Herbal Allies

One of the things I focus on in a daily meditation is Herbal Allies.  I will spend at least 5 minutes in meditation on what herb has particular wisdom for me/my health.  Sometimes, I immediately get an impression of a specific herb and other times, I am drawn to other sources to see which one wishes to speak to me.  Today, I was drawn to a board game I have called Wildcraft: An Herbal Adventure Game. 
I pulled out the deck of herb cards and shuffled them until I felt the right card was on top.  The card that presented itself was Cattail; typha latifolia. 

I know N.O.T.H.I.N.G. about typha latifolia.  From the game, I gather that it can stop bleeding and has something to do with hunger... but nothing else on my cursory flip through the info.  So, I pick up a few books (well, maybe a lot more than a few) and start looking for info.

(Do you remember the beginning of this post when I talked about Meditating on my herbal ally?  Yeah, well, that thought escaped me for a while) 

I found about Zero on this herb in the (probably) 8 herbal books I looked through and was thinking "what the hell is this card doing in that game?  It's a game for helpful herbs!"  Then I picked up one of my favorite books on herbs in Wales called Flowers and fables; A Welsh Herbal by Jocelyne Lawton.  It's actually IN There!  So...ok, this is an 'herb' that the Welsh apparently found useful, so I'll investigate. 

There wasn't much in medicinal usage, but there was quite a bit of folklore - which although interesting, didn't really have anything to do with my health.  The 'other uses' listed were of things like using the down as stuffing for mattresses and using the leaves as fillers in between boards to make a vessel leakproof.  In addition, the herb is planted in wetlands management to restabalize marshes and increase the diversity of species. 

"Ok...whatever... what does this have to do with me?  I am going to have to meditate on this to see what I get."
OOHHHH.... yeah..... that's what I was supposed to do all along....  DUH.

As it turns out, Cattails, being aligned as water of earth, hold water in.  In medicinal use, it is used to stop bleeding... duh... holding liquid (water) in the body (earth).  In the marshes, it's used to stabalize the land (earth) to hold water. 
What does this tell me?  Upon meditating on this question, I realized that I am still dehydrated.  I am not getting enough water.  Cattail medicine tells me that my body (earth) needs to contain more water.  I need to hydrate; with Water as well as green tea and juices.  When my body is HYDRATED, I only FEEL hungry when I actually AM hungry!  Oh....there's the tie to hunger!

In this particular case, I don't need to make a tea or tincture or anything else out of cattail, it's enough to understand how she works energetically with my health.  But I will look into the herb a little more closely - because who knows... there's always more to learn~