Animá Lifeways & Herbal School

The following is a brief interview conducted with Wolf prior to this year’s conference, used as background info for an article Sarah did on us for the Arizona paper The Noise.  It includes insights on not only the event but also the Medicine Bear novel I love, and on the spirit and future of herbalism.  Soon I will be working on my book and course, while Wolf will be writing interview questions for 10 herbalists and finally getting to read the applications from those of you who applied to help as staff!  We’ve been so swamped since getting back from the event, that I only today got something new posted on the Medicine Woman Roots blog, and we’re only now getting this interview up. I hope you will enjoy reading it, and sharing.  -Kiva

Noise Magazine Interview With

JESSE WOLF HARDIN

Author, CoFounder of Plant Healer Magazine and Herbal Resurgence Rendezvous

Conducted by Sarah Supernova, Noise Magazine, AZ, Aug. 2012

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1) Speak about the intimacy of your relationship with plants.

Jesse Wolf Hardin:  I grew up in the suburbs, nothing like the river canyon I now know as home. That said, from earliest memory I was drawn to the natural world, its authenticity as compared to many people’s lives, its diversity and oddness, enchantedness and eloquence. This led me to wildlife that was pervasive enough, or small and slow enough, for my inspection… and to plants, easier to find, or fun to climb. Like our partner Kiva, I spent much of my childhood exploring and finding refuge high in the branches of trees, as people walked busily below without noticing. There may have been no coyotes in the neighborhood, but there were exotic green beings from around the word used to landscape the nearby yards, and weeds, lovely willful dandelions that I respected for their brilliance and tenacity long before I was aware of their medicinal value. Even my mother’s house plants served as conduits to the natural world, agents of the wild preaching their radical vision of beauty and liberty and subverting the barefoot boy who entrained with their movements, and tended their needs.

Today, we publish Plant Healer Magazine (www.PlantHealerMagazine.com) and put on the Herbal Resurgence Rendezvous (www.HerbalResurgence.org), in order to share with people the empowering knowledge of plant medicine… while at the same time, we champion the cause of the often endangered plants themselves, and write about the intrinsic value of these wondrous green beings apart from their nutritional, oxygen producing, scenic and even healing benefits. And we teach that it is personal familiarity and deep intimacy with the herbs that can make us more intuitive and effective herbal consumers and practitioners.

2) Speak of the different levels of medicine. How herbs work not just on physical level, but emotional and spiritual as well. (or do they?)

JWH:  At their most evident, plants are organic chemical producers, manufacturing chemicals that serve them in various ways, and coincidentally also prove useful in treating a lot of human conditions and ailments. In addition, it’s now scientifically proven that we are affected energetically by plants, our moods and ways we perceive triggered or influenced by nothing more than the smell of a calming lavender sprig, for example. And plants have been given credit for contributing to a spiritual sense of interconnectedness or “oneness,” the sense of accessing a transglobal body of collected terrestrial wisdom, and a feeling of being a part of something as eternal as it is ever changing. From the psychotropic visions induced by Peyote cactus to the more pedestrian sense of well being that comes from tending the roses in the yard, plants provide a healing experiences far beyond their uses in tinctures and salves.

Herbs are an affordable way to sensibly manage our own health, in the majority of situations, and they can also lead to realizations that are deeply personal, emotional, even spiritual, and inspire us to make lifestyle changes that result in us becoming more self sufficient as well as healthy.

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www.HerbalResurgence.org

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3) Speak about the demographics and kind of people seeking herbal knowledge these days, and who show up at your Herbal Resurgence Rendezvous (TWHC) each year.

JWH:  Herbal medicines, self care and natural healing no longer appeal only to traditional rural folks, homesteaders and New Agers, but to broad spectrum of the mainstream as well. The majority limit their interest to the purchase of herbal supplements, but a growing number are also seeking out herbal books, schools and conferences to further their understanding. Published stories on the dangers of pharmaceuticals, difficult economic times, ecological destruction and increasing government regulation have all resulted in increased interest in herbalism in recent years, after what had been a decade of decline.

Herbal Resurgence attracts a special audience that is anything but typical, with many attendees to our international event avoiding normal conferences. What we host each year is an intense tribe of plant and herb enthusiasts from all over the world, grateful for the opportunity to gather together, strengthen bonds, and plan alliances and projects. They range from esteemed clinical PHDs to excited beginners just learning about herbs, from elders to wild eyed children and teens, and including “kitchen” herbalists, misfit nurses, street medics, free clinic organizers, herbal activists, visionaries and alternative folks, outliers and oddballs, the happy loners and sadly alienated now finding their “people” and “home”.

4) What goes on at an Herbal Resurgence Rendezvous?

JWH:  Resurgence is a combination gathering/celebration and unique educational event, featuring unusual and inspiring classes taught by some of the biggest names in herbalism, like Matthew Wood, Paul Bergner and Rosemary Gladstar, along with the most intriguing and promising of new talents in the herbal field. Classes include both lectures and medicine making and other topics that invite audience hands-on participation in the processes being taught. Participants also join in a number of plant identification walks along the beautiful trails surrounding Mormon Lake, and party hearty during the two nights of live music and entertainment.

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5) Speak about how you and Kiva decided to put on these conferences.

JWH:  The informed practice of herbalism had been in a tailspin since the mid 1990s, with schools losing students, and many conferences closing or contracting even as billions of dollars was starting to be made by the big corporations selling herbal supplements. We’d witnessed political infighting and been saddened by what was often an air of quiet desperation in what should by all rights have been a practice and community that brings great joy. We launched Herbal Resurgence Rendezvous (first called Traditions In Western Herbalism Conference) to assist the reinvigoration of the “people’s medicine,” a resurgence of inquiry, study, history, community, and new ideas. And to instill a sense of personal responsibility and herbal knowledge that’s resistant to what will be increasing regulation and proscription by the corporate funded U.S. government.

We measure the success of this event not just on the quality and originality of the presentations, but on the residual effects it has on all how attend, the new friendships and alliances, new realizations and valuable lessons learned, the joy felt and callings affirmed.

6) Speak about your personal journey as an herbalist, how you came to this path.

JWH:  Kiva is the accomplished herbalist, whose intrinsic affinity for plants combined with efforts to heal her own condition and imbalances, resulting in a lengthy study and then practice. I serve as an herb interlocutor and agent of the plants, helping grow and deepen the herbalist community while promoting herbalism’s values, aims and aesthetics. My work in this field naturally follows my years as a naturalist and ecological activist, in which I used music and story to inspire an inseparable healing of the land, our community, and our emotional and physical bodies.

7) When you encounter an unfamiliar plant, what is your process for gaining knowledge of it and building your relationship with it?

JWH:  We’ve written thousands of words on this topic so far in Plant Healer Magazine! Familiarity and relationship with a plant requires that we first positively identify it (“key it out”) and do all the research and reading we can do on it. But it also requires that we set aside our formed preconceptions and all we think we know about the plant, long enough to perceive it fresh. That we resist humanizing the plant (anthropomorphizing it) and projecting our preferences or imaginings on it. That we take our time, sense it with our physical senses, and get a feel for its energetic actions. That we recognize its needs as well as its gifts, honor its integrity. If and when we harvest it or snip from its limbs, we do not ask permission to cause it pain or take its life, but rather, acknowledge that it feels pain and has a desire like our to live and thrive… and then give thanks. And we need to relax into a wordless communication, that is more about mutual recognition than special instruction. Only then can we expect a clue as to all the ways that ingesting it will effect us and maybe help us, and feel close enough to the plant to be full deserving of its gift of healing and life.

About your new novel, The Medicine Bear (www.TheMedicineBear.com), how did you conceive of the story and the characters? Did it come all at once (as visions so often do!), or was it something that came slowly and was put together piece by piece?

JWH:  The Medicine Bear is the first work of fiction of my several books, envisioned to be an accurate and thought-provoking history of this region in the closing days of the “Old West,” with these mountains and deserts, forests and rivers being not just the settings for the story, but complex and evocative characters in their own right.

Nearly all of the tale came to me at once, the juxtaposition of real historical characters such as Pancho Villa with my fictional protagonists, the writer and adventurer Eland and Omen, the gifted but haunted, mixed-blood, herbalist Medicine Woman. And the flow of events, from Eland’s birth in 1892 to the closing scenes in 1964, spanning Omen’s apprenticeship to the Tucson cuarandera Doña Rosa and the central event of 1916, with Villa’s retaliatory raid on Columbus, New Mexico and the scene of revolutionaries with bows and arrows facing the machine guns that would so loudly announce the modern age.

The Medicine Bear’s inspiration were its themes of undying love, personal and cultural transformation, recognizing and living our dreams, and healing… the healing of emotional wounds caused by alienation or abuse as well as the art of helping to heal the ailments of others with the artful use of medicinal plants.

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9) Your book sounds deeply researched and richly written. Can you speak about the process of writing it and your relationship to the characters?

JWH:  I, like the Medicine Bear, am a product of the fertile milieu of the Southwest’s inspirited places and Indian, Hispanic and Anglo cultures, of un-corruptible elemental values and resilient outlaw attitude, its deep passions and particular aesthetic. As a denizen of this place, the book’s accurate history of this area is my history, and its characters are amalgams of and representatives of my neighbors and loved ones, from native traditionalists and cowboys to those folksy, big-hearted purveyors of herbs… the people’s medicine.

I’ve lived at the Anima Sanctuary (www.AnimaCenter.org) for over 3 decades now, a restored riparian wilderness, a botanical and wildlife sanctuary seven river crossings and several bends of the canyon from the nearest pavement. It was therefore not hard for me to suspend for a year my preoccupation with the modern age that I’m trying to affect with my writing, our magazine and conference, and instead to fully inhabit – moment-to-moment – the world that existed a hundred years ago… one that still exists here in the Southwest’s more remote mountains and canyons. I lived and interacted with the Medicine Bear’s characters for all those months, shared feelings, fears and hopes as I scrambled to keep up, to type as fast as the scenes became clear to me. The Doña gave voice to what I teach regarding place, true magic, glad service and devotion to a calling. Eland embodies the quandary I’ve always faced, the tension and hopeful balance between adventuring and settling, between creating for others and simply deeply experiencing, between the endless train of words and a profoundly experienced, wordless reality. And in Omen, blooms the sweet sadness and resolute will that complicates as well as helps to shape my own winding life trail, portrayed in a woman a heckuva lot like my Kiva Rose.

The process of writing The Medicine Bear was emotionally challenging more than technically difficult, with my investment of time and caring rewarded by every reader who tells me they were touched or opened by its sentiments and passages, stirred to action or deeply inspired.

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10) Anything else you’d like to add?

JWH:  The need and calling for self-care and community care skills like herbalism has never been greater. As the price of pharmaceuticals continually goes up and their dangers become ever more evident, and whenever the general economy is shaky, herbal knowledge is becoming once again as essential and accepted as it was in the days before the advent of “modern” medicine. There is a new and rising wave of herbalists of all ages, insistent on learning the old ways and the new twists, treating their families or serving their communities. It’s that which has us giving nearly all of our time to these projects, the necessity for a “Medicine of The People, By The People, For The People”… and the satisfaction that comes with helping to feed and further this aroused herbal resurgence.

Folk Herbalism is only one piece – although a key piece – in what is a larger interweaving of social action, earth stewardship and crucial cultural change. With increased attention to the self-empowering field of herbal healing, we will again and again be making the connection to the necessary, active healing of our wounded hearts and psyches, healing the schism between us and the rest of nature, healing our communities and the damaged earth.

Nothing is needed more. And nothing could be more exciting or satisfying.

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Jesse Wolf Hardin is an acclaimed teacher, presenter, artist, activist, and author of 7 books including his new novel The Medicine Bear (www.TheMedicineBear.com). His over 400 published articles have been featured in numerous other books including The Encyclopedia Of Nature & Religion (Continuum, 2005), The Soul Unearthed (Tarcher/Putnam, ‘96), and How Shall I Live My Life? (Derrick Jensen, PM Press 2008). His work has been praised by a wide range of luminaries from the poet Gary Snyder and herbalist Rosemary Gladstar, to the editor of True West Magazine, Bob Boze Bell.  Hardin writes and teaches at his remote botanical sanctuary in a river canyon in SW New Mexico (www.AnimaCenter.org), and is the cofounder of both Plant Healer Magazine (www.PlantHealerMagazine.com) and Herbal Resurgence Rendezvous (the third week of each September – www.HerbalResurgence.org).

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It’s important that Plant Healer Magazine not have so many columnists that room runs out for contributions from others.  Last time we announced the addition of quarterly contributions from Susun Weed… and this round, we found we couldn’t resist adding just one final column:

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Mountain Medicine: Traditional Healing Folkways

by Phyllis Light

Phyllis D. Light (http://phyllisdlight.com) is one of the foremost repositories and champions of both traditional Southern Appalachian herbalism and folk herbalism in general.  We are so happy to have her insightful and personable articles every issue, covering everything from plant profiles and medicine making to childhood tales and poignant history, case studies and thoughtful ruminations, the practices that grew out of her wooded Southeastern mountains and hollers, and valuable and endangered plant-medicine traditions from all parts of this country and beyond.

What a pleasure it was for Kiva and I to meet Phyllis in person at last year’s Traditions In Western Herbalism Conference, and to look forward to having her there to teach again this September. She is discerning and opinionated while still being warm, accessible, humorous, unpretentious and seemingly free of entitlement… in every sense, what we would call “down to earth!”.  Below is an excerpt from an interview we did with her Fall of 2011, one that you’ll likely find informative and inspiring whether you happen to be an herbalist or not.  To read the entire 8,000 word conversation, including Phyllis’ detailed description of Southern and Appalachian Folk Medicine blood typing, please see the Winter Issue of Plant Healer Magazine, available by going to the Plant Healer site:
PlantHealerMagazine.com

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Plant Healer Interview:

PHYLLIS LIGHT

SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN HERBALIST

In dialog with Jesse Wolf Hardin

Plant Healer Magazine: Thank you, Phyllis, for taking time for this conversation.  We honored to have this opportunity to talk more with and about you, and to hear your heart and mind on topics you might not otherwise have cause to address.  Let’s start at the beginning if you please – what do you remember as your first deep connection with the natural world?  When did you begin acknowledging nature as a teacher?

Phyllis Light: My first deep connection with plants came when I was about five or so. I was too young to help pick cotton so my mother let me run around the field and play hide and seek with the kids of the other field hands. There was a strip of grassy meadow land between the cotton field and the woods filled with sedge grass, golden rod, asters and passionflower and it was here that I hid. If you lay flat in a field of sedge grass no one can see you and there isn’t any apparent ripple in the flow of the grass to give you away. I hid very well and no one found me and the next thing I knew, the other kids had left and I was left alone. At first, I was a little scared, it was such a big cotton field and there were no adults in sight. It was a vast land of cotton rows and emptiness. I could hear the wind through the trees, the buzz of insects but nothing else. It was eerily quiet.

I didn’t know what to do, I felt very alone, very small and just a little afraid. So I just lay in the sedge grass and stared at the leaves on the trees, all moving together in the wind. I watched the clouds moving across the sky. I listened to the sound of the grasshoppers jumping among the grass stalks. I don’t know how long I lay there, not moving, just being. I wasn’t scared any longer, or upset. Just quiet and a little subdued. I had become part of the land, the cotton rows, the meadow and the woods. We were the same.

I didn’t move until Momma came looking for me and then I leaned over and pulled a ripe maypop (passionflower) and ate it as we walked back to where she had left her pick sack.

I can’t remember a time when Nature wasn’t a companion, a friend, benefactor or teacher and sometimes, an enemy. Nature can be loving and generous and it can be hard and cruel. I grew up well aware of the dual aspect of the natural world taught in early lessons of survival. If there was no rain, the crops didn’t grow and we didn’t have anything to eat. If the wind blew too hard, the corn stalks lay on the ground. If it rained too much at the wrong time of year, there would be no cotton crop. If we were in the path of a tornado, we could be homeless or dead. And then there are those wondrous days, when the sun is shining, the wind is gentle and the temperature mild. All of creation responds to those days.
We lived in flow with the seasons; the sun and the moon and the natural rhythms guided our lives. We followed the growth cycles of the plant world keeping track of the abundance or lack of wild plants for wildcrafting. Some years were ginseng years when the digging was good. Some years were pink root years when the digging was good. My grandparents chronicled their life history with stories about senging, herb digs and natural phenomenon.

When you live with the flow of seasons, Nature is a constant companion. A lover, a mistress, a child or a relative. You are not separate.  I have never considered myself separate from Nature; we are part and parcel.

Plant Healer Magazine: Was your love of nature and plants the bridge to doing healing work with herbs?  What other vision, insight or events might have led to your giving your life so fully to this work?

Light: My love of Nature wasn’t what called me to healing work. My love of Nature is a solid force, a constant influence in my life, and it would be a part of me regardless of my profession. As a child, I knew that I would help people when I grew up but I wasn’t sure how. Using herbs was just a natural extension of my early training and that belief. My grandmother taught me, my grandfather taught me, and  my father taught me. In a way, it was the family business.

Over the years, I’ve used many different tools to help people; herbs, bodywork, psychology, energy, nutrition, metaphysics, prayer, or whatever works. I will use whatever is available, on-hand, or needed to help someone.

I’ve been seeing people since I was about 19. In the beginning it was a more casual arrangement. People didn’t make an appointment, they just dropped by and Sunday afternoons after church was especially busy. At that time, being an herbalist was a lot like being a lay preacher. You didn’t get paid. It was your gift and your calling and it should be freely given. But one event sent a clear message that it was time to change the way I did practice.

I was a single parent going through a divorce. Life was tough with four kids and not much money. I had been feeling really depressed for several weeks wondering how I was going to make ends meet. One early morning I went to the grocery store dressed rather raggedly and looking a little unkempt. I was slowly pushing my cart up and down the grocery aisle wondering what to buy when I passed a woman dressed rather like the Amish, in a long dress, with long sleeves and bonnet.

I paid for my few purchases and went home. As I was unloading the car the same woman pulled into the driveway. She came to me and held out her hand. I held out my hand in return and she put a wad of money in it. “God told me that you are doing good work. And we’ve a little extra money this month.” That’s all she said and before I could even say thank you, she had turned and gone. I was totally flabbergasted; it was enough money to make it through the month. After that event, I suddenly had a full-time herbal practice. But how I came to charge people is another story.

There was a camp revival meeting in an empty field not far from my house. About mid-afternoon, three women appeared at my door looking for the herbalist’s house. When I told them they had the right house all three wanted appointments. After their appointments were finished, one of the women asked how much they owed. I told them nothing, no charge. Another of the women asked me to pray with them and they all stood up and we circled. After the prayer, the third woman said that God told her that I should charge $25.00 for each appointment and open a big office to see folks. They went back to the tent revival and told everyone about me and for the next few days, I was deluged with clients from the tent revival. When the revival was over, I drove to the closest large town, found an office and opened a practice. I was busy.

It seems I’ve always had guidance along the way.

Plant Healer Magazine: I consider strong sense of place essential for any life or purpose, committing to the land and its human and other-than-human cultures, and being accepted, informed and nourished by the land in turn.  What does it mean, to be a conscious inhabitant and member of the Southeastern mountain region?

Light: Wow… big question. Sometimes it’s really hard to maintain my equilibrium in the face of stripping mining, coal mining, clear-cutting, planes spraying cotton defoliate, polluted lakes and rivers and all the other ways that we humans have of defiling the very land that gives us life. In the South, there seems to be this love/hate relationship with the land. Folks truly, truly love their land even while they are strip mining it. They will tell you how much they love the mountain while they are clear-cutting it. I don’t understand the gestalt….. maybe it’s a cognitive disconnect, but folks here just won’t believe that what they do to the earth is reflected in their health. They also don’t believe that we can ever permanently damage the earth. And of course, there’s that whole Christian perspective of stewardship which is not defined well. For some, it gives them the right to rape and pillage the earth, for others, it is about conscious care-taking.

Sometimes, I just cry when I see what is being done to the land, the rape, the ravage, the need to squeeze every dime from every inch. I do what I can and over the years, I’ve worked with others who feel the same way.  Being conscious carries responsibility.

Plant Healer Magazine: You are known as a teacher of Appalachian Herbalism.  How would you define that term?

Light: Southern and Appalachian Herbalism, the traditional medicine of the lower Appalachian Mountains and the Lower South, developed from the folk medicines of the Native Americans, Europeans, West Africans and Celts. Its development resulted from the need of settlers to take care of themselves and their families in a new land filled with strange and wonderful plants and animals and new diseases. Southern and Appalachian Herbalism and Folk Medicine includes the use of plants, home remedies, foods, prayer, story-telling and psycho-spiritual rituals handed down by oral tradition within families and communities. Assessment techniques are based on physical observation, understanding the personality, and the Southern blood types, bitter, sweet, sour and salty. There are three main categories of illness: physical, psychological and spiritual (magical).

Plant Healer Magazine: What is the most common ailment or complaint you deal with?  Has this changed over the years?

Light: The most common ailments I’m seeing now is Chronic Fatigue due to viral overload, too much stress, gluten sensitivity, lack of rest and lack of good nutrition. It seems that chronic illnesses always come in batches. Last year it was hypothyroidism and the year before multiple sclerosis. Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Lyme disease, polycystic ovarian syndrome, mitral valve prolapse and digestive tract issues round out the problems I see most often.

Plant Healer Magazine: How much of a factor is lifestyle and environment, and to what degree can an herbalist even address these relevant or even central factors in client consultations?

Light: Lifestyle and environment are the primary factors in illness along with emotional strife and discord. My grandmother called all this “worriation” which says it all, the lack of being true to oneself. If we forget who we are, if we move away from our authentic selves, then we are more prone to illness. Herbs and other healing modalities can help us remember who we are, help us value ourselves again and restore self-esteem. Once self-esteem is restored, if our bodies have not reached the point of no return, then we can heal.

Herbs work on every level of our existence, physical, psychological and spiritual. In my tradition, for chronic illnesses, herbs were used to change attitude, restore vital energy and facilitate physical healing. When our self-esteem is low, when negative emotions are engaged, then vital energy plummets. Tommie often recommended a “swallow” of herbs in these situations; his version of drop doses. For acute illness, larger amounts of herbs are needed more often because  this could be life or death and we must respond appropriately. In Southern and Appalachian Folk Medicine there was always an action on the part of the client required in addition to herbs or other recommendations. The required action, usually a penance of some sort, engaged the client in their own process of healing and kept them engaged. I still use this technique but I call it homework instead.

Chronic illness is never without lifestyle, environmental, stress, or emotional influence and I do address this in sessions. As a healer, I believe this is totally appropriate. It’s often the emotions we bury that continue to facilitate chronic disease. They may not have caused the problem, but emotions hold the problem in place and cause stagnation in body and spirit. This stagnation then leaves us more susceptible to acute illness and infection. When our spirit, our personalities are low, then our immune system is low.

Plant Healer Magazine: Describe the system of therapeutics and diagnosis that you use.  To what degree does it derive from this continent?

Light: I use observational assessment techniques and constitutional analysis based on Southern and Appalachian blood types and personality profiles, the four elements and folk astrology. This is my primary technique. But I also use Western nail and hair assessment, Ayurvedish/Western tongue assessment and biomedical knowledge of disease. All this comes together to help me find the patterns of dysfunction inherent within the constitution and personality of the client. And I also read bloodwork.

Plant Healer Magazine: On another topic, what do you think are the biggest threats to herbalism in the world today, not only from outside, but from within?

Light: The pharmaceutical/medical industrial complex is high on my lists of threats to herbalism and natural healing techniques in general. Greed and the desire to increases the bottom line is all it takes to threaten the ability of folks to take care of themselves and their families. Tighter government regulation on herbal products is also an issue that we herbalists must maintain vigilance toward.

Herbalists tend to be a house divided: Those for licensure and those against. That division fairly prohibits any type of mass political action. This is both a strength and weakness. It keeps our profession viable, active and non-exclusive. But it also limits our political power.

Licensing herbalists emerges from time to time, but licensure is a state’s issue, not a federal one. Let’s keep herbs for the populace!

Plant Healer Magazine: What kinds of regulation might prove intolerable for you?  What is the responsibility of herbalists, when it comes to helping determine the direction of this field, creating useful forms and protocols, or resisting imposition and injustice?

Light: As herbalists, many of us are already practicing under the radar. It’s a balancing act trying to grow the profession while simultaneously not wanting to call too much attention to your practice. It seems to be the really successful herbalists with lots of clients that the authorities tend to watch or bust. It’s an odd thing: The better you are at your job as an herbalist, the more popular you become, the more likely to draw the attention of the authorities.

Herbalism, in the South, is considered a tradition and I’ve seen less hassling here than in other parts of the country. Actually I’ve never seen any herbalist hassled except Tommie who blatantly put on his salve label that it cured skin cancer. It was the feds that came knocking on his door about that, not the local authorities. And I must say, the woman sent out to Tommie’s place with a cease and desist order was really nice, non-threatening and totally reasonable. Tommie change his label and that finished that business, well almost. He hand-wrote a sign on plywood that basically said his salve would do what he said it would do.

There is also the belief that God gave us herbs for our health. Here, herbalism is a religious freedom. It is ours by right and gift and the Bible speaks clearly on that point and there is protection in that belief. It’s a different situation in the South for that reason than I’ve seen in other areas of the country.

Even when I worked in a medical clinic, I never introduced myself an anything but a folk herbalists. In the South, there is acknowledge respect for the profession. However, from my experience in the medical clinic, I now believe that herbalists who work in this arena need training above folk medicine. The number of pharmaceutical drugs grows every year and clinical herbalists (my definition) must be familiar with them.

While I don’t believe in licensing herbalists, I can see where educational standards for clinical herbalists might be appropriate. But that being said, we herbalists can even agree on the definition of what a clinical herbalist does.

Herbalist are independent, ornery, and filled with opinions. It’s hard to get us to agree on anything.

If I couldn’t grow or gather herbs that would be pretty intolerable.

Plant Healer Magazine: What responses or adaptations might we see in the future, what forms might herbalism take?

Light: Too many options to make a clear statement on this. I do see a revival in folk medicine for which I am thankful. Herbs are continued to be researched and this research is influencing how people do practice so I don’t see that changing. It will be fascinating to see what happens over the next 10 years.

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Plant Healer Magazine: What most pisses you off?

Light: I get really pissed off at injustice, brutality, and the strong taking advantage of the weak. I get really, really, really pissed off when people hurt or abuse children or animals. And I don’t care too much for lying either.

Plant Healer Magazine: What tickles you more than anything?

Light: I get tickled at people watching, getting to know someone, funny British comedies, and watching butterflies and birds.

Plant Healer Magazine: If you weren’t already giving all your time to herbalism, if your future were a blank slate, what else might you do with your life, what might you give to yourself?

Light: Hmm… that’s a tough one…. rock star, famous author, actress, warrior, magician, astronaut, … All my childhood fantasies.

Plant Healer Magazine: What are the most essential tips you might give to an herbalist, to make them more effective, or to help them deal with the challenges, politics and pressures they may face?

Light: Never lose faith in who you are or what you do.  Study with as many teachers as possible. Self-study continually.  Become an engaged member of your community.  Question authority when appropriate.  Maintain a connection to Nature and the plant world.  Find a good mentor and maintain that lifelong relationship.  Stretch your herbal boundaries.  Strive for excellence.

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See the Winter 2011/12 issue of Plant Healer Magazine for the complete interview with Phyllis Light.  You’ll need to be subscribed prior to March 1st when the Spring issue replaces it.  Go to: www.PlantHealerMagazine.com

To learn about studying with Phyllis, or to read some of her work, please go to: PhyllisDLight.com

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Plant Healer Interview Excerpt With Gaian Artist

Joanna Powell Colbert

Interviewed by Jesse Wolf Hardin

Intro:
We’ve long loved Joanna’s beautiful and meaning-full artwork, since we first shared pages in SageWoman magazine long ago… and she was the first artist we thought of when selecting a cover for the maiden issue of Plant Healer journal, and she has appeared in every issue since.  You will be able to meet her in person at the 2011 Traditions In Western Herbalism Conference, Sept. 15-18. You can subscribe to Plant Healer at www.PlantHealerMagazine.com

Plant Healer Magazine: There are wondrous but accurately portrayed green beings in many of your creations, what do they evoke for you?

Colbert: I love their personalities. I love the “voice” of each plant that is so distinct and unique.  Each one is like a new friend or a new lover, waiting to be discovered. They’re waiting for you and me to enter into “right relationship” with them.

As a student of folklore and mythology, I also love the symbolic resonances of so many plants. I put hawthorn in the hair of the woman on the Lovers card, for example. Hawthorn, of course, traditionally blooms at Beltane in the British Isles (although my experience here in the Northwest is that it blooms closer to the first of June).  So hawthorn links the card to the May Queen of Celtic folklore and the celebration of sacred sexuality. Hawthorn is the May-flower, which was the name of the ship the Pilgrims took to the New World in search of living a more authentic life. So, for me, hawthorn carries the message of Joseph’s Campbell’s famous admonition to “follow your bliss,” especially since it is used medicinally to strengthen the heart.  Even though the hawthorn blossoms are a small detail in the Lovers card, they are intrinsic to the meaning of the card.

Plant Healer Magazine: What were some of the most memorable experiences in your past, opening you up to the numinous natural world?

Colbert: For me, it has been more of a slow unfolding rather than a sudden revelation. I have an early childhood memory of being on a camping trip in the California redwoods, when I was suddenly aware of a shimmering in the woods, of an undulating energy half-seen but wholly felt. It was as if I had stepped into Faery — and perhaps I had. But as a good Sunday Schooler, the only language I had for the experience was that I felt closer to God in the woods than anywhere else. Today I would say I had experienced the Otherworld for the first time — the land beneath the land, the river beneath the river.

During the decade I lived on the island, I studied its natural history with a young woman who was an instructor with Wolf Camp. We would go out for long tramps around the island, and she would teach me about plants that were new to me, or how to recognize the tracks of island deer and coyotes, or what kinds of birds made what kind of nests.  One day we were rummaging around the base of an old Douglas fir tree near the beach and found a cache of crow bones. Delighted with our find, we were headed for home when we passed by an old decaying boat we had seen many times before. We were startled to see that someone had laid the body of a young, dead heron in the boat. There were skulls of other birds and animals in the boat as well.

We both sank to our knees, aware that we were in the presence of the Death Goddess. (Heron is sacred to me as an epiphany of the Goddess in this specific Place.) Then we began collecting cedar boughs and yarrow from the meadow, and made offerings by laying those in the boat. We sang to Her, and to the spirit of the Heron.

I looked up and realized we were on the west side of the island.  Overhead, a turkey vulture glided on the wind. I saw sunlight sparkling on the water (a symbol of the Goddess to me), and remembered all the stories of the Celtic Otherworld as being located in the Western Isles. When people died, they would sail into the West. Something shifted, and I realized I was being given the image for my Death card.

To this day, I consider that old boat to be sacred ground. We never did discover who placed the body of the heron there.

Plant Healer Magazine: You chose Gaian Tarot for the theme of your deck, before or after you started drawing the series of pictures that appear in it?  Gaia is an icon for a living earth, a concept whose resurgence couldn’t come at a better time… what is the story of your connection to the term, and the inspiration to create this deck?

Colbert: The theme came first. I had no plans to create a tarot deck — I had been away from tarot for many years. Then I had an encounter with a woman at a festival in Chicago that made me realize I had a calling and a mandate to create a deck that would bring together two great passions of mine — my love for the natural world with my love for the rich, archetypal imagery of the tarot.

I don’t actually remember how the name “Gaian Tarot” came to me.  It was just, suddenly, there; and I recognized it as the right name. It honors the Great Mother, which is very important to me.  And it gives a nod to James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, which says that all organisms combine together into a system that sustains life on our planet. The Gaia Hypothesis may be controversial among scientists, but it has given us a useful term for referring to a worldview that honors the Earth as sentient and as sacred.

Plant Healer Magazine: Art is often either adulated or dismissed, in either case a rarified thing existing above or irrelevant to our every day experiences and lives.  Can you recommend ways in which art and artistic sensibility/perspective can be made more a part of life, and our daily existence be made more artful?

Colbert: I think the most important thing to remember — or perhaps to reclaim — is that each and every one of us is creative, just by virtue of being born as human beings. It’s intrinsic to who we are as a species.  We are creating every day, whether or not we recognize it. Our art forms may be cooking, gardening, doing ritual, building community, writing, dancing, making music, being a political activist — can we even begin to count the ways?

Plant Healer Magazine: What advice, warnings or or encouragement can you offer to any of our readers feeling the call to not only appreciate the beauty of plants, but to also paint and draw them?

Colbert: Make time for it! Make time every day for art. Take at least 15 minutes a day (longer, if you can) to sit outside and draw the plants you see. Your sketch doesn’t have to look professional. You don’t even have to show your sketchbook to anyone. Just draw what you see. It will become a meditation, an exercise in mindfulness, and there’s no better way to get to intimately know a plant than to lovingly draw it. Get a good book on basic drawing skills and do the exercises. Take lessons if you can. And practice, practice, practice. It’s more about the process than about the final product. But you will find that, the more you practice, the better your results will be (like anything worth doing).

One of my favorite books on this topic is “Keeping a Nature Journal” by Clare Leslie Walker. If you worked your way through that book, doing all the exercises, you’d have a beautiful nature journal by the time you finished.  And you would know the plant world (and yourself!) so much more deeply.

Plant Healer Magazine: We know what it is about Joanna Powell Colbert’s art that inspires us to include it here.  And what is it about Plant Healer Magazine, that has resulted in such support from you?

Colbert: I have loved, grown and used herbs for thirty years but it’s never been my area of expertise. I know enough to appreciate the herbalists and wise women who have made it their life’s work and who have so much wisdom to share with the rest of us.  Plants, and the people who work and play with them, are really on the front lines of our relationship with Mother Earth as a global community. I appreciate the name of the magazine with its emphasis on the word “healer”, because I believe we all have a mandate to not only heal ourselves and each other, but to heal the earth as well.

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Joanna Powell Colbert is an artist, writer and teacher of tarot and earth-centered spirituality. Amber Lotus Publishers calls her one of “the most accomplished and well-loved artists in the Goddess-spirit community.” The Gaian Tarot, nine years in the making, combines Joanna’s love of symbolic, archetypal art with the mysteries of Mama Gaia, the natural world. A Collector’s Edition is nearly sold out, but a mass market edition will be published by Llewellyn in September 2011. All the images from the deck can be seen online at www.GaianTarot.com. The Gaian Tarot was created during the decade Joanna lived on a small island near Bellingham, Washington. Today she lives in the woods outside town, where daily encounters with the mysteries of the natural world continue to inspire and inform her work.

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