Animá Lifeways & Herbal School

(Our last post showed it is as hard for nature lovers to look at its unpleasant side, as it is for land developers to read about nature’s wonders and benefits.  In the interest of balance, we follow with this ode to nature as a teacher, and a call to step out of our constructs and into the word of magic and purpose… a post we hope you will be inspired to widely post and share)

The Portal:
The Opening To A Vitally Realized Life

By Jesse Wolf Hardin

www.AnimaCenter.org

There is a portal, an opening, largely concealed in the misty Avalon of our unconscious.  And it’s right there, too, in the natural world just outside the walls of our houses and minds.  In our still wondrous souls and feeling hearts.  Like a view of the stars reflected in a pulsing river, its edges are fringed with foliage that stretches and strives before us.

It’s there we go to hear the earth’s stories and heed its plaintive pleas, close to the source, on hands and knees.  And it is there that we meet with the others of our kind and calling, to converse and counsel, to cocreate a reality reflective of the medicine and mysteries within and around us.  We walk together through narrow openings leading out of the constricting paradigm, and through and under the foliage curtaining the shaman’s or medicine woman’s cave… consciously connecting all that has been, with all that can be.

From the very earliest manifestations of what it means to be human, we have looked to and honored the earth and the anima, the vital life force.  Before turning to the stars for influence or intervention, we apprenticed to the examples of the birds and the lessons, aid and inspiration of medicinal plants and mushrooms and trees of knowledge, revealing crystal studded rock and life giving rivers, our fellow wild creatures as well as the energy or spirit that we sensed empowering them.  Even now, it is the example and force we can both learn from and access from, whether approaching it as secularists and describing and testing it like scientists, as mystery reveling animists or pagans, or as Christians attributing nature and that vital force to most generous God.  Regardless of one’s religion or cosmology, the natural world and our own inner intuitive natures are together the most immediate, grounding, instructing, empowering force available to the present day seeker, healer, teacher or practitioner.

It’s all too easy to listen to the current news on the television, and be overwhelmed by hopelessness or negativity.  But we have only to look around for the exceptional examples of caring and consciousness, of resistance to the paradigm, the re-creation of heartful traditions and the reweaving of healthful community.  Somewhere as we speak, a dance troupe choreographs their interpretation of what it means to be wounded but driven by and given to life, in their own way helping inspire needed changes in ourselves and the world.  A man contacts self and planet more deeply through his sense-filled preparation of wild foods and a home-baked pie.  Groups of allies are pooling their resources to buy, restore and often resacrament a piece of land where their communities can pilgrimage or homestead.  A young woman is dropping out of business school to pursue her herbal studies, with plans to make a humble living on her efforts at natural healing.  And a preschool teacher is helping to encourage not only the curiosity of her charges, but also their sense of adventure, mission, and bliss.

In an age of accelerating distraction and advancing destruction, each of these determined adepts pursue a heroic journey in the direction of presence and place, authenticity and response-ability, reconnection and rewilding, sensation and celebration, clarity and power, assignment and purpose, tribe and truth.  Taking risks, pushing the envelope, doing all they can to help.  You, like they, are one of those who refuse to numb down or look away, an empathic who dares to feel both the suffering and joy of the world in every cell of your beings.  No matter how lonely your sensitivity ever makes you feel, you are not alone.  You are in partnership and community with all the caring seekers experiencing the world through reawakened primal instinct and so called “6th sense,” through caring hearts, and through every inch of skin!  We are the inheritors of, practitioners of, and living vehicles for a contemporary nature-informed sensibility and practice that heals, informs and excites… the welcomed apprentices of an ancient and crucial calling.

Ours is the practice of not only healers and caregivers, activists and artists, but also of sensualists and celebrants, reaping the rewards for awareness and engagement in the now, tasting every flavor, every detail of what it means to be fully, completely alive!  While drawing from or sharing elements with ancient shamanism and animism, Western and Eastern herbal healing traditions, Taoism and more, our practice is more than a resurfacing and editing of historic systems, more than a return to  the “old ways.”  It’s accessing the same inspirited source that has informed spiritual, philosophic, magical, lifeways and healing practices throughout time.

Such conscious reconnection promises to give us back our most authentic selves, awareness of our special powers, our childlike wonder and delight!  It can inspire us to follow the imploring of our enchanted hearts, rather than always blindly acquiescing to the logical mind.  It brings us full circle to the responsibilities of discernment and choice, meaning and mission.  It provides us with a deepened sense of place, and with a community of allies for those who have long felt alone.  And to the displaced and dissatisfied, to those who never quite “fit in” anywhere else, this way of being offers us a home.

Admittedly any intentional change in consciousness is magical in its own right, but the greatest
magic may be the ways we focus and extend out our consciousness in order to actively influence the world for the better.  It is this manifestation that in the long run most empowers, validates and sates.  The most intense magic, the greatest miracles, will always occur when we’re aligned with and act in collusion with natural and native forces, with ongoing evolutionary processes, acting in our full capacities to remedy, create, defend, empower and deepen.  This includes  guarding and restoring the natural world that is affords us our inspiration and instruction.  Healing who and what needs healing.  Opposing injustice.  Making all acts more intensely meaningful, enjoyable, beautiful and right.  Helping others to make the vital shift. Noticing and savoring.  Giving thanks and praise for every lesson and gift.

Genocidal Plants and Killer Deer:
Discernment and Reason For Us Unreasonably Nature-Loving Folks

by Jesse Wolf Hardin

(Anima Lifeways & Herbal School)

Things aren’t “all good”, in spite of the popularity of the expression… it’s a matter of perspective, even in nature.

In my life, as in our teachings at Anima School, the most consistently valuable sources of information and inspiration, new ways of perceiving and more complete understanding, have been 1. actual personal (and sometimes intuitive) experience, and 2. the natural world.  I’ve been formed as well as informed by the processes of nature and the usually exemplary examples of wild creatures and plants, the ultra awareness and lasting loyalty of the wolf, the bravery as well as playfulness of the river otter, bamboo’s attitude and dandelion’s perseverance, the importance of diversity, and water’s ability to cycle and transform, rising into the sun warmed winds and then finding it’s way back to earth and home.

Usually exemplary examples, I say, because even the most ardent nature freaks among us do not necessarily want to adulate or emulate the slave-holding traditions of the various ant tribes, returning to that early human practice of capturing and harnessing another race in order to produce riches for our kind.  Only Fox News could celebrate such brutal domination.

Nor is gang rape any more commendable when sex crazed ducks do the raping instead of drunken, duck walking frat boys.  And the ingratiating way that submissive male wolves grovel, piss on themselves, and lick the butts of a dominant male is something that I – known for my wolfen name, totem and traits – don’t even care to picture, let alone copy.

Nearly as dangerous as writing off the natural world as external, savage or irrelevant, is the tendency of some us to idealize it as all-wise and totally free of duplicity, its animals killing only what can be eaten, never waging war or hoarding resources.  But cuddly looking chimpanzees, like Tarzan’s furry buddy Cheetah, wage deadly war on other nearby chimp bands.  Coyotes, while not as much of a problem as ranchers sometimes claim, nevertheless have been known to sometimes work themselves into a fury of blood lust, such as killing every sheep in a pen without either stopping to eat or trying to drag any home.

But don’t just put it off on predators.  Bambi-eyed deer snap up any field mice that they come across while grazing, and elk have been found to unkindly chew the heads and legs off of ground-nesting baby birds, and the fact that they swallow mainly the calcium rich skulls and spit out the meat is hardly comforting.

When Tamarisk want to take over an entire riparian zone, they do so in part by secreting and blanketing the ground with salt, making it uninhabitable by any other species.

These salt cedars surely don’t have conscious genocidal intentions, but genocide is the result in most areas of the U.S. that they colonize. Incapable of deception?  Plants that kill and eat insects and even small mammals, often catch them using a practical but disingenuous ruse, pretending to give away a gift of pollen or other food in order and then seizing and dissolving the tissues of those enticed by their advertised generosity.

As for the inevitable intelligence of nature, there is no doubt that nature in whole, in balance, exhibits world’s more more savvy and survivability than even the most educated, conscious or in-tune of modern human kind… and the average plant exhibits more usable intelligence than the average couch potato by far.  And yet, not everything that nature does is particularly smart, ever so often resulting in human-like self destructive patterns and leading to an evolutionary dead end.  To drive the point home, so to speak, we need look no further than the moose photographed while attempting to copulate with the cold brass statue of a buffalo.  Intrepid, yes, but to my way of thinking not very bright.

Even when the acts of nature appear most wise and noble, their examples do not always apply to us.  What’s right for another species, is not always what is most helpful, honorable, useful or right for us.  We can learn something from everything in nature, but that doesn’t make it always admirable or even applicable to us and our lives.  Sometimes we can learn from negative examples, by what we strongly sense we don’t want to do, sensing not just in our reasoning minds but at the deepest levels of our being, realize we do not want to act.

The key, as always, is to be aware and discerning, making responsible choices, learning from, distinguishing the value of and then either adopting, amending or rejecting any models of behavior that we witness and investigate.

Most of my readers know well that they can’t unquestioningly accept everything that the dominant social and cultural paradigm asserts or insists on, that all rules and laws are not in all cases fair.  No matter what the authorities say or our country’s cultural trends may dictate, most of us still realize that toys like Barbie dolls are not only superficial but and a set-up and trap, that money doesn’t guarantee happiness or democracy ensure justice, that plants are never simply “weeds”.  While we may foolishly give the benefit of doubt to a Democratic president no matter how much war he wages or how many freedoms he undermines, my readers can usually see the dangers of right wing demagogues and can avoid blindly accepting at face value or even idolizing every civilized icon and notion.

What is harder for us, in most cases, is to relate to and learn from nature without anthropomorphizing, projecting, and idealizing.

One can’t really come to know or have a healthy relationship with another person if we only see what we want to see in them, unrealistically idolize, sanitize or canonize them.  Likewise, we can neither deeply comprehend nor have a deep and honest relationship with nature and other species, without seeing them whole, as complex as well as beautiful, self serving as well as community supporting, potentially dangerous as well as often healing.  We’d do well to remember that we ourselves are integral elements of the natural world we love and study.  To this Gaian, ecological and energetic whole and flux we bring the possibility of natural reason and discernment as well spirit and heart.

(for further discussion of perception, anthropomorphism, interspecies communication and nature as teacher, look to future issues of Plant Healer Magazine)

(Please post and forward freely)

Courage & Stupidity:
It’s A Fine Line, They Say

By Jesse Wolf Hardin

www.AnimaCenter.org

Wise risks and stupid choices…

gambling on an overloaded raft in a roaring flood… chancing to live our dreams.

In the course of my life, I’ve had to be comfortable conversing in the clipped sentences of martial jargon, thanks to early years in military school, and with the limited but loaded vernacular of the outlaw bikers I hung with after I ran away.  Thanks to my diverse and checkered past, I can speak fluent “poet” and “revolutionary”, and can carry on in the language of “hard-bit logger” as well as “sentimental tree hugger”, talk a bit of “barrio” and make out more than a few words of “academia”.  My history and firearms vocabularies are extensive, making interesting conversation possible with both college professors and self described gun nuts.  I utilize terms and expressions particular to veterinarians and veterans, aesthetic focused artists and mumbly Latin-mouthed botanists, evoking the inflections of hell defying preachers as much as pissed off protestors.  In every case, there are trademark aphorisms that denote each group’s values and attitudes, prejudices and priorities, in the course of teaching broadly helpful truisms to anyone able and willing to hear.

One of the passed around here in the still rural West, is that “there’s a fine line between courage and stupidity.”

It could be considered courageous, for example, to gallop your horse to the front of a stampeding cattle herd in a bid to slow and turn them, before they dash to their deaths off the nearby cliffs like panicky investors in some failed banker’s securities scheme.  Courageous, to risk a whiskey bottle to the head in the course of defending the honor of a woman.  Or to face off against the New Mexico State Police and U.S. Air Force with nothing but an antiquated Winchester rifle and copy of the Bill of Rights, when the government tells you they are taking your lifelong ranch away… to expand their White Sands missile testing range.

One might think it purely stupid, however, to get drunk and ride a bull through the window of an eastern New Mexico bar, or to break bottles over your own head just to show some gal how tough you really are.  Stupid, to tell a Texas sheriff that no “tin-star hick-ass agent of oppression” has the right to goad, pulling you over just because you looked out of place on that lonely stretch of desert road.

Such expressions can be applied to anyone’s life.  Quitting a job that you feel wastes your life or deadens your spirit, especially in financially difficult times: pretty doggone brave.  Getting fired for telling the boss off, a month before retirement: potentially short on smarts.  Sticking with a difficult relationship, because of real love, a desire to help, and signs of progress: courageous without question.  A wife staying with a man who berates and belittles her, “for the sake of the kids”: simply dumb, dumb, dumb.

When it comes to the herbalists we know, it’s brave for them to defy the cultural bias against natural healing and in favor of biased research and pharmaceuticals, to risk being ridiculed over either the primitivity of their craft or occasional habit of talking to plants, to spend money on books and schools with no assurance they are devoting themselves to a career that will pay them back.  But what’s less than smart, is whenever a few practitioners go so far as to discount all scientific research, or don’t readily utilize modern conventional medicine even when clearly advisable, or nurse an emotional attachment to having either mass appeal or official acceptance.

So often though, it’s not really clear which we are until after the fact, the test, the crux, the close or finish line.  If I’d been killed while living with criminals and crazies on the street, it would have seemed far more dumb than courageous.  Or if was never able to make an income or have an affect on the world, due to a stupid stunt like turning my back on formal education, certificates and degrees.  Or if I’d ended up penniless and back to sleeping under bridges, after selling the engine out of my only vehicle and school-bus home for the down payment on some wild and remote land.  Or if no one had attended our herbal conference or read our new herbal magazine, after launching them in the middle of an economic recession.

If such things seem brave in retrospect, it is because I both survived as a teen runaway, and learned on the mean streets much of what I needed later to thrive.  It’s only due to the evidence of hundreds of articles and dozens of books that I’ve written, the nature awareness school I founded and the many people who say I and my partners have helped them, that dropping out of school, living without medical insurance or a consistent income, and following a dream at such great risk and cost can be seen as anything but ignorant and disastrous.  Thanks to a few successes at raising awareness of endangered wildlands, my Don Quixote efforts aren’t as laughable. It seems brave how I bought this property I’m on, because I somehow or other managed to struggle and make each of the 15 years worth of payments, restoring this micro ecosystem to health as it restored me myself.  And our magazine and conference could be dismissed as ignorant and foolhardy gambles, if not for the volume of enthused subscribers and the first year’s event selling out.

Watching and measuring me throughout all these tests of relative stupidity or courage, have been not only my various audiences and constituencies, the sportsmen, conservationists and scholars, readers and supporters, detractors and denigrators, but also the few locals inhabiting my isolated county.  It is they, of all people perhaps, with no investment in the outcome, who have been the most objective witnesses of all.  The majority didn’t care if I managed to make the land payments, walking the 17 miles round trip to the nearest village for supplies, or if I would keep from being thrown and killed after buying a proud-cut Arabian with no experience in cinching a saddle… but they’ve certainly been entertained at all my efforts and contortions, and at time seem to have greatly enjoyed betting on the results.

Never was this made more clear than during one of our normally small river’s periodic floods, with us unable to get out to the road except by scrambling and sloshing up miles of soggy mountainside or swimming with one hand while holding the outgoing mail aloft.  The nearby town’s wonderment regarding when and how we might brave the 20’ high rushing waters again was finally eased when a few fellow visitors to the Reserve post office noticed me carrying out a very large package, and unpacking it in the parking lot, and carrying what looked like rolled up plastic over to the gas station and its air hose.   By the time I had filled the raft’s three chambers, a half dozen of my neighbors (loosely defined, of course, since our cabin is situated miles from the next nearest domicile) had cued up to find out what I planned, fascinated by the site of a water craft in a Southwestern landscape known for its dryness.  All proved glad to help me get the inflated vestibule lashed down in the back of old Sammy Giron’s  Toyota pickup, and determined to follow us to what was now a highly anticipated launching.

Sammy drove slow as always, with me perched in the back so I could try to hold down the raft’s nose in the wrestling winds.  Every mile or two, it seemed, somebody else would jump into their truck or jeep as we passed by, then follow the growing line of vehicles that was appearing more and more like an underfunded and under-decorated parade.  Nearly 30 people pulled up behind us at the edge of the river where it snaked virilely into the our narrowing canyon, the floating tree trunks and white froth rushing by at a remarkable speed as the first of wagers were made.  A bet in rural America is not always a simple matter, though this day money was laid done over nothing more complex than whether I and my baggage would possibly stay afloat past the first sharp turn and until I was out of their sight.

It was the matter of my baggage, as it turns out, that determined the arithmetic of the bets, with the odds against me going up with each heavy item that I loaded up.  Containers of kerosene for the lamps, groceries, books and mail, judiciously wrapped in garbage bags to guard them against the paddle’s sure spray.  So heavy were they in total, that the last half had to be hoisted in after the boat had already been slid into the water, held against the shore only by the efforts of a so many folks holding its tethering ropes.  With all the available floor space thus taken, I had no choice but to sit high astride the plastic covered boxes as ropes were released and the current had its way.

Fact was, that I’d never actually boated before, only watched videos of white water rafters jauntily navigating between jagged river rocks.  What such films failed to indicate, needless to say, was the fact that an overloaded vessel is absolutely impossible to steer, with one’s paddle being of no use other than to push off of any rock eddies where you might get stuck.   “Get the camera, George,“ and “God help him” some woman was heard to say, just as the muscular current got its way.  And then was the first time I ever heard that old expression, about what a fine line there can be between courage and stupidity, or considered that it could prove an important lesson.

Kindly exclamations of concern now gave way to shouts of excitement from the shoreline crowd, as I bounced violently off of the cliff at the first bend.  Not to be outdone, one boisterous cowboy was shouting “I’ll give you eight to one” at the top of his lungs.  By this time, my new raft was spinning precariously in a circle, water spilling over its sides in what must have briefly looked a lot like a water rodeo.  Briefly, I say, with no time to consider who among them might have been right, before careening crazily out of the crowd’s site.

For a short while, I could still discern the sounds of truck horns honking back at the crossing, and the occasional distant thunder of revolvers fired in celebration into the air.  In less than ten minutes I was swept, bounced and jolted all the way to our property, jumping into the cold, neck deep water in order to slow and then finally beach my bloated craft.  Except for a couple of the packages that I’d gotten, most of the boxes remained dry, I’m happy to say, with only a few folks making money on me that fine Fall day: those willing to bet on a long shot.

Many years later, our rancher and retiree “neighbors” still have little admiration for our growing a riparian forest where there’d been none, and our successful magazine and conference are only curiosities, but they nonetheless like to cite such things as examples of a person accomplishing the unlikely.  They reason that if I can get done what I have, with the odds consistently stacked against me, then anything may be possible.  They imagine it means they they could win the New Mexico Lottery jackpot, by spending only a buck or a two on tickets at Jake’s Grocery.  That one might be able to get that special gal or guy that the heart longs for, no matter what his or her friends or parents might say.  That the too brightly lit and over managed monoculture that is the 21st Century can be kept at bay a while longer, helping ensure that rural landscapes, country skills and personal freedoms continue to exist.

In this, there’s something for all of us, it seems… learning to not let the chances for failure – nor even the possibility of looking stupid – prevent us taking the necessary risks to live out our dreams.

(From an upcoming book of mind stretching thoughts and heart opening anecdotes from a wildly rural perspective… by Jesse Wolf Hardin, possibly to be titled “The Town That Waves”)

(Post and share freely)