On Herbalism //
Energetic Herbalism. featuring Renée Camilla of La Yerba Buena Herbs.
*originally published on Magic Inclined // 13Jan, 2021
On Herbalism //
I grew up in the desert; in an ambient land of greys and greens blanketing the huge mountains that surrounded our town on all sides. As a little girl, my mother's herbalist was Andrew Weil and my first acupuncture session was in the Spring of second grade. I remember laying on her stone blue living room couch and music playing from a cassette tape coating the stuccoed apartment walls. My great-grandfather was a great oil painter whose favorite subject was the yucca. Highlight and shadow, the smells of turpentine and creosote, scratchy tape rolling through a cassette.
As an adult, I took a journey with plants that led me to the most illuminated corners of professional experience- really, that journey took me. For years I sat in a gorgeous seat as an 'expert' in using the flavors and beauty of plants to create drinks: teaching classes, and seeing me staring back at me from the pages of magazines. I write about the landscape as it appears and the holy behind it. I draw botanical illustrations. I use my voice to raise awareness for human rights in cultivation and best harvesting practices. It's all plants, all of it.
The point is this is a love story. This is the great union of my time here.
Herbal medicine is a human love story too. Plants have been the basis for medical treatment for people since our very beginning. We set foot into this evolution together from the first. Contemporarily, we refer to the learned professionals who pull the thread between human health, wellness, and plants as 'Herbalists'. Although accreditation varies in the world of what is often expressed as 'folk medicine', the Herbalist title expresses that a practitioner claims an educated understanding of that great relationship. They suggest beneficial foods, craft tinctures, and nurture the wellness of their communities as a whole system. I want to echo these words as I loop this knot in what I am weaving: whole system, whole system, whole system.
So, I use plants to translate my being to others in the form of flavor and line, some stand guard at the very origin relationship and medicine, some dream of childhood meadows, and all of us in the very core of our hearts deeply know our wild.
It was natural that I found myself in the Magic Inclined workshop on Energetic Herbalism with Renée Camilla of La Yerba Buena Herbs. Being a sometimes plant educator, continued education that reflects your individual values as it matures over time is a responsibility I take seriously. And, having a long relationship with my energetic body, I was thirsty for knowledge on the practice of the energetic body of the human/plant relationship. The extra sweetness that permeated it all was that Rohini Renée and I first became friends in our twenties in the hills nearby the ranch where I sat that November afternoon. I open my screen thing and see these women I have watched walk into their light framed in the boxes that Zoom has hung around them and I pause and smile at the littles in us as I take in who we are now. The grace they walk with. The wisdom. And Renée began...
Her resonant truth hit my system like drinking clear water. As I listened to expressions of sentient nature and respect, responsibility and justice, I felt a soft electric rolling through my body. I was in the process of evolving my perspective and I was gently breaking open. The phenomenon of hearing language that describes something you already know is true, and the relief that gives a human heart is one I hold up a highest expression of community and story. She unpacked a revolution for me in saying that “lowest effective dose is an Anti-colonial act”, that we need to hold up the great teacher Robin Wall Kimmerer and use 'they' pronouns for plants in our minds and with our mouths, and her words on wild tending vs. wild crafting hit my history to the marrow and held the tough parts on all sides with love.
The energetic body of the plants that have carried me on their shoulders since the time of cassette tapes. Unbelievable.
I am newly made whole in an area where I have been considered an expert, and isn't that what our time is here? And isn't that what love is really? To love forever and the act of 'being in love' is to be reborn again and again in the ever-deepening complexities of the universe of the other.
Thank you Renée.
x,
LDV
Renée's work can be found on her website at: www.layerbabuenaherbs.com
*this week's blog was written in Petaluma, California on unceded Coast Miwok land
