Animá Lifeways & Herbal School

The Medicine Woman’s Herbal
By Kiva Rose Hardin
A Brief Excerpt, The Opening Parts Of Chapt. 1:

(Prequel:)
There came a point, or points in their lives when they increasingly recognized something unexpressed inside their selves, a certain power they couldn’t explain to parents afraid of wilderness and scornful of miracles and faeries, an urge to escape the mundane or the expected, a sense of mystery, an inexorable draw towards something as yet unseen, a compulsion to do something special or heroic. Whether clothed in urban fashions or tribal dress, each Medicine Woman to-be saw in the faces of the crowd that they were not the same, were subject to visions of healing or helping the lost and hurting, or dreamed of their hands grinding up communicative herbs in with a hand-carved mortar and pestle. Like a seed, this thing inside them grew with their every watering, a wild gift of foliage too long confined, and not to be denied.
(J. W. Hardin, The Medicine Woman)

“Clothe yourself in your authority. You speak not only as yourself or for yourself. You will speak and act with the courage and endurance that has been yours through the long, beautiful aeons of your life story…”
-Joanna Macy

In our cozy cabin kitchen, my partner Loba opens the ornate oven door of our antique wood stove, checking the progress of four golden loaves of homemade acorn bread while singing a sweet old tune. Nearby, our apprentice Ivy rubs the injured shoulder of fellow student Cara with practiced hands, as our little Rhiannon happily shells the acorns that she gathered. I sit close to the heat-giving stove, stirring crushed elderberries and finely chopped ginger into a bowl of warmed honey and fine brandy, concocting my cold season remedy. Each of us is an evolving Medicine Woman, discovering and refining our skills and talents through practice and improvisation. Through the magic of healing plants and scrumptious foods, touch and sensation, sweet scents and grateful songs, focused intention and artful follow-through, we share our personal medicine with the world… giving to ourselves in the most nourishing and empowering ways, and making heartful contributions to the greater whole. Outside, a great wind howls through the canyon, heralding the onset of late Autumn storms, and bearing yet another wave of migratory birds scouting our warmer environs for the ideal nesting spots. Like them, we are clearly called… simultaneously responding to the pull of home and purpose, and heeding the urge to fly.

I, too, followed instinct or destiny home, to an ancient ceremonial site deep in the Saliz mountains, in the sparsely populated southwest corner of enchanted New Mexico. Home to the insights that Mother Nature and this enchanted canyon in particular afford. Home to my authentic self and real gifts, and to what we call “one’s personal, most meaningful purpose.” And in my case, home to the Medicine Woman Tradition, a nature-based healing and empowerment practice founded and developed by myself and my partner Jesse Wolf Hardin to meet a real need.

Most of us are of mixed lineage, and all of us have to deal with the disempowerment, destruction and distractions of the present times… as well as with the resulting displacement, illness, self-doubt, and self-worth issues. We all suffer to one degree or another from a dangerous “disconnect” from both the natural world and our own natural selves… and from our childhood hopes and dreams. The practice of Anima answers the need for a system of intense reconnection, personal empowerment and action. Anima itself means “breath,” and is essentially the animating essence of all life. Whether we think of it in spiritual, or strictly secular or scientific terms, it is the vital energy that both enlivens and heals the human body. Through the ever adapting dance of the Anima within our bodies, we grow and learn, rest and repair, thrive and eventually die, our bodies returning to and transformed by the earth it was born from. It is this underlying and interconnective source that the Medicine Woman draws from, understanding the earth as a living composite and inspirited organism that we are each an integral part of.

The Anima Medicine Woman Tradition of herbalism is a manifestation of this way of perceiving and acting, specifically designed for those seeking the perceptual and practical skills and tools necessary for global as well as personal and interpersonal healing, and grounded in common sense principles and skills rather than complicated or artificial structures. Healing is hands on and experiential, and medicines are often best made in the kitchen with fresh, vital ingredients by loving hands. The Medicine Woman understands that the most powerful remedies are those that are most personal, defined by her relationship to both the plants and the people she cares for. She also knows that healing comes through both nourishment and challenge, darkness and light, comfort and dis-ease, not as a dichotomy or polarization but as a careful balance of many elements and ingredients. Problems and illnesses are not seen as enemies to be destroyed or battles to be waged but rather as sometimes necessary lessons and helpers on the journey to wholeness.

Though the Tradition draws from ancestral stores of tribal wisdom and ancient ways, it operates outside any particular cultural or ethnic bias or constraint. We each gather knowledge and skills from whatever resources available to us, yet remain rooted in direct experience and place based knowledge. This frees us from holding to historic techniques or philosophies that no longer serve us or the current times, and allows us to grow with continuing experience and fresh understandings. The Medicine Woman Tradition speaks the language of the hills, of old wives and wise women. As ancient as the sea, as familiar as a mother’s hand upon our forehead and as true today as it was 500 years or even millennia ago. The most fundamental healing techniques are both timeless and tirelessly adaptive. For every generation they bloom with new insights and yet remain essentially applicable to current context and need.

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What a great day! I am having cherry cake and mint tea, dressed up to attend a fantasy wedding with all my make believe friends! This is the drawing my Papa did of me (in the middle as a cat at the wedding, with the dashing Baron Cat and Yuki there too from that great movie The Cat Returns. I can’t tell you how happy it made me! And thank you to Roya and Allison and everybody that wrote me about school curricula! Good-bye for now. If you haven’t done something wonderful and yummy for yourself yet today, you had better get to it!

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Hello Friends!

I’ve made fun of Daily Planners before, and don’t like being on the clock.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t all benefit from some prioritization and organization!  I have this lovely bulletin board in the kitchen, really just a big piece of cardboard that I covered with blue calico, that for years has functioned as the handiest place to tack up Rhiannon’s never ending flow of drawings and paintings of faeries, cats wearing elaborate outfits, other assorted plants and animals. It was so delightful, that completely forgot the reason why Wolf had suggested the space in the first place – which was to remind myself to do all those things that get so easily put aside! So this past week I finally relocated all the many drawings, cut up a bunch of construction paper and made some very pretty lists large enough for me to read from the middle of the kitchen, with lots of hearts and flowers and suns and butterflies etc. in the margins.

There’s the “health stuff” list, with reminders to do my yoga, make infusions and take tinctures etc., the “everyday things to remember” list (turn the solar panel, keep buckets out of the sun, get water in before dark, etc), the “things to tend to” list (trails, sheds, mending, mail, plants, paper piles) the “kitchen things” list (make yogurt, sauerkraut, cookies for whoever, make food lists, plan meals, clean the coolers, etc)… all of which are things to consider doing every day.  Then there’s the lists that change pretty constantly such as the meals I want to make soon, things in the pantry that need to be used up: the special things that need to happen immediately or very soon, and the list of not-so-urgent things I’d like to do, like clean out the kitchen cabinets! Then there’s the list of “fun stuff” like reminders to read my cookbooks and Wolf’s novel, to work on editing my own cookbook The Enchanted Pantry, to paint pictures and go for walks. You might not think we would need to write down what we enjoy, but you would find it helps to have the reminders not to skip or overlook any of the activities and pleasures that nourish us!

I guess it’s very much in keeping with the idea of setting intent, and how powerful an affect that can have.  Rhiannon was so excited about the new bulletin board arrangement that she put up her own lists of things to do.  She even made another bulletin board for her pretend friends, which she put up in her tree house. It includes a menu of things that Tabitha Twitchett will make for her kittens, and reminders for her to feed all of them, mend their clothes and so forth.

It’s only been a week, but already it’s helped me maximize & organize my days better, getting around to tasks and rewards I might never otherwise have made the time for.

Love, Loba

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Welcome again to my blog!

It’s been great getting your letters and comments!  Living out here in the canyon like I do, my friends can live a long ways away, but this is how we all stay close.  Many of my friends, because I’m not a typical kid, are big people, but I have some kid friends in the town not far, and new kid friends online.  Kenzie is really special, and loves to learn about plant medicine like I do.  And I got to meet sweet May this way.

Writing this, and then fixing my spelling and grammar, is part of my schoolwork today. Math is next, which you know I don’t like, but I’m trying not to have a bad attitude about it.  Besides, it’s getting easier and easier.  Which reminds me, it would be great if anybody could help us find more curricula, for the 3rd grade, workbooks and lessons and things (science and math, history and grammar and things).  I know amazing things they would never think to ask, of course, but Papa also wants me to keep up with all the things they make you do in a regular school.

I keep seeing more about the importance of attitude.  Pa says being aggravated just makes a hard situation worse, and now even when it’s hard to enjoy something I still try to take it easy and keep a good attitude.  Things can get easier and better, but of course they can also keep going wrong and we need to be able to deal with whatever happens.  Like if you brake up with a wife or you lose your job.  Life is like this long bumpy road and those who try to shovel down all bumps just hurt the mother and it ends up even harder and more troublesome.  Some of us let the bumps just carry us along, and we just check everything out as we go up and down and around, trying hard to do things right.

See, that’s the way things go.  Hope you enjoyed this.

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The swallow I came under the wing of, was actually called a “snake in the grass” by many… and yet turned out to be crucial in getting us the land now known as Anima Center. Dan Swallows was one of only two or three real estate agents within a hundred mile radius at the time, in a county that now hosts a half dozen or more. Agents are often dishonest, in my experience, unprincipled people who would gladly help turn heritage ranches or wilderness paradises into mobile home lots if it would make them a buck. In my intemperate youth, I was known to refer to the majority of the fellows in this profession as “land pimps” and worse. It nonetheless occurred to me, that working at the side of an agent could mean being among the first to hear about a new parcel the moment it was listed. This was especially important in the Gila bioregion of S.W. New Mexico, where over 80 percent of the area is state or federal land. In 1979 the few private parcels were still mostly in the hands of Anglo and Hispanic families that had been here for generations, leaving little for sale. And even if some of the ranches had been broken up already, I certainly wasn’t interested in anyplace where the mark of inglorious and often artless civilization could follow. I was looking for what is popularly called an “inholding,” a piece of undeveloped private property surrounded on all 4 sides by National Forest. Nor would just any inholding do, but only a special river canyon I felt sure existed, the singular place that I had so long imagined, dreamed of, and felt called home by.

An hour after hearing Swallows was hiring unskilled labor, I was at the door of his Cruzville ranch house ready for work. He said he’d start me at $3.00 an hour, less than minimum wage but, as he pointed out, over twice what he could get an undocumented Mexican for. A few months before, I had been making up to $1000 per framed oil painting, and although the high cost of Taos gallery rent ate up nearly everything I made, my 3 dollar wage was still quite a blow. Setting pride aside for the greater cause, I parked our school bus camper in his back 40, as far as I could get it into the trees, and put on a pair of borrowed coveralls. Unfortunately, nothing in my past had equipped me with the kinds of practical skills required to handle even the most menial labor on a ranch. While other youngsters were playing with their daddy’s hammers, I was busy reading classical literature and picturing myself in the roles of adventurer, outlaw, scientist or explorer. When other teens were happily learning how to adjust four-barrel carburetors under the hoods of their first cars, I was a runaway on the streets, a self fashioned street philosopher painting wildlife and wild sword-bearing women on the sides of custom vans and motorcycle gas tanks, riding a chopped BSA that I always needed someone else to fix. I always made money by exploiting my creative talents, and the closest I got to being a laborer was playing a double bass Rogers drum kit in various rock n’ roll bands. I knew things, by golly! And so you can imagine my great disappointment at finding out that I didn’t know how to run a plow, know how to weld the casing on a water pump, or even know how to hit a nail on the head more than one out of five times.

Swallows kept trying me at different chores for the first month, including gluing together PVC plumbing at the bottom of a 6’ deep ditch. It was while on my knees in the ditch, that I first heard a truck drive up, and a soft spoken man describe an isolated piece of property that he wanted help selling. With the two of them standing just out of my sight, I could make out every word: “You gotta find me some city rube,” the old man said. “It’s only got one rough trail leading into it, you’ve got to cross the same river 7 times, anyone would play hell trying to develop it. I can’t figure who’d want such a thing.”

The fellow at the bottom of the ditch, that’s who… doing his best to keep his long pony-tail out of the PVC glue.

(to be continued)

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Now that our little Rhiannon’s getting older, she is able to be lots of help. Like all kids, she’d like to only do what she feels like, and she is totally honest about that, but she also knows the importance of helping take care of things that are so essential and integral to our lives, whether clearing ditches for the coming storm run-off, or helping with the dishes that we need to cook and serve our lovely meals.  Something we’re always working on is balancing work and play time– schoolwork balanced by time alone at the river, washing dishes but also swinging on her swing, gathering kindling but also riding the bike Wolf ordered and painted special for her (with an otter on the chain guard!).

Our current fun project is decorating a special fantasy wedding dress, in keeping with her interest in staging a marriage with a classy cat named Baron from the animated Miyazaki films… (by the way, we totally recommend most of his work, which combines elements of empowered girls and women, positive messages regarding nature and the effects of civilization, and the triumph of will… especially Howl’s Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke).  Rhiannon’s lovely dress already features beaded ribbons, lacey sleeves, beads and more!  She is so tickled to get to do some of the sewing, that she gladly completes her other less enjoyable chores!

I try to apply this means of balance and reward to myself as well, putting a few nonessential activities on my daily list of things to do, or just recognizing opportunities to soak in the beauty of the moment.  Sometimes this may just mean slowing down what I’m doing enough to take in the magnificent view through the salvaged farm windows of our kitchen, as I scrub the pans.  Or to sit by the cookstove fire as it’s getting going and offer a prayer of thanks.  It’s truly amazing, discovering in everything I do an opportunity to connect deeper to myself, my purpose and home.

What do you do, where you live, to feel connected and nourished in the midst of a busy day?

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