Animá Lifeways & Herbal School

Traditions In Western Herbalism Conference Redux
The Story of the 2012 Festival for Folk Herbalists

“What an exciting conference. The TWHC is the new wave of herbalism in North America, featuring speakers and a community rich with a combination of long hands-on experience and fresh creativity.”
-Paul Bergner

“The most amazing conference ever!” -Juliet Blankespoor

Ghost Ranch Cliffs - TWHC 2011 - by Dan'l

“The best weekend ever!” -Rebecca Altman

Wow! is the word that most comes to mind… wow!, to feel so much truly incredible energy, purpose and joy among the folks teaching at and attending the second annual Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference. And that we were even able to pull it off in our situation, with our devoted little crew. Wow!, the diversity and knowledge of the people who came, from ever further afield, and the amazing classes and greatly stretching presenters we’re so very fortunate to have. The spirit of these ancient, living, Western lands with its crimson striped rock formations and hardy blooms of desert medicine. The infusion of art, and the incredible ratcheting up of music. Wow!, to witness old connections rekindled, new alliances made, and those wonder-full kids joining in the learning as much as in the culture, the movement, the dance…

Wolf Jamming with Rising Appalachia & Lunar Fire

“I am filled with gratitude and awe in the wake of TWHC.   You have created an alchemical vessel that concentrates and brings forth all that is most magical and powerful in our community, our movement, our medicine, our selves.  I’m proud to have been a part of it all…. The only large gathering I can ever remember leaving feeling more energized and alive than when I arrived.”
- Sean Donahue, TWHC Teacher

We’ve come home filled with the potent images and expressed gratitude of so many, lending weight to what has often felt like a series of acts of magic, or of deeply earthen miracles. It seemed improbable and thus miraculous, that folks were willing to travel hours from the nearest airport, in times of financial difficulty, some taking off of work or school, saving their money all year long, and otherwise doing whatever it takes to get here. Miraculous, that we were even able to hold the conference at Ghost Ranch again, when we had exceeded their attendance limits the very first year, and then swelled that number by an additional 50 people this September. Our second time of hosting at this stunning site, the Ranch directors required that we contract all their lodging rooms and put up a 50% deposit, something that was only possible because we hadn’t been taking cash draws for our previous year of working on the 2010 event! Almost unbelievable, the quality and commitment of our teachers, and the movement they join us in helping create. Miraculous, this dance may seem, but not without daily effort and attention for over 13 months prior. Folks are right that things flowed incredibly smoothly this time, but not without a behind the scenes bustling of adaptation, remedy and repair… efforts that would be too extreme and stressful if not for the fact that we do this to help heal and better the world rather than simply to earn dollar and cents.

“Even better than last year, and I didn’t think it was possible!”, exclaimed more than one registrant, leaving us feeling not relieved and affirmed but warmed and emboldened. And from those attending TWHC for the first time: “It’s everything I heard it was, and more!”

“TWHC was phenomenal! Thanks for the tremendous amount of work that went into this. I had a blast! Many thanks for a fabulous conference. Now I understand why people were raving about it.” - Lisa Ganora

Trail Boss, Phyllis Hogan, Denise Tracy, Lisa Ganora - Photo by JWH

There was already a sense of TWHC alumni, alliance and rapport that naturally builds each year that folks come back. For whatever reason, this event has proven to result in a high number of deep reconnections, as esteemed teacher and artist Mimi Kamp pointed out. Herbalists that don’t normally run into each other in their normal course of studying, practicing and teaching, have felt blessed to have time with old friends and to plan new, shared projects. And alongside and within these confluences, flowed a wild stream of new faces, marked by a certain eagerness, reflecting the fact of their commitment to the learning, the healing, the life.

TWHC Teachers Doug Elliott & Ryan Drum

As to be expected, a 3 hour drive from the airport meant being lifted into the world of old New Mexico, past the art and spirit mecca of well appointed Santa Fe, through the mundanity of low-rent Española, up the twisty turns next to the plunging Rio Chama river and into a surreal looking landscape of buttes and spires, marking the premises of Abiquiu and then the Ghost Ranch proper. For most of us arriving, it was also transport through time, not forwards to the event’s substance and climax, but backwards into the folds of historic precedence, into prehistory and myth, and sideways perhaps into a mode that is beyond and oblivious of the cadence of linear time. Perhaps it is a miracle, as well, that any of us were able to make it to the start of classes before they had started. Or if not a miracle, than a simple four day return to the kind of alternate and sensate way of being where conjunctions are natural, meetings organic, and the steps of our destinies synched in uncounted rhythms.

Chama River by TWHC Site - photo by Andrea Denault

The silver waves of much needed precipitation added to the mystical effect, seen blowing in from a great distant, stroking the cliffs closer and closer until wildly blowing through to a clarion of thunder. The shifting light caught everyone’s attention, as first one prominent formation and then another had its moments in the sun’s warm spotlight. Festivities kicked off a day earlier than in 2010, with Quetzal and Tina of Tina and Her Pony playing tighter sets than ever. Tina took a turn on the cello during Quetzal’s great new songs including “I’m So Lonely” which we can’t wait to get a recording of. And classes got right off to a great start on Friday morn, even dear Phyllis Hogan’s plant walk that tempted a large group to follow her on a mission through mud and rain. One class after another through Sunday, each with a teacher seeming to exceed their own usual best, being more personal, detailed and adventurous. Time and again we heard folks praising the classes they’d just left, even when it was a teacher they had seen present before.

Chloe of Rising Appalachia - photo by Dan'l

Leah and Chloe of the group Rising Appalachia flew direct from a collaborative art and music event on the side of a volcano overseas, in order to arrive an hour before their return set. Their afro-appalachian performance captured and propelled the Friday night audience as we knew it would. We love them, and their devotion to new culture and plant medicine as well as to music.

Chloe, Jaden & Leah - TWHC 2011 - Photo by Terilyn

The one request we got over and over last year, was for dance music to get everyone moving after the long days of sitting down in classes. True to our promise, we upped the tempo on Saturday night with a band that hardly no one at the conference knew, but one that folk will probably never forget. Lunar Fire Tribal is a revolving cooperative of musicians, ritualists and fire dancers, weaving not only a sonic wave but a tapestry of connection, of earth, healing and love. Part shamanic, part hip hop, and all nuevo-tribal… Lunar Fire blew us all  away.

Teresita, Rodo, Lisa, & Gilly of Lunar Fire Tribal, with Wolf & Kiva

Robin Rose Bennett called for presence at the start of our Sunday closing, creating the feel of sacred space without the usual gathering circle. What followed was pure inspiration from one of the very first allies and instigators of TWHC, our like hearted teacher and Plant Healer columnist Paul Bergner, invoking an ancient sense of calling for the days and lifetimes ahead.

Definitely “not your mother’s herbal conference.”

TWHC 2011 Closing - photo by Andrea Denault

The unconventional folk feel of TWHC results in what our excellent teacher Bevin Clare declared “a different cross-section” of attendees. Over and over again, we heard from folks who said they weren’t “conference types” or “never go to conferences”, and we’d wager that as many as 20% of those who came this year would fall into that category. These are people serious about herbal medicine, but bored or uncomfortable with what they perceive as “normal” events. They’re grateful to be accepted and not talked down to, regardless of their lack of certification or personal eccentricities, their inexperience or “kitchen herbal” approach, their youth or street cred. And they say they are excited to be in mixed company with all manner of herbal enthusiast, from heart centered clinical herbalists and nurses to free clinic activists and far thinking herbal remedy alchemists.

Chelsea, 7Song & Scott - Photo by Juliet Blankespoor

This cultural diversity included Hispanics, African Americans, and Native Americans, and also Tewa herbalists and midwives brought to the conference on scholarships paid for by cultural activist Michelle and her mother. And even more than the year before, we welcomed practitioners and students from outside the U.S., from French Quebec to New Zealand. A guest, Chris, came from the Caribbean to learn, and was asked to consider writing about traditional Carib herbalism for our magazine.

Jesse Wolf & Christa Sinadinos - Photo by Dan'l

Diversity includes gender, and while most herbal events either mostly involve women or are for women only, TWHC 2012 achieved a closer to even mix of both sexes… something that several people including our friend Jim McDonald noted and appreciated and noted. And we’ve achieved greater age diversity as well. Often you will see mostly middle aged folks attending, with only a few elders and almost no young. This year we made a special effort to bring the young to this gathering, not just for them but because of what they each bring. Walking about the land you could see numerous “twenty-somethings”, some in black, some powerfully tattooed, with a passion for this field and resistance to stasis that’s not otherwise often seen. And the little ones were all about, form the preteens down to toddlers that we encouraged with special ticket discounts and 3 different classes designed just for kids. Everyone was impressed with how focused and eager to learn these plant-minded, nature loving young’ns were, and with the energy that they injected into the evenings’ celebrations.

Howie Brounstein, Christa Sinadinos, Kristi Reese

We now know one other event that strives for similar inclusion of culture and skills, activism and ecology, classes and party, so we are not entirely unique in this way. What most distinguishes TWHC, perhaps, is all these elements in combination with a high rate of experienced and practicing herbalists and herbal clinicians. Friend and awesome teacher 7Song asked those in his audience to raise their hand if they were currently practicing 7Song  was surprised and pleased to find that…

…over 50% of those attending class were in one way or another active practitioners.

This means that over half of the folks identifying themselves in some way with the folk herbalism resurgence are doers, actively making use of what they know for the betterment of others whether as clinical herbalists or village practitioners. For all the fun and music, the Traditions In Western Herbalism Conference remains defined in part by the seriousness and intense commitment of a tribe intensely focused medical herbalism and new herbalist culture.

Mimi Kamp teaches at TWHC 2011 - photo by Dan'l

For all the beauty, education, camaraderie and celebration, it the sense of what the 2011 event has inspired that has us most excited and fulfilled, the work that will be done because of what was learned here, the steps that will be taken by students of medicinal plants towards their own make-it-real practice

Kiva Rose - photo by Juliet Blankespoor

“I came to this year’s conference thinking it would be my last year, as I am moving to Ohio soon.  I left realizing that I must always find a way to come back.  I intentionally did not pour over the schedule in advance of registration.  I didn’t plan my experience, and yet everything I needed to coalesce the filaments of my longings, dreams, and desires into a cohesive goal was offered, and received.  Grassroots, edgy, and exactly what I needed to satiate my thirsty soul.  This Conference, this movement, they are like gravity.  The law of attraction is vividly at work here, answering the spoken and unspoken pleas of grassroots healers. The conference end was a bittersweet event.  I am one of many who found themselves moved to tears multiple times during this conference.  I am so very grateful to have time to spend in community, with others who hear a similar call, and speak similar languages.  Plant people, with dirt under their nails, stars in their hair, and roots growing out of their sacrums.”
-Heather

Chama River near TWHC site - photo by Andrea Denault

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Gratitude:
Thank You Teachers, Sponsors, Volunteers & All Who Came

It’s getting harder to acknowledge everyone fully who has a part in this entity called TWHC, especially at the conference where the growing list of loving helpers is so long it starts sounding like chant or litany. And it simply takes too much time to not only name but adequately acknowledge our 29 awesome teachers. Next year we are likely to make the closing just as powerful, but tighter and shorter, asking volunteers, sponsors and teacher to stand for appreciation but not naming any but our very largest sponsors. What we will do, is name them all repeatedly as we have done and more, in the conference book, blog, and this TWHC Newsletter. We’ve heard great things about this year’s classes, and we will always be grateful by the unique and powerful contributions of 7Song, Robin Rose Bennett, Paul Bergner, Juliet Blankespoor, Howie Brounstein, Kristine Brown, Larken Bunce, Todd Caldecott, Bevin Clare, Sean Donahue, Ryan Drum, Margi Flint, Rosalee de la Foret, Lisa Ganora, Charles Garcia, Linda Garcia, Phyllis Hogan, Mimi Kamp, Susan Leopold, Kathleen Maier, Jim McDonald, Kristi Reese, Corey Pine Shane, Christa Sinadinos, Katja Swift and Denise Tracy. You were awesome, stretched boundaries, touched the people.

Resolute, Amazing TWHC Site Manager

Some may have thought it odd that volunteers got so much mention at the closing, but we were so blown away by the amount of essential work done by folks asking little or nothing in return. Resolute, Trail Boss and Dan’l were key to keeping it all together. Without Avonda and everyone that assisted Resolute, we couldn’t possibly have handled the set up and registration. Asa and Dan’l jumping on filming at the last moment, is the only reason we have video to hopefully get to share with you. And how can we not thank sweet Bruce and incredible Claudia, for bringing Blue Skies Espresso & Smoothies, and their dear spirits, to a parched and quality hungry herbalist crowd.

And our Sponsors are so very, very appreciated! Without them, their alliance and support, we would either have to run a much pared down event, or else charge much more for the tickets. The affordability of the tickets and the survival and success of TWHC are this year thanks to Mountain Rose Herbs, LearningHerbs.com, Herbal Roots Zine, Herbs Etc., HerbPharm, Humboldt Herbals, Organic Unity, Tai Sophia, The School of Traditional Western Herbalism, Sylvan Institute of Botanical Medicine, Super Salve Co., Traditional Medicinals, Vermont Center For Integrative Herbalism, Winter Sun Trading Co., Alchemical Solutions, Essential Herbal Magazine, Frontier Herbs and the North American Institute of Medical Herbalism. And our dear Nick M., lovingly providing TWH with essential solar powered satellite internet service all year long.

Thank you Tina & Quetzal, Rising Appalachia and Lunar Fire Tribal, you stirred our souls, touched our hearts, and rocked our socks off.

And thank you everyone who came. As I said in the closing, we are all students. You are all teachers. There is power in our doing this together.

-Jesse Wolf Hardin

Wonder Kristin, with Veggies traded for her TWHC ticket

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TWHC 2012 Dates To Be Announced Soon

As quickly as we choose the next conference site, we will be contracting for certain dates. It is looking more likely that TWHC will be held mid to late August, but we will give you dates really soon so that you can begin to plan for next year.

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(please post and forward)

Cabinets of Wonder:
Awakening Connection, Educating, & Nourishing Our Inquisitive Beings

by Jesse Wolf Hardin

Excerpt from Plant Healer Magazine Vol I Issue IV

www.PlantHealerMagazine.com www.AnimaCenter.org

Wond-er (noun):
a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration and arousing curiosity, caused by something overwhelmingly beautiful and unfamiliar, unpredicted or inexplicable.

There’s many an inspiration for our getting into a life of herbalism, from suffering a persistent illness responsive only to medicinal plants and knowledgeable self care, to a lasting desire since childhood to ease the suffering and discomfort of others.  Income is usually far too miniscule an amount to be a factor, although objection to and mistrust of the modern corporate healthcare system is quite often weighed in.  And in most instances, a core element in our embrace of this study and field is a fascination in – and irresistable love for – the natural world we sense we’re both corporeal and energetic/spiritual members of.  It is excitement, that moves us to weave plant-drunk through fields of herbs, to experiment with the effects of a dizzying number of alternatives in the creation of specially tailored recipe,  bordering on obsession.  Connection and amazement, intact in the face of a culture of separation and cynicism… and utter wonder!

The word “wonderful” is used these days to mean pleasurably great or superb, but more likely, its original use was to describe a thing that “fills us with wonder.”  It is this sense of rapt engagement, observation and inquiry that not only inspires our apt apprenticeship to the plant world, but that also once led learned pupils of nature to pursue sciences like astronomy and botany prior to the age of reductionism.  And it is that which drives most collectors as well, wondering about the pieces or specimens they gather, wondering of their origins and development, their nearest relatives, analogs or equivalents, at the possible functions suggested by their design. Wondering, wordlessly, at the intensity and subtlety of the studied, engaged, collected and beloved.

Author Hardin photogaphing his Cabinet of Wonder, Plant Healer Magazine

Since earliest recorded history, some have gathered together collections of culturally significant or natural objects including dried plant specimens.  They sometimes did so to tangibly catalog the edible and medicinal resources around them, other times as teaching aids for handing down information vital to the community, wisdom extended if not forever preserved.  Almost always, however, such gathering was a true passion as well, a collection of objects of interest, often natural, usually with no definable limits on the kinds categories covered.  We should note that this was a result not of disorganization or a lack of discipline, so much as recognition of the inherent and evident interconnectedness and interrelatedness of all things.  Such connections may be similarities in form between different species and phyla, or of varieties within a species.  Or conversely, an association of oddities linked only by their rarity or unusualness.

“If there ever was an age when one sees varied and wondrous things, I believe that ours is one, for it is an age in which things happen that are worthy of astonishment, compassion, and reproach.”
–Matteo Bandello, preface to V#3 of the 1554 Novelle

There was once a time of true interdisciplinary studies and eclectic practices fed by multiple fountains of tradition.  For all the screwed up shit that can be attributed to the Renaissance to Victorian periods, they proved nonetheless the ferment for geologists who studied weather and Greek odes, aristocrats saving up for bass microscopes, and rural doctors familiar with the medicinal qualities of local plants.  Being called a “Renaissance” man or woman today, still indicates that one is considered to have an unusually extensive range of interests and pursuits, knowledge and abilities.  Civilization, with all it relative benefits and great harms, knew at least a 300 year span in which research and study held its own appeal apart from any practical applications, in which some who could afford it pursued knowledge for knowledge’s sake, with peasants trading large amounts of grain for a few used books as literacy spread from the cities, certain curioius minded noblemen setting aside vast rooms for the display of the amazing things that they had collected on their travels about the world.  The wonder-full spaces for such collections are sometimes called Imaginariums, fed by and feeding the human imagination.

The most common three ingredients of such exhibitions were the products of nature (naturalia) those of mankind (arteficialia or artefacta), and those manmade items created to investigate or measure natural conditions and phenomena (scientifica) such as telescopes and kaleidoscopes, curiously animated clocks, complex astrolabes and automatons, microscopes and balance beam mineral scales.  According to Horst Bredekamp (1995), the juxtaposition of objects encouraged comparisons, finding analogies and parallels and favored the cultural change from a world viewed as static to a dynamic one of endlessly transforming natural history.  The threads of connection between each grouping of items could be almost anything.  Framed plant specimens might hang next to a shadow box of ancient arrowheads, and plant fossils were could be displayed below equally evocative forest etchings by a promising egg tempera artist.  In fact, selection of fine paintings was likely to hang next to shelves of archaic scientific instruments, animal skulls and plant specimens.

At this time at least, there seemed only a mutable, dynamic boundary between the relative aesthetic and informational appeal of human created art and artful natural objects.  Not yet, was the full break between science and folk methodology, between research and spirit or mythos, the known or predictable and the unknown or mysterious, and between knowing and wonder.

Thus, in the 1500s we begin to see what came to be appropriately called Cabinets of Curiosities or Cabinets of Wonder, with the original meaning of “cabinet” being a dedicated room rather than a piece of furniture.  In German, the term was Kunstkammer (“art chamber”), or Wunderkammer (“wonder chamber”).   Combined were physical examples of, and art emblematic of the fields not only natural history but human history, botany and geology, archaeology and ethnography, and including herbariums, scientific ephemera, antiquities and religious icons.  According to author Peter Thomas, a Cabinet of Wonder was regarded as a microcosm, a theater of the world, a memory theater.

These early famed collections were the pursuits of great rulers including Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor at the close of the 16th Century, the Grand-Duke of Tuscany Francesco I, Frederick III of Denmark and the ever curious Peter The Great.  Often, as in the case of the Habsburg Imperial collection, they served as grand displays to impress and wow foreign dignitaries and selected distinguished guests, intending to impress them with the intellect and taste, influence and especially far reach of the royal collector.

While the acquisition and maintenance of large collections could be too expensive for all but the most rich and privileged, they conversely had the effect of democratizing collecting, or at least in insinuating into the larger culture.  Mini-collections sprung up in many upper middle class homes in emulation of the most famous exhibitions, such that it became in some circles expected for anyone of demonstrable intelligence and tastes to have a sitting room surrounded by the artifacts of travel and inquiry.  Up until the Victorian Age, it was still not uncommon for parlors to include Wunderkammer display cabinets made of precious woods and filled with fascinating items, or for otherwise urbane housewives to be found pressing plants between wooden boards to be added to their home collections.  Many of the Cabinets of Wonder were the seeds from which incredible public museums grew, offering their tales and delights to all who cared to enter.  And far from being exclusive and insular, cabinets of curiosities provided the material for scientific discussion and publication, one example being the Museum Wormianum catalog published in 1655.  It’s artifacts were said to be the springboard for founder Worm’s philosophic, scientific and natural history investigations.

One example of interest to herbalists is the English physician Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), member of the Royal College of Physicians and the founder of the British Museum.  He began collecting plants while studying medicine as a young man in France and England, then as personal physician to the West Indies fleet in Jamaica, Sloane invested over a year in nothing but collecting and cataloguing the native plants, animals and cultural curiosities found there. The long trip back to England in 1689 cost the lives of his captive iguana, alligator and snakes, but the majority of dozens of live plant species survived.  He additionally brought with him 800 plus dried plant specimens mounted on special paper in what became an 8 volume herbarium, the beginnings of a collection that would swell immensely with gifts from other naturalists from around the world.

Already, however, there were also plenty of examples of science’s progressive subjugation to vested powers economic and political, and some who saw the Wunderkammer as symbolic of a its patron’s increasing control over and ordering of the natural world.  Indeed, racks of colorful pinned butterflies were an account of predation as much as celebration.  Bones from a thousand species might be dramatically displayed in shadow boxes, but they marked the taking of life as much or more than they suggested the expression and behavior of living creatures.  Ironically, species of birds nearly killed off by commercial meat hunters, were on more than once occasion pushed the rest of the way to extinction by ardent collectors and their agents competing to gather one of the last of some ever rarer specimen before it was gone.  There was danger of collections including Wunderkammer and zoos depleting the natural world they meant to account for and possibly to honor and even champion.  There was the danger, also, of the viewers of increasingly accessible collections finding the static and stuffed, cataloged and arranged items an adequate substitution for the real thing, dioramas standing in for real habitat that may be denatured, impacted or even disappearing.

Plant Healer artist Madeline von Foerster has let us use images from her Wunderkammer series, where she paints a species of tree carved into a cabinet, with the curiosities within it being actual species dependent on that tree to survive.  And she wanted “to paint cabinets that represented trees, as if a tree had been cut down and made into something,” her inspiration being Heidegger and Die Frage nach der Technik (“The Question Concerning Technology”) and his valuable concept of enframing.  “As humans, our relationship to nature is based on what we can do with nature and how we can use it for our purposes.  We’re nature [ourselves], but we’re seeing nature through that framework, never experiencing nature as it really is… We have this desire to fetishistically collect and display things, take them out of their place, and somehow understand them by doing that, but in a way they’re totally better understood in their own environment.”

So true.  Yet also, just as paintings can awaken in a viewer deep feelings and ways of seeing that may impact and benefit both individuals and our kind, so too can even the most inert and contained collections provoke curiosity, inquiry and connection, making evident crucial patterns, suggesting possibilities, prompting careers in conservation, or even calling for action and activism… potentially irrevocably benefitting those who enter, stimulating and broadening an exhibit goer’s mind.  At best, college herbariums and urban museums, famous Wunderkammer and simple living-room curiosity cabinets will not substitute for environments and experiences, but help lead us there…

…there, to the source of all interest, and the place of our original enchantment.  There, to the always vital, ever expectant state of wonder.

(Please Post & Forward Freely… as agents of the ongoing awakening)

• New Plant Healer Annual and Art of Plant Healer Books

• Latest Plant Healer Magazine Releases Today

• Back Issues Now Available

Announcing 2 New Books For Herbalists & Plant Lovers:
THE PLANT HEALER ANNUAL
THE ART OF PLANT HEALER

YES, the rumors are true!  If we didn’t have enough to do before the September conference, we had to add production of our first 2 Sweet Medicine Press books to our busy list.… feeling compelled to respond to the plaintive pleas of our Plant Healer Magazine readers!  Copies will be available at the Traditions In Western Herbalism Conference beginning Sept. 15th, and discounted mail order copies can be pre-ordered now by subscribers by logging in to your personal Membership Page on the Plant Healer website.

PLANT HEALER ANNUAL, VOL I (Book)

While there is much to love about the tree-free, easy to navigate digital format, there’s admittedly lots to be said for actual physical hard copy that can be read off of the glaring screen, handled and placed in an honored spot on the shelf.  Given that paper copies of our up to 200 page long color issues would be ridiculously expensive to produce and ship, we’re committing to print for you a yearly Plant Healer Annual instead… a perfect-bound 8.5×11” softcover book in affordable Black & White, that’s well over 600 pages long!

The first of these Plant Healer Annuals contains full length versions of all of the articles, art and photos from the magazine’s first year, 2010/2011, and in affordable black and white.  Featuring columns and articles by many of the leading voices in folk herbalism and wildcrafting –– Paul Bergner, Matthew Wood, Aviva Romm, Kiva Rose, Phyllis Light, Samuel Thayer, 7Song, Rosemary Gladstar, Jim McDonald, Kristine Brown, Virginia Adi, Todd Caldecott, Sean Donahue, John Gallagher, Rosalee de la Forêt, Robin Rose Bennett, Ananda Wilson, Christa Sinadinos, Margi Flint, Katja Swift, Dale Bellisfield, Susan Belsinger, Jane Valencia and Henriette Kress.
$39 ea. (plus $15 Shipping) to Subscribers
To order yours, go to the website and then Login to your personal Member Page:
www.PlantHealerMagazine

For Subscribers ONLY!

If you’re not already a Subscriber, you can pre-order both the Annual ($39) and a 1 year’s Subscription with bonuses ($57) at the combined discount price of only
$77 (plus $15 Shipping) at:
www.PlantHealerMagazine.com

“This is the first publication I’ve seen in my 38-year career that captures the wild diversity of herbalism in North America while still reflecting excellence and high-level practice… for the practicing herbalist from entry level to advanced, inclusively.”
-Paul Bergner

THE ART OF PLANT HEALER, VOL I (Book)

As helpful as the Annuals will be, some of you can’t help but wish there was a full color book with at least a portion of the original artwork and posters for herbalists.  It is for you, that we have also worked late into the nights putting together a perfect bound volume featuring over 60 full page sized color illustrations from the first year of the magazine, including paintings, drawings and sculptures by Joanna Powell Colbert, Madeline von Foerster, Lauren Raine and Rebecca Altman, and art as well as the many posters and text designed and written by PH coeditor and copublisher Jesse Wolf Hardin.  The 8.5×11” pages can be carefully removed for framing and hanging, so you may want two copies… one for dismembering and displaying, and the other to keep whole.  The Art of Plant Healer is sure to make an especially appealing gift for friends and family as well.
Subscribers: $25 ea., NonSubscribers: $35 ea. (plus $15 Shipping)

The Art Of Plant Healer will be available to nonsubscribers in mid-September, and those of you who are subscribers can pre-order your discounted copies now by logging in to your Member Page at:
www.PlantHealerMagazine.com

“Plant Healer is the most beautiful magazine I’ve ever seen, bar none. It’s right up there with National Geographic in its use of color and natural landscapes and plants. A true feast for the eyes!”
-Phyllis Light

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BECOME A PLANT HEALER AFFILIATE

Herbalists and companies with established herbal related websites and blogs can help promote these titles while making a little extra money, by becoming a Plant Healer Affiliate.  Approved Affiliates can download Plant Healer Annual, The Art Of Plant Healer, and Plant Healer Magazine banners for linking and placement on your website, in blogs, newsletters and mailings… and then every month you can expect to automatically receive a PayPal payment for 10% of the price of any book sales or magazine subscriptions that you send our way.  For info and application, go to the PH website and then click on Plant Affiliate Page in the Menu:
www.PlantHealerMagazine.com

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THE NEW PLANT HEALER MAGAZINE Vol.1 #4 RELEASES TODAY

The exciting, 209 page new issue of Plant Healer is available for download by subscribers as of today.

If you are not already a subscriber, go to:

www.PlantHealerMagazine.com

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And yes… PLANT HEALER BACK ISSUES NOW AVAILABLE

For those subscribers who may have missed any of the early Plant Healer Magazines, Back Issues are now available to Subscribers only.

To purchase a full color PDF of any of the first 3 issues, login to your Member’s page on the site and click on Back Issues.

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And thank you all very much for posting and forwarding this announcement.

Your support for this work has been phenomenal, and we can only hope to serve you as well in turn.

Plant Healer Interview Excerpt With Gaian Artist

Joanna Powell Colbert

Interviewed by Jesse Wolf Hardin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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