Union with the Beloved

Union With The Beloved The Mystical Experience in Nature A few years ago while teaching a plant medicine retreat in Costa Rica, I had the most mystical experience of my life in the rainforest. It feels strange to write about, …

Nymphaea.

I have given you my mouth and you have given me the night. Wet, scent, petals and lips, the gift of an open gate. a small fire in the darkness to lick the wounds clean wrestling the beast of unrest. …

Healing Through Lyme Disease

~ Personal Holistic & Herbal Therapies for Lyme Disease ~ I’ve been wanting to write for a long time now about my journey with chronic Lyme disease, and what has supported my healing thus far. Many people ask what me what has …

Bearing Witness

The Peaceful Path to Healing          I’m borrowing this title ‘Bearing Witness’ from the book written by Zen master Bernie Glassman, both to honor his healing work at Auschwitz (and beyond), and to underline what I believe is our key …

Drink

A woman so far from the sea, displaced and holding perch. She chases the intoxicating flowers to the corners of the earth, the ones that spin a fury of fire in the body, and turn the eyes to God. She …

Hay-Scented Fern and Lessons from Childhood

Hay Scented Fern Walking in the Vermont woodlands, along rushing streams and tall pines, hay scented fern fills the air with it’s sweet perfume. Being in these woods always reminds me of my childhood, so similar to the forests I …

Plant Teachers – Healing from the Source

  Watching the snow fall among the pines and evergreens surrounding my Vermont home, the sunlight streaming through the trees in long bands… I’ve forgotten what day it is, the things I had planned, what my name is. Everything empties …

Confronting the Ego Within the Practitioner

  “A great man is always willing to be little.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson One of my students told me something not long ago that has since stuck with me. An indigenous elder they spent time with was asked what …

Relationships & Interactions Between Plants & People

  Exploring relationships… (as a pause during more scientific writing to reflect a moment…) Sitting and writing about particular medicinal plants, I realize it’s important to talk about relationships and interactions between plants and people first. I believe questioning our …

Opening to the Sacred

    In the Spirit of Plants…   I am sitting at the ocean’s edge wrapping leaves together of Willow, Red Clover, Jasmine, and St. John’s Wort, in front of a lit candle. The full moon looms above me casting …

The Deep Ecology Movement

Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago. Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing. …

The New England Woods

    My life has been a love affair with nature, and I’m not sure I could write a more passionate love story. There is no place more sacred in my experience than the landscapes of wild nature. The woodlands …