Peregrine Bermas: It’s All Time

It’s my deepest pleasure to share space with my beloved friend, comrade, and kin who forever lives in my heart, Peregrine Bermas. Peregrine is a community herbalist, artist, educator, and the founder of Dirt and Free Herbal Arts and Freedom Fighter Herbs. FFH is a collective mutual aid effort on lands colonially known as Chicago, intended to support local organizers, care workers, and folks who experience police brutality in somatic wellness and relationship to plant kindred.

Irina: I’m so happy we finally got to connect! I know I reached out to you about painting your portrait back in 2020, and then life happened. So here we are, three years later. 

Peregrine: Three years feels like the right amount of time. So much comes up for me around the number three. I have deep tarot practice. Lately, I’ve been pulling the Empress, the third card in the Major Arcana. I've always loved that card, just the energy of abundance and being in harmony with the natural world.

At the beginning of this year, I got the Empress a lot in different tarot readings. The position it’s been coming up in shows me that I'm not embodying the Empress now. The Empress shows up inside and around me to help me move through some deep healing work around the Queen of Wands.

That archetype has represented pushing myself hard and putting myself into the public space. Doing things I really want to do that I'm passionate about, but sometimes before I'm ready to, without tending to my softness.

Also, a lot of my friends are turning 30 this year. Freedom Fighter Herbs just celebrated three years. There's just so much around that, the triangle being the shape symbolizing change and also the most solid, strongest shape. Three is a number that represents integration, reharmonizing, all of that has been coming up. So, when you were saying it's been three years since the last time we talked about scheduling a portrait session, that felt right to me.

Irina: Thank you so much for sharing all of that. I resonate with so much of what you shared. Three is also my favorite number! What you shared about the Empress being within and around you to help you navigate times where you're more public-facing and are not as sure of yourself or pushing yourself. I’m curious if that connects to your work with Freedom Fighter Herbs?

Peregrine: It really feels like an Empress year for Freedom Fighter Herbs, too. When I started the project, I was looking for a way to help. I was practicing herbalism. Having a relationship with plants has been something that saved my life many times.

I wanted to bring herbal products to protests and have care packages distributed with mutual aid organizations. All of my friends who were youth workers, educators, and healers would reflect back to me everywhere they turned in the summer of 2020, there was an ask for free labor. But no one was reaching out asking, “Are you okay?” or “What do you need?” or “How is this time impacting you?” So that was the seed of Freedom Fighter Herbs. 

It was my way to support care workers and ultimately, share with folks that we want you to be alive. We need you here on this earth. There's someone looking out for you. I started with people in my network of care workers, educators, and Black and Brown people, and it was so fun. It expanded really quickly, and it felt really beautiful.

I started with mugwort, and it feels really meaningful to name them as a plant I've been engaging with deeply in the last three years. In the last three years, I moved through a lot around learning how to ask for help, be perceived, and hold myself through other people's ideas, hopes, and dreams that didn't necessarily align with what I wanted for myself or for Freedom Fighter Herbs.

Then I got to the point of burnout sometime last year, probably every year in the last three years. I got to the point of burnout around the time of the anniversary. [We were] leading up to our final event, like this kind of apex of the summer.

Now, there's a collective, and it's a collective of three more people. That feels so fun. I feel like in the last three years, I've been able to laugh alongside the universe. In the past, I would feel like the universe was laughing at me.

I've learned a lot about the kind of resourcing I need to ask for to do the work that wants to pour out of me. I learned about the amount of healing possible because of this project, especially now that it's collectively stewarded. I also learned about the amount of healing the project requires to be sustainable.

I've had a lot of full-circle moments. Recently, I was walking by the river and ran into this beautiful yellow plant and asked who it was. It was Evening Primrose, one of the first plants I ever wanted to study in herbalism. I tried to learn about them when I studied herbalism on my own. I tried to buy them back then, maybe nine years ago. It was inaccessible. The seeds wouldn't grow. I kind of gave up and started working with these more accessible plants, which is how I got to where I am now. 

I just recently met them along the river. It was very easeful, welcoming, and a reconnection. Since then, I've seen this plant every day since I moved to Albany Park three years ago.

Irina: Oh my goodness. Wow. A homecoming!

Peregrine: I know. It's like, oh, of course, this is you. I wasn't ready to meet you back then, but those kinds of moments show me the circular nature of time. When you were asking the question, what time is it on the clock of the world? My whole body was like, it's all time. It felt like time opening up. 

I'm sitting next to my ancestral altar right now. I have this altar in my workspace, which feels really special because when I get overwhelmed, it's easy for me to decide to stop what I'm doing and sit with my ancestors. They feel very present with me.

I've been reflecting on these full-circle moments. I love the idea of time as another shape, like a triangle, spiral, or circle. That feels much more gentle in my body and my mind. Life can be full of these opportunities to meet ourselves and each other again and again.

Irina: I love that. Thank you very much. I'm so grateful for you. I feel like we're meeting again and again. You’re like that flower for me. We used to be in each other's lives more regularly, and it's been a minute. This conversation feels like a homecoming. I love you.

I deeply resonate with what you shared about growing a project, stewarding it on your own, and then stewarding it with others. I think about how I started “What Time Is It?” on my own, in my living room during lockdown, just painting and having conversations with folks over Zoom. It’s been three years. Now, it’s held collectively, and that co-stewardship has allowed for much more possibility. 

I also think about how challenged I am by the idea of time being linear and white supremacist and capitalist notions of productivity and how time and pressure feel like the most difficult parts of this work – which is ironic. 

I’m so curious about how you described your relationship to time as a cycle or a triangle. How has your relationship to time impacted your work with Freedom Fighter Herbs?

Peregrine: I'm in this transformation right now. First of all, it’s not perfect. I mostly think of time as linear. I also have these deadlines, most of which I set for myself. Then, I feel guilty about being so ambitious.

Thankfully, I have this really beautiful community that reminds me of who I really am and where I want to be. You’re definitely one of those people for me for sure.

I've been in need of a more robust practice of self-compassion. I've realized all these life experiences from childhood, indoctrination, and capitalism, connecting my worth with my productivity.

It's so deep. I can know it so well with my logical mind and get frustrated with why I haven't healed from it yet. Why am I still being so mean to myself, pushing myself hard to meet all of these due dates or accomplish all of these metrics for success set by somebody else?

Understanding an embodiment of time as a circular, spiraling, flowing, blobby, all-the-time space has opened up a lot of potential for me to practice self-compassion and be more gentle with myself.

There's so much more room for making new mistakes. I already know from my life experience that if I don't learn a lesson, the universe is going to bring it back around. I'm always learning lessons from my younger self. That feels like a very special relationship. It may be one of my most important relationships. I’ve been reflecting on my time with my innermost self. The people I don't just open my heart to, but they live inside my heart all the time. 

It means that when my heart breaks open because of grief that comes unexpectedly and spontaneously, these people live inside my heart. It's less scary to be vulnerable with them. It's less scary to receive support, to be in a space of reciprocity, in the darkest times or the most painful times.

Irina: The practice of naming the blobbyness of time does open up. It makes it more true, you know, to say it out loud to connect with somebody else to be like, oh, this is a shared reality. Let's lean into that reality, embrace it more, and remind ourselves as an act of resistance. 

Peregrine: Times are different now. It's so exciting to be outside without a mask on, to be able to go to the beach and not smell smoke and feel like I can really take a full breath. Our breath is so impacted, and our lungs are so impacted by the state of the world right now.

I think that's something to pay attention to. I was just thinking about how if somebody were to tell me that you needed to reschedule this call or whatever it was we were doing because you wanted to go to the beach because the AQI was under 80 or something, then I would be like, hell yeah!

I really want more of that for us to listen to the spontaneity, to listen to the desires inside of our hearts. Even though it might not, it might seem inconvenient or illogical. 

Irina: Yes, I needed to hear that. I was literally planning to spend all night in the studio - I’m so behind on these paintings; the time! The Time! You've inspired me! 

Peregrine: Oh, good! You want to leave the studio right now? 

Irina: Yes, bye! The call is over, let's go! 

Peregrine: This was fun! See you at the beach! Let's go to the beach! 

Irina: Thank you so much for this conversation and this time and your presence. Thank you so much, Peregrine. I hope you can enjoy the beach. Have a sensual time in the heat and the water. Enjoy the feeling of floating, being held, and also being free. More is coming.

Peregrine: Love you, friend. Talk to you soon. Bye, friend. Bye.