to come apart. We are not being asked to return to what was. We are being asked to discover whether something more honest can grow where it once stood. And of course, I don't know the outcome of the story, but it has given me ground to stand on. One of my priestess mentors was sharing about Vetiver and how in the Hal Safini Hypegeum in Malta, it is likely that they used scents. Vediver would have been one of the scents in this hypogeum. It's an ancient underground burial complex and is carved into limestone. It was used thousands of years ago, and its deepest chamber sits nearly 35 feet below road level. It was discovered accidentally in 1902 when a stonemason was laying foundation for houses. The story is that priestesses use Vediver inside the hypogeum. What really moved me is the intense relationship created in this teaching between Vediver and the underground chambers, and the death mystery places like this may have held for our ancestors, that they descended into the earth, they entered darkness, they entered a place where the ordinary markers of life disappeared. My mentor spoke about these death mysteries as a way of loosening fear from the human system, to enter into the womb of nothing, surrender what had been known, and encounter the mystery beyond the ego's control. Many of us have inherited stories that teach us to fear darkness. Darkness maybe becomes danger or punishment, evil or abandonment. But also the womb is dark. The seed begins in darkness. The roots of Vediver do their stabilizing work in darkness. Darkness can also be the place where life is forming before it is ready to be witnessed. Reclaiming darkness still requires discernment. Harm is harm, and safety does matter. The sacredness I mean is the remembrance that an absence of visible evidence is not an absence of life. Darkness can be gestational, not only destructive. Vedevere has taken me into those depths with what feels like a cloak of protection. It has helped me face fears, stories and identities that I have held as truth about myself and about love. It has not eliminated fear. It has helped shift my relationship with fear. Fear can be present without becoming the only voice in the room. In the Gospel of Mary, Mary Magdalene shares about how the seven powers that the soul, the soul can move through to awaken, and the first is darkness, followed by desire, ignorance, and other forces that attempt to hold the soul back. While she doesn't use our modern language of ego, I hear within it an invitation to lovingly unhook from everything we have mistaken for our whole identity. The ego wants definition. It wants certainty. It wants to know what this means, what will happen, who will stay, and who we will be with when the structure changes. The soul can remain present inside mystery. And this season has asked me over and over again to surrender identities and stories that I used to create a sense of safety. It has asked me to feel the difference between losing a form and losing myself. Veda brings me back to the part of me that exists beneath the story of the day, beneath the text message, beneath the conversation, beneath the hope or the fear. There are roots there. I've also lived in relationship with Ayaveda for nearly twenty years, and there is a beautiful connection here. In Ayurveda, Gandha is scent, smell, or odor. The olfactory faculty is associated with the earth element, so I've been receiving a medicine from roots, through the very senses that Ayurveda connects with earth. That lands so meaningfully for me. Modern neuroscience gives us another language for why scent can feel so immediate too. Olfactory processing has unusually close relationships with areas of the brain involved in emotion and memory, including the amygdala and hippocampal networks. A scent can call up an entire emotional world before the thinking mind has assembled an explanation for it. Scent can reach places language cannot always reach. It can meet us before the mind has organized an experience into words. And that has mattered because there have been days where I have not had the energy to do anything. There were many days that I didn't have the energy to journal or to process, to make meaning or turn healing into another project I needed to complete. I could simply open the oil, breathe her in, anoint my skin, and let the fragrance wash over me, and that was enough. There have also been days when I could sit with a scent and listen. I could ask Vediver to show me where I was being supported, what I needed to name, what was I being invited to release, or where my roots wanted to grow next. But Vediver never required that level of participation before offering herself. Sometimes spiritual practice is active, sometimes practice is receptive, and sometimes the most honest practice is allowing ourselves to receive, to receive something beautiful without demanding that we produce an insight from it. When I call Vetiver medicine, I am speaking about it as a sensory ally, ritual relationship, and a form of support. It has never replaced people, therapy, or appropriate medical care. Scent has gone places in me that willpower and analysis could not reach at all. Another thing Vediver has shown me is that a root is always in relationship with something else. A root does not exist by itself, it is in relationship with soil, moisture, microorganisms, and other roots. When Vediver is planted in rows, those living networks work together to reinforce the land and slow what would otherwise wash away. Its strength does not come from isolation. Its strength comes through belonging. Vediver has been in relationship with me, but it has also been in relationship with my family, my friendships, and especially my husband. When I anoint my beloved with Vediver, I feel something wild, ancient, and incredibly tender move through me. And I know and I believe that he does too. And for me this is an offering rather than a spell meant to control him or force an outcome. The medicine that has held me is also the medicine I can offer him and our relationship between us. Sometimes I can almost feel those roots beneath us reaching toward shared ground. The roots do not erase what has happened, they do not make two people the same, and they do not pull us back into the old form. They ask whether we can belong to the same living landscape while becoming more deeply ourselves. That is the kind of marriage I'm interested in. Not a return, a real rebirth. And before this year, I thought my strength meant keeping my life from falling apart. Now I understand that strength can look like remaining present while a form comes apart around me. I thought healing required me to actively work on myself to understand, name, process, and do. Now I know there is medicine I can receive even when I have nothing left to produce. There were times where I felt darkness meant I was lost. Now I know for sure darkness can also mean something is forming beyond my sight. I caught myself in patience, waiting helplessly for someone else to decide my life. And Vedever brought me back that patience is a form of action. Roots are moving even when the surface appears still. I thought destruction meant love had failed, and now I can imagine that sometimes a structure has to break open, so love has room to become more truthful. And I thought being rooted meant being unmovable. And now I understand roots as living, responsive and relational things. They bend, they seek water, they enter new ground, and they hold without becoming rigid. Vete Ver has not changed me by giving me the answers. It has helped me build a wider capacity to remain with the unanswered questions. Each month of my Sent Priestess work, I enter into relationship with another oil blend. I am now in the ninth blend of the year. Each one has carried its own counsel. Each has shown me another aspect of myself and offered something I needed during this extremely unpredictable time. But Vediver is the oil I return to every day as its temple keeper. In perfumery, Vediver is often a base note, the scent that remains after the brighter top notes have evaporated. That is what it has become in my life. The base note for this year, the fragrance underneath the grief and the hope, the endings and the beginnings, and the calm lakes and hurricanes, the reminder that the most important movement may be happening beneath the surface. I have no idea where my story is going next. Vediver offers me a way to stay rooted enough to meet what is true as it arrives. And really that is what support is. Being held does not mean that nothing falls apart. Being held means that when it does, we remain connected to something deeper than the form we are losing. Maybe what gives a piece of land or a relationship a chance is not a force reaching down from above to put everything back where it was. Maybe it is the willingness to grow roots below the rupture, below the defenses, below the old stories, and below the fear until we find the red thread of belonging again. So here I'm going to leave you with some reflections. What in your life feels like disintegrating land right now? What if you did not have to rush to rebuild it? What roots might already be growing where you cannot yet see them? And what form of support can reach you on the days when you do not have the energy to work so hard at being okay? I'm living this medicine, and some days I am the calm lake, some moments I am the hurricane, and every day I return to Vedavere. It does not prevent life from falling apart. It's taught me how to be held while it does. Until next time, I invite you to move slowly, but not vaguely, and let your roots take the time they take.