High in the hills of Trelawny, Jamaica, where the clouds kneel low enough to touch the breadfruit trees, I was raised by a woman who carried lightning in her bones. My grandmother, a Taino master herbalist and spiritual guide, did not simply teach me about plants she introduced me to their spirits. She showed me how to listen to the rivers, how to dream with the leaves, and how to walk barefoot on the land not as a visitor, but as a descendant and a steward.

She taught me that healing was not just medicine it was memory. It was the act of remembering who we are, who we’ve always been, and what the Creator placed in every cell of this earth for our regeneration.

This wisdom was never written in a textbook. It came in whispers, in visions, in scripture, in ritual. It came through her hands calloused from grinding roots and gentle enough to bless the sick. From her, I inherited not just a method, but a mantle.

As I grew, I realized that what we called “Bush Medicine” was far more than survival knowledge it was an ancient science, a spiritual technology, and a sophisticated healing system built by the Tainos, Caribs, Maroon and the countless ancestors whose feet carved paths through the mountains, gathering remedies from the wild.

But that wisdom was under threat. Not just from modernization, but from erasure from a global system that devalues what it cannot patent, and fears what it cannot control.

CIM: Caribbean Indigenous Medicine is my answer to that threat.

It is a name I gave to what has always existed: a healing tradition forged in the Caribbean but influenced by the stars. A syncretic system touched by the Moors of North Africa, the Root workers of West Africa, the Vedas of India, and the Qi of China. It is ours reclaimed, refined, and restored for the generations to come.

This book is not simply about herbs. It is about liberation. About the rights of our people to reclaim our medicine, our language, our health, and our harmony.

This is my offering. May it stir memory. May it awaken power.

And may it return us to the garden healed and whole.