The impulse behind the offering.

People have been asking lately, “how do you know what you know?”

Several years ago, I looked up from my listening spot and the land said, “I think it’s time you take what you know about plant medicine and re-weave it with what you know about movement medicine.” Everything I know deeply I’ve found in my moving body, listening to a place whether it be a body or a meadow, and researching the answers until I’ve exhausted all perspectives. Movement is a memory palace for me, and I can only really grasp tricky concepts by taking them in through my feet. The Daoist system (which might also be called a pagan, indigenous, or animist system of knowledge) is complex, but I’ve (begun) to understand this system through qigong and the weaving of physical intelligence.

Like trying to make a basket, at first all the reeds or sticks are straight, and bending them into a sphere is chaotic. But after rounds and rounds of surrendering to the pattern - the repeated weave - a different shape emerges. Warp and weft, weavers and stakes, verticals and horizontals for the web that can hold anything.

I apply this to my practice as an herbalist, as a parent, and an artist living creatively. It’s not new or different, and it’s nothing that isn’t always coming off the earth. It’s just an attuned, systematic listening practice, with many concepts that challenge the way the western world thinks about the body, the planet, and what healing is. One might call it an animist practice.

What is animism?

Animism is a term first coined by anthropologists in the late 19th century to describe the belief systems of indigenous peoples around the world. Anime=life. (It’s an unfortunate synchronicity that presently, we’re most likely to think of a cartoon when we hear this word, which is the very antithesis to ‘life’.). Animism is a belief, since we can’t know that the soulful world is breathing with us until we allow the thought to enter our minds. I’m quite weary of beliefs, especially systematic ones, but it only takes a tiny shift of attention to understand that we are nothing without our place, and to regard a tree or river or stone is also to be regarded right back. This is not a transmission, an insight, or (my personal favorite) a ‘download’.

This is a view: we are living, breathing, and sleeping in an animate world.

and what is herbalism?

My entry into formal herbalism was a slow one. When I first moved to the Pacific coast I found myself in front of a plant I didn’t know (many in fact). It was a little lacy thing standing upright on the crumbling edge of a cliff, and seemed quite comfortable there. I was drawn to the smell of the tight umbel of flowers, the scrappy stem, the leaves like lace. I was awake enough to follow this attraction, and this plant became my safe place wherever I found it. I heard its name over and over in my head though I truly had never heard it spoken before. I finally heard its name aloud months later, hiking with a friend, who flippantly pointed out a patch of ‘yarrow’. I now know this plant is an incredible boundary medicine, the master of the blood, and grows nearly everywhere. I might have known all of this in those first moments by the cliff, but I doubted the communication. Listening takes consistent practice. For me, this is herbalism at its root: listening to plants, to people, and to the inherent reciprocal relationship we share.

We - plants and people - shape each other, and care for each other on the most subtle and profound levels.