Hi all!
All week I've been sitting in session with folks as they gather their wishes for the new year. It's been really sweet to hold these visions with a candle, cedar smoke and a cup of elderflower tea and make formulas for each person in the cozy apothecary afterward.
I have been hearing so many powerful intentions this week, it feels right to share one of mine with you, as you are woven into this web: This next year, I'm making real steps towards opening the freaky fun folk herb school of my dreams, here in upstate NY. I'll be building out an apothecary space and classroom space (next to the apple orchard!) and I will start to host more and more in person classes and programs.
As some of you will remember, I used to have a little herbal schoolhouse in Mendocino (pictured above!) that hosted classes and a residency and all kinds of fun: herbal dance parties, ancestral feasts, pine-resin cleansing, water-scrying rituals, folktale hours (with s'mores) at the wood stove, oracular group poetry making, forming a chorus of Mugwort songs…. I've missed it so! My work has been shedding and shifting and morphing and growing since I moved back home to New York 5 years ago, I have lots of offerings that have been simmering, waiting to gather with you all, in the flesh again.
As I vision into this dream over the winter – I wonder what kinds of classes and programming would you like to see from me? From collaborators? If you're up for it, can you fill out
this casual survey and let me know what you are also dreaming?
And I know that these things take time; I am in no rush. But I have decided that I am going to begin this coming March by
bringing Herbal Mystery School back to it's in-person original form. (I know some of you have been holding out, waiting for the in-person return!) We will meet one Saturday a month, in an all day class and work in ritual together for the entirety of the day. Since next year will be an “in-progress” year - our classroom space will take a few forms, likely beginning in a heated greenhouse, to a yurt, to the gardens & fields & orchard, as we see fit. We begin in March. Come join in Red Hook, NY for a deep dive into herbal energetics and magic. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis.
You can find the class dates and more info here.
Of course, I will continue to offer HMS online as well (thank you if you sent in an application, I am diving into them this week!) – I feel so wildly lucky to work with so many incredible folks and feel into our synchronistic web of plant magic, continuing to be in awe of how the plants speak to and through each of us, even if we are not physically together.
