Food and Medicine

This week we were at Venture again, and spent the day with the RDNA crew. Our focus for the day was herbs, herbal medicines, and local and wild foods. The day was so creative and varied that I think this’ll have to be one of my longest posts ever. Apologies for the unbalanced text-to-photos ratio.

(We found the snake while wandering the grounds. He doesn’t have much to do with the day’s activities, but I thought he was beautiful enough to share anyway. I think his Latin name translates to “fierce bush snake from Hell.”)

We started the day with a blindfolded string walk. The Cultural Mentoring group strung a string down paths, around obstacles, and ended at a group meeting point. We were blindfolded and allowed to guide ourselves along the string using touch.



I found that I was far more comfortable going without shoes than with, and given the extra tactile connection to my environment, along with the string guide and the other sensory information from scent and sound, I felt totally comfortable, safe, and happy walking the landscape blind. With sight deprived, textures and temperatures, rather than sights, furnished the beauty in my landscape. Even the clammy grass and sharp gravel felt good on my feet, as it gave me that much more information about the world.

The one source of frustration I found was with negotiating my path in the presence other people. I found it easy to tell when the person in front of me had stopped, but harder to tell when they started up again. I didn’t want to bother the person in front of me by touching them if they were still there, but sometimes there was so much shuffling going on that I couldn’t tell if the person in front of me was walking or just fidgeting, or if an instructor was moving in front of me instead. I found myself worrying and fretting about holding up the line by waiting too long, and anxious about annoying the person ahead of me by poking her too often. This social worry was so strong that by the time I got to the end of the string, I was fuming about the bad design of this exercise, and how the presence of other people ruined the sensory immersion experience.

When we debriefed the exercise, an often-repeated point about nature connection practices came to the fore again: the stuff that comes up in these exercises is the stuff that participants bring to them. Likely, the blockages one comes up against in nature connection are the same blockages that one repeatedly engages in life. Like so many other personal practices, nature connection brings one’s blockages out of their familiar context and into a new and different light. I went into the next exercise musing on these thoughts and hoping to erode my anger with new understanding.

(Unlike other personal practices like martial arts or meditation, practicing nature connection allows for more feedback than that provided by one’s individual point of view and that of the mentor. Nature connection brings one’s blockages into an environment where not only mentors and students can reflect them to you, but where birds can shout at you about them, fox and mink can honor you for your progress, and trees can offer comfort and grounding in a crisis. And practicing nature connection with others on the same journey offers that many more eyes and ears and hearts and minds to perceive that feedback, push you when you’re unwilling to push yourself, and help you incorporate the feedback into your development.)


(Photo from CalPhotos)

The next exercise was a simple plant sit. We were told to find a plant, sit down with it, and talk with it, aiming to get to know some of the plant’s “spirit medicine”. We were advised to begin with a question, such as “what’s your name?” or “what story do you have to tell?”

I wandered away from most of the group and sat down by a big, beautiful Scrophularia plant. My question was, “what’s your role here,” a variation on the get-to-know-the-stranger line of, “so what do you do?” After sitting with it for a time, spacing out and being distracted by very cool looking hoverflies, I was feeling a little unfocused and ineffective at my task. I reconsidered my question, and sent a wordless request for communication with the plant, opening this “conversation” to let it say whatever it needed to say. Quietly, I watched bugs crawl over it, saw the discarded skins and honeydew excretions of now-absent aphids on a young stem, inspected leafminer tracks in the newer leaves, and noted that most of the mature stalks and leaves were free of insects. I inspected the flowers and wondered about their pollination.

Holding the plant stalk between my thumb and forefinger, I realized that physically, the plant’s body and my body were part of a continuum of matter, that the divisions of individuality between human and plant were arbitrary and that in fact one body merged into another and into the air and the earth, and more, in a continuum of matter and energy. I thought that perhaps spirit might be similar, and wondered, with silence rather than words, about participation in plant spirits and the continuity of spirit between apparent individuals.

Then the coyote howl came to gather us back, and we moved on to another project.






After a fun communal journaling session and a lunchbreak that included more journaling, (I got to learn about the medicinal and toxic properties of Bleeding Heart wildflowers) we launched into the afternoon activity, a lesson on intuitive cooking from one of the Cultural Mentors.



We had each brought at least one food local to our homes, meaning harvested less than 100 miles away from where we live. I brought snow peas and fava beans from my former garden (I had to negotiate with the landlord to get in an pick them), winter squash from the last fall harvest in my garden, and duck eggs from the Eco House nearby. Others brought many citruses, greens, peas and other vegetables. One person brought some ground beef, another some kefir, a jar of dried huckleberries (yum), and the star of the show was fresh abalone from Bolinas.

Our challenge was to create an appetizer dish for the rest of the class using only these ingredients. We grouped into teams and selected our ingredients. My group wound up with the kefir, the huckleberries, and lots of veggies. We were frustrated at first with our luck, getting such an odd collection of ingredients, but we came up with a plan and created a dish. Vibrant, energetic chaos ensued in the kitchen.

Our dish, a sweet stirfry using greens, sugar snap peas, celery, and apple with a sauce of huckleberry kefir flavored with lemon zest, nettle, and lemon balm herbs turned out to be an improbable success. Others made equally delectable dishes: herb meatballs with dipping sauces made from fava beans, tomato soup, or mustard; toasted kale chips (delicious and simple creations that result from tossing kale with oil and salt and toasting the leaves in the oven); stuffed beet leaves; carrot and greens salad alongside abalone that was breaded (with locally dumpstered bread), seasoned, and fried in olive oil; squash, herb and dandelion flower fritters; and squash stuffed with an herbed duck egg scramble.







With dinner over, three rounds of dishes done, and the sun setting low, we gathered in the main room for more herb work. Some of our musicians jammed with drums, guitar and mandolin while we milled about and waited for everyone to settle. Only settling never quite happened, and finally the energy of the music took over the room with dance and improvised song. Rather than fight the energy, our instructors began to sing their instructions for the next activity. Demonstration flowed into dance, questions came out sung in time to the beat, and spontaneous poetry erupted. We learned and processed herbs for the next hour with music fueling our motions. This was by far the most fun herbal class I’ve ever attended. My grandmother would be overjoyed to see this kind of learning going on.







Finally, we finished out the evening with a council circle, discussing sex and gender issues. The men asked the women’s circle questions, and vice versa. It raised many more questions, and opened new avenues of communication that I think will continue to be explored for these last five weeks of class.

Tracking Day

We’ve been on a three-week break, during which I’ve been, if anything, busier than while class is in session. So it’s taken me this long to blog our last class. But here, at long last, it is!

We met at Venture this week. After romping with Mojo the dog and playing a morning round of T-Rex Frisbee (which is the most awesome game in the Universe) we set off for the lagoon near Pescadero.



We ambled down to the beach to check out the morning’s stories. These marks were all over the sand, crisscrossing each other in little trails and sometimes funneling into a big communal run. I love sand tracking.






We continued on, tried to stick our heads into an old beaver den but found it blocked by a botanical guard. Though many of us are nonreactive to poison oak, we still didn’t push our luck. We consoled ourselves by investigating this interesting mark and fairly fresh scat near the den area.



When we stopped for lunch we found these beautiful prints in the mud of the channel bank, still fairly close to the den area.



As we moved on, we kept on the look out for beavers or beaver sign. They continued to prove elusive, despite the fact that I’d brought my beaver-cut walking stick with me that day. We did get close to a wary, plain-looking turtle. He looked like he was enjoying the sun so we did our best to go quiet and slow and respect his space.



Finally we found our way up the hill to an open area full of grasses and wildflowers. The ground there was peppered with big holes and massive throw mounds. We spread out, looking for the freshest mounds.

On the way, I encountered this butterfly. I’ve never seen this type near my home, or in any other urban area.



Finally we found a fresh looking mound that lolled from the mouth of a very big (perhaps 9 inches across) hole. The mound showed deep lumbering tracks across its length. I took these photos while standing uphill from the hole, with the hole in the lower left corner and the mound extending up the photo, downhill from me.






These tracks raise a lot of questions: Are all of these from the same animal? How was the animal moving, to leave such a jumbled pattern? When was the animal last here? Was this a one-time or repeat use? Why was the animal in the area? Is it still here?

We still had further investigations to carry on elsewhere, so we dragged ourselves away from the tracks and the wildflowers, and moved on to the hypericum zone further south on the coast.

Once at the hypericum area, we all took Cybertrackers and dove in. Our last many attempts have been aborted for one reason or another, and as of this afternoon we hadn’t yet placed any hyperucum data points on our map. Our mission for the last hour or two of the afternoon was to catalogue whatever biodiversity we could. For reference, this is what the interior of the hypericum growth looks like:



Not very diverse. The hypericum is especially strange because one will push through and through the unending monotony of hypericum stalks, and then find, engulfed in the center, the skeleton of a long-dead tree or shrub, shaded out under the thick canopy. After such a find the hypericum seed capsule rattling that follows all of one’s movements often takes on an eerie sound.

But we did find some interesting things. I followed the edge and found a stand of poison hemlock, a plant that I’ve never seen wildlife use very extensively. In the middle of the stand were clipped stalks of hemlock, smoothly cut at an angle very much like a rodent’s or rabbit’s work.



I continued on into the hypericum, and found a woodrat nest uphill from a dead elderberry tree. The net was constructed almost entirely or elderberry sticks, with little hyperucum material. I wondered if the woodrat had such an aversion to hypericum that it would try to use hemlock in the absence of good elderberry or other more commonly used material. When I heard the rat skittering and rattling through the hemlock stand, it sounded to me like he moved with energy and health. But my ears are not well trained in woodrat skitters, so I could be wrong.

We returned, our cybertrackers finally full of good data for our maps.