Julia de Burgos + Yerba Santa Flower Essence
By Amylisse Torres-Watts
Summer 2023 Flower Essence Formula Design Class
Julia de Burgos: Transforming Grief Into Light
No poet in Puerto Rican history is more revered and adored than Julia de Burgos. Although her life and death are steeped in mystery and myth, she has become one of the most important literary icons not only on the island but throughout the Puerto Rican diaspora, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Julia was also an educator, a feminist, and an activist fighting for the independence of her beloved Isla as well as for the rights of its people. Her poetry related her experiences as a Black Puerto Rican woman and dealt largely with themes of racism, culture, politics, feminism, grief, and love.
Parque Julia de Burgos
Julia Constanza Burgos Garcia, was born in 1917 in the town of Carolina, Puerto Rico to a working class family. She was the eldest of 13 children, six of which died due to malnutrition or poverty related illnesses. Even at an early age, Julia experienced much grief and hardship.
After graduating high school in 1931, she entered a two-year teacher certification program at the University of Puerto Rico. In 1938, at the age of 24, she published her first book of poetry entitled “Poemas in Viente Surcos” (Poem in Twenty Furrows”. Soon after the poem “Es Nuestra La hora” (Our Time is Now) was published in an nationalist newspaper, advocating for the independence of Puerto Rico from the United States. Julia was a staunch supporter of the Puerto Rican independence movement and soon joined the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party which was led by Pedro Albizu Campos, who she was inspired by.
In self-inflicted exile, a 25-year-old Julia departed for New York City in 1940 where she continued the fight for Puerto Rico’s independence. She became a writer for the newspaper, Pueblos Hispanos, a political and progressive newspaper that published news on what was happening in Latin America at the time. To the Latine community living in the New York City area, Pueblos Hispanos, served as a connection to the homelands and family they had left behind. Her journalism work reflected her continued support of Puerto Rican and immigrant rights as well as advocacy and solidarity with Harlem’s African American community (Perez-Rosario, p. 9).
While in New York City, Julia suffered from depression and alcoholism. Although Julia was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver due to her excessive drinking, she ultimately died of pneumonia. In 1953, at the age of 39, Julia was found collapsed on a sidewalk in the Manhattan neighborhood of El Barrio (Spanish Harlem) and later died in the hospital from complications due to her illnesses. She was buried nameless on Potter’s Field on Hart Island but her remains were later repatriated to Puerto Rico where she was laid to rest in the place of her birth, Carolina, Puerto Rico.
Photo Credit: Richard Katz
Yerba Santa (Eriodictyon californicum)
Positive qualities: Free-flowing emotion, ability to harmonize breathing with feeling; capacity to
express a full range of human emotions, especially pain and sadness; positive melancholy and
soul depth.
Patterns of imbalance: Constricted feelings, particularly in the heart and lungs; internalized grief
and melancholy, deeply repressed emotions.
From the FES Repertory: “Yerba Santa (Spanish for “Holy Herb”) addresses the inner sanctity of the human soul. There is within every human heart an inviolable space which must be kept open and free; the Self breathes its soul essence in and out from this center. This part of the human being is the most sensitive, the most deeply feeling, and the most psychic. It is especially vulnerable to emotions of sadness, grief, or other related soul pain. If such emotions are not actively addressed by the consciousness, they will be stored and buried away in this part of the heart. The individual becomes profoundly melancholic, bearing deep internalized sadness, which is not simply related to daily events, but which pervades and colors the entire emotional life”.
Signatures of the Yerba Santa Plant
Native to the Western and Southwestern regions of North American, the Yerba Santa plant features flowers that have a curved tubular like shape which not only face upward but often downward in a slight tilt. In the most iconic photo of Julia, she gazes downward, head slightly tilted. It appears that she is not only gazing downward but also inward as well. As Patricia Kaminski relates, “the tubular shaped flowers speak to the process of descent into the deepest parts of the soul temple”.
The color of the flowers are a light lavender almost purple. Purple is associated in the Hindu Chakra system with the crown chakra (Sahasrara). The crown chakra is the seat of our spirituality and our connection to higher realms. It governs our ability to be perceptive and communicative (Dale, p. 172).
Another signature that tells of its strong affinity to the lungs is the mottled appearance of its leaves that collects dirt on its sticky leaves which gives them the appearance of lung tissue after it has been exposed to too much inhaled smoke. (Graves, p. 266 & 267). Yerba Santa is used medicinally to treat afflictions of the lungs by various native communities on the West coast.
"Yerba Santa also has a relationship with water, although in an opposite way. With its tough, resinous leaves, it holds and conserves its water from the inside to meet the intense fire of its environment. Looking at its signatures, Yerba Santa, has a strong water element to it, growing in moist and cool areas.” (FES website).
Water is a prominent theme in Julia’s poetry. One of earliest and most famous poems, “Rio Grande de Loiza” is not only a love poem to the river that was a part of her childhood experience but also serves as an allegory to the historical violence and racism that the enslaved Africans and indigenous people of Puerto Rico, the Taino, endured.
Río Grande de Loíza
Río Grande de Loíza! ... Undulate into my spirit
And let my soul founder in your rivulets,
To seek the fountain that stole you as a child
And in mad haste returned you to the path.
Wind into my lips and let me drink you,
To feel you mine for a brief moment,
And hide you from the world in myself
And hear voices of fear in the mouth of the wind.
Come down for an instant from the spine of the earth,
And seek the intimate secret of my longing;
Confounded in the sweep of my bird fantasies,
Drop a water rose in my dreams.
Río Grande de Loíza! ... My source, my river,
After the motherly petal raised me into the world
With you went down from the rough hills
To seek new furrows, my pale desires,
And all my childhood was like a poem in the river,
And a river was the poem of my first dreams.
(Excerpt from Rio Grande de Loiza written by Julia de Burgos and translated by Grace Schulman
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, grief is most often expressed in the lungs and is related to the metal element. Julia experienced tremendous grief and hardship in her lifetime. She experienced the deaths of loved ones at an early age and the dissolution of her marriages and romantic relationships as well as her self-inflicted exile from her Matria (motherland), Puerto Rico, when she moved to New York City.
A few years before her death, Julia was hospitalized at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island to treat her cirrhosis and alcoholism. She writes once again of watery elements in the poem Farewell from Welfare Island, the only poem she ever wrote in English. Welfare Island was the nickname she gave to Roosevelt Island, which she had to travel by ferry across the East River to get there. This poem foreshadows her death and is a stark contrast to the exuberant energy of the titled water element in her poem Río Grande de Loíza.
Farewell from Welfare Island
It has to come from here,
right this instance,
my cry into the world.
The past is only a shadow emerging from
nowhere.
Life was somewhere forgotten
and sought refuge in depths of tears
and sorrows;
over this vast empire of solitude and darkness.
Where is the voice of freedom,
freedom to laugh,
to move
without the heavy phantom of despair?
Where is the form of beauty
unshaken in its veil, simple and pure?
Where is the warmth of heaven
pouring its dreams of love in broken
spirits?
It has to be from here,
right this instance,
my cry into the world.
My cry that is no more mine,
but hers and his forever,
the comrades of my silence,
the phantoms of my grave.
It has to be from here,
forgotten but unshaken,
among comrades of silence
deep into Welfare Island
my farewell to the world.
“A picture of the soul qualities of the Yerba Santa essence emerges from this botanical herbal portrait. Yerba Santa flower essence is indicated for those who hold in the water element, especially manifest in the emotions of grief, melancholy, depression or despair. These emotions are stored in the deeper cavities of the body, particularly in the heart/ lung/respiratory region. The free flowing, or “breathing out” of soul expression is often impeded. Respiratory illnesses, addiction to tobacco, and various allergies are common physical manifestations of this soul imbalance.
Yerba Santa in many indigenous cultures is used to cure various illnesses associated with the lungs such as asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia.” (FES website). When Julia de Burgos embodied the positive aspects of the flower Yerba Santa she transformed her grief and pain into poetry bringing forth those emotions from the deepest recesses of her soul into the light.
Sources Cited:
Dale, Cyndi. The Complete Book of Chakras. Llewellyn Publications, 2020.
Graves, Julia. The Language of Plants: A Guide to the Doctrine of Signatures. Lindisfarne Books, 2012.
Kaminski, Patricia, and Richard Katz. Flower Essence Repertory: A Comprehensive Guide to the Flower Essences Researched by Dr. Edward Bach and the Flower Essence Society. Earth-Spirit, Inc., 2019.
Kaminski, Patricia, and Richard Katz. “Yerba Santa - Guarding the Sanctity of Psychic Space, www.fesflowers.com/yerba-santa-guarding-sanctity-psychic-space/.” Flower Essence Society, Accessed 25 Aug. 2023.
Pérez Rosario, Vanessa. Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon. University of Illinois Press, 2017.
Excerpt from Rio Grande de Loiza written by Julia de Burgos and translated by Grace Schulman (Read the full poem here: https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/río-grande-de-loíza)
