organization of nature evolutionaries

Is your kitchen ‘herb-ready’? Kami McBride can help! With the widespread increase in chronic and infectious diseases, having the antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant power of your herbs working for you at maximum capacity is what’s needed now. Setting up an effective herbal kitchen is the foundation for making sure you get the daily dose of herbs you need if you really want a pro-active herbal health care plan in place for your family.

Stocking your pantry with herb-filled condiments is the easiest way to have an ‘herb-ready’ kitchen so you can fill your food with the healing power of herbs at every meal. Kitchen herbs not only add flavor to our food, but they also support our overall health on a daily basis with their anti-oxidant and anti-viral supporting activity. You don’t have to be an herbalist and you don’t have to be a good cook to benefit from the top disease-fighting spice rack herbs. With 30 years of inspiring families to feel confident in using herbs, Kami has developed some fast track tips that to help you sort through the herbal information overwhelm and enjoy using more herbs in your daily meals.

Kami McBride’s 30 years of teaching herbal medicine is steeped in her calling to activate culture that embraces deep connection with the earth and inspire the next generation to love and care for the plants. Kami has taught herbal medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Nursing and in the Masters’ program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She has helped thousands of families learn to use herbs for self-care. She is the author of The Herbal Kitchen and her online workshops fuel the home herbalism movement to revitalize our relationship with the plant world and use herbal medicine for home wellness care. For more information about Kami and her work visit www.KamiMcBride.com

 Jolie Elan shares her experience of tapping into the wisdom of the oaks for guidance in hard times.

Many Indigenous people say that plants reveal their medicine via dreams and visions. What if these types of relationships are within everyone’s reach? How do we go about building mutually beneficial relationships? On a decade long adventure to eat acorn food, ethnobotanist Jolie Elan became so intertwined within the oak web of life that the oaks began to reveal myths and medicines in dreams and visions. Join Ethnobotanist and oak lover Jolie Elan as she tells her ethnobotanical love story that discusses the ecology, botany, medicine, myth, spirit, and food of the mighty oak.

Jolie Elan, M.S. is the Founding Director of Go Wild Institute. She is a deep ecologist, ethnobotanist, consulting botanist, and educator. She has inspired thousands of people to deepen their relationship with nature. Jolie has worked with ethnobotanical projects on four continents including restoring sacred forest groves in India and developing the herbal medicine sector in war-torn Kosovo. Jolie is also a certified permaculture designer and a seasoned environmental advocate with twenty years of experience building diverse networks, especially with Indigenous groups focused on protecting sacred sites. Combining her love for the earth and spirit, Jolie completed her training as a Spiritual Director and acts as a spiritual companion for those who wish to increase their intimacy with the divine, especially through the natural world. 

Jolie is adjunct faculty at the College of Marin and regularly teaches at Point Reyes Field Institute, the San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus, as well as a large variety of herbal medicine schools, and environmental and spiritual organizations throughout the west. She works with Jewish organizations, like Hazon, Wilderness Torah, Temple Emek Shalom and the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco to offer eco- Jewish classes that ground Jewish practices and teachings in the Earth. Jolie received her B.A. from the Evergreen State College in Environmental Studies, her Master’s degree in Natural Resources from Humboldt State University, and her certification in Spiritual Direction from the Chaplaincy Institute. She has served as the President of the Marin Chapter of the California Native Plant Society. Jolie can often be found foraging wild foods and medicines and hanging out with oak trees.  To learn more about Jolie’s work visit the Go Wild Institute website.

Maureen Robertson (Medical Herbalist) and Jose Melo (Musician & Composer) explore medicine. They have been working together for over 5 years to forge a conscious crossover between the healing vibrations of plants and the healing vibrations of music- a powerful example of working with nature in way of deep listening, attunement and cooperation.

In this teleseminar, they will give an overview of health or disease being a dissonance of vibration musical harmony within the body, mind, spirit whole, and how the sound vibration of the different chords in any octave can have a strong effect on the different energy centers of the body. Jose uses guitar chords to illustrate the concepts of the top, middle and base notes within essential oils. If you have your own essential oils, have them ready to smell whilst the relevant chords are being played to emphasize the qualities!

Aromatherapists already know how essential oils with their range of different notes can literally resonate with the energy centers to enable them to create a blend that harmonizes the energy. By experimenting with different chords stemming from the notes of aromatic oils choices, it is possible to begin a co-creative composition of healing vibration translated into music. This experimental technique gives a unique insight into which areas of the body need attention and then the relevant vibration of essential oils and their herbs which can help address that as well as the associated musical note(s).

The self-evident opening up to vibrational energy in this way can literally bring an immediate healing resonance as well as informing blends of essential oils to support energy imbalances.

Maureen has over 25 years of experience working with herbs and sharing Green knowledge. She co-founded the Scottish School of Herbal Medicine in 1992 offering courses from introductory to professional training at BSc and MSc degree level.

At the same time, she encountered Goethe's way of studying "the Holy Open Book of Nature" as shared by Rudolf Steiner and discovered an approach of wholeness to studying plants, landscapes, and natural phenomena. She developed a clinical application of Goethe's method which shaped her herbal practice and the way she supports the healing process for the people she works with.

In 2012 she established the Herbal Apprenticeship at Drimlabarra Herb Farm, Isle of Arran, Scotland which she ran for 4 years before relocating to Portugal where she continues her Apprenticeship training as well as hosting Inspiring International Herbal Speakers.

Her travels in Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador meeting shamans and teacher plants helped create a deepening into the interior world of self-healing and shamanic practices which aid these processes are now an integral part of her approach to purification and rejuvenation. https://www.theherbalpath.net/about-us

Jose has been involved in music since his first successful punk rock band as a teenager in Sintra, which had a strong following for many years and made a number of recordings. He quickly moved into working with the uplifting, feel-good beat of ambient electronic music which he composed and produced as a professional musician for several record labels and performed as an internationally acclaimed musical artist DJ for over a decade.

His warm, easy-going, and caring approach allows people to work with him to relax into their own healing through close encounters with teacher plants as allies and healing musical resonance. https://www.theherbalpath.net/about-us.

Geneen Marie-Haugen explores an emerging dimension of the human/Earth relationship – a relationship in which the human capacity for imagination is an essential component of planetary ecology. We’ll consider the possibility that our manner of approaching the wilder Others make a difference – both reawakening the older mind in us that knows the animate nature of the world, as well as re-enlivening the wilder Others themselves. 

“A practice of celebrating the wild Earth and cosmos – like other practices – holds the possibility of re-shaping consciousness; the more our thoughts, words and gestures are intertwined with the beings among whom we abide, the more the world pulses with life, the more we hear the exuberantly singing Earth, and perhaps even the songs of starlight.” –Geneen Marie Haugen from her essay, “Thomas Berry And The Evocation Of Participatory Consciousness,” which appears in Thomas Berry: Dreamer of the Earth.

Dr. Geneen Marie Haugen grew up a little wild, with a run-amok imagination. As a guide to the intertwined mysteries of nature and psyche, she delights in multidimensional listening and in offering perceptive questions, ceremonies, escapades, and reflections that help expand a sense of our own possibilities as individuals (and as a species) and deepen our experience of participation with an intelligent, animate Earth/Cosmos. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth; Thomas Berry: Dreamer of the Earth; Written River; Parabola Journal; Kosmos Journal; Ecopsychology; and The Artist’s Field Guide to Greater Yellowstone. A former tipi-dweller and whitewater river guide, she now lives amidst the creatures and features of southern Utah’s sandstone labyrinth. She is exploring the awakening of what she calls “planetary imagination,” and the possible emergence of a new mode of the human that she has called Homo imaginans. She is committed to the world-transforming potential of the human imagination in collaboration with the Earth community.

To know more about Geneen’s work visit https://animas.org or see her offering this spring at Esalen.

 Rina Kedem, environmental peace-builder, dialogues about peace, ecology, and communities.  Rina believes in peace between people and the land and is part of an international network of projects and communities that are involved in this work. 

Rina Kedem has developed and directed cooperative projects with Palestinians, Israelis, and Jordanians for the past 16 years. Her work is guided by a holistic perspective that includes the social-economic and environmental well-being of communities, as well as hands-on, long term peace-building opportunities that impact policy.  She helped found a multi-cultural center for peace and ecology at the Almog- Jericho junction, an area accessible to Israelis and Palestinians, and was part of a volunteer team that has built a network of ecological villages in Israel (GEN- Israel).

Rina is currently working on her Ph.D. in Community Development and Environmental Conservation Across Borders in the Department of Geography at Hebrew University and resides with her family in the Israeli desert.  She is part of the University of San Diego’s 2019 Women PeaceMakers program. and lives with her family in the desert of Israel.

Join Dr. Ablard on a journey to the heartwood of growing and preserving, sharing, and healing.

Rosewood (Aniba rosaeodora) faces possible extinction due to unsustainable harvesting and management practices driven by a high global demand for its precious essential oil. Native to many biodiversity hotspots throughout South America, the loss of rosewood is inseparable from the loss of many other native species. Its cultural importance among the Shipibo Indigenous people of Peru attests to its importance as a traditional aromatic and spiritual medicine with a reputation for strengthening the heart and relationships. 

Kelly Ablard holds a Doctorate in Biology, an MSc in Conservation, and is a certified aromatherapist. As Director of the Airmid Institute, she is dedicated to the global education, research, and conservation and sustainable management of aromatic medicinal plants. 

Kelly has completed and published research on olfactory systems, chemical communication across species, and clinical uses of plant medicine for humans and animals. Her work has taken her all over the world where she has studied the different uses of traditional medicine, worked to help protect threatened species, and discovered firsthand the vital role that chemical communication plays in the natural world. For example, she has recently identified over 60 Peruvian aromatic medicinal plants, her novel discovery of how small wasps rely on individual chemical signatures to mediate their mating ritual is featured in Canadian Geographic magazine, and how she identified potential toxins in the critically endangered slow loris (Nycticebus javanicus) is highlighted by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). She has also reported on the ingenuity of tool use by endangered orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and has investigated the link between sociality and olfactory communication in mammals. She currently conducts research in Peru with the Shipibo and Quechua Indigenous peoples into their near-threatened and threatened aromatic medicinal plants.

Kelly sits on the Board of the United Plant Savers, is Co-Chair of the International Committee on Sustainability of Aromatic Plants used in Aromatherapy and Natural Perfumery, and is co-owner of Essence of Thyme College of Holistic Studies.

To connect with Dr. Ablard and to help protect threatened aromatic medicinal plants, please visit: Website:https://www.kellyablard.com or Facebook: @airmidinstitute

This Dialogue with ecologist and artist, Dr. Rene Henery will explore pathways toward the simultaneous healing of systems in nature and of our own internal systems, hearts, minds, and spirits. In the process, Rene will share some of his experiences, as a scientist deeply engaged in the complex and contentious politics of water in California, pivoting from an emphasis on the application of science and mind to “fix” the world to an emphasis on relationship and heart, to heal, to catalyze greater connection with others and alignment with nature, and to be guided by what emerges from that connected place. The discussion with Rene will also explore how science, deep listening, and inner wisdom can work synergistically to orient us, with the dynamic natural systems we are a part of and the effects of that reorientation on the way we understand and value diversity and equity, our capacity for growth and change, and our felt sense of belonging.  We are part of nature.

Dr. Rene Henery is a Deep Ecologist, artist, writer, and speaker based in Northern California. Rene holds a joint position as California Science Director for Trout Unlimited, US’s oldest and largest Salmon and River conservation NGO and part-time Research Faculty with the University of Nevada, Reno, Global Water Center. Rene’s work in the US and abroad embraces water, diversity, reconciliation, and equity as pathways to resilient ecosystems, coherent communities, and personal experience of belonging. In his home state of California, Rene works collaboratively with private landowners, resource managers, universities, NGO’s, and state and federal agencies to recover water-dependent systems through science, relationship, and the reconciliation of conservation, flood management, agriculture, environmental justice, and indigenous wisdom

Linda Lombardo is A Certified Forest Therapy Guide, Life Coach & Sacred Activist. She finds wonder in the worlds-within-worlds of the forest; seeing nature as a regenerative culture, in which nothing is wasted, nothing is without purpose.

In addition to forest therapy and coaching, Linda produces and hosts Voice of Evolution Radio, sharing the voices of those creating a more compassionate and sustainable world. Her eleven-part radio drama series, In the Souls Waiting Room, chronicles her own spiritual journey to create a story about who we are as Humans today and why the world is the way it is. She uncovers and explores deep wounds that we no longer remember or accept as part of our collective stories that continue to create polarity in us as a species. The radio drama series led to Linda publishing her pre- and post- production notes and the scripts as a book, now available on Amazon.

 Earth Activist, Ardelle Ferrer shares about the regeneration of the Ceiba Tree on Vieques, Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.  She also speaks about the creation of a park around the ancient Ceiba Tree and the meaning it holds for the community and the land.

Excerpt from:  An Ancient Ceiba Tree Blooms Once Again After Puerto Rico’s Devastating Storms 

A protest movement, known among locals as “the struggle,” finally ousted the Navy in 2003. Four years later, Ferrer and others started La Ceiba Community Project to remove trash and debris from the grassy area around the ancient tree.“She brought us all together to restore that space, which is now used by the locals all the time,” Ferrer said. “It’s a symbol of hope that we can continue, that things may get hard but if we stand strong we can make it.”Today, the ceiba is the centerpiece of a 51-acre coastal park where endangered manatees, green turtles, and brown pelicans live. On rainy days, water pools in the bowl-shaped crannies between the tree’s twisted limbs, attracting tiny crabs and wild horse, who drink the rainwater.

Nature is Ardelle’s artistic muse. Her life is colored by evolutionary change, as is her art. Ardelle’s artistic history has and will continue to eternally emphasize the protection of our natural environment. Her deep connectivity to nature started as a child and has continued to be inspired by Puerto Rico’s natural wonders, where she first learned how to connect with the trees of El Yunque rainforest and the raw elements of nature.

Since 2007, Ardelle has dedicated endless community-based efforts to the preservation of a 400-year-old Ceiba tree site, located in the heart of El Parque de Ceiba in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Ardelle is the principal force promoting the legacy of the sacred ceiba tree and the primary organizer of projects that encourage the youth of Vieques to absorb the wealth of knowledge the ceiba tree has to offer to the local and global community. The goal of the community outreach project is to incorporate art, culture, nature, and spirituality, in a way that emphasizes the conservation of the land of our ancestors, the sacredness of the tree, and its teachings.

Ardelle received her BFA, Magna Cum Laude, from the Puerto Rico School of Fine Art and postgraduate studies at the Urban Glass studio in New York. She has been awarded several prizes for artistic excellence and her art includes multiple performances, expositions, symposiums, stained and fused glass, sculptures, public murals, installations, and monumental works of the ephemeral.

 Emma and Davyd Farrell speak about the power of plant dreaming and sacred earth activism.  They will share with you how dreaming can inform your daily life and help you break through illusions to come to a better understanding of reality and therefore become a more whole person.

Emma & Davyd work in co-creation with plants and trees for every aspect of their work, from event design and creation to making medicines and providing healings for their clients. Living in the hills of Mid-Wales their house sits underneath a large 1000-year-old Yew Tree. The plants, trees, and more specifically the ancient Yews serve as spirit guides and teachers and help to inform their actions through dreaming whether it be shamanic dream journeying, daydreaming, or lucid dreaming. 

Emma &  Davyd are the founders of Plant Consciousness, the ground-breaking London event about the conscious intelligent world of plants and trees. A lot of their understanding of the healing process comes from years of their own inner work into childhood, ancestral, and soul traumas. Combined with a daily spiritual practice they have gone to the depths of their souls to make awakening an embodied process and uncover the truth of their existence.

Emma spent 6 months in the Himalayas with master energy healers and five years learning from one of the world's leading plant spirit healers, Pam Montgomery. She is a certified plant spirit healer. Emma also spent 5 months in the Ecuadorian Amazon with Kichwa elder and shaman Kurikindi, his mother and sister learning a unique form of shamanic healing and receiving initiations into their Sacred Tobacco & Jaguar lineages. She is one of the first people to be initiated into the Yew Mysteries for hundreds of years, brought to the modern era by Michael Dunning. She has studied Geomancy with Dr. Patrick MacManaway and Celtic Shamanic Healing with David Leesley.

Emma also holds a practicing Master's Degree in 'The Preservation & Development Of Wisdom Culture & The Art Of Liberation' in the Tibetan Buddhist Mahayana Tradition, writing her thesis on 'Understanding The Nature Of The Self Through Lucid Dreaming'. Emma spent 2 years at the Lama Tsongkhapa Institute in Tuscany studying under lamas and geshes including her refuge lama, Dagri Rinpoche.

Davyd comes from a strong Celtic background with ancestry from both Cornwall and Ireland. This connection forms an essential part of his healing practice. He has trained and studied under many great masters and teachers. After a powerful wake up in Egypt in 2010 he then initially spent 3 years studying Tibetan Buddhism in first India and then at a semi-monastic center in Tuscany. He has received teachings, transmissions and empowerments from; HH Dalai Lama, Dagri Rinpoche, Chamtrul Rinpoche and Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.

After living overseas for 15 years a powerful experience with teacher plant medicine called him back to his homeland and so began a journey deep into the world of plants.  Since then he has spent 5 years studying under herbalist and plant spirit healer Pam Montgomery and is now a certified Plant Spirit Healer. He also spent 2 years learning in Ireland with herbalist and plant diet initiator Carole Guyett.

In addition to that, 4 years was also spent studying the Yew Mysteries with Yew Shaman Michael Dunning during which time he and Emma moved to a house that sits directly under a 1000-year-old tree in Mid Wales. The teachings of the Yew have continued under this powerful tree's tutelage.

To learn more about Emma and Davyd visit their website at https://www.plantconsciousness.com/  

Karyn Sanders, herbalist and activist,  talks about healing our relationship with nature and our vital need for connection to all beings. Her analysis focuses on the trauma caused by living in a way that separates us from our power and the resulting loss of connection with all our relations. Karyn will also speak about how to overcome this separation and heal the wounds we have been carrying in our own lives.

An essential evolution of Sacred Earth Activism is taking the step from healing our own trauma to then serving all our communities. Karyn will speak to this as she talks about her “sacred site” and “water” work and their meaning in the world.

Karyn has been working with plants for most of her life. She was first trained in Native American traditional plant medicine. In her mid-teens, she apprenticed with a Mexican curandera and has subsequently studied with various traditional teachers as well as Western herbalists. Karyn has been teaching and practicing herbal medicine from an energetic perspective for over 42 years.

Karyn has a live radio show, The Herbal Highway, that has aired weekly since 1996 on KPFA, 94.1FM out of Berkeley, California. She co-hosts this program with Sarah Holmes. You can listen to her show live through the internet at http://kpfa.org/herbal-highway, Thursdays from 1 to 2pm PST. Karyn is also available to teach at other schools, community groups, and conferences.  To learn more about Karyn Sanders, visit her website at https://www.blueotterschool.com/

David Haskell spent several years listening to the stories of trees in forests, cities, and coasts. At each, he explored the many interconnections that give us all life. It is these connections that David speaks about in this talk. In the lives of trees, we see that living beings are made not from "selves" but from networked relationships. Trees, therefore, tells us both about the fascinating stories of particular places and about the processes that unite all of life on the planet.

"He thinks like a biologist, writes like a poet, and gives the natural world the kind of open-minded attention one expects from a Zen monk rather than a hypothesis-driven scientist." --A profile of David Haskell by James Gorman in The New York Times.  

David Haskell’s work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of the natural world. His book, The Forest Unseen, was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction and recipient of numerous honors including the National Academies’ Best Book Award for 2013. The book has been translated into ten languages. Haskell’s second book, The Songs of Trees, examines biological networks through the lives of a dozen trees around the world. The book was the winner of the 2018 John Burroughs Medal, named one of the Best Science Books of 2017 by NPR’s Science Friday, selected as Favorite Science Books of 2017 by Brain Pickings, and in the 10 Best Environment, Climate Science and Conservation Books of 2017 at Forbes.com. Haskell received his BA from the University of Oxford and Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is a professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, and is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He serves on the boards and advisory committees of local and national land conservation groups. Haskell’s classes have received national attention for the innovative ways they combine action in the community with contemplative practice. In 2009, the Carnegie and CASE Foundations named him Professor of the Year for Tennessee. In addition to his books, he has published scientific papers, essays, poems, and op-eds.

To learn more about David visit his website or follow him on Twitter (@DGHaskell), Facebook, or Instagram.

Brooke Medicine Eagle shares about the wisdom of the Buffalo and the co-creative journey and sacred ecology shared by the people, the land, and the herd. This talk is rife with rich stories about living in regenerative partnership with the land- see below for photos of the herd and the Old Moccasin Place - near the medicine springs shared by Brooke after the seminar. 

Brooke Medicine Eagle is a legendary indigenous Earthkeeper, wisdom teacher, mentor, healer, visionary, singer/songwriter, shamanic practitioner, catalyst for wholeness, and sacred ecologist. She is the best selling author of the Native American literary classic, Buffalo Woman Comes Singing, and of The Last Ghost Dance. Her individual and group work is empowering, enlightening, and supportive of your very best self.

As a sacred ecologist Brooke has a focused interest in promoting a conscious and sensuous relationship to All Life and to living a harmonious, sustaining lifestyle. She has a deep personal dedication to the honoring and preservation of our sacred waters. What she has to offer has been deepened remarkably by going back to her childhood home buffalo ranch in the mountains of Montana.

Over the last 40 years, her many music recordings, teachings, writings, conference appearances, and wilderness spiritual retreats have touched the hearts and minds of people all over the world. Blossoming Into Harmony, the primary ongoing resonance of her work, promotes a heart-centered, ecologically sound, healing way for the flowering of Mother Earth and all our relations. She is now traveling and teaching internationally, enjoying the experience of being a Gaian citizen.  For more information about Brooke visit www.MedicineEagle.com and https://brookemedicineeagle.wordpress.com/

Felicia Kainat Norton and Charles Muinuddin Smith speak about feeling into our sacred connection and how this can be a source for the transformation needed at this time. They will speak of our shared issues and how each of us can be a force for change by continually joining our inner cultivation with hope and Sacred Action.

Felicia Kainat Norton is a senior teacher, retreat guide, and faculty member of Suluk Academy in the Inayati Sufi Order. She serves as the International Head of the Ziraat Activity which is devoted to inner cultivation and sacred ecology. She also tours as a solo dance theater artist internationally with the one-woman show ‘NOOR’.

Charles Muinuddin Smith, Ph.D is a senior teacher, retreat guide, and teacher of Ziraat in the Inayati Sufi Order. He teaches leadership and sustainability studies at Hofstra University.

They are both longtime students of Pir Vilayat Khan within the Sufi tradition and in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Together Felicia and Charles co-authored the book, An Emerald Earth: Cultivating a Natural Spirituality and Serving Creative Beauty in Our World. and they have published articles in Resurgence and Ecologist magazine and The Jung Journal.

They offer meditation workshops and retreats worldwide.

Mary Reynolds – Reformed Landscape Designer and Nature Activist-- explains how we can all become guardians of the earth, starting in our own back yards, shifting human consciousness into remembering that our role here is one of caretaker and creator. 

Mary is a garden designer, a philosopher – a writer. She is the youngest woman to win a Gold Medal for garden design at the Chelsea Flower Show since its inception over 100 years ago and is known as one of the world’s ten best landscape designers.

Mary grew up on a small mixed farm in Wexford, in the south of Ireland. 20 years ago she set up her own company designing gardens in Dublin. A few years later, having lost the will to live from constantly creating modern gardens, she realized that she could no longer continue shaping land in the same way and re-imagined her work to become nature rather than human-centered.

Mary brought her new, still relatively unformed ideas to be showcased at the Chelsea flower show in London where she achieved a gold medal, unusual at the time for a first-time effort. Since that time, she has built up quite a cult following in the world of garden design and is considered unique in her field.

Another transformation came a few years ago when Mary realized we had to rethink the whole relationship we had with the land and re-examine what it means to truly design in harmony with nature. Those latest revelations lead to The Garden Awakening – Designs to Nurture Our Land and Ourselves being born, which imparts so much wisdom to people who are fashioning their own gardens and wild places.  The book was written at night, over four years, when her two young children were asleep… and Mary was almost awake. 

Mary has appeared on numerous television programs, and podcasts. She regularly offers talks and workshops about her work.  To learn about Mary, visit her website www.marymary.ie 

Dr. Patrick MacManaway speaks about how you can listen to and take care of Earth within your nature community whether it is your backyard, park, garden, or farm. There is a sentient intelligence in the spirit of place, in the spirits of the elements, and of vibrant nature that we can interact with telepathically. 

Patrick will share land whispering stories of working with farmers, gardeners and land stewards over the past 25 years on three continents to inspire and invite you to what might be possible where you live. 

Dr. MacManaway is a third-generation practitioner of psychic and healing arts, trained in Western Medicine and the arts of Geomancy and Shamanism.  He works with earth energy balancing, and earth acupuncture for geopathic stress remediation, and space clearing for site energy enhancement.

Training first with his parents at their Healing and Teaching Centre in rural Fife, Scotland, Patrick graduated in Medicine at Edinburgh University before taking apprenticeships in both Western and Eastern approaches to traditional Geomancy and working with landscape energy.

He is the author of several books and CDs including “The Practical Guide to Dowsing: How to Harness the Earth’s Energies for Health and Healing“, “Cultivating the Light Body” and “Keys To Grace“.  For more information about Patrick please visit his website.

Past-President of the British Society of Dowsers, he is a Founding Member of Circles for Peace, and design consultant for the Burlington Earth Clock.

Cosmologist, physicist and author Dr. Jude Currivan invites us to remember who we really are and take our place as micro-cosmic co-creators of the cosmic river of life. The ancient and sacred understanding of the fundamentally interconnected web of life is finally being reconciled with the latest scientific discoveries. Instead of the hitherto scientific model of a merely materialistic Universe of randomness and separation, compelling evidence is revealing that our entire Universe not only exists and evolves as a unified entity, but that its very appearance emerges from deeper nonphysical realms of intelligence and intention.

Dr. Jude Currivan is a cosmologist, planetary healer, futurist, author, and previously one of the most senior businesswomen in the UK. Having grown up as the daughter of a coal miner in the north of England, she has since journeyed to more than seventy countries around the world and for the last, nearly twenty years has lived in the sacred landscape of Avebury. She has experienced multidimensional realities since early childhood and worked with the wisdom keepers both incarnate and discarnate of many traditions.

She holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology from the University of Reading in the UK researching ancient cosmologies and a Masters's Degree in Physics from Oxford University specializing in cosmology and quantum physics.

She is the author of six non-fiction books currently available in 15 languages and 25 countries including CosMos – A Co-creator’s Guide to the Whole World (co-authored with Dr. Ervin Laszlo). Her first fictionalized e-book Legacy is available on Amazon.

Her latest is The Cosmic Hologram- In-formation at the Center of Creation, the first book of the Transformation trilogy. She is currently writing book two Gaia: Her-Story.  Learn more about Jude here.

This episode is the fifth in a series of episodes centered around the Rivers of Life. 

Phyllis Hogan --herbalist, activist, and ethnobotanist-- shares her story and insights from participating in efforts to preserve sacred waters and lands, working with the native people and plants of Arizona, and serving her community as a village herbalist. One of her most inspiring stories is about a small group of tribal activists that were successful in stopping an aquifer from being destroyed at the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado River in Hopi sacred lands. This is the Hopi place of emergence, and Phyllis will share the creation story linked to this special place and the importance of Rivers to all life.

Phyllis Hogan is an acclaimed herbalist and ethnobotanist with over 40 years of experience practicing and teaching in the American Southwest. She has worked deeply for many years with the Navajo and Hopi, helping preserve sacred traditions and medicine ways. She resides in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she founded the Winter Sun Trading Company in 1976. Since its inception, Winter Sun has provided exceptional organic botanical products, with a special emphasis on traditional southwest herbs and tinctures. Working directly with indigenous artists, she also showcases Hopi and Navajo jewelry and fine art. Immersion in the rich cultural heritage of her bioregion inspired Phyllis to cofound the Arizona Ethnobotanical Research Foundation (AERA) in 1983. The AERA is a 501(c)(3) private non-profit foundation committed to the investigation, documentation, and preservation of the traditional plant uses in Arizona and the greater Southwest. 

Phyllis has been awarded the United Plant Savers Conservation Award and the Culture Bearers of the Colorado Plateau Footways Award, and in the 1990s was the first Practitioner Associate to be recognized by the Northern Arizona Anthropology department. She has taught ethnobotany in bilingual health and educational programs for the Pima, Hualapai, Havasupai, Hopi, and Navajo tribes. 

This is the fourth episode in a series of episodes centered around Rivers of Life.

Grant Wilson, Directing Attorney for the Earth Law Center, speaks about the rights of rivers and the processes that individuals and communities engage in to assure basic rights for their rivers.   See the Earth Law Center's Universal Declaration of River Rights.

Grant has advanced environmental campaigns in the United States and worldwide, from representing island nations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference to National Land Policy work in Kenya. As Directing Attorney of Earth Law Center, Mr. Wilson works to advance the rights of nature in law, and in particular focuses on ensuring that our rivers thrive. Grant earned a degree in Environmental Policy from Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University, and a J.D. with a Certificate in Environmental and Natural Resources Law from Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.  

This is the third episode in a series of episodes centered around Rivers of Life. 

Dr. Rosita Arvigo-- famed ethnobotanist, spiritual healer, shaman, and author-- will share about the Macal river which was the life-blood of an ancient Mayan civilization and is still important to the people there today. 

The Macal River flows through the Cayo District in western Belize and eventually into the Belize River. Sites along the river include the ancient Mayan town of Cahal Pech and the Belize Botanic Gardens. The river is a meandering waterway flowing through rugged mountains and countless ancient archaeological sites.  It was one of the ancient Maya’s superhighways, linking urban, trade, and ceremonial centers and connecting the interior to the coastal trade routes. After linking up with the Mopan at Branch Mouth, it joins the Old Belize River to carry on down to the coast. For centuries it was a vital part of the Maya Empire and an important source of water, transport, communication, trade, food, hygiene, and recreation for the Maya.

Rosita Arvigo is a Doctor of Naprapathy, ethnobotanist, spiritual healer, author of six books on traditional healing of Central America, co-founder of The Belize Ethnobotany Project with Dr. Michael Balick of the New York Botanical Garden , and an international speaker. She is the founder of Ix Chel Tropical Research Centre in Belize, the Rainforest Medicine Trail, the Terra Nova Medicinal Plant Reserve, and the children’s Bush Medicine Summer Camp in Belize. She had a thirteen-year apprenticeship to one of the last Maya shamans, Don Elijio Panti, who was born in Peten, Guatemala. She is the recipient of The Earth Award, 2007. As the founder of THE ARVIGO TECHNIQUES OF MAYA ABDOMINAL THERAPY she teaches extensive courses on the subject as well as courses in Maya Spiritual Healing.

This is the second episode in a series of episodes centered around Rivers of Life.