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Woolgathering & Wildcrafting

Monthly Archives: September 2017

My Top Three Herbal Books

26 Tuesday Sep 2017

Posted by Asia in Inspirations

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

herbal books, herbal medicine, herbalist, library books

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There are a handful of things that I can say I’m honestly addicted to. Potato chips are, admittedly, one of them.  Buying crystals is another (guilty). Oh, and raw vegan cheesecakes (ugh, don’t even get me started). But if anyone got a peek at my amazon account they’d see where the real problem lies— Books.

Around my house there are piles pretty much everywhere. Next to my bedstand, my reading chair, my computer desk, the toilet… I’ve loved books for as long as I can remember. I still get a special tip-to-toe thrill when I think about the day the book fair catalogues came to our desks in elementary school. I would take them up, pen in hand, with the same kind of zeal I imagine hoarders might feel when they stumble across a football field-sized fleamarket. Combing the pages and circling books for my wish list felt distinctly different from the ways in which I would absentmindedly mark up clothing magazines (which, in contrast to the book catalogues, I never actually convinced my parents to purchase from). It was as if my very self was changing just by imagining cracking open these tomes.

It felt less like marking a book I wanted, than circling an entire world.

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The library at Terra Sylva

What would it be like to wear a skirt made of nettle and ride a horse at full speed across the moor? Or to navigate a ship by the milk of the stars? To speak to pelicans or to have everything taken away from you except your grandmother’s songs?

Books are more than just a way to learn, or transport yourself, they are a portal to accessing other whole fields of lifeline and thought. Books help us put aside the well-worn map of our own patterns of thinking, our well-thumbed beliefs and calcified knowing, and step into the beyond. Books show us the worlds that exist within worlds, and teach us how to look behind the corners of things. To see shoe scuff and chickweed and the way mica and starlight can, truly, be the same thing.

One of the most common questions I get is… what are your favorite herbal books? There are a lot of answers to this question. I could tell you about the books that helped me learn how to make medicine. The books that gave me the encyclopedic knowledge of herbs that I’m still cultivating and harvesting from. Or perhaps the books that taught me how to identify the plants and call them by name?

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For me, though, reading and education in general has always been less about informational input or practical resource, and more about the concepts, sentences, or sometimes even single words, that struck me so deeply I was never the same. The best books I’ve ever read didn’t really “teach” me anything at all. They helped me remember. They made me cry, not with sadness, but with recognition. They washed my eyes so I could see clearly again.

I think when folks ask me for my favorite herbal books what they really want to know is, what are the books that made you the herbalist that you are? And that’s a different thing entirely. So, in honor of the new school season, and for all those bibliophiles on my list, I’m comin’ clean. Check out the video below to get a peek at my three favorite, slightly unconventional, herbal tomes.

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Pilgrimage Project: Japan

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by Asia in Inspirations

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

animism, japan, koyasan, kyoto, pilgrimage, shinto

This trip was the first in a pilgrimage project that I’m just beginning to lean and listen into. Visiting landscapes where animisim, an intimate and interactive relationship with the land, is alive and well. It is new creek in the mountains of my work and I’m so excited for what is to come.

So come begin the journey with this collection from my time in Japan…

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“There are many unseen things that drew me to visit Japan, most of which I cant yet name but feel underneath my hands, like warm tea through porcelain. The inspiration to travel to Japan came in when I was out for a walk on this year’s summer’s Solstice. It was as thrillingly unexpected as a basket of roses. So when the opportunity arose to hop a plane from Hawaii to Tokyo came along a few weeks ago I jumped first and asked questions later. I think I’m still figuring out what the questions are that drove me here. But I know (at least) one of the answers — the Kami.

Japan has a long standing tradition of animism woven into the fabric of their cultural expression. Called Shintoism (a name given to distinguish this ancient folk worship from the “newer” influence of Buddhism), it is a belief system as old as the humans who inhabited these seasides. Shinto means the “way of the Kami,” a practice of devotion to and connection with the unseen elements that animate all things. “Kami” is often translated as “sacred spirits,” but it would be closer to the truth to say that the Kami are the spirits of everything, the living sentience, the soul that exists within every being. The Kami are the consciousness of mountains, rivers, stones, trees, thunder, wind. There are Kami of growth and fertility, Kami of the ancestors, the Kami of a path made by a thousand journeying feet. Everything that springs naturally into being is Kami. And so shrines, ancient and tended, dot the country here like springs.

It has been a long time since I, or the ancestors who make up my lineage, have lived in a place of such uninterrupted connection with the spirit of all things. It has been a long time since my body has moved in a place where it is not only natural, but expected, to bow to trees and make offerings to stones. And there is something about being here, in this place, that activates a language that moves like marrow in me.

To spend ones life enshrining the natural magic of the world, coming into its own being.

I do not know yet, entirely, what question drove me here to the heart of Japan. But I know an answer, or at least I have met many of them, so far, along the way. The Kami.”

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A Soundscape of Bamboo

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“I am continually amazed by how alive the plants feel here in Japanese cities. How differently a tree can look when it has been recognized, since birth, by all the people who pass underneath it’s branches. When it is seen as the being of consciousness that it is. Our first night in Kyoto we stumbled upon a canal lined with weeping willows and I actually gasped. There was no steps, no long corridors, no special meditations necessary to speak to these trees. They were already speaking, in fact, they were singing. And it brought me to tears just to be near them. They were more alive in this cityscape than the flames in the nearby lanterns, just lit and swaying. The trees felt more alive than my own being.

It is a gift, to be a student to the trees. To the landscape. To a cultural interaction with animism never lost. To ways of seeing and tending to the aliveness of the world. It’s a gift to be here, and be learning.”

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“There are Shinto shrines every where in Japan. Embroidered into street corners, tucked behind temple monasteries, beside public phones or subway entrances. Often these sites were first enshrined to recognize the specific spirit of the living landscape. In some places the city has grown up right around them, in others shrines are still hidden so deep in the cedar woods only locals know they are there.

The recognition that we live in a living world is every where you look in Japan. There is no self consciousness about bowing before a tree or stone, because therein lies a Kami, an ancient consciousness from which we are here to praise, learn, tend.”

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“How would things change if we moved through the world and paused to recognize the emanations that surround all beings. If we were as deliberate as the rock gardener. Starting afresh every day, not with our own designs, but with the beginners mind. With the openness to read the patterns that are already in motion. To align our lives with the flow of bird, river, stone.

It is enough, I think, simply to be able to see it. Those invisible circles of relationship touching corners with your own. To witness the way magic ripples off of all things. There is so much mystery in the way this world moves. In the way one thing is hitched to all others. I’m grateful for the glimpses. Stones surface like sea creatures, humming to us for a brief moment so we know there is more, so much more, below our own horizon lines.”

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Emanations

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 The cable car up to Koyasan

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“Mountains hold a special place in the Japanese landscape of consciousness. By some accounts mountains are seen as the first magics, the originators of wisdom, spirit, life and kami. If you wished to cultivate yourself as a scholar, a monk, a ninja… you need only go to the original teacher– The mountains. In Japanese “san” is an honorific, it announces someone of great internal stature and importance. You would call your beloved professor “san”, your mentors, your elders. Almost all mountains in Japan hold the title “san.” It is a marker of the way in which the sentience of the mountains tower in the Japanese imagination. And a nod to a long history of learning, devotion and reverence. This mountain, this high altitude place of quiet bamboo, waterfalls, wind thickets and stone is called Koyasan. Home to a shoreline of temples since the 700s, arriving to Koyasan on one long cable rope feels like stepping off a ship, a pilgrim in the presence of an entirely new, and long holy, teacher.”

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“At some point I noticed the fact that the light is different everywhere in the world. Some places it’s as milky as common Quartz, diffuse like lantern light. In others it pierces the water like sunspots, makes even shadows sharp. Here in Japan it feels as if everything is seen through soft paper and soji screen. There is a dimness that makes shadows as comfortable as quilts. A place where a light parasol is part of ones courtship with the sun rather than a necessity in the face of its gaze.

The light is different here, and I feel different within it.

Funnily enough, I’ve even found myself using different filters to try and capture what it is I’m seeing through my little phone. But somehow they always seem to sharpen like glass edge when they need to be diffuse as moss into stone. Print in bold when the scene before me is smudged as brushstroke. It’s the failure of a new technology in an ancient land. Sometimes I wish I carried watercolors with me wherever I went.

How can I capture the particular pewter glow of cobble stone here, or the way sunsets melt like well used brushes in pots of water? I cannot. So I record it somewhere in my body, so I can learn how to walk slowly in a Yukata. So I can see the way gold is meant to come alive in shadow. So I can watch the rain and see the brightness it brings to the pond outside my window.”

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Worn wood corridors and gardens lit by lantern light

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“I’ve had the privilege of traveling here in Japan during Obon, a time of lighting lanterns and honoring the ancestors and communing with those who have left to sit in eternal mediation. In a place where ancestor tending has continued uninterrupted for millennia it is easy to feel them close. They are not the ancestors of my own blood, but they are grandfathers and grandmothers of this land that is teaching me so much. I am grateful to have been with these islands during this special stretch of time.

If you have a moment, tend your own guardians. Leave a small dip of sake. A sprig of lilies, a cake of rice or sweet bean. Because, truly, the ancestors are never so far away. They are right there, on the other side of your offerings.”

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“Empty rooms fill with light.”

“In Japan the concept of Mukayu has pervaded every bare corner, wood curve and low roof of light. Coined by the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzhi, Mukayu means “non-existence” or “non-purpose,” the freedom of emptiness. Mukayu is the purposefulness of not doing. It’s the richness of a wall left blank, a thought allowed to dissolve, a life left entirely open. It is the fullness of an empty schedule and a cup anticipating finely steeped tea. In Japan, a country of zen and quiet manners and moss, they talk about the idea of existing in a “countryside of Mukayu.” To me, this sounds like heaven.”

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Empty Rooms Fill with Light

13 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by Asia in Inspirations

≈ 3 Comments

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Fall always come in with a bit of a sigh. The letting go after a long haul. A shift that is needed in the bones, but that arrives on crow wings with a tinge of sadness all the same. There is something so beautiful about an Autumn field, that copper expanse gone to seed. When the options of what can be cultivated grow slim, and the things that must be done to tend the future become clear. Harvest what is ripe. Compost the rest. Till under, bed down, grieve, rest. The callings of fall are as golden and entire as a tumbler of whiskey, enjoyed on the porch at sundown. There is a slight burn to the necessary abandonment of it all.

I won’t lie to you, it’s been an intense time. Fires in the west with ash falling down like rain. Waters in Houston and South Asia flooding from home to home. The repeal of DACA and fear for the 800,000 Dreamers who are risk of being kicked out of their homes. Irma leaves rubble in the wake of her winds. Here in my own community we’ve lost two beloved herbalists in the past few weeks. Loss ripples out like autumn winds through the fields.

Liminal moments like these are strange. That space between the endings and the beginnings. You don’t quite know where to put your feet. In my last missive I wrote about the uniqueness of this season of Long Summer, how to ground into this in-between time and dig into the Earth again. As I sink into the final days of Long Summer, I find myself seeking out the comfort of these season’s medicines. To navigate by nourishing and clearing out the debris from within my own being.

There is the desire, as the sun dips down into the harvests of Autumn, to really let go. To empty your rooms, and your inner thoughts. To fill boxes with everything you never wore this past summer, to upend the pots into the compost. To let go so you can create space. Space to fill, not with new objects, but with the necessary exhale of your being.

The Philosopher Zhuanzhi says, “Empty rooms fill with light.” There is something about the emptying of grief, or just the plantings of old, that always opens us up to further light.

Last month I got the opportunity to travel around Japan and I was struck, wherever I went, by the way in in this emptying and filling, this Mukayu, takes form. Coined by Zhuangzhi, Mukayu means “non-existence” or “non-purpose,” the freedom of emptiness. Mukayu is the purposefulness of not doing. It’s the richness of a wall left blank, a thought allowed to dissolve, a life left entirely open. It is the fullness of an empty schedule and a cup anticipating finely steeped tea. It is the act of witnessing amongst the tumult. In Japan, a country of Zen and quiet manners and moss, they talk about the idea of existing in a “countryside of Mukayu.” To me, this sounds like the exact medicine needed for dense times.

So wherever you are in the cycle of grieving, rejoicing, birthing, reuniting or saying goodbye, may today be a moment of rest for you. A pause to empty, so that you may take it all in. A time of unburdening, of letting the tap run until the water is clear once again. May you find yourself in a countryside of Mukayu and at peace, if even just for the space of a single exhale. With the oceanic unknowing and the autumn fields of endings and possibility, and your home (the home you can always return to) in the countryside of simply being.

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Defined

[wool-gath-er-ing] v.
daydreaming, the gathering of thoughts and dreams as one might collect fallen tufts of wool

[wild-craft-ing] v.
the harvesting of herb, root, flower or inspiration from the wilds

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