Animá Lifeways & Herbal School

Health & Healing

The Sweet Medicine Sanctuary is a restored riparian wilderness, a river ecosystem made healthy again through the reintroduction of cottonwoods and willows, cattail and clump grass.  Ringtail cats cavort next to splashing muskrats, and fish make love under an expanse of heron wings.  It’s been nearly 3 decades since I first started excluding cattle from the land and replanting native plants.  With each new season, an increasing variety of plant life have made their way back home here, and every Spring comes the sound of yet another bird species I’ve never heard.  With every reintroduction the land becomes more of what it once was, and in this way, more itself.

Like this land, I too have sacrificed parts of myself, only to regain them through practice and prayer, personal insistence and the passage of time.  Things such as the willingness to laugh, and the ability to cry.  The honest depths of agony, and far extremes of joy.  My inner animal, and the reason for being.  The inclination to play, and the patience to stay.  It’s a good thing, because the longer I’m here, the better able I am to hear the will and whisperings of the Earth…. and more myself I am.

Of course, the walk downriver hasn’t always been easy.  Although some seasons I’ve leapt about, moving rocks for soil berms as if work had no weight, when I’ve been ill it hasn’t been so easy.  But in either case, I’ve never been truly healthier since coming here to home and purpose: knowing who I really am, what I most need to be doing, and where I most certainly belong.  Indeed, what is to be healthy, but to be whole: a balanced unity of gifts and needs, heart and mind, vision and action.  Gaia teaches that good health isn’t the absence of trauma or pain, but rather, the most complete embodiment of our authentic selves.  The depth of sensation, emotion and experience.  The fullness of expression and response.  The fulfillment of our passions and our purpose, our destiny and our dreams.   It’s how  we live, more than how long.  “Wellness” means living well: consciously and compassionately, artfully and purposefully.

The Anima Medicine Woman is adept at treating disease.  People come from all over for the healing effects of this place as well as Kiva’s insightful prescriptions and adept ministrations.  At the same time, it isn’t disease that makes us unwhole, for pain makes us more aware of our bodies and feelings, and the way both our lifestyles and our immediate environments are affecting us.  Suffering tempers our skills, tests our resolve, and strengthens our will.  Debility teaches us humility, and infirmity counsels patience.  The loss of one sensory organ leads to a heightening of the others.  At its worst, a deadly virus does nothing but return us to the earth we arose from, extend from, and belong to.  We are made unwhole not by death, but the failure to fully live.  By that which dilutes our focus, weakens our intention, or dishonors our spirit. That which makes us doubt our instincts and intuition, significance or value.  We are made unwhole by the suppression of our feelings, and the repression of our needs.  By the subjugation of our animal beings.  We have to give up certain aspects and components of our selves, in order to fit into society’s mold.  It is the loss or neglect of these parts that contributes to our greatest dis-ease: our imagined separation from the rest of the living world.  And with their re-membering and reclamation, we take the first of many steps towards the necessary cure.

Likewise, the Earth isn’t made any less — or any less healthy — by the eroding of mountain rock into fertile valley soil, or the death of a cottontail in the jaws of a fox.  Or even the shredding of forests by an erupting volcano, which relatively quickly grow back.  Even the natural extinction of species is only a recycling of the parts into the whole, each pruning back resulting in a new burst of growth, an opportunity for new color and form.  To the degree that it is sickened it is not because of the annihilation of individual life forms, so much as the overall reduction of biological, cultural and topographical diversity.  The extincting of species for no reasons other than obliviousness and greed.  The appropriation of habitat, so there’s little place left for the wildlife to spring back.  The monocultures of agribusiness, and the genetic manipulation of life.  And it’s not just the killing off of native songbirds, but the hundreds of indigenous languages being lost to neglect.  The defacing of the planet with asphalt, and the defaming with plastics.  By our failing to notice Gaia’s every miracle and gift, every hint of wind, the opening of a sidewalk blossom, the dance of a floating leaf.  And by our forgetting to give thanks.  We make the world sick with our neglect of self and planet, the dishonoring of Spirit, and the conceptual and physical dismembering of the which was one.

We say the “integrity” of a structure is compromised, and perhaps made unsafe, if any portion is degraded or removed.  It is the same with a person or an ecosystem. The health of people or places increases with the diversity and magnitude of their expression.  Thus any reduction in diversity impinges on the integrity of the whole— and the role of the activist becomes one not only of resistance but restoration and reimmersion.

It all starts with us literally “coming to our senses.”  Our creature senses are organs of reintegration, and when opened and heightened they bring the world we’re integral to even closer.  It is taste that can stir our gratitude, sight that can awaken awe, touch that can mend the imagined separation between body and soul, self and place.  Touch, through which we feel.  Touch that heals.   Our sensory and emotional contact inspires the protection, nourishment and celebration of that which we’ve engaged.  Our future personal, social and ecological health may hinge on our personal integrity, and the surviving integrity of the natural world that we love.  For us, to be reintegrated is to be accepted back within the identity of the earthen whole, to exist and act in harmony with tribal human community and the community of nature.

We commit ourselves to learning how to make medicines and heal with herbs, good food and real magic in our quest to stay physically well and able… but we understand that real health is a state of being at one with the needs, expression and spirit of not only our physical and energetic beings, but with the living breathing Earth as well – engaged in the endless adventure and fulfillment of our awakened lives.  By learning to wholly be aware, wholly serve, we intentionally rejoin the Whole.  And it is through this bringing back together of disparate and damaged parts – of self and planet — that we never have to feel apart again.

-By Jesse Wolf Hardin

(To learn more about whole-istic healing, consider applying for an Anima studentship at www.animacenter.org)

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The wonderful renovation of my dear kitchen has brought to light my lifetime of fearing change and trying to keep things largely the same.  I was very attached to the way things were in my lovable, huggable niche, attached to the way I’m able to nestle into its lovely curvy counters as I drink a cup of tea, and to the rhythm of my ever-spiraling  movements in its little 8 by 10 foot space. I even had a funny attachment to the spot in the floor where the breath of the ground came through and I thought of it as my sipapu – like the hole that the ancient peoples always made in their kivas, an avenue for Spirit to enter. But over the years, the little split in the linoleum grew and grew, until I often tripped on it and it became hard to keep clean. And so for the past year or so we had been discussing possible ways of fixing it, whether we should patch it up or do something more drastic.

I never doubted the practicality of it, mind you. Kiva and I were finding it hard to cook at the same time without constantly bumping into each other, with me coming close to injuring her on numerous occasions with my tendency to gesture excitedly with hot spatulas and pans! Plus, with all the blessings of her incredible online shopping skills, the pantry had outgrown itself. More and more, we were both feeling the need to make room for the pounds of dried shitake mushrooms, bulk teas and spices, sea vegetables, whole grains for sprouting and grinding, and quality decaf coffee. And as part of her medicine woman magic, Kiva had created so many herbal vinegars, oils, honeys, salves, tinctures, herbs for Wolf’s infusions and fermented drinks that every available shelf and cranny was overflowing.
As hard as it was to accept the role or trust my abilities, I had by then accepted the blessing of being an excellent cook. Even though everything I had valued when I was growing up had one way or another been stripped from me, after arriving in the canyon I was somehow able to accept and believe in the reality of a kitchen of my own, in a home that no one would ever take away. I’d taken in the blessings of love, and all the gifts and skills I’d been working so hard to develop. What I continued to have trouble with was the shift in self image that came with my engagement with the real world beyond hope and imagination, with any alteration in what I knew and believed, with the onset of my first white hairs and the uninvited lines on my face.  What I had the hardest time accepting, I realize, was the gift of change.

When I sat down with Resolute to first envision the possibilities, I was as excited as a little kid!  At a deeper level, change still felt like a threat to the integrity and form of all that I cherished.  It seemed like the waves of the ocean trying to pull me from the rock solid world I cling to. Loving this dear wilderness sanctuary, change could mean a fire that would burn down the forest we live in and the native species we’d restored. Finding true love, change could mean getting less of that love if not losing it altogether. Aging seemed like a change from life in the direction of death. On the other hand, my teaching of Animá has meant seeing not only the value of change, but the necessity. Changing the way genders relate, and mothers teach their children. Changing the way we treat ourselves as well as the earth. Changing society from a fear and war based paradigm to a community of cooperation and caring. Growth is change, as is wising up, and growing stronger. Improving is change as much as loss or damage, and accepting change was for me an important improvement.

From the time I gave my blessing to the project, it wasn’t long before Wolf cut out the section of the wall separating what had been the dining room. With every layer of old carpet and linoleum I helped pull up, I felt us getting closer to our vision of what the kitchen could be: an oasis of beauty and inspiration, nourishment and satisfaction. As I write this, we’re still waiting for help with counters and cabinets… but with the newly laid tile, it already feels so beautiful I just want to light candles, burn sage, drink tea on the floor and admire it. I want to polish the silver trim on the old cookstove, cover the plastic water jugs with pretty Indian tapestry material, replace the old trash cans, and start using a more attractive compost bucket that Wolf got. I intend to find pretty gallon jars to fill with my many treasures of grains, beans and pickled wonders and clean out all the existing cabinets. I’ll go through the pantry and sort out anything that doesn’t belong, and make (and then keep!) everything as nice as this rose-tinted tile floor.

In this profound evolution of the kitchen I see a mirror of my own personal shifts. I give myself credit for overcoming my resistance and embracing the changes that were happening in my life and home. For letting go of attachment to the way things were. For accepting the help of so many loving people in this concerted effort, when some part of me wishes I could do it all on my own and not trouble anyone. For finally getting to a place in my life where I feel worthy of such blessings, and for being committed to maintaining, treasuring and honoring this kitchen for the temple that it has always been but is now so much more, now. For being able to deeply appreciate the changes and for being as thrilled as always about those things that remain the same: the view out the windows, the wind that flows through, the dancing fire in the hundred year old cookstove, the food in the pantry, the curvy counters, antique cookware, drying canyon herbs, precious canyon stones, handmade lace and knickknacks…and for the unchanging love I feel every time I cook a meal.
Next I will learn to welcome other alterations of my daily existence and maybe even the appearance of the beautiful white hairs that once gave me fits… accepting the ways in which change can be a progression, a healing and a gift.

-By Loba (www.animacenter.org)

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Rhiannon has learned to swim!  After three Summers of trying, she is now cavorting about in the deep water like her totem the playful otter.  What a great joy to watch her leap in with no apprehension, anxious to show me her latest tricks like paddling in place, floating on her back, diving for the bottom, and swimming in tight little circles with the appropriate grin on her face.  I feel both the pride of a father and the satisfaction of a teacher, knowing not only that she will be safer when the river is high from the rains or have more fun in the water, but that she is gaining confidence and power from this that will serve her all her days.

When she feels submerged in work that leaves her struggling for breath, holding her head high and continuing forward will already be her habit.  When things seem to rush by to fast, she will know to strike out for the land where she can be still,  nourished and grounded. The tickle and rush of water will have been excellent preparation for focused sensual engagement and sensuous celebration as an adult in the shower, at the dining table, in relationship, or biking with the wind in her face.  The depths of emotion and experience will not intimidate her, after she has plumbed the dark unknown in her exploration of the river’s mysterious bottom.  She will not run to refuge in the shallow or superficial.  She will not doubt her ability to cross what others might consider barriers, to make them her allies, and to always maker her way to the other side.

How fortunate she is to have learned to swim in a wild place, in flowing, clear wild water, compared to my own earliest experience of pushing off from the safety of the side into a pile of kicking and screaming strangers with a cloud of chlorine fumes in my face.  My first memories include a hunger for streams and rivers, lakes and oceans that never went away, while the highlights of my teen years often involved hitch hiking or motorcycling to any water I could find other than treated pools.  Ahh, the steaming hot springs of New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming.  The leaps from 60′ high bridges in the mountains of N. California.  The diving into Pacific breakers, and floating like a lily pad in the bass and frog ponds of the South.  In the classic movie Easy Rider, the characters were on their way to a fixed destination.  I was on a search for home and purpose that could be traced like a spiral on a map of the Western United States, with every stop marked by the presence of a beach, spring, creek or lake.  The place I was looking for – and the amazing place I’ve found – was home.  And home, too, has proven defined as well as nourished by the Sweet Medicine River flowing through its canyon embrace.

Rhiannon has not become fearless since learning to stay afloat.  But as the Anima teaches, she has used her fear as fuel to do what had once seemed impossible.

-Jesse Wolf Hardin (www.animacenter.org)

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(Photos (C) 2008 by Jesse Wolf Hardin)

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(Our next event is only a little over a week away now, a good time to please copy and forward this invite to your list)

WILD FOODS WEEKEND: August 28th-31st
Collecting & Feasting On Plants Of The Southwest
(for men, women & families)

Join the delight-filled Loba, Wolf and myself at our enchanted wildlife sanctuary, for 2 days of deep presence and connection to nature… learning to identify, gather, preserve and prepare some of the many wild foods of the mountainous and riparian Southwest. You’ll arrive Thursday Noon and leave Sunday, sleeping in riverside tents and cozy cabins, and feasting on wild fare that you help to gather and cook.  Learn about ecological restoration and sense of place while becoming intimate with the spirits and uses of plants like stinging nettle, dock, clover, lamb’s quarters, dandelion, acorns, wild grape leaves and grapes, and wild olives.  Learn to dry, salt-cure, and grind on an ancient stone metate as the herons croak and eagles soar overhead!  Sliding scale donation, with no one turned away for lack of funds.

For more information, read Wolf’s inspiring Wild Foods article.

To attend, please download, fill out and return the event Registration Form: wild-foods-weekend-reg.doc

Thanks Much!   -Kiva Rose

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Wherever we live we’re likely never far from quality whole-foods market as well as some fine restaurants. What we may not have noticed are the diverse native foods often found growing at the base of their walls, or concealed among the exotic grasses that border their parking lots. Re-wilding our flower beds and bursting up through the cracks in the sidewalks are delicious salad fixin’s like dandelion and dock. And on the way to buy our organic produce we probably walk or drive past examples of those diverse indigenous grains and greens upon which the original indigenous peoples once fed. Collecting a portion of our dinner from nearby meadows or neighborhood yards, we gather not only sustenance but taste and tradition… gather up our thoughts and spirits, memories and moments!

Looking out the window as I write this, I can see patches of wild celery greens which I know to be delicious steamed with onion, plantain leaves for frying, and the prolific lamb’s quarters which can be dried in the Summer and reconstituted in soups and sauces come Winter. Watercress is a tasty plant popular with health-minded buyers, high in vitamin B and iron, found in many of the less impacted creeks and rivers. Our partner Loba is one of those sensualists who revels in endless new combinations of ingredients, and of these she may well love her feral feasts the best. Each year she cooks or preserves the bounty of our isolated river canyon including red and sweet clover, high protein amaranth and dandy dock, beeplant and magic mint, yucca flowers for stir fries and prickly pear fruits for syrup and jam. Puffballs, boletus and shaggy mane mushrooms. Tomatillos, mustard seeds. Black walnuts and juniper berries. Imagine pesto with wild oregano, clover or mint leaves. Suckerfish sushi and hearty crawdad stew. Hand decorated jars of pickled purslane. Wild grape jelly crepes. Prickly pear buttermilk pie and yucca fruit crisp. Browned Pinon cookies. Garlicky Beeplant ravioli with local goat cheese in the early Autumn. Stir fried stinging nettles, crisp salads of you local wild greens and maybe a wild mulberry pie!

An indigenous person would likely tell us that eating wild is taking into ourselves the energy and power of the land itself the tendencies and sensitivities, capacities and qualities of wildness. Bending over to snip leaves or gather nuts, we sense not only our connection to the land but to a lineage of gatherers and procurers that can be traced back to the very beginnings of our kind. Know it or not, in this simple act we enjoin a sisterhood and brotherhood of wild-food lovers that has over the generations included loin-clouted Africans with earrings that swayed as they cut and lifted their favored plants, Asiatic villagers shouldering their special harvest packs, and Native American mothers carrying their babies in slings while they pulled or hacked.

I’ve seen how every little bit that we’re able to subsist off the land increases our confidence in ourselves and our ability to survive. Even in the best of times we can eat not only cheaper but better, by adding some foods we’ve gathered to those ingredients we buy. And on day trips to the neighboring hills one is not only fed but informed. We soon figure out which months to harvest which foods, and when to collect their seeds to help disperse or plant. We learn to recognize the soil and moisture requirements of the various species, and how much sun and shade each needs. We also notice when certain human activities have degraded those conditions, and may feel moved to do our part to protect, tend or restore the remaining habitat.

The wonderful flavors of the wild call out to us, invite our participation in their native dance of delight. We might consider this as we’re driving past what appear to be indiscernible patches of roadside greenery, or while walking by those curly-leafed plants lining the local ditch. Coming to know the healthy native foods of any region is to become more intimate and familiar with the land, its seasons, its song… and with our own bodies natural needs and desires. There is perhaps no tastier way for us to come to know ourselves… or to know that we belong.

-Jesse Wolf Hardin

To register for a S.W. Wild Foods workshop, fill out an event Registration: wild-foods-weekend-reg.doc

(Photos (c) 2008 by Jesse Wolf Hardin)

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Part 3: The Anima Sanctuary

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
-John Muir

The capital of Catron County is Reserve – affectionately known as “Reverse”– a village housing something less than five hundred year-round residents as of this writing. A show of bumper stickers such as “Hungry? Eat An Environmentalist” betray a cultural prejudice amongst the mostly logger and rancher families, provoked more than anything else by what they see as the heavy handed influence of government and the courts. Just South of town lies the local ranger station where a visitor intent on getting to know the area is likely to stop to orient themselves and ask questions. Spreading out a Forest Service map of the Gila bioregion one sees a few peripheral sections coded in tan, marking them as being under the care of the Bureau of Land Management. Nearly all the rest of the surface will be colored green, denoting what is a vast preponderance of National Forest lands. A relatively small number of tiny white squares representing mostly 40, 80 and 160 acre inholdings lie scattered like islands of private property in a vast emerald sea of what are in actuality green clad mountains and windswept trees.
One of those “islands” is the Animá Sanctuary proper, home to the Animá Learning Center and the extended family that tends its land, mission and guests. Folks from all over world make the long trip to this ancient site of ceremony and seeking as part of their own quest for authentic self and sense of place, for a deepening of understanding and direction. Whatever their specific needs, intent and vision might be, they share in common having made a conscious choice at a pivotal point in their life and growth– to search out a place of reflection as far removed from their everyday paradigm and predictable perceptions as humanly possible, to reenter the lap and womb of nature and thereby come to know themselves apart from a cultivated self image and pervasive self doubt. The inconvenience and isolation of wild places serve the process of engagement with self, Earth and purpose. Away from the rote and the habitual, from the superficial and the less than relevant as well as the too casually familiar: somewhere they can wholly “be,” unburdened by posturing and preconception disinterest and distraction. A place unbowed, free of the tyranny of clocks, pagers and “day planners”– where the cycles of light and dark, activity and rest can reassert their natural influence in our lives. Canyons are perfect for this kind of focused cleansing, connecting, reflecting and transforming, the way they seem to cradle us in caring earthen arms– simultaneously sheltered and exposed, contained and delivered, made content and moved to action….. held tight and propelled forward in the direction of our most meaningful service, artful and enlivened existence, insistent hopes and indefatigable dreams! And nowhere is this more true than the Sweet Medicine Canyon, nested ten miles from the nearest village and phone, and seven generally shallow river crossings from where folks park their cars. Seven is a number frequently associated with both spirituality and magic. There are usually seven tests for the mythic hero to undertake, and “seven bridges” that one must cross on the twisty road to paradise.

While it’s possible to get into the sanctuary in a four-wheel drive vehicle much of the year, we still suggest that guests leave their vehicles and walk in the last mile and a half. This is partly to satisfy sanctuary covenants mandating a minimal amount of mechanized traffic down the canyon, and partly to promote depth of experience from the moment they arrive here. The walk is just long enough to ensure a degree of presence, thoughts of other places– and anxieties over what might be next– slowly giving way to the sounds of the river or the call of the eagle, the feel of the breeze on our face, the musky smell of beeplant and the arresting colors of volcanic cliffs in afternoon light. We’re thrust into our creature senses with every river crossing, stimulated by the rolling grains of sand beneath our bared feet, the cool water splashing playfully up our legs. Everywhere we look the land seems to be calling out like a child for our undivided attention, the gurgling of the river as it tumbles over rock, the scampering of leaves at our approach. The way the spines of cholla cactus glow like a halo when backlit by a setting canyon sun. The majesty of the mountains, prompting us to raise our heads to the sky. The perfect symmetry of riverside clover clusters. Red and black marbled rock that insists we pick it up and trace with our finger tips its crimson veins. Bizarre golden knots of strangler vine, grapes heavy with sugar and promise, and the greens of young cottonwood leaves in the Spring. A flapping of wings behind us. The impossibly red bear claw marks on the alder trees just ahead.
We might walk in by ourselves, but we are never alone here. We are, know it or not, part of an ongoing text, of the story of the land, of the cadre and coven of diverse life. We likely sense that the plants and animals are not only a resource, scenic or otherwise, but an alliance in which we partake: A coalition of bristling prickly-pear, cane cholla, barrel and cushion cactus, along with quaking aspen visible near the closest peaks. Pondersosa pines with their russet bark flaking off in the shapes of children’s puzzle pieces that reaching a hundred feet and more into New Mexico’s turquoise sky. Of nut-laden oaks and pinons. Junipers including the alligator-bark and the shaggy barked one the locals mistakenly call red or yellow cedar, ripe with vitamin-c rich berries on the sun soaked slopes. Wild roses laden with tart hips on the shadier, North facing side. Currant bushes loaded with sweet red fruits. Wild canyon grape, once scarce, and now thickly twisting through the branches of majestic black walnuts. Sumac, yucca, snakebrush and sagebrush. A couple of rare mulberry trees, and whole stands of alder and native olive gathered down in the canyon bottoms. The willow too thick to walk through, now lining the Frisco River thanks to a protective fence. The hundreds of sixty-foot tall cottonwoods that have grown back since we began to protect the fragile riparian area from grazing and a few giants still standing from “the old days,” including one big-hipped grandmother it would take more than a dozen people to encircle hand in hand. The conjointment and conviviality of innumerable varieties of grass. Chorus lines of morning glories and four o’clocks, Indian blanket and starflower, asters and daisies, prickly poppy and desert paintbrush, yarrow and wild mint, skyrocket and evening primrose blossoms, sunflowers and bee plants coupling with multicolored butterflies and at least four different types of wide-eyed bees. The lush patches of magical datura seducing the long tongued moths of the mystical Southwestern night. Rich associations of water plants like cattails, rushes, duck weed and watercress in league with crawdads, frogs and suckerfish, plus the occasional trout taking refuge in the deeper pools from the Summer’s heat. Ducks raising their young in the river’s shadow draped nooks and gentled eddies, while giant blue herons stand tall over middens of speckled crawdad shells. A deer darting for cover. Sharp toothed javalina grunting and rooting. Pounding swarms of gray jays and dive bombing hawks. Orange winged clown flickers and hard headed woodpeckers. Kingfishers, mourning doves and a bald eagle circling unhurriedly overhead. And everywhere the tracks of canyon bred raccoons and ringtail cats, bobcat and muskrat, coatamundi, lion and bear…. reminding us of the many other unseen beings who also make their homes there. We do more than observe. We engage and enjoin, submit and surrender to this wholeness, this belonging, this destined love.

And like an attentive lover, we lean closer and closer to that which we adore, learn from, give to and depend upon. In the course of such courting and knowing we may find ourselves bending ever lower, in order to see better the psychedelic patterns of river water coursing over our legs, or the complex arrangement of the pine needles and green acorns blanketing the forest floor– and then getting down on one knee to luxuriate in the many smells of wild mountain flowers. We may then ease onto our bellies to see the world the way one of the myriad canyon insects do, as infinitely immense and thoroughly irresistible. At the end of our walk, at the end of the day, we might find ourselves rolling onto our backs– right there in the middle of the feral Gila wildlands, in the center of the enchanted canyon, on a soft sandbar in the center of the San Francisco river, centered in our feelings of sensuousness, connectedness and caring. It’s then, grounded in this spinning globe of rock and flesh, we can feel most comfortable shifting our gaze for awhile…. from the living Earth we’re each an inseparable extension of, upwards to the fecund cosmos we and this planet lie forever bedded with and in.

-By Jesse Wolf Hardin – www.animacenter.org

Feel free to copy and share this series.

(Photos (C) 2008 by Jesse Wolf Hardin

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Part 2: The Gila Bioregion

by Jesse Wolf Hardin

“Spirit howls and wildness endures. Anticipate resurrection.”  (Terry Tempest Williams)

The American Southwest is famous for its ambiance and energy as well as its scenery, often described as “spiritual,” “other worldly” or “magical” in nature. The state of New Mexico in particular has a reputation as the Land Of Enchantment, attracting spiritual leaders and communities from the Sufis to the Dalai Lama, and host to its own still vibrant indigenous religious traditions. This is on top of its draw as a place of beautiful mountains and stunning deserts, of colorful cultures and relatively low human density. As I write this the entire population of New Mexico is considerably less than that of numerous “mid-size” cities including Denver, Phoenix, Charleston and St. Paul.

If you look at a map you’ll see that most of the lower left portion of New Mexico, bordered by the Rio Grande valley to the East and extending West into Arizona is one huge mountainous forest, encompassing the Black Range and the Mogollon, Tularosa and San Francisco mountains. At its center is the roadless Gila Wilderness (pronounced hee-la), the first national lands intentionally preserved in a native, wild state. The was largely due to the proddings of the visionary conservationist Aldo Leopold a full forty years before the passage of the U.S. Wilderness Act. The county is one of the largest at approximately 7,000 square miles, most of which is national forest and state lands…. and with only about two percent of the surface area being private property. The area is filled with a combination of history and legend, beauty and romance, the quiet space necessary for reflection, and the busyness of myriad active species each living out their own rendition of life, adventure and home. Thousands of elk, the most unobstructed view of the stars imaginable, and acres and acres of unmolested old growth forests. And it is defined not only by what it has, but what it has not: no stoplights or rush hour traffic, no polluting industries or midnight sirens, no gangs and scant crime. Thousands of miles from the intrigue of our nation’s capital. Three hundred miles from any nuclear reactor. Two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest “real” city or targetable military base. One hundred miles from the closest crowded discount store. And no cloud cover throughout most of the year.

Given the amount of sunshine it receives, it may come as a surprise to learn that temperatures in the Gila bioregion seldom exceed ninety degrees Fahrenheit. The hottest months are July and August, but even then the chill nights tend to ensure pleasant mornings, and just around the time the heat is getting uncomfortable along comes the relief of afternoon storms. The end of Summer is the monsoon season after all, when each day the wind dramatically picks up around two o’clock or so and thick black clouds rush in to dump their precious load. Thunder echoes as lightning cracks against rock outcroppings and treetop spires, and drops of rain the size of marbles gather into sheets blown nearly sidewise in their rampant race to the thirsting ground. Winters are mild with few nights that dip below the zero mark, and snows that melt fairly quickly from all but the highest of North facing slopes.

Mountains in the area rise up from primeval inland sea beds to around 12,000 feet in height, laced with streams and spotted with a handful of especially enticing hot springs. Created by the most recent and violent volcanic activity on this continent, the fire colored cliffs climb above pines and oaks where Geronimo and Victorio once undertook their own quests for vision, meaning and assignment. And snaking through these peaks and hills are the beds of the region’s life giving waters: the Tularosa, San Francisco and Gila rivers. Creeks with names like Palomas, Gilita, Iron and Indian. Turkey, Bear and Centerfire. Alamosa and Negrito. Oak and Willow. Mangas, Mineral, Deep and Devil’s Creeks. Waterways anywhere are a literal magnet for plant and animal species, and nowhere is that more true than in the arid Southwest where other sources of moisture are seasonal at best. Spilling out of artesian springs or draining the snow-saturated soils of the high country, trickles couple with seeps to become rivers that may be calf deep in late June or December, and thirty feet deep and seventy-five yards across during a big Spring runoff or following relatively rare Fall torrents. No lover is unmarked by love, and everywhere the flowing water touches there is a meander carved deep like memory. And where raging love or insistent waters cut deepest, the result is a canyon– bone deep, the bedrock of human or Earthen soul exposed and titillated by passion’s churning currents. It is from the very bottom of this glad wound, this sculpted gifting, that art and magic rise, lifted forever into a cliff-framed sky.

One of these special canyons now hosts the Anima Sanctuary, and was once a village of up to thirty families and It features the largest kiva site for many miles in either direction, evidence of its having been a ceremonial center for ritual gatherings and sacred rites. The same precious flow coveted by those of root, feather and paw, drew early human kind close as well. At the same time as the Tevere of Roma and the Euphrates of Asia supported the growth of civilizations, rivers like the San Francisco watered the palettes, the crops, the imagination and spirit of its Earth-honoring residents. Climb up from the river to almost any flat spot above the flood plain, and we will likely find ourselves atop the erosion-filled pit houses of those who loved and revered these canyons long before we did. They migrated in mass down the Rio Grande Valley approximately a thousand years ago in response to raids by hostile tribes, a particularly long drought or a well received vision of some messianic shaman…. and at around the same time as the first boatloads of Norse Vikings were making landfall in Greenland.

Referred to as the Mogollon people by archaeologists, the Sweet Medicine people lived in underground “D” shaped structures, hunted, cultivated maize, and seem to have practiced a spiritual tradition that emphasized connection, reciprocity, interdependence and the necessity of honoring life through ritual and caretakership, song and dance, story and craft, intention and act. The painted pottery sherds scattered about on the ground are reminders of this lineage of celebration, responsibility and prayer. And many of the rock ledges feature obvious trails burnished smooth by the touch of countless sandal soles, the villagers making twice daily trips from their dwellings to tend their irrigation ditches and carry back to the houses pitch-lined juniper baskets filled with sweet river water.

If as Leopold suggests, this wild land does indeed come with its own intrinsic set of values, priorities and hopes– then they are ours to learn, following the river to what is not only roofless temple but experiential school. A journey into any canyon is a journey into history and not only due to a deepening of intimacy with an indigenous past, nor simply for the way in which the traveler is cast into a mental/emotional state that seems somehow outside the constraints of linear time…. but also, a descent from above traces an actual regression through the various geologic eras, down to the time and place of life’s beginnings. And there we too, may yet discover the beginnings of our own sacred/sensate story…. and thereby the root of our truths.

-Jesse Wolf Hardin www.animacenter.org

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(Photos (C) 2008 by Jesse Wolf Hardin)

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Part 1: Coming Closer

“The principles on which the universe functions are three: differentiation, increasing subjectivity, and communion. A truly human intimacy…. is needed. We are returning to our native place after a long absence, meeting once again with our kin in the Earth community…. participating in the original dream of the Earth.”
-Thomas Berry

Looking out upon an astounding cosmos is one thing, but looking groundwards and inwards can be even more revealing…. and one of the most evocative of all photographic images is surely that of the Earth taken from outer space. One shot or another decorates the cover of the largest “alternative” consumer catalog, is featured on decals sent out with environmental fund-raisers, once topped the letterhead of a space-warfare agency and now brightens the nylon flags sold through magazines to promote world unity. It’s easy to see the Earth as finite and not nearly so immense as we once thought, and thus all the more vulnerable and in need of our care. And we see that it is unscarred by anything as artificial and temporal as national borders, a veritable lifeboat we have no choice but to share, pulling for the common good across an airless sea of stars.

The problem with this view from thousands of miles away is that the diverse range of colors from meadow to tundra appear blended into a solid shade, the songs of each distinct bioregion reduced to a single muffled roar as if each part were indistinguishable and interchangeable, as if one continent or watershed could serve us, fill us, define us in the same ways as the next. To truly know the Earth, to know life one needs to focus in on just one of those umber masses until the myriad hues of the mountains and swamps, the wildflowers and hummingbirds stand out one against the other. We need to zoom in on a particular section such as the Southwest section of the North American continent, a vast mountain range where Arizona and New Mexico meet, the Tularosa watershed, a special river like the San Francisco, a select grove, a specific meadow, an exact section of soft grass beneath a solitary majestic tree. We must then get down on our hands and knees in the native grasses or down in the water, cast our gaze on the details of vetch and clover jungle, stare into the universe of stars that sparkle in a single inch of river sand. We need to get so close that we not only see but hear and smell and taste the context we’re a part of, getting down and feeling the cool water as it flows over our exposed arms.

We have been taught to see the world at a distance, often from a moving vehicle, framing giant vistas in our minds-eye. While no dream can capture the view of an entire mountain range, we may wake up drenched in sweat from the visceral experience of a single cliff we could fall from. We’re relatively small creatures on a scale that includes not only bumblebees and grizzly bears but glacial summits, and our psyches/souls require also a more intimate view, a favorite saguaro covered draw rather than an image of an entire desert, the details of a well loved swimming hole over some abstract hydrological mapping. We need easier realized pictures, settings small enough to include a picture of ourselves within them.

Fully reinhabiting the land and restoring one’s “sense of place” calls for personal reimmersion in the tactile immediacy characteristic of our formative years, demands our unstudied reentry into the intimacy of complex childscapes. As with any reality there are likely distinct openings, portals through which we step like the mouths of caves, an arbor of roots, a tunnel through a thicket of trellising wild grape vines, a place where the river canyon narrows into a bottleneck before widening out again. They take us to limitless ways of seeing, all grounded in receptivity and being, realities easier entered once we’ve learned to be “little” again. Kids tend to feel comforted by an encircling branches of weeping willows, protected by the close-in wooden walls of a playhouse, cradled in miniature caves, touched on all sides by the circumference of hideouts and nests, drawn to those downscaled environments that evoke a sense of familiarity and safety. Take a child to any “scenic vista” and they’ll quickly turn their attention from the distant sunset to the ground at their feet, following scurrying stink-bugs on their hands and knees, collecting pieces of quartz-studded gravel or chalky animal bone, discovering any nearby places for exploration and concealment. Take your eyes off them for more than a minute and they’ll likely uncover an overgrown deer trail or hobbit run winding away from the lookout point and down into the bowels of a more intimately experienced reality.

Adults tend to seek out those postcard-perfect views of great heights and wide expanses, but a child will look instead to those things she can come to know up close. I loved watching our once tiny daughter Rhiannon reaching out to gather her universe closer to her, bringing it into touching distance, climbing on it, swimming in it or putting it into her mouth. Like the young of most species, she still prefers that which is most immediately accessible and therefore able to be engaged and understood through more than just the eyes…. that which can be handled and hugged, arranged and arrayed, tossed and teased, rolled on the tongue or rolled about in like a coyote playing in a bed of leaves.

The kids have got it right on this count. Place can be best understood up close, in microcosms nestled between hillocks, inside the hollows of lightning struck trees, in the overgrown corner of the school playground or between waving rows of sky-clad corn. What we call “place” is made up of little worlds inviting us to be little again within them, enlisting our patience and attention, enticing our sensual exploration, insisting that if we’re truly to experience it, we must first slow down. Slowing down to “smell the flowers,” and beholding the blooming present. Experiencing sacred presence, and being fully present for every challenge. Sampling again and again the unfolding miracle of life. The child’s-eye view is way of seeing that can make the world new for us again, make it obvious how much things matter, and make it harder to turn away from a life of noticing, intuiting, connecting, empathizing, delighting, healing, celebrating, praising and giving thanks. It’s not just a child’s unblemished innocence that wins them a ticket to their own manifest paradise…. but also their tendency to engage the world up close, their openness to looking at the world in new ways, their willingness to feel. We rediscover the full depths of self and place by being “small” enough to connect to the intimacy and immediacy of a child’s universe, and big enough to take some responsibility for the well being of that which we come to intimately know and connect to.

-Jesse Wolf Hardin

www.animacenter.org

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(River photo (c) 2008 by Jesse Wolf Hardin)

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Lissa is another person who has never signed up to be either an Anima student or supporter, yet she is someone who in her own right become a supporter by returning to the Center over and over and insisting on generous donations. And she is a student in that she has opened to learning much here, and has applied so much of what she has learned and realized.  Now that fuel costs are causing a lot of event participants to stay home, she is is one woman we can count on to show no matter what!

It wasn’t always so clear that she’d stay involved.

Lissa first came to the canyon for a Wild Women’s Gathering, three summers ago, after having heard Wolf speak at the Albuquerque Unitarian church. The Gila was on fire at that time and she remembers standing in the parking area watching the smoke covering the mountains, feeling a lot of self-doubt about her decision to come. “I was freaking out!”, she recalls, with a big laugh. “And do you remember how much stuff I brought?” Of course we do, I tell her, cause it filled the whole truck! And how could Kiva and I forget that first night, hauling her many bags in the dark up to the Gifting Lodge, and how impressed we were that 60 year old Lissa kept right up with us, hauling giant bags across the wash, expressing her gratitude for our help, and apologizing for having brought so much. The bags and volumes of food eased a lifetime fear of being deprived, something she she understood as well as us.

Nowadays when Lissa comes to the canyon, she brings just one bag and her sleeping bag, other than the boxes and coolers filled with food she donates. She’s the first to admit that her letting go of “baggage” has taken many forms since she started coming here. She speaks of how essential the whole process of stripping through the layers to “get down to Lissa” was, and how accepted and supported she felt the entire time. Active in many community groups, from the Unitarian church, to women’s groups  she was still searching for the right place to do the internal work she needs in order to truly give back to the whole in a grounded, self-nourishing way.

“Anima, for me, has been a place of magical freedom”, she says, with tears in her eyes. She speaks of how important it’s been for her that we offer teachings, but that “they’re not crammed down my throat”. And of how important it is to her that we’re so focused on Nature, empowering people to discover their own connections in their own unique ways, free of “-isms” and prescribed ways of being. And, perhaps most powerful, is her gratitude for the opportunity to be in such an intense place of power, where the voice of the earth can be heard undiluted. She admits how scary and challenging that can be, but also knows how needed and heart-opening once one can begin to truly open up and simply engage and listen.

“Everyone needs to come here, but they’re not all ready for it, she says, though I’ll bring everyone I can always.  “The canyon”, she explains, is “ a place where the Earth herself tells us that our efforts do matter, that who we are and what we do, can make a difference.” It’s a special gift for us to work with someone like Lissa, to get to witness the change and growth from one visit to the next. It’s an incredible thing, to sense how much internal movement occurs for her each time she comes, and to see how in her case and that of others the magic happens between her and the land, with we humans here having less to do with the outcome. It’s a great blessing to all of us, and to the land, that people such as her keep coming back to receive what is here for them, going deeper every time, and then going back out to share it with the world!

Thank you Lissa, for your courage, your insistence and so much more! We look forward to seeing you here ever more your wonder-filled heart-full self, again and again and again!

-love, Loba

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An interview with my partner Jesse Wolf Hardin is featured in Derrick Jensen’s new book How Shall I Live My Life?, revisioning a world more dynamic and meaningful than often destructive and repressive modern “civilization.” Recorded in person in the canyon in 2000, it focuses on what is most necessary for us as humans to find ourselves and our place in this world. Wolf’s years of teaching Anima and developing new practices, land restoration and activism, his life as poetry and profound commitment to the earth are all very evident in this moving conversation. Other featured visionaries include Vine Deloria, Thomas Berry and David Abram. The following is an excerpt focusing on Derrick and Wolf’s discussion about Home and what that really means. If you’re interested in purchasing a copy, it’s available here though the publisher.

——–

The Meaning & Responsibilities of Home

An Excerpt from the interview with Jesse Wolf Hardin by Derrick Jensen

How Shall I Live My Life? (PM Press)

Derrick Jensen: You’ve written: “To become native again is not to emulate Native American or other past or existing cultures, but instead to recall and relearn our own connection to, and responsibilities to the regions where we presently reside.” What does that mean?

Jesse Wolf Hardin: We’re native to the degree that we enter into reciprocal relationship with the living land we’re each an integral part of. To the degree that we are not only in love with—but loyal to—the place that supports, nourishes, sustains, informs and inspires us. And it is to give back: our full sentient presence and artful acknowledgement, our protection, and affection. Repaying the gifts of food, home and wisdom with personal activism and heartfelt prayer, with restoration and celebration. With our fullest living of life, while we’re alive … and with our bodies when we die.
Being indigenous doesn’t necessarily require we be members of some established culture, or even have a history in a place. What is essential is that we be open to the directives of the ecosystem. That we become conscious of its needs and troubles, character and flavor, integrity and health; conscious of the essence and spirit of place.

DJ: Let’s back up. It seems before we can talk about inhabiting a place, we need to talk about home. What is home?

JH: To “lose our place” is to lose our way home. Home is the heart, in deep relationship with the land. It is the place that calls us most insistently, instructs us loudest and best. The place we inevitably miss when we leave, the partner to our pain, and reason for our joy. Home is not only where you want to live, but how you want to live, and the place you want to be when death finally claims you.

Let me put it this way: the source of all psychological, social and environmental disease is our illusion of separateness. The first step in mending that artificial schism—that deep, damn wound—is to bring ourselves back to a place of engagement with our authentic beings, in the vital present moment. The opening to the experience of the universe is through intimacy with a living planet. The doorway to the experience of the land is through our sentient animal bodies, and our feeling hearts. And the journey—the work, the realization—can only happen in immediate present time. Reindigination begins with reinhabitation of our awakened bodies and roiling emotions, in the “now.” Much of the natural world, and our own wild spirits, are dying as a direct result of our alienation and abstraction, from what I call our “great distancing.”

DJ: [Regarding] the notion of reinhabiting one’s body, what are you saying?

JH: Your door to the entire world is located where your feeling body touches the giving ground. Your bare feet, your rear end, the few square inches of absolute contact is a point of connectivity between yourself and millions of years of organic process. And the way to fully experience that connection is by disengaging our mental tape loops, our voice tracks, the constant commentary that keeps us perpetually anticipating the future or criticizing our self about the past rather than tasting the muffin we’re eating right now. Then we can experience the world around us—as well as within us—like the awakened, hungering, feeling, responding, caring creatures we really are.

We can’t feel our connection to the sentient body, or participate in the processes of the natural world anywhere but “here,” and “now.” And we can’t really be either if we’re forever residing in our brains, engrossed in the movies of our minds.
Most of us have read that science fiction classic where the professor departs his basement shop astride his “time machine,” leaving nothing behind but a ring in the dust on the floor. In the same way civilized humanity is often out of touch, absent, unreachable by a world of unfolding presence. Our bodies remain in place like that impression in the dust, while our minds orbit backwards and forwards through the years, inhabiting every period of time but now, and every place but here. Too often we dwell on our desires and worries, rather than dwelling in: in the present, in place. Meanwhile things like industrial development and environmental destruction are largely accomplished out of time, by future-looking planners and bureaucrats who are oblivious to the purrs and pleas, the rewards and challenges of the beckoning present. What we need is a conscious, collective high-dive into the always decisive moment—re-immersing ourselves in the sensations and responsibilities of the real world…. now!

DJ: How does one begin to do that?

JH: Reach out to what is real—a leaf, a chair, a friend—emissaries of the present glad to reconnect us to the now. If something exists for the senses, it exists in present time. There’s so much distraction and obstruction we have to remain fiercely focused and totally insistent. Almost everything in society calls you away from yourself. The clamor and bright lights, standing in lines or working in offices, going to movies or making small talk. For the un-placated few, our society can seem like a very lonely place. The average Joe doesn’t seem to want to smell as deeply or love as much, or to risk deeply caring, because it might mean he has to act on those things he sees and feels. Becoming yourself makes you momentarily the loneliest person on earth, but as you walk through that door you realize you’re a part of everything; that in the end, it’s impossible to be alone. That’s the kind of assurance and wisdom nature affords: intimate knowledge of this moment, this tree, this place, this home.

DJ: It seems to take a long time. I’ve been living on the same land for about three years. . . .

JH: And you’re just starting to get introduced.

DJ: Yes.

JH: This courting and bonding requires not only commitment but presence and attention, day after day. If we’re only home seasonally, or if we’re gone five days out of the week, it’s not the same. Deepening relationship requires we get to see the sun come up in a slightly different place each and every day through each of the four seasons. I have friends who live in cities, who work all day indoors, and some of them don’t even know which way the sun sets. Until we’re oriented, until we know where we are, until we know what direction is East, how can we know what direction to take our lives? And it takes time to recognize the ecological cycles, as many of them are long. There are seven-year cycles for different insects, and there are different flowers that come up only every four to eight years. Patterns of rain and drought. New species moving in or disappearing. Miss a single week in this enchanted canyon, and you could miss the bulk of the wild mulberry season. No single sunset will ever be repeated again, quite the way it shined today.

DJ: Let’s talk about this place.

JH: The Anima Sanctuary is a restored riparian wilderness, an eighty acre inholding surrounded by millions of acres of Aldo Leopold’s Gila forest, in mountains that were one of the last refuges for free Apaches, including Victorio and Geronimo. This particular bend in the river is a place of power, and served the Mogollon pithouse dwellers as a site for ritual and worship for tens of thousands of years. Since the willows and cottonwood trees filled back in, we’ve seen the return of herons and ducks, owls and eagles, deer and elk, lion and bear.

When I first saw this land I fell helplessly in love with it. I sold the engine out of the school bus I lived in, in order to get the earnest money, with no idea if I could get up the rest of the down I’d offered. Apparently on some of their historic raids Vikings would find themselves outnumbered, and the chieftains would set fire to the sails knowing the men would fight harder once they saw there was no retreat. By selling the engine I’d burned my ships, and there was no going back on my oath to purchase and protect this special place.

DJ: How did you know this was the place you needed to be?

JH: Finding our home, like finding our destiny, is a matter of getting in touch with our intuition and instinct, and then learning to trust and follow it. You can’t pick a home by comparing the facts and maps in some atlas. Home, like adventure, is something that becomes possible whenever we suspend our plans and criteria and feel our way to where we most belong. It’s not only the place our souls need, but also the place that most needs us. It isn’t where you lay your head, it’s where you pledge your heart.

The events leading me to find, buy and preserve the Sanctuary have been nothing short of miraculous, convincing me without a doubt that I was meant to be here serving this place and teachings. And anyway, we can sense where we belong in the compass of our bones. Whenever we leave we’ll feel like we’re going the wrong way. And when we turn back, we know in every cell of our being that we’re headed in the direction of home.

DJ: You’ve written that we can’t own land; that land owns us. What is your contract with this canyon?

JH: How can we own that which contains, predates, and outlasts us? I didn’t contract for this place so much as with it. We enter into a relationship sealed in blood and tears, sweat and semen, an equitable giving and taking that’s clearly spelled out, and duly sworn to. The land is pledged to give wholly of its authentic self, to offer home and shelter, beautiful groves and stunning mountains, the food and water we need, inspiration and instruction. We promise gifts in return, like our attendance and presence, attention and focus. We promise to try to feel her needs, and meet them. To support her in her fullest flowering; to defend her integrity and honor from all threats, including those that come from ourselves. To appreciate, and celebrate.

It is, as much as anything else, a marriage contract, bound by love rather than law. I’ve stood before these orange and purple cliffs many times and repeated my vows: That I’ll do everything I can to restore her and make her all she can be, to never bend her to my will, to always serve her, touch her, stroke her hair of grass. To revel in the sensation of my bare feet on her naked earthen body.

DJ: One of the things I love about your work is that activists generally do restoration, some new age types sing praises, but you do both. It’s very evident how much work you’ve done here.

JH: You’re a gentleman for saying so. Restoration and resistance can be arts, just like music and poetry—if we infuse them with passion and prayer, rhythm and style, meaning and grace.

The most adamant and beautiful work seems to emanate from the reptilian cortex, from caring souls and expectant flesh, from Earth and Spirit. The rational mind really only serves this work to the degree that it functions as an honest translator: as communicants, litigants, poem creators and prayer reciters. And especially, as praise givers.

DJ: It’s like Meister Eckhart said, if the only prayer you say in your life is “thank you,” that would be sufficient.

JH: Words too easily become a substitute for emotion and experience. When it comes to language, it fills only these few redeeming roles: Giving thanks. Giving warnings. Creating odes to the beloved. Directing people’s attention back to what’s real and wordless. If I’m constantly writing, it’s only because I’m trying to pontificate people into howling, to return them to vital immediate experience. If we were all conscious and present, all fully landed, we could revert to what you’ve called “a language of bodies … of wave on stone … a language older than words.”

It’s an old metaphor, but we’re all planting seeds. And this takes us back to the question of whether we can hope for results. A person planting seeds can’t stand around and wait to see what grows in every situation. Sometimes seeds come up the first year. Others might take ten or fifteen generations, and come up when there is just enough sunshine, just enough moisture, just enough compost for the seed to sprout and bloom.

But these are just words. The essential thing is to re-become who we really are, opposing the destruction and lies, embracing the natural world, working and playing as if life itself depended on it. Once we do that, there will be no more quandaries, no more need to “process,” no confusion about wrong or right, or wondering if we’re on our path of heart. We’ll feel, we’ll care, we’ll respond. We’ll express this wholeness in acts of beauty. We’ll give everything … and that will be enough.

-Jesse Wolf Hardin – www.animacenter.org

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