While we make clear in the profile of our project and our current life-trajectories, that consistent contact is a no-can-do at this point (do we make that clear? am I deliberately shifting the onus?), I do feel intermittent pangs of guilt for not being better at updating the blog with my current musings on life, love, women or plants. For this I am sorry and will only say that grad school has been kicking my ass and my ability to use my brain for much other than the academic grindstone is much obstructed. THAT said, I have been in the Mexican campo for the past month working with some incredible ladies on a traditional plant medicine project and have had a greater chance to, you know, eat, sleep, get it on, and roll around giggling with women much my senior, who speak a language infinitely quicker than I am capable of doing even in my first language. I reflect on the quiet joy of this experience with a sigh to match the billowing of my curtains as el aire picks up with the coming rain. Perfecto, porque sembramos ayer el maiz, y la tierra todavía está muy seca. I therefore have a few moments to catch up on some thoughts inspired by other-than-academic texts.

While I fully intend to write a series of entries about these fabulous ladies in the months ahead, right now I am writing to alert you, my fair friends, of an incredibly talented woman who I just had the pleasure of reading on therumpus.net. The lady in question is Miss Roxane Gay and while I was made aware of her work through a brilliant article she wrote about the Hunger Games trilogy (which you ALL should read, if you know what’s good for you), after publicly declaring my loyalty to her and privately pledging to read everything she has written, low and behold I came across an article about, among other things, can you guess it, women’s reproductive rights and the historical use of medicinal plants to secure reproductive autonomy. I mean, could I love this woman any more? No need to answer, the power of the rhetorical reigns over us all (or should). What?

I am a firm believer in the occult power of serendipity, though I maintain a not-so-small visceral discomfort for the word itself. Be it the fault of the ice cream shop, the legend of which I always heard tell as a child in New York, though never had the good fortune of visiting (once again the word NEGLECT looms in my consciousness), or of the gran culpa that was the unforgettable romcom starring Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack, I retain considerable distaste for this term. THAT SAID, I regard this new encounter as absolutely nothing short of fate (huh, I suppose I could have bypassed that tangent through the employ of another word, but no bother, I’m in the mood for a rambling narrative. I hope you are too!). This Roxane lass is nothing short of phenomenal and I hope you see for yourself just how ridiculously talented she is. A teaser excerpt follows below.

Much love to you all and I PROMISE this hiatus will not last much longer!

Claudia

The Alienable Rights of Women

By Roxane Gay

Lately, I read the news and have to make sure I am not, in fact, reading The Onion. We are having a national debate about abortion, birth control and reproductive freedom, and men are directing that debate. That is the stuff of satire.

The politicians and their ilk who are hell bent on reintroducing reproductive freedom as a “campaign issue,” have short memories. Of course they have short memories. They only care about what is politically convenient or expedient.

Women do not have short memories. We cannot afford that luxury.

The politicians and their ilk forget that women, and to a certain extent men, have always done what they needed to do to protect female bodies from unwanted pregnancy. During ancient times, women used jellies, gums, and plants both for contraception and to abort unwanted pregnancies. These practices continued until the 1300s when Europe needed to repopulate and started to hunt “witches” and midwives who shared their valuable knowledge about these contraceptive methods.

Throughout history, whenever governments wanted to achieve some end, often involving population growth, they restricted access to birth control and/or criminalized birth control unless of course, the population growth concerned the poor, in which case, contraception was enthusiastically promoted. Historically, society has only wanted “the right kind of people,” to have a right to life. We shouldn’t forget that.

Here’s the thing about history—it repeats itself over and over and over. The witch hunts, and the demonization of contraception and abortion and the women who provided these services from the 14^th and 15^th centuries, is happening all over again. This time though, the witch hunt seems to be more of a cynical ploy to distract the populace from some of the truly pressing issues our society is facing like, oh I don’t know, the devastated economy and a Wall Street culture that remains unchecked even after the damage it has done, the raging class inequalities and widening gap between those who have and those who have not, the looming student loan and consumer debt crises, the fractured racial climate, the lack of civil rights for gay, lesbian, and transgender people, a healthcare system too many people don’t have access to, wars without cease, impending global threats and on and on and on.

Rather than solve the real problems the United States is facing, some politicians, mostly conservative, have decided to try and solve the “female problem,” by creating a smokescreen and reintroducing abortion and more inexplicably, birth control into a national debate.

Here’s the thing about history—it repeats itself over and over and over. Women were forced underground for contraception and pregnancy termination before and we will go underground again if we have to. We will risk our lives if these politicians, who so flagrantly demean women, force us to do so.

Thank goodness women do not have short memories.

To read the full article, visit therumpus.net.

In & Out of Time: An Interview w/ Dori Midnight

with Gina Badger

GB: It’s interesting that the sense of history you’re relating is less about where the plants have been than who they’ve been with. It’s that that builds up the history and the character of the plant and that also informs how people relate to it as medicine. The reason I was thinking about mugwort earlier relates to how you were saying that it doesn’t really want to grow in a garden in nutrient-rich soil. It thrives in disturbed sites, in marginal sites. There aren’t a lot of nutrients, the soil is dry and compacted… and what that means, of course, is that it occupies an ecological niche that a lot of other plants can’t.

When I think about the colonial history of the Americas, ever since Europeans first showed up and started ripping up soil and changing the lay of the land in abrupt ways, one way of understanding this is as a process of incredible ecological disturbance. And I understand that to include all of the human violence. Plants like mugwort were there to step into the void created by these disturbances. They also remediate just by virtue of being there. They decompose every year and add nutrients to the soil, which then makes it hospitable to other plants that need a more nutrient-rich environment. The demonization of so-called invasive species can only come out of the most superficial understanding of what an ecology is and how it functions, that basically refuses to see it as something that exists in time.

DM: Mugwort or dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) both remediate ecologically, but it’s also like they’re trying to give us their medicine. Those are both really good medicines for people who live in cities, which is where they grow, they are really incredible liver tonics, and bitters, which we really need because we eat so much crap, and fat and sugar, and they help us metabolize those things. And, just in general, people are really stressed out and angry, which is the mark of a hot liver. It seems like plants are responding to land disturbances and also to how they affect people. So it’s really good to notice what plants just pop up right outside your door and in your yard. We tend to think of ourselves as outside of ecology, and we’re not at all.

GB: You talk about healing as a process that happens in time. So when you work with post-op trans people, for instance, you’re not just helping people to get over surgery but really trying to get to a place of healing from generations of oppression and violence. Particular to trans people is the way that heteronormative violence works to erase their history. It seems like an understanding of the thickness of time is really crucial to doing the work that you do, and understanding time in multiple ways. I relate that to the way that you can’t understand an ecology if you don’t understand it in time. Time operates on all of these different scales because it’s determined by the life cycles of all of these different organisms, plus really old and slow things like rocks.

DM: Yes, having a connection to stories and history is another invisible tool in terms of folk healing. Carrying history in our bodies by remembering where we came from, both blood ancestors who determine part of how we walk on the earth, and where we’ve been. It’s both being in time and out of time. Honoring a trajectory of one’s individual history, and community history, land history, and plant history. And then the out of time part is being able to heal in widening circles, so that as you heal, and as you’re healing yourselves, you’re also healing the land and healing ancestral patterns.

GB: The effect of the healing spreading between people is totally stunted if it’s only available to people with money who can pay for consultations and if it happens in private, so that it doesn’t get absorbed into kitchens and everyday experiences. It still clings to a kind of exceptionalism, and it is commodified in this way that’s pretty embarrassing. But if it’s possible to overcome that—and this is something that I see a younger generation of radical health practitioners being attentive to—then it’s really easy to see how healing work spreads between people. But what’s more difficult, at least for me, is figuring out how to address histories through healing work. Is it possible to talk about that?

DM: Yes, it is. I too, am really excited about the movement towards community based healing and the integration of healing work in activist circles. I am so into making magic and healing as everyday practices, which means they have to be more affordable and accessible.

But in terms of healing through time, a place to start, which is the place that I start, is with individuals. Part of that is people being willing to carry family stories, and to tell them, that’s part of the work of breaking a pattern of silence—both violence and oppression within families, and also cultural phenomena of oppression and violence on a larger scale. It’s so clear that some of the wounds we carry are not just our own wounds. In the same way that we can carry wounds that come from our parents or our grandparents, or from our great grandparents, or maybe from the different lands that our ancestors inhabited.

When I work with people, things come to me in images. Somebody can come in and be explicit, “I have depression.” And tell me a little bit about their family. Or what I’ll see is a really heavy felt, that’s really cold. It’s a sensation, it’s both sensation and image at the same time. So it’ll be something cold and damp and felty, covering something. And then when I try to pull on it, I get this sense that it’s not just theirs, but it comes from also their mother, and then I pull on it more, and then I can see a grandparent. But then when I pull on it more what I see is some really intense world history. Like maybe I see Eastern Europe, or maybe I see somewhere on the coast of West Africa, or maybe I pull further and I see… with people I see who were adopted internationally, what that looks like in terms of relationships with birth parents and birth countries. All of that just has different energies that I can feel and see… we carry all of that.

Then there’s work for people to do. Going back into their history, dreaming, or writing, or doing rituals, or eating certain things—daily ways for people to do healing work themselves to free their ancestors, or free the land, and to do healing work around racism and internalized racism. Part of it is acknowledging it and part of it is transforming it. So many people who come to see me have decided to be the person who is not going to continue a pattern of addiction or sexual abuse. We can’t underestimate the power of choosing to stop a pattern that’s six generations behind us.

Magic is the perfect way to heal it because it doesn’t have the bounds of time and space. That’s what I mean about honouring and being in history and also being able to be out of time. In a way, it’s traveling through time, which sounds so strange, but it’s so easy to feel when you’re in it. And we can see it, too, when we look at the industrial prison complex, when we look at legacies of oppression of poor people and people of color, and how ancestral some of those wounds are that we’re enacting. I would love to be able to work in there. People are doing that. There are people who are doing magical activism work, really trying to undo huge power structures through magic. I’m thinking, for example, of the Reclaiming community, who ground their activism in magic, building off Starhawk’s work. Ritual is incorporated into political actions, like casting circles and chanting around nuclear plants and prisons.

What’s more, people in power are using magic themselves. It’s scary because for the most part, they’re using it really unconsciously, which makes it incredibly potent and insidious. This kind of magic could be called power over, which grows from a place of deep wounds. And that’s one huge way that oppression continues—a legacy of unhealed wounds and throwing those wounds on someone else.

GB: Are you saying that what defines magic is specifically the practice of working out of a deep history? Or, in other words, present actions take on magical dimensions because of the relationship that they have to history?

DM: Yes! Part of why ancestral wounds and oppression continue is because people don’t look at history as something that they have to take responsibility for. Magic is very much part of a broader history and also a way of inhabiting deep and expansive time, geological time, ecological time. It means breaking out of our temporal trap. That’s really important and really validating for people because of this individualistic culture, where all of your wounds or whatever’s going on with you are really specific and particular to you, and you need to take care of them in your own private secret way and work them out yourself, and maybe they have something to do with your mother, but that’s it! That’s about as much of a sense of interdependence as you’re allowed.

I think it’s also important to not just talk about wounds, but to talk about gifts, ancestral gifts, and having access to ancestral gifts and places that we visit in dream, in a way, that we can dream into and be able to harvest gifts from, too. History, both what has come before us, and that we’re also a part of what comes after us: that’s a place of healing, too.

Read the full article at www.nomorepotlucks.org

Hello Everyone!!

Well, it has certainly been a while and we have lived many lives since we last posted. Following Montreal we headed out to Prince Edward Island for a trip down the lane of Anne of Green Gables fantasies and reenactments. The island was absolutely beautiful though we could have done without the intense memorializing of the much-loved literary redhead. From the calendars, mugs, T-shirts of Anne and Gilbert to the little girl we saw parading around in a straw hat with red braids attached to it, we were sufficiently imbued with the desire to scatter to the lesser populated parts of the island. The narrow roads snaking around the island roll through golden wheat fields and were bedecked with flashes of Golden Rod and Fireweed (Rosebay Willowherb), wild Roses, Pearly Everlasting. The landscape was very soft and inviting, we waded out into the water along the calmer beaches of the northeast inlets – tasting salty estuary water and digging our feet into white sand. We took some rides on the Confederation Trail and along the coast, which were really mellow and challenging respectively. It was lovely though and as luck would have it we managed to get there during a short dry spell of an otherwise very wet summer. After possibly the sketchiest camping situation, where we were given a place to stay amidst the fading grandeur of a once-great RV park, complete with discarded towels in the bathroom, tinseled with an array of spiders webs and musty with the smell of decaying wood, we made our final evening one to remember when we stopped at the lovely cafe Chez Cartier, and were served by the sweetest Frenchman known to Christendom.We had a wonderful meal, contrasting with the insane number of breakfast sandwiches we’d been accumulating in our bellies, and slept soundly in a lovely little Provencal-themed B&B room of the same establishment. Breakfast was very French and VERY good and our three hour bike ride, though painful for our poorly-oiled bodies, very satisfying indeed.

The ferry to Nova Scotia was terrifying, given the fact that we never quite know what Poppy’s going to do and we were nervous about her rolling off the front of the boat. Chips and gravy followed by a Dolphin marathon and ruminations on the soy drink in the cafeteria being made in Vancouver when tens of thousands of PEI acreage is devoted to soybeans, made for a pleasant evening, as did our short stay in an RV empire – complete with fully landscaped “front yards” and an incredible assortment of potted plants, both real and fake. Cape Breton was ridiculous. Steep and forested, with insane mountain views to the wild Atlantic coast. We ended up rolling around mainly in the truck, as the weather turned wet and there was too much to cover just by bike. But it was truly beautiful and the adverts for ceilidhs in almost every place we stopped made our hearts ache for a proper barn dance. One highlight was the goat farm we came across, where we picked up some lovely goats milk soaps and Claudia was bitten by an errant suckling goat kid. After a couple of restless, moist nights at a campsite with a significant enough yob presence to keep us awake til 2 or 3am, and after bolting to the diner like wildwomen to grab our breakfast sandwiches before they stopped serving, we made a move towards Halifax to meet up with the wonderful Kira (Kiki), Rebecca and Nam (Thomas). Kira is one of Meghan’s closest friends from University of Toronto and has been on a cycle tour with her boyfriend (Nam) for the past month. Due to the generous hospitality of Kira’s highschool friend Rebecca, we stayed two nights and had a day out to the South shore, where we swam, “snorkeled” and strolled along the sweet little cottaged streets of Lunenburg, flanked with shops and cafes. All just too cute. Halifax is a pretty city, though very white. It felt a lot like Portland, Oregon to me and Meghan, which is, again, very white. The houses were beautiful, very colorful and simply designed. Just as soon as Claudia replaces her photocard converter, we’ll be able to show you what we mean.

Just as soon as we said hello to Canada we were back on the road heading for Maine. We zipped through Eastport, where Meghan’s grandfather’s family originally lived. We talked to Bob, a long-winded local who gave us directions to a place we didn’t intend to go. We stopped to cuddle a herd of kitties on the road on our way out of town. We got lost on the way to Mt. Desert Island and had to ask a million fuel attendants for help, but felt it worth it considering the introduction to the strongest Mainer accent either of us had encountered. We spent a bucolic day at the home of Tina and Jerry Rosenburg, who have the prettiest little cabin near Acadia national park and shared the loveliest meals and gave us much of their time to show us around. Tina toured us around Bar Harbour and Acadia to get an idea of how insanely beautiful that part of the country is. We followed this up with the unbelievable generosity of Paul Arthur, Claudia’s teacher from a highschool semester she spent in the woods and on a farm in Maine (Maine Coast Semester – MCS). He fed us from his garden and gave us kittens to snuggle and we stayed in our pyjamas all day during Hurricane Irene and watched Wallace and Grommit. Hooray! We did talk about serious grown-up things too, but who are we kidding? The claymation and the feline friends, coupled with Paul’s gentleness and care really made it.

And then we came back to NY!!!! Oh it was dark and yes we may have run out of gas and had to fill up with the gas can outside some chintzy hotel – bringing the riffraff to the well-dressed masses. It was exhilarating to finally use the gas can, as we’d lugged around 2 gallons of gas for the past 6,000 miles and we wanted to make sure it had been worth it. We finally rolled into Claudia’s family house – read: “falling down but charming ramshackle structure” – and fell asleep in familiar (to Claudia) beds, to cricket and frog sounds jabber. We had an EXCELLENT workshop in Florence, Mass the following day. Really engaged and, for the first time, heated dialogue. It was a challenge to our facilitating skills, which felt great, and many folks stayed around afterwards to make connections with each other on how to proceed as a community. The enthusiasm was really inspiring and the venue, Goldthread Apothecary, was lovely. The following workshop in Chatham, New York was equally exciting, though in a different way. A lot of the folks knew each other to varying degrees, which was great, given the likelihood they would go on to work together in future. They were very open and outgoing people, eager to contribute and excited to engage. The group was intimate and we got into very deep and moving topics, exploring a lot of the hurt and fear that is exposed when processing the finer and more seemingly innocuous issues of oppression.

We geared up for our final workshop upstate, only to break down 20 minutes from our doorstep! Thoroughly unamused and sad that Poppy had finally kicked it (it turned out just to be some crud in the gas tank that was blocking the flow – hence the glugging and chugging we’d experienced earlier), we were then faced with sitting on the doorstep for a couple of hours until Nina (Claudia’s sister) arrived back from dinner, sans phone, avec the only house keys. It was a serious tragedy as we hadn’t written down the venue number properly and could only alert Tweefontein Herb Farm hours after we’d stood them up. It was truly heartbreaking and we are ever so sorry to the folk who had anticipated joining us on the evening of the 2nd and to Twee Herb Farm for compromising their community.

But now we’re off to Brooklyn, after a couple of days of peach picking, cider drinking, jam making, bike riding, etc. Cozy time with Claudia’s lovely sister and her boyfriend, as well as Suzu, a UK highschool friend, and her boyfriend David. Lots of good food and a houseful of humidity. Today is our last workshop! We hope to see many folks there to celebrate our final chunk of the adventure. Meghan will be leaving NY for Idaho and Northern California on Wednesday and Claudia will be leaving for England next Monday.

But you’ll hear more from us before then! Now that we’ll finally have some time to go through the plants we saw and bulk up the resources and reading list that we have owed you all for a long time. All our hearts! Claudia and Meghan

We knew already that we loved Montreal, but every time we go back it gets even better. We stayed with Meghan’s fabulous friend Natasha in Outremont, a beautiful neighbourhood of residential attached townhouses, lots of trees, back alleys, vegetable gardens, balcony chitchat, close-at-hand coffee shops, record stores, restaurants and book shops. The buildings are very street-oriented, with balconies on each face – complete with little biddies watching the world go by, friends sipping espresso and lounging in the breezy, pre-rain bluster. One of the more communal feeling cities, more so than San Francisco, which before now had seemed like quite a community-oriented city.

We had one of our best workshops yet, with really interesting and dynamic responses to our questions. We had been concerned that our main discussion question “When thinking about a recent interaction with our corporate health care system, what themes or words best describe your experience?” would not be relevant enough in a country afforded free healthcare, but participants defied our more superficial expectations and delved into the inherent oppression in any healthcare system where knowledge is hoarded and the interpersonal dominance wielded by an authority figure over an individual’s sense of their own health is repressive regardless of whether or not it is government-subsidized. We went deeper into the violence in attitude and language by doctors towards women and individuals with non-normalized gender identification, pressure from peers to use socially accepted forms of contraception and medical care, regardless of the detrimental effects on a person’s anatomy. We talked about who gets to become doctors, how being a full-time student isn’t an option for poorly resourced people and the myriad pressures experienced by a recently graduated medical student to tow the line and dehumanize patients in order to pay their university loans and succeed in the world to which they committed so much time and effort. These issues are global, regardless of the level of access a citizen has to healthcare. Private medicine still exists in universal healthcare systems. If you’re tired of waiting for an appointment or being told there’s nothing wrong with you when you know there is, those who can afford it pay private doctors for more personal care. Those who can’t, suffer.

Thank you to Depanneur Le Pickup for the wonderful food and their outside courtyard for our workshop space. Thank you to French Canadian radio for the dubstep dance remix of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” at midnight, when we rolled into Montreal rocking out as hard as we were able within the confines of Poppy’s red metal walls. Thank you to Poppy for making it another day. Thank you to google maps for giving us the worst possible directions ever and sending us in the wrong direction not one but 3 times, making our 6 hour projected journey last 8.

Thank you so much to Natasha Li Pickowicz for the wonderful documentation of our Montreal workshop. She did an incredible job and we’re so grateful for her support.

Mark Wheeler, founder of Pacific Botanicals, has given us a very generous donation for our workshop tour, so we wanted to give him a little shout out for his commitment to true grassroots organizing around the myriad issues of our oppressive corporate healthcare system and the role of healers in a growing community-based movement to resist it.

A little bit about Pacific Botanicals:

… dedicated to empowering people everywhere to experience the miracle of good health.

We see our farm, its people, and processes, not as a factory but rather as a living whole system.We recognize that organic production integrates social, biological, and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance and conserve biodiversity. Our ecosystem here at the farm is alive and has many interwoven components; from the seeds to the soil, from the climate, to the people who work here. Each piece of the farming process contributes to making something greater than the sum of its parts.

We have been growing high quality organic medicinal herbs in the Applegate Valley now for over 30 years. We have a passionate commitment to quality in everything that we do. We are not the biggest herb grower in the country but you can count on us to really know the herbs we grow and sell; from the seed that we use, to the starts in the green houses, to our pristine growing environment, to the organic nutrients we add to the soil, to the perfect time for harvest and conditions for shipment. In addition to our own farm we have built good working relationships with many other organic growers in the U.S. We have been sourcing herbs from them for many years. We only do business with growers that meet our high standards of quality.

All of our seeds are collected from our own plants. Our microclimate is pollution free, and takes advantage of the abundant rainfall of the Oregon coastal flow, and the irrigation water from the Applegate River Watershed whose source is in the snow melt of the Marble Mountains Wilderness Area. Our soil has been enhanced by cover crops of oat, mustard, and clover, rotated for maximum replenishment, and fed with the finest organic ingredients for all the years we have been here. We rigorously inspect everything we grow and everything that we source.

With the Internet, and the huge warehouses that supply herbs today, it is easy to lose sight of the importance of building relationships with customers.We have tried to keep our business to a manageable size so that we do not lose sight of people. Individuals, retailers, practitioners, or manufacturers, always get the best service we have to offer. We appreciate the relationships we have built over the years. We take time with people.Building relationships that are lasting is better. You can feel the good energy here on the farm. It is unmistakable. We believe that if we put this good energy out there in everything we do it will come back our way.

Thank you so much Mark!

My goodness we’re exhausted. It has been a very long way indeed from Denver to Toronto – a shocking revelation, we know. Denver to Omaha was long and arduous, though waiting for us in Omaha was the interminable generosity of the Armstrongs, who kept us well-fed and well-rested. An early rise put us into Madison around 6pm, for another well-attended and thoughtful workshop at Avol’s Book store, a really lovely library like shop. Lots of curved shelves and big leather chairs, rolling book stands to reveal hidden back rooms. We spent the night at possibly the coolest apartment we’ve ever seen – Dawn’s little two room was decorated with awesome activist art and sweet pieces of furniture, appliances, decorative touches, killer book selections and shelves of herbs and healing preparations. Between those and the buckets of fresh produce from her farm, we were quite literally in heaven. It was the first day we’ve slept in in the last few weeks, so we rose around 9am and lingered on her fire escape, marveling at the greenness of Madison, the wide streets and town houses. It’s a very lovely place indeed, though to be fair, we barely got to see much of it. That said, it was pretty exciting to have left the open road for city streets crawling in bicycles. The presage of two-wheelers reclaiming the tarmac is quite spiriting indeed. It’s an inspiring trend, regardless of how snotty bike store employees can be when they’re determined they know more than you do about the specifics of a bike they’ve never ridden… Bygones.

We got to Chicago in the evening (of the 9th), to Andrew’s immaculate home and seasoned Midwestern hospitality. We got to scope out the hipster scene at a fancy taco joint in Wicker Park, with much fabulous food and trendily indifferent meal-goers. Turns out where the west coast specializes in “farmer” hip, the midwest has a thing for “preppy” hip. We counted a noticeable number of boat shoes and crisp pastel plaid, over the notorious flannel and blundstone look (that’s not a dig at you Matt, we love your style). Clearly we’re learning about more than just community mobilization on this trip, though how this type of education serves us we’re not quite sure. The next day we booked it to Detroit and toured around the city, balking at the empty streets and the incredible abandoned houses and farm-sized overgrown lots. Meghan was Claudia’s tour guide, given her attendance at the US Social Forum the year prior, and excitedly pointed out the incredibly detailed art deco facades on unsuspecting structures, the insanely ornate Victorian homes with smoke stains climbing up the walls like ornamental creepers. We know we join an impossibly long list of white, earnest activists when we say we would love to live in Detroit given the potential seeping out of every crack in the pavement, but it feels truly invigorating to be in a place that is rebuilding “post-apocalypse”. That it is now a fifth of the original population still occupying the same area, makes a person shiver with anticipation over what will come next and how. It was a gorgeous sunny and breezy day and we felt quietly calm – the first time on the whole trip.

We continued the ride north to CANADA where a charming border patrol officer greeted us with a cold disposition and ambiguous interrogation style that made our hearts jump and our mouths go dry. All this after scrambling to hide the various dried plants hanging from our mirrors and splayed across our dashboard. But she let us go free! Poppy decided to glug a bunch and generally freak us out, though driving her a little less fiercely than we’d become accustomed to seemed to help some. We decided the spark plug wires might have come a little loose, we’d perhaps added too much petrol conditioner to the tank, which might have changed the viscosity of the fuel, or the fuel pump needs replacing. Any thoughts? It glugs and chokes a bit when we accelerate fast, i.e. the harder you push on the gas pedal. If anyone has a suggestion, we’d like to know. Trying to avoid taking her anywhere for a checkup.

So that brings us to tremendous Toronto and Elliot’s masterful hosting skills. We’ve been well-loved and well-fed; entertained; assisted, etc. The little house is lovely and Claudia’s first experience of Toronto is simply grand. SOOOO nice to be on a bicycle again as we gear up for our little bike trip, god(dess) willing. It has been so nice to relax and forget we’ve a workshop to deliver another day. Meghan warned that we’d get tired after a while but Claudia would have none of it. Turns out Meghan’s more than the staggering wit and fabulous dress sense she commands so deftly. We needed a break and we have one until Sunday. Tomorrow we head for Montreal to see more loved ones and run our 5th workshop (of 9). The list of plants continues, though they tend to be the same suspects at the moment – keep in mind we record what we see only from the vantage point of little Miss. Red Sled. Once we’re on our bikes, patrolling Nova Scotia, no doubt the head count will skyrocket.

FINAL INFOBOOK!

Y’all should check it oot

Was it the lime green VW bus with the tartan upholstery we slept in or the insanely wonderful women we ate phenomenal food with the evening before our workshop? Was it Amanda for mobilizing a bunch of folks to come to our class? Was it the in-depth explanation of the shocking intricacies of the Mormon church or the equine snuggles we shared with Monica’s beautiful horsey?  Was it Matt for putting out the word and showering us with enthusiasm or the Boing house for hosting the event with a great turnout? Whatever it was, we felt a lot of love and the workshop was brilliantly attended. A very involved crew made for excellent dialogue and we were overwhelmed by the generosity of everyone who put themselves out for us during our stay. The many gifts showered upon us included hand carved Juniper soup spoons and wild greens and potato soup, farm fresh produce and gleaned apricots from Sharon of BUG Farms, free access to Spencer and Shelby’s medicinal herb gardens, Selena’s masterful food preparation and the incredible company of the SLC gifting contingent. Monica, Amanda and Melanie. You are three of the most beautiful women to occupy space in our hearts. Thank you SO much, we felt incredibly blessed by the love and inspiration wrought upon us.

Following a magnificent afternoon, Meghan and I braved the Rockies in the dark and arrived almost unsafely at the home of the lovely Clarissa, one of Claudia’s most favourite people and the BEST host anyone in the world has ever encountered. Bella and Rufus greeted us with wet licks and heart wrenching brown eyes, and I almost lost my sleeping space when Rufus bounded into bed to spoon Meghan as soon as she lay down. Craig took it upon himself to fix our ailing trucky, pointing out that 3 quarts of oil is not a reasonable amount to lose after 2,000 miles of driving and replaced our oil cap. Thanks Craig! Our Denver workshop was very intimate and was comprised entirely of Clarissa’s friends and family. What a lady!

Meghan and I continue to maintain a list of medicinal plants, which now includes: Fireweed, Vervain, Willow and Golden Rod. I’m afraid we didn’t see any of Colorado in the light, so we’ll have to report back on those plants in the near future. Tomorrow we head for Omaha! Our red sled continues to push on through, we are so proud of her and are rewarding her endurance with a long flat ride through the midwest.

We are uploading our 16 page infobook that is available for sliding scale purchase at our workshop but free to download from the site. Enjoy!!!

Hope to see you in Madison!

Hello!

Well, we managed hauling it to Oakland after an insane final week of packing up and sorting out the trip. We’d like to say we covered all our bases, but well, the history is still being written on that one. After a funny trick Poppy (our red sled) pulled in the Willits Mariposa Market car park, where she pretended she wasn’t going to start up again, we braced ourselves for the rest of the precarious journey south. Thanks to wonderful friends pulling through for us and bringing us our last needed supplies in time for the workshop, we delivered the unpolished version to a very well informed and committed crew of 10. It was definitely our tester workshop but it went really well and we received much support and excellent feedback, which we are taking on board and will hopefully apply to the next round in Salt Lake City, tomorrow at 12pm at Boing!

Our epic adventure continued through Yosemite National Park, when, again, Poppy in her infinite humour decided to give up on an uphill on the side of the road just as it was getting dark. We tested the camper shell and slept amidst our luggage, with park fee-dodging traffic barreling by us all night. The din made the early rise easier and we took off to Zion National Park, which was absolutely stunning. We are sold on the Nevada landscape and the epic stretches of road through insane scenery of Joshua Trees and sandstone. The canyons of Utah and Arizona were just ridiculous. We’ve never seen the west in this way and we were completely blown away. It is so hard to avoid platitudes in this situation we realize, and apologize. We have a list of plants we noted on the way, as well as medicines we’ve been taking and notes on how we’ve been surviving the heat without air conditioning. We’d like to post the plants on an interactive map with descriptions and medicinal uses, but, well, we’re realizing a lot of this will have to be done after the fact, because we have been driving non-stop and don’t have a huge amount of time between pauses. Our driving times have been significantly extended beyond our original calculations. We failed to realize the capacity of a 1980 Ford Pickup would be seriously compromised by the many pounds of gear we’re carrying and the crazy hills we’ve encountered. Suffice it to say that we are not everyone’s best friend on the road, especially those who get stuck behind us trundling up a hill in 2nd gear.

Alright! This list already!

Prickly Poppy, Evening Primrose, Indian Paintbrush, Mullein, Balsam Root, Cone Flower, Columbine, Pines, Sage Brush, Cedar, Manzanita, Juniper, Jimson Weed, Snakebroom, Sweet Clover, Milkweed, Grindelia

We would NOT have made it through without the essential oil spray we’ve doused our bodies in every ten seconds along the road. We added a few drops of peppermint, lavender, rosemary and sweet orange essential oil to an 8 oz bottle of water and after shaking, sprayed ourselves, nay HOSED ourselves down to keep cool in the 90+ degree heat in a hot little tot of a truck. The oils have a cooling effect especially when the windows are rolled right down. We recommend the soles of one’s feet and the back of the neck and knees. Pure bliss.

More to come once things have slowed down a bit! We are entering the most intense portion of the trip, as if we’d not driven enough already. 4 workshops in less than a week. We’re going to be wrecked. What’s this about how activists need herbal medicine to avoid burnout? Perchance at some point we will practice what we preach….until then, we will continue to spread the gospel.