Our Story

an excerpt from an editorial feature with Standard Dose. you can read the full interview here.

Tell us about your journey to founding Moon Mother Apothecary -- have you always been interested in plant medicine? 
Plants and plant medicine have always been constants in my life. As a child, I didn’t know our traditional AfroCaribbean and AfroDominican healing practices as “plant medicine,” but the universe made sure to bring me full circle to my starting point. I remember growing up, it was common for all 4 burners in my mother’s kitchen to be going at all times: rice and pollo guisao’ (stew chicken) on the two front burners, and beans plus a mysterious boiling pot of plants or peels on the two back burners. No one named it for us then, but we trusted my mother’s inherited plant wisdom. This was my introduction to the medicine of plants. 

I was born in New York City and raised by my Dominican mother. I am told I gravitated naturally to the elements. I loved the beach, was fascinated by the sky, and I could appreciate every living thing in the bustling city around me. I could extract the natural world from the noise, more importantly. I watch the ways my daughter does this now. I feel like no one was ever expecting me to be interested in plants, but the apartment I grew up in was flanked by two major NYC city parks, so in a way these parks became my backyard, and I still know them like the back of my hand.

I came around to my formal study of plant medicine about 8 years ago, when my wife was suffering from debilitating, paralyzing migraines. Western doctors prescribed her a series of seizure medications, each one accompanied by its own individual laundry list of side effects. I started searching for another way. I studied on my own for a few years before enrolling in the Sacred Vibes Spiritual Herbalism Apprenticeship program, and in 2018, after the birth of our daughter, Luna, I started making and sharing herbal medicines under the name Moon Mother Apothecary. I’ve been on this journey ever since, learning and growing, sharing and receiving, dreaming, and deepening my practice alongside my community, my family, and brilliant, visionary collaborators and friends.

Your work is deeply rooted in community and activism - where do you find that work intersecting with your practice as a spiritual herbalist? 
They are one and the same, truly. I view my work (across all sectors) as the most authentic reflection of my personal truths. In everything I choose to enter into, I am guided by a commitment to deep and true relationship-building, sincere care for people, respect for the natural world around me, and moving in accordance with the universal laws. So the work is not necessarily guided by the sector (as I straddle both the art world and the herbalism/healing world), but instead by being in continuous practice with these core principles. 

The medicine I create is informed by the specific needs of my community: my family, my friends, my wife, my daughter, my mother, and my purpose is to respond to our unique challenges and opportunities, our life cycles, and our future trajectories. That is truly my greatest form of activism, co-creating the future that we’ve* been written out of and ensuring we continue to steward, care for, and learn from the very land that nourishes us, offers us medicine, and keeps us living and thriving. 

*We= BIPOC, LGBTQAI folk, GNC and GNB folk

I am also deeply committed to decolonizing medicine, to re-introducing my community to the traditional, ancestral wisdom we are sometimes ripped away from as a result of migration, erasure, colonialism, and other oppressive and violent systems rooted in violence and the abuse of power. This too, is a form of activism: returning to ourselves, creating spaces of agency for folks to enter into their own healing, so that when clients/participants/spirits who open themselves to my offerings walk away, they leave with much more than the plant medicine.

I am forever student of herbs, of herbalism, of plants, and of this precious earth. There will always be more to know than I can know and I am so grateful to be a student of this work. I approach my work with sincere humility and a baseline understanding that collective wisdom is the greatest wisdom there is. When we combine our knowledge, we know and understand more than we ever could on our own.