Ash & Honey: The Root and The Road- S 1-E1: Two Became One: Why This Show Exists

Two thousand years ago, Hippocrates combined honey and vinegar into a single remedy called oxymel — and modern researchers just confirmed what he already knew: together, they work dramatically better than either one alone. That's also the story of this show.

Ash & Honey: The Root and The Road is the merger of two podcasts — the original Ash & Honey Podcast and Root & The Road — hosted by Alexandria Quinn Love, M.A., historian, formulator, and founder of Ash & Honey Botanique. In this founding episode, Alexandria lays out exactly why two shows built on the same philosophy, the same pre-industrial standard, and the same voice were never really separate to begin with — and what this unified show is going to be.

That means the real history first: Greek Humorism, Ayurveda, and two ancient medical systems that never separated the body from the mind, the emotion, or the season. It means a strict history-first corrective lens on what crosses your feed. And it means honesty — the kind that includes a personal origin story told here, plainly, for the last time, before this show moves forward.

This isn't a wellness podcast. It's a history podcast about healing. And it's going to range — because life determines some of what crosses this microphone, and the body, the mind, the emotions, and the seasons were never separate to begin with.

Ash & Honey: The Root and The Road is hosted by Alexandria Quinn Love, M.A. — historian, formulator, and founder of Ash & Honey Botanique.

Nothing on this show is medical advice. Talk to your licensed practitioner before making any health practice a regular part of your life.

Search Ash & Honey: The Root and The Road wherever you listen.

The road was always there. Someone always walked it. Now — so do you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Most people would never think for two thousand years ago. Jesus was already doing exactly that. He called it oxygen. Honey and vinegar combined deliberately used for coughs and fevers and moons. And here's the part that just got confirmed by modern researchers more than two thousand years later. Honey and vinegar are each modestly useful against infection together. Dramatically more effective than either one alone. Not because two good things added out. Because they were never really meant to be measured. That's the show. Two things that were always stronger together. Finally done pretending otherwise. Before we go any further, research me. Not just the stuff scrolling past you on social media. Me too. Everything I tell you here, you should be able to go verify. That's not a legal disclaimer. That's the whole point of this show. One more thing, real quick. Nothing here is medical advice. I mean that. And I'll say more at the end. Just keep it in the back of your mind as we go. I'm Alexandria Coinlove. If you've been following either of the earlier shows, you already know most of this. I'm going to say it one more time, all the way through, and then I'm going to let it rest. Because part of what this new show means for me is moving forward instead of circling back. A few years ago, I was a year into a job that was slowly killing me, not as a figure of speech. Disability analyst. Dennis's work had moved us from Massachusetts to North Carolina. Away from teaching, away from the history I loved, away from the place I'd always considered home, away from everything I actually am. We'd had to leave our youngest daughter behind in the Northeast. We were living right between both of our girls and unable to see either one. Couldn't touch them, couldn't hug them. A year in, I already knew the job was wrong, the place was wrong. And underneath all of that, our family was carrying its own trauma. Trauma is the only word for it. Someone we loved very much was fresh out of rehab, with more on their plate than anyone should ever have to carry. And our grandson Marcus, who had been sick for a very long time, was nearing the end of his fight with adrenalukodystrophy, a rare genetic condition. All of it seemed to hit it once, the way real crises actually do. And together it made one thing very clear. Nothing about that job mattered. As a family, we needed to be together. We needed to be present. So the decision got made. We were moving again. Ashley and Marcus were in Oklahoma, along with Ashley's oldest daughter, our granddaughter, Adriana. That's where we needed to be. But I won't pretend it was simple. It was far from our other daughter. And that distance felt even greater once we made the choice. We wanted both of them close. Moving toward one felt some days like moving away from the other, like a betrayal. There were a lot of mixed feelings in that decision. But we had a very clear need, and we made that decision anyway. Dennis made some calls. He got his job transferred to Texas, not Oklahoma. Not exactly where we needed to be, but it was the opportunity in front of us, and we weren't going to pass it up. We drove to Oklahoma first. We knew our time was short and we needed to see Marcus. We got one day with him. He likely didn't even know we were there. But we knew. We got to look at his face one more time, and that mattered to us and to his mother. It mattered to Ashley that her parents could make it to say goodbye to their only grandson. The next day, we continued on to Texas, and just four days after we arrived, I was T-boned by another driver, ate herniated discs, told I'd have to accept pain for the rest of my life. Herniated discs don't heal. The very next night, the night after getting that wonderful news from my doctor, Ashley called. I was on the phone with her when Marcus passed. I will never forget that sound. The scream that came out of my daughter sounded like her soul was leaving with him. As his grandmother, I grieved alongside her. But I will never claim to understand what that was for her as his mother. I couldn't even get back to her right away, as close as we've always been. We just arrived in Texas. The moving bands were showing up the next day. And if I'm honest, we needed some time to handle our own grief so we would have something left to give her when we got there. And I was also terrified of the trip. I was carrying PTSD from that accident. And it's fair if that sounds selfish to you. Because I've looked back at it, and I still feel that it was. It was a little selfish to even have the thought that I was scared to be in a car come up when she had just lost her son. We did make it for the wake, and when we finally got there, my daughter was in my arms the way she used to be when she was little. My brother-in-law made the trip with us and played the bagpipes, which in this Scots-Irish family is no small thing to send Marcus off with that kind of honor. That was the whole reason any of it mattered. There's more from that stretch I'm not going to unpack today. The disability claim of my own I spent two years waiting on from the very system I used to work inside that ultimately denied me. I'm not going any further into that right now. What I'll say is this: we made it through. And since then, this family has grown. About a year after Marcus passed, Ashley found out she was pregnant again. Because adrenalucodystrophy predominantly affects males, we were terrified. We didn't know the sex. We just waited. Violet arrived healthy last August, and this past March, her youngest daughter, McKinsey, had her son, Charlie. Two beautiful, precious lives coming into a family that was still healing. Two lives that without even knowing it fostered that healing. They gave us hope. And there was still, there is still a lot of trauma underneath that hope. I am back in North Carolina, caught between my two daughters, my two new grandbabies, and my oldest granddaughter. Right back where all of this actually started. That's why I started the podcasts in the first place, looking for some place, some reason, some purpose, some way to heal. The very first show wasn't the root and the road or ash and honey. It's mindful vibes. And it took some finding before it became this. I did a fair amount of playing around before this took shape. But mindful vibes was about finding peace on the inside. And that's exactly what I needed. That's where hope actually started coming back. And once we were settled back in North Carolina, I started seeing a chiropractor who introduced me to acupuncture. And from there, I started researching other ancestral remedies, and that research became Ash and Honey Botanique. Not the podcast. But it wasn't enough just to start making these products. I wanted to talk about what I was finding. I wanted to share knowledge I thought was genuinely beautiful. So the Ash and Honey podcast came next. And here's the thing I want you to understand because I think it'll help you understand me as the person on the other side of this microphone. These shows healed me. The research healed me. Walking this path is what actually healed me. Violet and Charlie arriving. That was the first proof that grief and fear and relief could all live in the same body at the same time. And none of them had to cancel the others out. Now, the doctors looked at my spine and told me what the structure said. Doctors don't look at the soil. They don't always get to look at the whole person. And I want to be careful how I say that, because it's not a knock. It's a standard. A standard isn't the same thing as the definitive answer. And because of all that, I want to be straight with you about something going forward. Life decides a lot of what gets talked about on this show. Whatever crosses my path, whatever's actually happening, sometimes I'll be locked in on nothing but ancestral health. Other times there'll be some viral claim making the rounds that just gets under my skin because it doesn't give people enough to actually work with. And sometimes it's just going to be real talk about real life. I'm going to follow whatever's true because the body, the mind, the emotions, and the seasons were never separate to begin with. So yes, we're going free range on purpose because that's what an honest life actually looks like. And an honest life for me meant facing the fear that I'd have to live with pain for good. I made the decision to start walking anyway, even when it hurt, even when my legs didn't want to land where I told them to. And today, today I'm taking golf lessons from a PGA pro because I refused to let a system that looked at me as a structure decide what I was actually capable of as a person. Again, I want to be careful with that. It just was never the only true thing about me. I picked up the crayon. I colored outside the lines that had been drawn for what my spine was supposedly worth for the rest of my life. But here's the honest part. And this show is always going to give you the honest part. That's a rule for everything, no exceptions. In our own personal lives, sometimes we have to color inside the minds, not to limit our own truth, but to protect somebody else's. And when an episode genuinely leads somewhere relevant to Boat and Meek, I'll tell you, when it doesn't, I won't force it. You deserve to know the connection exists without it ever hijacking what we're actually here for. I want to say one more thing before we close. And I'm only going to say it this once, because it's not a tagling, it's just true. Structures aren't what's permanent. Some last centuries, castles across Europe that will still be standing when our great-great-grandchildren are gone. Frameworks of medicine that have held up for thousands of years. Some structures fall in a season. Either way, the soil underneath was always there first. It's still there after. The soil doesn't care how long the thing on top of it stood. Your body is soil. Your history is soil. The traditions we keep coming back to on this show are not relics sitting on top of the ground. They are the ground. We're not zooming out into deep history before we get to the real work. The deep history is the real work. Everything else, the viral claim, the trend, even the structures that genuinely held up a long time. That's what we measure against it. Before we go, the full version of what I flagged in the beginning. I am not a doctor. Nothing on this show is medical advice. My healing happened in my body with my history, and it is not a protocol for yours. Everybody is different, different history, different medications, different risks. Before you make anything, we talk about here, a regular part of your life. Please talk to your own licensed practitioner first. Some of what worked for me could interact badly with something you're taking or be wrong for a condition that you are dealing with. That's not caution for caution's sake. It's just true. Probably the truest thing I'll ever say to you. And I'd rather say it plainly than have you find out the hard way. You're already doing it. You're here. The road was always there. Someone always walked it. Now, so do you. Use it on the next thing that crosses your feed before it crosses your judgment. Let the burn teach you. Let the honey keep you. And until next time, take care of yourself, my friend.