About

My name is Michelle Malito. I was born in October 1986 in the outskirts of the Chicago area - a vast sprawl beside a rural setting where I have returned to in currently living beside massive woodlands and prairie where I grow medicine and steward the land. I am a non-binary person bestowed with a lifelong enchantment for the complex Cosmos Of Ecology that began when I was three years old through the plants chosing me by growing Calendula and Marigolds from seed in what is now a herb sanctuary and garden I tend to this day...  

First, foremost, and always : I am a visual artist, composer, writer, film-maker, meme-dream engineer, and lifelong pupil of many disciplines with divergent teachers: as a former student-of-a-student of the controversial philosopher Heidegger and a student-of a student-of-a-student-of-a-student of the great composer Arnold Schoenberg. A Jane of all trades in the life sciences and a drop out from an agriculture in space program at NASA - with a sensitivity to the higher and esoteric fields of knowledge and reality. An autistic Libra with too many cosmic bodies in Scorpio, an academic dissident decorated with degrees in botany and biology,  savvy to wilderness survival, Reiki attuned, and a trained birth doula (but a little too skittish around live births - so instead dipping my toes into studying gender transitioning doula / abortion-after care doula / and death doula work.)

With skin in the game - I am stealth disabled with Lyme drilling away at my joints, a mitral valve in my heart that is sometimes a lil janky, and a history of anxiety that was at times debilitating.  

These days I spend most of my time as a clinical / community herbalist running my own small apothecary called Michelle’s Medicine out of my apartment and teaching the recently incarcerated the methods of conflict resolution whereby peace is the philosophy and non-violence is the method. The majority of the medicine I make comes from plants and fungi I have tended to and grown or sustainably wildcrafted with an assortment of signature tinctures, salves, teas, and smoke blends. The permaculture, mycology, and land stewardship I practice is on occupied Illini, Miami, and Peoria lands that should likely be tended to and given back again to mentioned tribes.

My practice is based in the western tradition of human physiology synthesized with a handful of TCM diagnostic tools and the NADA protocol, an importance in bioregional ways of seeing what’s around, considerations of the Seven Sacred Directions as taught to me by my mentors. All informed by accessibility and affordability, the framework of harm reduction, integration with modern medicine, and the lost skill of listening. 

My herbal work focuses on both the trauma of contemporary life unto our bodies as well as the maladies that have inconvenienced us since we’ve been on this planet. Focused on helping those most in need,  but it has reached a wide spectrum : friends  with common ailments - to people experiencing chronic illness, queer people seeking herbal assistance as adjunct to HRT, those recovering from incarceration, chronic poverty, substance abuse, and medical neglect.

I try my best in freelance radical pedagogy that has ranged from helping autistic children with social behavior, teaching adults how to undo ecological blindness, and the A to Z’s of herbalism.

When a free few hours allow -  I slowly chug at writing three books : Total Ecology At The End Of Time /  The Body That Cried Wolf /  Tick Mischief: Recovering From Lyme And Tick Sickness In The Time Of Chronic Immune Disturbance while starting a podcast called Total Ecology At Midnight, craft a movie about the relationship between Astrology and Herbalism, and aim at increasing pollinating insects in the world during my lifetime by the order of one trillion…