Anima & TWH’s Year In Review
Friday, December 31st, 2010

Anima & Traditions In Western Herbalism’s
YEAR IN REVIEW
The past cycle of seasons has been as rewarding as challenging, with myself confronted with painful personal loss and humbling health issues as well as significant choices, with Kiva tripling her already prodigious output, with important new herbal insights and our responsibilities to a revitalizing herbal community. 2010 was yet another year of growth, working hard to keep a tight focus while still increasing the ways that we are able to teach, help and affect. This meant the scaling back of some notable projects, and the development and launching of others.
For the first year I can remember, the Rio Frisco running through the Anima botanical sanctuary and retreat center failed to flood. This made getting in and out to town over the seven river crossings much more certain, but is also an indicator of less overall precipitation. The canyon continues its path of fervent rewilding even without the constant tending we once gave it, 32 years of fencing, reseeding, monitoring and inventorying. We finally retired our U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service grant, that had helped pay for many of the indigenous plant species that we reintroduced. What was once part of a denuded grazing allotment is now a sanctuary with a truly amazingly diverse number of medicinal herbs, attracting waterfowl, elk, mountain lion and bear. We were surprised, in fact, to wander into a Forest Service office in search of topo maps, and discover among the various brochures one with a photo of our rewilded river right on the front! Anima Sanctuary is the “poster-property” for the newest U.S.F.W.S. brochure about the Partners in Wildlife Program that we continue to be a part of.
There simply hasn’t been time to promote or host the usual round of small workshops at the sanctuary, no matter how powerful it can be to teach here in such an intense place. Instead, our energy has gone in part to the further development of our herbal, nature awareness and herbal Anima Home Study Courses, with Kiva’s expanded Foundations of Western Herbalism series of courses expected to be released a few months from now. These courses are way to majorly equip and inspire folks from afar, as was the successful multi media (including video) Energetics course of Kiva’s that John Gallagher and HerbMentor produced and released (for those of you who missed it, John expects to re-release it for another limited time later this year, stay tuned to the Herb Mentor Site).

The majority of our attention, of course, had gone to creating and producing the TWH Conference, tasks that begin with site logistics and contracting a year prior, and requiring at least a portion of our every day. Work towards the 2011 event is predictable and practiced in comparison to 2010, when what seemed like an insane idea (launching a novel new event during the worst financial recession in 70 years) somehow coalesced into a rule-breaking, tradition boosting, spirit stirring experience for a sold-out crowd. We were pleased and surprised to find that our sometimes unusual backgrounds and experiences were actually just what was needed to accomplish the range of things required, like Kiva’s holistic/wildlands/bioregional/steampunk brand of herbalism and the kinds of incredible people it curiously weaves together; her herbal knowledge, connections and expertise; even the hard edged and deeply felt experiences of troubled youth and childhood abuse contributing to her determination to encourage both healing and empowerment in others. Like the earth-based nature awareness lessons Anima provides; my years of wildlands restoration as well as activism; my art and layout skills previously expended on painting to sell and fundraising t-shirts for government-harassed organizations I believe in; the now helpful observations made while giving 300+ presentations at other people’s conferences and rallies; even the concerts I organized and performed at as benefits for causes I supported, proving to be experience that TWHC needed… my multi media concerts/talks having been prophetically named the “Deep Ecology Medicine Shows.” We’re thankful for the unexpected but undenaible “juju” that attracted the most amazing teachers and least typical participants from the get-go, for the evolving purpose of not only promoting herbal education but acting as a catalyst for a folk herbal revival. (Go to www.TraditionsInWesternHerbalism.org)
From out of the conference, rose the new magazine Plant Healer, featuring the same degree of diversity and depth, spunk and spice as the event, in-depth botanical and medicinal material balanced by activism and heartful story, interpreted with an artistic rebel sensibility. There’s no way we would have added all the work such a magazine entails, if not for the wonderful way that it augments, expands and extends the spirit of the conference and continues its community building, information sharing mission. The first 135 page, full color issue of Plant Healer has been made available in several digital formats to anyone subscribing, from high resolution files for printing to low res for those with slow servers, and even a 3-dimensional magazine format whose pages can be turned right there on the personal membership pages on the site. Advertising is being accepted from only the most respected businesses and schools, and writers are encouraged to submit to any of its 16 different departments (www.PlantHealerMagazine.com). For a free sample with short excerpts, photos and art, dowload the: Plant Healer Magazine Sample
To a luddite like myself, coproducing a digital publication is in some ways uncharacteristic and discomforting, my aesthetics calling out for real paper that can be touched and held.
This method is far more ecologically sustainable, however, requiring none of the virgin tree flesh that print copy does. Text can be magnified for easy reading on screen, though the option remains to print out some or all of its pages. Printed magazines of all kinds have been going out of business one after the other, coincidentally reducing the number of venues for our writings (in 1996 I was able to find 27 publications happy to print a total of 34 of my articles, in 2010 only 11 pieces of mine saw print, and in only 6 different magazines). It is this trend towards online reading and pdf subscriptions that makes our websites, blogs, e-books and even this digital newsletter all the more crucial, and that led to our decision to release Plant Healer in pdf format.
Future books by us will in most cases be available in both digital and print versions, though elaborate full color versions may be sold as pdf’s only. Next to be released will be the collection of my collection of essays with rural and bioregional sensibilities, a blend of backwoods wisdom, irreverent humor and sentiment, with seditious deep ecology and libertarian undertones. It will titled “The Straight Shot” or “The Town That Waves” or some similar folksy lines not yet to be determined. Next will be my historical novel The Medicine Bear, complete with herbalist and wise woman characters alongside real events surrounding the formulation of Aldo Leopold’s groundbreaking land ethic, Ben Lilly’s biblical bear hunting obsession, and Pancho Villa’s retaliatory raid on the United States town of Columbus with what were essentially Indian warriors! Resolute will be expertly proofing both books over the coming months, with the hope of releasing them this Summer.
Anima teacher Loba will be releasing the first of many long awaited cookbooks beginning with one focused on wild foods, and Kiva will inevitable release an amazing book on herbalism if she can ever stop adding to her accumulating material long enough. My first book for children, “I’m A Medicine Woman, Too!” has continued to sell as more people become aware of it and its lessons of empowerment and herbal medicine.

Our daughter Rhiannon, too, has been full of creative energy, a year filled with home studies that she voluntarily opts for, homestead tending and wild-girl play time.
It is Rhiannon, like the Summer swelling and flowering of the canyon, that may best define what we here are referring to when we talk about the meaning of accomplishment and satisfaction, and the best measure of our efforts and days… our gifts to the world, rooted in this giving earth.
We value your alliance, assistance and affection, and value the opportunity to be of service or inspiration to you. Warmest regards throughout 2011, from all of us here.
-Jesse Wolf Hardin









People get very different impressions of Wolf, depending on their preconceptions and the circumstances under which they meet or read his work. To back to the land types and conservative outdoorsman he is a Libertarian iconoclast, a throwback to another age and time who just happens to be a crazy tree hugger who consider the mountains his school and church. Our more alternative friends and students tend to think of him as the rather psychic Intuitive and Counsel that he is, but manage to overlook his primitivist streak, or support for very non-liberal ideas like limited government and personal self defense. Those living with him can attest that he is more of a warrior than his compassionate counsel would seem to indicate, and sweeter, gentler and funnier than his muscles or adament opinions might lead you to believe. This picture of him was taken at age 5, at a time when it was trendy for photographers all over the U.S. to pose urban kids on groomed Shetland ponies (note that his legs were short and only extend halfway down the one-size-fits-all chaps). Here you get a glimpse into the real Wolf, always ready to pay any price for adventure, and ready to break out of all restrictive conventions just like he broke out of the suburbs… mischievious and unreasonably happy, as he rides off into the sunset on his hero’s quest!
Mud Slips & River Whims – Post Flood Ecology
Health issues are just one thing that brings to mind the value of prevention and the preciousness of life, as well as the fact of our mortal spans… and the vital importance of preparing for the Center’s land, its ecological well being and archaeological integrity, the legacy of the ancient ones and the lessons that have come to be known as Animá – insights and tools that will be ever more important in the coming decades of overpopulation, personal desensitizing and dumbing down, political repression, and a culture that is in dire danger of devolving into tasteless diversion and superficial pabulum. Never will the tools – of self knowledge and awareness, compassion and passionate response, self confidence and sense of interconnection, natural being and the natural world – be more essential or timely for our kind… and never will what human kind does have more definitively impacted the rest of creation. And those who follow will be able to say, that never was it so vital that there still be wild healthful places like the Canyon for the plants and animals that remain, or that there be places of power such as the Animá Center where they can go to rediscover, restore and redirect their selves.
Any future residents of the Canyon will likely be drawn from our student and apprenticeship programs, with one of the most important qualifications being that no place else can satisfy or fulfill them, that they feel most their selves when here, and carry the Canyon in their hearts when away… that when they do go for however long and for whatever reasons, they ache to return. The second most important qualification will be their ability to devote. The myriad other requirements can mostly be learned, including awareness, discernment, teaching techniques and homesteading skills. The deep ways they feel, their insistence on bettering themselves and their world, the things they have suffered as well as learned, even their sense of loneliness or frustrations with aspects of society will prove to have been significant preparation for the huge role they assume here.
Some guests talk about complex challenges and situations in their life that they are ready to change, others can express only a general desire to reconnect with the canyon that nonetheless speaks of something primary, sincere and deep, and it is partly for them that both I, my associates and this place itself exist. And in truth, there is nothing else I want to be doing, besides what I already am – only more so – reaching, stirring, awakening, informing, helping heal and empower ever more people… while necessarily establishing a lasting lineage of Canyon caretakership, continued learning, deep feeling, radical envisioning and insistent doing equal to the greatest individual efforts and shared missions in all of history. Animá was never just an idea, nor only a piece of land. All the magic around it would seem to indicate that what I knew in my heart upon first putting my name on the contract to buy it… that it is meant to be an evolving tradition that lasts so long as there is even a fractional minority seeking out a more real and realized existence, and a place honored and protected not just for a lifetime, but forever. Such is the future we plant our seeds for, grown in the rich ground of our histories, fed in the now by our ceaseless helpful efforts, watered with tears and laughter, rivers of love.
(This photo shows some of the rock borders I first put up near the cabins, which immediately began to collect new soil and seed… a first step in the greening of the Canyon.)
Because of this policy, and my not touring anymore, finances became more difficult again. At one low point I had sold 10 acres to a gal whose well intended but often reckless activism dearly cost the work here and jeopardized the Canyon. A subsequent buyer built the cabin that has since been called the “Gifting Lodge,” then “flaked out” as we say, and if Canyon acolyte Ron Sutcliffe had not come forward and paid the fellow off, the portion where the Lodge sits could have ended up on the open market instead of being given back to the Sanctuary. With no money for building materials, I didn’t get our Anima den – a humble 12’ X 20’ one-room office, internet, counsel area and art studio – built until 1990. In the accompanying photo, you can see the den as well as the now-covered school-bus kitchen to its left, taken from the other side of the river (about 230 yards away), at approximately the same height.
Shown in the photo is the original Anima school bus, sporting a Viking ship medallion to commemorate the act of selling the engine and wheels to raise the earnest money. You see it covered by a sheath of well weathered wood insulating it as well as helping it blend into the landscape, but for over a decade it served as the only structure on the property without cover or siding. It was there at the table I sat, looking over the freshly signed sales contract, thinking hard on what I would do next. Coming up with the down payment for what became the Anima Sanctuary put me through unbelievable stress, as did every single semi-annual payment over the course of the fifteen year obligation. A child of the 60’s (60 B.C.!), I had always chosen free time over dependable income and illusory security, and even my art and music were geared towards awakening personal and global change rather than taking those forms that could actually make me some money. My role models were not the shallow cultural icons of the day, but those who did much with nothing, from cantankerous mountain men to visionary holy men, and I had always quit every job as soon as assured income began to take the edge off my risk taking, or slow my learning, experiencing and growth. I focused on music and art not only because of my natural talents, and their potential beauty or ability to touch hearts and open minds, but because I knew neither would ever make me so secure as to become less motivated and alert. Now I took dangerous and unpleasant jobs that paid well, as well as menial work like pouring adobe bricks that paid almost nothing. Instead of insisting on meaning and enjoyment from my employment as before, I now accepted every opportunity that could help nudge me a little closer to sealing the deal. What I might otherwise have thought of as an unpalatable compromise, I now looked at as simply the necessary trials on the way to what I was meant to do, and where I was meant to be.