By Mariam Tvaliashvili · e11DROPS · Key West, FL · Reading time: 3 min
People ask me sometimes where my recipes come from. The honest answer is one I don’t always know how to explain in a way that sounds practical — because the truth is, some of them come to me in my dreams. Others arrive in the quiet of a deep meditation, when my mind finally stops and something older than me seems to step in. I’ve learned not to question it. I just write it down when I wake up, and I make it.
That’s exactly how Babo’s Balm came to life. And it’s exactly why I named it after her.
Who Babo Was
In Georgian — my home country, the Republic of Georgia — ბაბო (Babo) means great-grandmother. Mine was named Nina, but to me, she was simply Babo. She is the person I grew up around, the person who taught me to love, respect, and appreciate Mother Earth before I even understood what those words meant.
I spent my childhood beside her — in the garden, in the barn, at the hearth. She didn’t teach with lectures. She taught by letting me do the work alongside her.
What She Taught Me, With Her Hands
I grew vegetables from seed to harvest in her garden. I cared for the animals with her — fed them, cleaned after them, learned their rhythms. I was there the night our cow, Marta, gave birth to her calf, Saturn. I still remember how still and quiet the barn was, and then how loud it wasn’t. It was magical, in the most literal sense of the word — the kind of moment that rearranges something in you permanently.
I milked cows beside Babo more mornings than I can count. And I baked bread with her in a თონე (tone) — a clay hearth oven, similar to a tandoor, that’s been in our country for centuries. Nina and her husband built that tone with their own hands, long before I was born. Every შოთის პური ( georgian type of bread) that came out of it tasted like it had history baked into the crust.
This is what I mean when I say I was raised by the earth, through her.
Where the Recipes Come From Now
I don’t think the dreams and the meditations are separate from any of that. I think they’re a continuation of it — Babo, and the generations before her, still finding ways to hand things down. When a formula comes to me, it rarely feels like I invented it. It feels more like I remembered it.
The ingredients in Babo’s Balm are the ones that keep showing up: shea butter, calendula, chamomile, lavender, St. John’s Wort, rosehip, nettle, sunflower oil slowly steeped with all of it. Earth-given things, gathered and infused the way they’ve been gathered and infused for generations longer than I’ve been alive. I don’t see myself as the one who made this balm so much as the one who was trusted to pass it along.
Why I Make This
I make Babo’s Balm — and everything else under e11DROPS — because I believe the earth already gave us what we need. My job is just to listen closely enough to hear it, and to honor it the way Babo honored everything she touched: with patience, with respect, and with her hands in the soil.
So when you open a jar of Babo’s Balm, I hope you feel a little of that. Not a product. A story — one that started in a garden in Georgia, traveled through a Babo’s hands and a centuries-old tone, through dreams I didn’t ask for but am endlessly grateful to receive, and landed here, in Key West, in a small jar made with love.
Thank you to my ancestors, to God, and to Mother Earth — Gaia — for all of it.
With love, Mariam