Latest / Homestead And Heal Podcast / Ep 5: Deepening Your Connection with Nature Through Plant Consciousness with Pam Montgomery

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Ep 5: Deepening Your Connection with Nature Through Plant Consciousness with Pam Montgomery · Homestead And Heal Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Homestead and Heal.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Scott.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm Lindsay, and we live with our three children on a farm in Vermont.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_04: Our lives revolve around growing food and medicine, working with the body, and trying every day to live in deeper relationship with the earth.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_04: And now we're welcoming guests to our farm for intimate retreats where they can slow down and feel deeply into this earth-body connection.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_03: This podcast is about remembering something many of us have forgotten: that we're not separate from the natural world.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_03: Our bodies are part of it.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: Our healing comes through it.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_03: And when we reconnect to both, our purpose often begins to reveal itself.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_04: Through conversations with herbalists, farmers, body workers, and people walking unconventional paths, we explore what it looks like to step outside the modern paradigm and build lives rooted in connection, healing, and reciprocity with the earth.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, welcome to the Homestead and Heal podcast.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_04: We're so excited to welcome Pam Montgomery onto our show today.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much for being here, Pam.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you for having me.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_04: And I'll just give a quick introduction to Pam, and then I want to tell a little bit about how we got to know Pam.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_04: So Pam is an herbalist, author, international teacher, and earth elder who has passionately embraced her role as a spokesperson for the green beings and has been investigating plants and their intelligent spiritual nature for more than four decades.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_04: More recently, she's been working with the plants to heal the wounds of separation from nature in order to move into co-creative partnership with all nature.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_04: She is the author of three books, including Co-Creating with Nature, Healing the Wound of Separation, and the Highly Acclaimed Plant Spirit Healing, A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_04: She teaches internationally and virtually on plant initiations, spiritual ecology, and co-creative partnership with nature.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_04: Pam is the founder of the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries, or one, and was a founding board member of United Plant Savers.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_04: And yes, we're just so excited to have you here.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_04: And I did this morning as I was thinking about speaking with you and thinking about how incredibly impactful your work has been for me, like what deep medicine it has been for me.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_04: And I just feel like it's important for me to share that, to weave that possibility for people because there were two different experiences that I had with you in particular, besides reading your book.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_04: I've read Plant Spirit Healing.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_04: I haven't read the other books, but I would love to.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_04: You live in our local community.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_04: We got to know you through our free thinkers group during COVID times when no one was gathering and there was this amazing group of free thinkers that started coming together for potlucks.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_04: And I had heard about you years before, but I didn't really realize that we had this Earth elder living amongst us and getting to know you some that way.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_04: And then the very first experience I really had with your medicine was the rose initiation and it or rose green breath, I guess is what I should say.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_04: So it was breathwork with rose.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_04: And it was in this small little funky building that was came out of this free thinkers group, and you had roses there, and you led us through breath work with really powerful music and prompts, and giving us, I think, a little bit of rose elixir on our tongues and spritzing us with rose.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_04: And I knew that I had an affinity for Rose, but I didn't have much relationship with Rose yet.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_04: We did name our daughter, our first daughter Ella Rose.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that was coming from an actual really deep place within.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_04: And this connection with Rose that I had, I, it's not that I had forgotten.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_04: It's interesting.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_04: I've recently found this little box that I've given to Ella now that I've had since childhood that is a carved rose.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_04: And it's actually, if you look at the bottom, there's a little sticker on it that says it's made out of basswood or linden.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_04: And Linden is my namesake, Lindsay.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_04: And I know that these heart-opening plants are actually really important allies for me and medicine for me, but I hadn't realized it.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_04: And so in this rose green breath journey that you led us through, I had the most profound opening into what I can only say is either I felt like it was ancestral.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_04: It might have been more past life, but I'm pretty sure it was this ancestral grief that I just fell to my knees and sobbed tears that felt like they were coming from an entirely different place in my body.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_04: And I had the clearest image of being on a ship and watching as my homeland disappeared from view.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_04: And what makes me emotional right now to even think about it because I could just feel my ancestors and the pain and the bravery, the courage that it would have taken to get on a ship and leave behind the only land you'd ever known to come to America.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_04: I'd never thought about it before consciously, and it just came up for me so strong in this journey with Rose.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_04: It was incredibly powerful and it set me off on what I can only say is just a magical beginning of communication with my ancestry, specifically in the British Isles.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_04: I felt from that point forward, I decided to book a trip to England.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_04: I just felt called to the land there.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_04: I did go on a trip.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_04: As I was leaving to go there, I asked my dad, Do you know anything about Cornwall?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_04: I just had this feeling I was meant to go to Cornwall.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_04: And as I was boarding the plane, I asked him this.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_04: And when I arrived in England, he had gone down in his basement, which was my grandmother's house, and her it was her lineage that that went back to this place in England.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_04: And we didn't even know if we had ancestors that went back to Cornwall, but I knew my grandmother had traveled there a little bit.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_04: And so he went into his basement and found this 1850s Bible that was like gigantic.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_04: And inside was a handwritten lineage of our family and the handwritten name of a town in Cornwall.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_04: And I was just like, oh my God, I'd had dreams, seeing myself land in Cornwall.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_04: It just was all initiated with this rose green breath.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm still on the journey.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't have nearly enough time to explore there, but that was one thing.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_04: That was huge for me.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_04: That's awesome.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's incredible.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_04: It was And you know what?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody, except for the indigenous population in this country, has done the same thing.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: All of their ancestors left their home for one reason or another.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Either famine, religious, or political oppression.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot, all of us are pretty much orphans in this country.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so much about, I think, partly what you all are talking about is like, how do we come back into our bodies?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: How do we come back to ourselves?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know where you're going if you don't know where you came from.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: And most of us don't know where we came from.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the things that I'm seeing that the plants are bringing to us right now is exactly what you just described about getting back in touch with where do we come from?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Who are we?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: How do we be in this land?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: We've been here for generations, maybe now, and we're starting to feel a little bit comfortable.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: But I had one of a similar experience to you when the first time I went to Ireland and my feet touched the ground, and I went, oh, this is home.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've and I love my home here.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: I know we both we love where we live here in Vermont, but it's not the same.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_04: No, I'm definitely still on this journey because, and I think Ireland is my next exploration because when I was pregnant with our last baby, Serena, I had one of those moments in pregnancy where just like it hit me so hard that I needed to lay down and nap.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_04: And when I laid down and napped, I woke up with this word that I'd never heard before.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_04: It was Ioloc.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_04: And I didn't know, I didn't know that word.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_04: I happened to mention it in a kind of a witchy circle of women.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_04: And they were like, oh, that I that's an Irish word.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_04: You should look it up.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_04: And I looked into it and it means stone circle.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_04: And there's a famous Ialoc, Rihanna of Ialoc, or I'm not probably not saying it, but in Northern Ireland, that it was a stone circle specifically for celebrating the solstice.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_04: And Serena was due right around the solstice.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_04: And I was like, wow, like that's my next.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_04: And then I looked into my ancestry, and my ancestors, some of my ancestors came from like a day's ride away from that site.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_04: And I was like, okay, like now I gotta go there.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_04: It's just like I'm following the threads while also mothering three children and working in all the things.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_04: But I feel like there's so much there.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_04: And so that was just, and I felt like that grief was, I was feeling the grief of my ancestors, but also the world.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_04: Like you said, like so many people have that grief in their bones.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_03: Again, like all of us, and whether we've recognized it or looked at it or had the space to really think much into it.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_03: Lindsay and I have talked a lot about how we feel different in that our kids on my side are seventh-generation Vermonters.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_03: And there is a type of connectedness that we've built in this land.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, all of my ancestors and many of them marrying into those families came later and had that grief of leaving their homelands.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_03: But it does start to change the feeling of place and in yourself.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_03: I think just having that deep lineage in a particular place.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's something.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, go ahead.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: No, I just that this whole notion of separation, separate separating from the land, separating from nature, separating from the place where you can go back thousands of years perhaps and say, my people have been here for thousands of years.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And my big question is how long do we have to be here before we get to be indigenous?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's my big question.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: I know I'm not from this land, but my ancestors came from Ireland, probably originally Scotland, but came here in probably around the famine time.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's but for you, Scott, and you've been here for many, your people have been here for many.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's like when does that start to happen?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: When do we become so connected to the land again, not separate from nature?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: When does that happen?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: I have that big question, and I know uh when I say those words out loud, some people are like, oh, that's you can't say those things kind of things.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: But land is land, nature's nature.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so how long does it take?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's one of my big questions right now.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that makes me think of I wonder, it feels like maybe the answer to that question is it depends.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_03: It depends on how centered you are on the land, how much you're focusing on sinking into the place, and really maybe, maybe in the culture that's being promoted and that so many of us are caught up in the West, maybe it could take a lot longer, even if you're in the place and you're not actively connected with it.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_03: We are we of course, and we talk about this a lot.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: We of course we are all connected to the earth.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_03: We are the earth.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_03: We are we can never, but in our minds and our thinking, it's pretty easy to feel disconnected.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_03: And I feel like that's such a place of so much trouble, problems, and difficulties for humans in this day and age.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: I had this since we're on this ancestor role here, this is kind of cool.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Years ago, I was looking for the family Bible, and I found out that one of my cousins had my on my dad's side of the family had the family Bible.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I called up my aunt, and she was still, this was many years ago, so she was still alive.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: And my maiden name is McCain.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I said, Oh, I'm really looking for the family Bible.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to find out.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: And when everybody came over from Ireland and she said, This is what she said to me, oh, you're not Irish.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, How'd I get that name then?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean I'm not Irish?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I started to discover, especially about the Irish, and probably others too, is like they were running so hard and heavy, they wanted to leave it all behind.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: They just wanted to forget it.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, let's go to the new land and let's start a new life and all that stuff.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yikes, let's forget it as quick as we can.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, man, there's this big cutoff.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like she said that to me, and I was like, What?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: What is she saying to me?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just like, Oh, you're not Irish.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And she said it mean too.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why would you even like why would you want to remember that?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just blown away.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: So what it means, and I actually think the amnesia started way before then, but is like we started forgetting very early on.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it goes back to way back when you moved from being hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, which then you stayed on the land, which then means you stored food, which means then you had wealth in your stored food, and some had it and some didn't have it, and then there got to be landowners and all of that when when it switched from things being more domesticated instead of wild, the wild, and and then empire building and all that, and then you lose the people that live off the land lose their sovereignty, and once they lose their sovereignty, they forget to forget what it means to be of the land and not separate.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I feel like we've all fallen into this deep, deep amnesia, and that's what's separated us from nature and from the land is like we've forgotten.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: We've forgotten that we actually do know the language of plants, we've forgotten what wild water tastes like, we've forgotten what it feels like when you can feel the change coming and what's it feel like in your body, and what's it smell like, and how do the birds sing at that time of the year?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: We've forgotten so much, and now that there's all this, oh yeah, it's like a whole virtual experience, which we're having, which I'm grateful for.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: There are some values to it, but yeah, not to be the notion of living virtually instead of being out there having the experience of it is wow.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that goes back to what you're saying, Scott.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: It might take a while.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: It might take a while here, but I feel like not to be like trying to be like a snot about where I live here in Vermont, but I must say that I think there's a lot of folks in Vermont that are really trying to remember and to wake up and to be with the land and grow their own gardens.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And these kids now, I'm just hiring Asa and Insa to come and work in my garden.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're the teenagers of the whole crew of kids here.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, gosh, look at these kids.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: They know the plants.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they know which ones I want them to pull out and which ones I don't want them to touch.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: They know they know how to work, they know how to be with the soil.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, this is great.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I feel hopeful actually.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: With I kind of live in a bubble because I'm around people that want to do this kind of stuff.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, I don't know.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_04: It's important to keep that hope alive.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_04: And I feel that with our kids, just to have my two-year-old be able to identify the red-winged blackbirds and the daffodils, and and for our seven-year-old to be so interested in cooking the food that we have.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_04: There's so many aspects of it that I feel like we need to keep that hope alive because some people feel like they're, they feel like they have no choice in how their kids are growing up, and they absolutely do.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_04: So I feel that.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_04: You know what?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_04: Their our first episode that will air of this podcast, Scott and I talk about our own stories where Scott really didn't ever have a big disconnect from nature, but I did.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_04: I had a stretch of years, especially in my teenage years, but maybe even some before that, where I was just, I feel like I was entirely disconnected from nature.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_04: And it was actually just such a painful time in so many ways.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_04: And it had to do with moving and really trying to fit in and these sorts of things.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_04: But when I'm just actually have the having the connection of the other kind of deep healing that I experienced with you was at the Hawthorne initiation, which was on your beautiful land, drinking the wild waters of sweetwater sanctuary, is that what you call it?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_04: And that I'm just connecting that actually the deep healing I had was related to this time of disconnect for me because in that initiation, that's there were, I'm not sure how many, like 20 some people.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_04: And it was all women.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember having these feelings of not fitting in, and it's very much related to that wounding, that time of my life, of how much I had to try to fit in with other humans.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_04: And then the really like one of the most profound moments for me with that experience was we made our masks to go out and meet Hawthorne, and everyone was using all these greens and reds and the colors of Hawthorne.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_04: And I was in my own bubble, in my own world, and was doing my own thing.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_04: And when I looked around and saw what everyone else was doing, I was like, oh, I'm so different and bizarre.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_04: Why did I paint my mask blue with stars all over it?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_04: This makes no sense to me.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_04: I'm embarrassed, I'm different, I don't fit in.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_04: And then we went out to meet Hawthorne, and you said, This is Estrea.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_04: This is Hawthorne.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_04: Her name is, and I was like, oh, stars.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_04: It just, I had then I had this feeling of, oh, I do know, I know things inside, and that can make me feel like I belong.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm just having this realization now that so much of that was around that period of time of disconnect from nature in my life.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_04: And I just love that I've been able to do to work with these heart-opening plants with you because that I think is a big aspect of what I feel in my body is my heart.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_04: And those, those were just such beautiful, deep healing moments for me.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_04: So I wanted to thank you for that as well.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, you're so welcome.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the initiations for me are that's a big part of what I do now.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Almost, I wouldn't say exclusively, but it's a very big part.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And what's happening is that the plants are boy, oh boy, they're turning up the volume.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm and they're really bringing people in.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I last year was Mother Wart, which was unbelievably fabulous.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: They're all fabulous in their own way, but another big heart plant too.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I usually schedule two dates, one same plant, two dates, and they just filled immediately.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I had this big long wait list.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I go to Mother Wart and I said, Oh gosh, Mother Wart, I'm so sorry.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I there's all these people on this waiting list.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: And Mother Wort was like, Oh, you're not gonna turn anybody away.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, really?
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I added a third date last year, and I was and I was and it filled right up.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: All the people that actually, all the people that were on the waiting list that wanted to come ended up getting to come.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it worked out perfectly that everybody that wanted to come came.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, oh, oh good, I did my part, oh good.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so this year is Angelica.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so I early on I said, look, Angelica, I'm just gonna let you know right now that we can do two dates because I'm really I got other I'm I got other things I'm doing too, and I got some travel I gotta do.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm busy and I'm trying really hard to not do so much.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love what I do, don't get me wrong, I love it.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: But there are other things in life, and so trying not to overdo it.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: So of course I put it out there beginning of January, as I usually do, my January newsletter.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: I put it out there, and both of them were full by the end of January.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: One month's time.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we're and we're and then what I did is I was like, I'll just overbook them a little bit because usually two to three people cancel, one person has canceled, and they're both over full now, and I've got this big long waiting list.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, oh, and I feel I always feel like, oh, who am I?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: These people are being called, not by me.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's not because I sent out some mailing thing, or they're being called from Angelica.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like, who the hell am I to say no to them?
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: If the plant's calling them, and it part of it is just doing it all myself and getting it all together.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: I always feel like, oh gosh, I need help, I need help.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a woman in the UK, Emma, who's she's we're colleagues, and we're doing another course together.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just said to Emma, I said, Oh gosh, you know, this thing with Angelica, there's all these people on the waiting list now.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: And oh, and I said, But oh, the thought of trying to do it myself, like I try to do it online, doing it myself.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: And she was like, Oh, the sale of our house here just fell through, and I didn't book any work this summer because I thought I'd be moving house and packing up and moving.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's not gonna happen.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: I can help you.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, This is how it works, too.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: If I just put It out there, okay.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I need.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I need.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: I need help.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I just happened to mention it to her.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I can help you.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: So now we added a third date.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be online.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of everybody coming here to me, it's going to be online, which also means because then I went to Angelica and said, okay, look, we're going to do it online.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that's okay with you.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I can manage and I got help and all that.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And Angelica was like, Okay, great, go big.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I went, Go big?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean, go big?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think that means whoever wants to come gets to come and don't cut it off at all.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, these plants are really stepping it up and they're calling people in to do this.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you saw what it was like.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's very deep work.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: And people have incredibly profound experiences.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really, it's like a fast track to waking up and remembering and remembering nature and remembering who you are.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's really about coming home to yourself, which of course, that also means coming home to nature because we are part of nature.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: So all it's all mixed, it's all together.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what's happening.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the other cool thing that's happening is that it used to be that a lot of the initiations were really geared toward people's personal healing.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it still is.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: People still have their own experiences and their own personal healing, but it also the plants seem to be stepping into healing the collective.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: And all those, all the isms, helping to heal all the isms.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: And in the last four to five years, that's who the plants are that are stepping forward.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I started calling them gateway plants because it's they're just like they're on the threshold.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're like the ones opening the door to a much bigger healing that absolutely has to take place, at least in this country, I'm sure in other places as well.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: This we need help right now.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: The people need help.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: The planet's fine and it's going to be fine.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're the ones that need help.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And these plants are bringing us to it.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm I'm hopeful.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm hopeful that if we could just keep our focus on what's important, what's real, what's life-giving, what brings us into unity consciousness, not into separation.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: We live in a very challenging time.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna say there weren't other times that are challenging, because of course there are, but this one seems a little seems kind of big.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's okay.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're I can I work really hard, not that you can't pick up one of those devices because there it's all there.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just try to not get too wrapped up in that.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of like to know what's going on, but without it taking me over.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm just really focusing on you know, TikNet Han coined the word interbeing, meaning that our connection to everything, our interdependence, and inter-being has one more little caveat that's really interesting to me.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: They use the word interpenetration, and I'm kind of like interpenetration, and so I kind of see it as the merge, merging, like the when you're like this with another being or within nature, or and so interbeing feels to me like if we can practice interbeing, being connected to all of life, realizing that we're interdependent with all of life, and that there's this interpenetration or merging.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I'm holding.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm kind of holding as a focus right now is practicing interbeing and as much as I can live with interbeing.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_03: I love that.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's all so inspiring and so well said.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_03: Being that we are meeting virtually, like we are talking about, like the in-person and not being on our devices, so critical.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: I don't do this sort of thing like I'm not on Zoom very much or whatever.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: And so when I have been, I'm always curious.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: You happen to be like right down the road from us, not very far.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_03: But I on this podcast, we've been asking folks to tell us a little bit about your introduced the place where you are and what you're excited about, what is happening in your place in the world right now that you're excited to share.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh gosh.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: How long do we have?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I feel like there's so much going on all the time.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: Really, I live in a beautiful place, number one.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I don't see any neighbors.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's a barn I can see through the trees, but I don't see people.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it let's see, I've been here, I bought this place in '99.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: So 20 going on 27 years now.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been doing this kind of work that I do, which is working with the plants, a lot of ceremony.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: So the initiations themselves, I should probably explain to your audience what an initiation is, which is what we do here.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: An initiation is working with one plant for three days.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: I that's the format that I use, three days.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we do all kinds of things.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: We prepare an a I call it an elixir, but it's different parts of the plant in different mediums.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: So in water-based, alcohol-based, it might maybe hydrosols.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: If it's a plant that has a lot of essential oils, then it usually has a strong smell.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe we'll bring in the essential oil that we smell or we keep it around so we can smell the plant.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so anyway, so we make this elixir and we drink this elixir, we prepare it in a ceremonial way and how it's the stirring of it.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: We do the biodynamic stirring of the when we put all the components together, we do that as a group and we stir in one direction and then in the other direction.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so it brings in the cosmic forces and then the earthly forces into the elixir.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we ingest this.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: I I suggest to people that they attempt to fast throughout the time.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Some don't.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't serve meals though.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: They can they we provide snacks and stuff like that for people who have to eat.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we spend three days being with the plant in all different kinds of ways.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: All that we embody, we make masks to embody the plant.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: Then we have a council of whatever the plant is at a fire circle at night, and we're all dressed ceremonially with these masks on.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so we all speak in a council.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: So if we were doing, if we were doing Hawthorne, then we'd be a council of Hawthorns.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: And Hawthorne would speak through us.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: We allow ourselves to kind of get out of the way and just be the hollow bone and let the plant speak through us in council.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: And we do that, we do the green breath, which is the transformational breath work, breathing, breathing for a long time, 72 minutes to be exact, with the plant.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it just goes into these deep places in the green breath.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: We walk the labyrinth, we have a whole labyrinth thing that we do.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: We so we do all these different things throughout three days, and these are and we're calling these plant initiations.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: The reason it's called an initiation is fully speaking, initiations were bringing young people into the tribe.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like when they became in their teens or late teens, or in that time period where you move out of childhood into adulthood.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so traditionally speaking, many tribal peoples, the initiations actually took a year, and then they would culminate in a great big huge ceremony and feast at the end.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, and what that was all about was being initiated into the tribe, being initiated into your place within the collective or within the tribe, and how to do that with all the diversity that comes along with the collective and to live sanely, to live sanely within the collective.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: So in the United States, or I would say the Western world for sure, there's hardly any initiations going on at all.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: And even tribe tribally here, there's probably a handful, but not many.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: And most of the elders have passed on, and the initiation process hasn't continued.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the plants in their evolution, because they're continuing to evolve, and they always precede us in our evolution, by the way, which is exciting.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: So in their evolution, they're stepping up to serve as the elder to initiate us into what it means to be truly human, uh, living sanely within the collective.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's what initiation is, and that's what these plants are doing.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're initiating us because that's what makes intact cultures is when you've been initiated into the collective, so that in all your diversity, in all your diversity, Lindsay, all your difference, you can live and in your place within that collective and feel really good about it, because only you can bring those kind of gifts that you carry.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: So these plants are so that's what an initiation is.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we're doing initiations every year.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: I've been doing them here in Vermont since 2010.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the first one we did here was Angelica, and we're coming full circle.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: Angelica's this year again.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a lot of what goes on here on this land.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of ceremony because this the whole thing is in a ceremonial context.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: And and so when I'm harvesting the plants, like harvesting the Angelica, actually, we started that last year because I wanted to harvest for making tincture and all of that.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's all done again.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're praying with the plants, we're being in ceremony with the plants, we're treating them as these, as the elders that are gonna, they're the initiators.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: The plants is the initiator.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the facilitator, I'm the one that gets it together.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the one that says, hey, we're gonna do this.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: Come on.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: And but the plants are the initiator.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: So that's who the people come here and they're working with.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's how they get here, is these plants are calling them in.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're calling them in.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, like I said, now these plants are broadening their scope.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's still lots of personal healing because we all need to be, we got stuff, we got trauma, and so we're we we need to heal it.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the plants are helping us do that, but they're also help, they're starting to work on the bigger picture too, and how because on this kind of I was just about to use the word global, which I guess I could say global because it's a pre-global thing right now, anyway, is that we've got a lot to heal.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a lot of healing that needs to be done, and I think it needs to be done relatively quickly.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure how many more years we got to try to work this thing out.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's like to me, war.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, oh my God, this is so archaic.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: We're still doing this.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's how it feels to me.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, totally.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't there another way to work this out?
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think the plants have the answer, but I'm not sure that maybe I could do an initiation in Washington, D.C., but I don't know about that.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I might not survive it, but yeah.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, so yes, so this we grow a lot of gardens here.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: We we live with the land.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just two days ago, it was before the yesterday it rained all day, but before that, Mark loves to get the mushrooms in the spring.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: So he went out.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Oh, the morels must be out.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: He came back with he came back with the black morels are now, and then the yellow morels come next.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: And he came back with a big bag full of black morels that's been in our breakfast egg scramble for the last two mornings, and so the leaks are up now, and so putting the leaks in.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's just so I really like to do wild food foraging.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: I like I like the wild plants in because they're so nutrient dense and rich.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need much because there's potent dandelion greens in the salad.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so so yeah, that's kind of what's going on with the land here nowadays, is and it's our home and business.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it's that interesting dance of not trying to work all the time.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: I know you know this, Scott, because you're really busy working, working in your gardens and all that kind of stuff.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just so how do you find that balance?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm Mark and I turned 75 this year, so we're not spring chickens anymore.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've now officially somebody was saying to me, Oh, ages, age 50 to 75, those are the wisdom years.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: You don't get to be an elder till 75.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, oh, so it's official now?
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so, but we're both looking at it, going, you know what?
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: We're not 50 anymore.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we're the roads getting, we're looking down the road, and the road's looking a little shorter now.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, how do we want to spend the next 10 to 15 years of our life?
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: How do we want to do that?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I I would love it if there were young people that wanted to come here and because and Mark is saying, he says there it's a lot of it's a lot to do here.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of it, there's a lot to maintain, to maintain it in the way that we feel is a good way to to be with the land.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: You really need to pay attention and you need to you need to work with the land, and stuff comes up and it's okay.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: How are we gonna and so we consult with the land, we consult with nature, we don't just go willy-nilly do stuff.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: We pay attention.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do we do this in a good way?
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that takes time, effort, energy, and marks the back's getting stiffer all the time.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's just yeah, I would love to be able to.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've been doing this for 40 plus years, and I would love to just I would love to just pass so much of it on.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm thrilled that teenagers are coming here to help me in my garden right now.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thrilled.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: It feels to me like, oh good, that's really the younger generation.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not your generation, it's the young generation.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: No, totally so that feels really good to me.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, I'm kind of I'm excited that they're gonna be here and I get to spend some time with them.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: And in not in the I I know what it's like to you get you're getting there to what it's like to raise teenagers.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you gotta tread lightly and not push them too bad too far, but just a little bit.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, that's what's happening here.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just hoping that that it can continue in the same way that we've been with this land for a while now.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_04: I love that.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_04: And yeah, just going to that idea of the young people, we would love to ask you what your childhood was like and if you can see the sort of breadcrumbs that led you on your path, or if you have any really specific memories of the plants for you at a young age.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: I have some very specific memories, yeah.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: I was one of the lucky ones that had grandparents that lived, they lived in the eastern hills of Kentucky, the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and we're talking that very down home.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that they neither they didn't know how to drive a car.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: Neither one of them, they didn't drive a car.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't know how to drive.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: And they lived on the same piece of land for, I don't know, a long time.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: My grandfather, when he in his younger years, was worked in the coal mines.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: And and my granny was, she was, she, it turns out she was a plant person.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: And and I sort of knew that because she had plants everywhere, all inside the house, tons of plants in the house, outside, plants everywhere.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: And in the south, you have your main meal at noontime.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: So she basically would be in the kitchen cooking and doing everything, and then we'd everybody'd come in and eat this great big giant meal in the middle of the day, and then she'd have to clean it all up and be in the kitchen.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so by about two or two o'clock, three o'clock in the afternoon, she'd come outside and she'd be like picking and pruning and doing all kinds of stuff with her plants, but she'd be talking the whole time.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I one day I'll never forget, I went up and I said, Granny, who are you talking to?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: And she said in her very Kentucky accent, said, Plants are just like people, they need friends too.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Oh, so in my young beingness, I was like, the message that went in is, oh, you're supposed to talk to your plants.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you talk to them and you have this relationship, and oh, that's what happens.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what I thought.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so as I got older and started to get into herbs and all that kind of thing, I just assumed everybody did that.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then I found out that no, everybody doesn't do that.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, when you start saying you talk to plants and this and that, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing, people's eyeballs start to roll into the backside of their head and you start to see the whites of their eyes.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's oh, oh, oh, people don't actually don't do that.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I got labeled airy fairy in my herbal work, which is so weird because I am so not airy fairy.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I got five planets and earth signs.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: I am so grounded to the earth, and I'm almost feel like I'm stuck to the earth sometimes.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: And but it's so odd because I'm not really like that at all.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very earthy.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's funny.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: But at my grandparents' farm, there was a smoke house.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: This was like stepping back about a hundred years in time.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: We walked to the general, one general store, which was on the other side of the river.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was called River Kentucky.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: You wrote them a letter, Granny and Grand Dad, Preston, River, Kentucky.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: I swear to God, that's how you wrote a letter.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the one general store was on the other side of the river with a swinging footbridge to cross this very wide river.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: So you would hear the train coming and it would whistle, and that's they didn't even stop the train.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: They just threw mailbags off the train.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so then you'd start walking to the general store where there was a mail call.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: I swear this was my childhood.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a barber chair in one little section.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: There was a dry goods section where you went and you bought your shoes and all that stuff.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: Then there was where you bought your food, and there was a big pot belly stove in the middle.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: And on Saturday nights, you took your guitar there and played.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: I swear this was like a whole nother place in time.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I feel like I stepped through a portal.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: I would go there in the summer, my summertimes, and I loved being there.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: I loved it.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, it was like I didn't want to be anywhere else.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until years later, I my mom and I went there.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: My mom was of the generation, get me out of here, help me to lose my hillbilly accent.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: I want to go to college.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: I want out of here as quick as I can get out of here.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: That was her.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we went back together to visit.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: My grandparents had both passed away by then.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: My Aunt Loretta, my mother's older sister, was living there.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it was springtime.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I said to my mom, I said, Oh, let's go out and pick some plants to put in the salad.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so we did.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: She agreed, and we went out and we did that.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we came back.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: And my Aunt Loretta said, Oh, there's sourgass and there's white top and all the common names that they had for the same plants.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Oh, then she said, Oh, mommy and I used to pick those.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I went, light bulbs.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: Boom, bang, bang, bang, and my aunt.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's the first I ever knew that anybody said to me that my grandmother knew all these plants.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: She had seven children all at home.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: She and my Aunt Loretta was there was a big storm.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: Kid was coming out, was being born, and the big storm and the bridge was dead, and oh done, and she had to run and try to find my granddad and blah, blah, blah.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: And oh, the midwife couldn't get there, and blah, blah, blah.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: And my Aunt Loretta, she was nine, caught the baby.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is how they lived.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so I got to be around this.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just, it was like a jump, it was for me, I feel like it was a jump start into all that I do.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I got ideas about being with the land, and and it was just what they did.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't know anything different.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: That it's how they lived.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I remembered they had this pawpaw tree, and it was right next to the smokehouse.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it was, it kind of the branches kind of grew down.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so I could get underneath there, and I was like in my own little World.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knew where I was.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: They couldn't see where I was.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: They couldn't see me underneath there.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't have toys.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have dolls and things like that.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I would make with sticks and leaves and little bits of fruit and all that.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: I would make so I had a whole imaginary world that happened underneath the pawpaw tree.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_00: I loved that pawpaw tree.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so it became my like, oh pawpaw tree, I love you so much.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: It became one of my, and this was I was young.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: I was really young when that happened.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, that was a big part of my childhood.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's beautiful.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: Really, I think it's directly related to who I am and what I do now was my grandparents.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it sounds like it made such an impression on such a strong positive impression on you to see.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_03: And it sounds too like with your mom wanting to leave that world and that life, you were like recognizing the beauty in it, like looking because you weren't maybe raised there and could see all the beautiful ways of your grandparents.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's just it's so interesting to see how different individuals relate to these sorts of things and what really draws them.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_03: And so always nice hearing people talk about their memories of their grandparents.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_03: And I just I love that.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean to me, my grandmother was she walked on water as far as I was concerned.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: She was like it.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_04: Can you can you think of ways that your mother maintained that earth connection?
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_04: Well, we always had a garden.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: My my parents always grew a garden, and I both my parents came from Kentucky.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: My father was more northern Kentucky, but they they did have they came from parents that grew gardens.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember my dad loved big boy tomatoes.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: We had to grow big boy tomatoes, and my mom would just slice tomatoes, and you just eat a sliced tomato on your plate and sprinkle a little salt on it, and that was your vegetable.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and so yeah, green beans.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: I can, yeah, they always had gardens.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember we even raised chickens at one point because traumatic actually, this memory, but we I know we raised chickens because uh the our dog decided to kill one of them.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: Oh God, and my dad did something so weird.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: He ugh, I don't even know if I should repeat it.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: He tied this dead chicken around the dog's neck.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: It did keep the dog from chasing chickens.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: Dog never wanted to go near chickens anymore.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: But but I read but it went back to I remember at my grandparents when they had raised chickens, and oh, there's gonna be chicken for the dinner.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: What happened?
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: My granddad went out and got the chicken and chopped its head off and it jumped up and ran around because that's what happens.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: Their nervous system uh doesn't shut down quite yet.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: They jump up and they run around, and I'm like the whole thing, oh, running around like a chicken with a set cut off.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's what they do.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: So so there was we lived, we lived, it was a suburbs, but it was country around it too.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: There were big fields around and there was woods behind us, and so I'm not gonna say she completely dissed it, but she wanted more than what life there could give her.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: She she went to a one-room schoolhouse.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, gotcha.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: When she got to be high school age, they sent her to the town and she boarded in the town so she could go to high school.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: High school where she lived.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_04: Have you ever read Hannah Culture by Wendell Berry?
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_04: You have read it.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: It just reminds me of some of what you're talking about.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: So my childhood was very influenced by my grandparents, but I I always remember wanting to be outside, wanting to be in nature.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: When I was a teenager, those years kind of like, but even even after I went to college, and then I was part of the back to the land movement.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: In my early 20s, I was all part of the back to the land movement, and we went and we moved to western New York and grew our phone food.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I we had we had one time we had 75 chickens.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, yeah.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: We raised kids, we had horses, we had a milk cow.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: We did the whole nine yards.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: We were like so hardcore.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: My husband at the time, we turned the hot water heater on when his mother came to visit.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: We were hardcore.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: We were cloth diapers the whole nine yards.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was like aye.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_04: Oh how about your path with herbs, with like medicinal herbs specifically?
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_04: Was that through that?
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Or yes, it was when we moved to the country, when we did all that, it was we were way into big brother's not taking care of us.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: We can take care of ourselves.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was like that, getting a little attitude about it.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, part of that was you had to take care of your health.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: And those days, we're talking 19, let me think, 72, three, a long time ago, and there were no herb books on the shelf.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: There was maybe two: Jethro Closs, Back to Eden, and what was oh, Dr.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: Christopher, I think.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: But you it you you walk into someplace now and you could you've got a choice of 50 books, yeah, or more.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: And there were no herb books.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if you tried to get one to try to help you identify, forget it.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: The pictures were so bad that you couldn't.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it was really uh I know this sounds grandiose or strange or something, but we really had to learn on our own.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we learned by the the good thing of where we lived when we were back to the land, as the Amish had moved in, and we had Amish neighbors that helped.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because they knew.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we just started with simple things, dandelion.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: We had a bunch of elderberries, and and so it was really like paying attention.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: We paid a lot of attention to what do the animals eat.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: What does the dog eat when it's uh we paid attention on that level?
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: Don't eat something that the animals won't eat, don't eat berries that the birds don't eat.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: Don't do that.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: We just really, it was really that.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was really, we really learned by being exposed and doing it.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_03: That's amazing.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_04: Are there any really clear memories you have that kind of led you more into the plant spirit?
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds like you've had that from the time you were young, but I did, but I didn't really, it wasn't until I was older that I started to be like, oh, there's something happening here.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think when you're a kid, it's just kind of natural.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: Just comes in, it's just kind of, oh, this is what happens.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know how your children are, they're like, yeah, probably seafairies and all that kind of stuff.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: But when I got older and I was doing my own gardens and all that kind of stuff, I remember making this.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: I had moved from New York and I and now I was in more the Hudson Valley part of New York.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: I had moved from western New York and I made a spiral garden, and it was just in a spiral shape, and it was mounded, so it was like a raised bed, but it was a great big spiral, and planted all my herbs and everything in this spiral garden.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: And things started to happen in that garden that I couldn't explain.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: Right in my peripheral vision, like where you can stretch your eyeball, but not quite.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: But there'd be all this movement, and I would almost had jump and look to see who was there, and there'd be nothing there.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then I would then I started to see these like well, how can I describe it?
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: I like a gossamer kind of whitish, shimmerish thing.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: I started to see these in the garden, and I was like, What's that?
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I I didn't know what was going on and what I was seeing and what was happening and the feelings I was getting and the sensations, all that.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, what's going on?
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I at that point the Findhorn garden books were available.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I read the Findhorn.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: I actually read everything I'd get my hands on of that genre.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: Findhorn, the guy in, oh, is he he's from Australia, I think.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh god, what's his name?
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, he used to write about elementals and nature spirits and all that.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: But again, there wasn't a lot out there, but I read what I could and I said, oh, nature spirits.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so what's that all about?
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was really because I knew these plants were more than their chemical constituents.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, the chemical constituents are amazing and they have a chemical effect in the body.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and isn't that fabulous?
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: And there's way more.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: And when I really got it, oh, there's so much more going on here.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know about that part.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's the part I'm curious about.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I was a trained herbalist.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_00: I know the chemical constituents of things, okay, but everybody else knows that too.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to know that.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know what else these plants are all about because they're incredible.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: They're these magnanimous beings that are amazing.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so look at your experience, Lindsay.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_00: They knew exactly what you needed and brought you in to those two experiences.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's yeah, herbs, you probably think herbs are cool and all that, but it's not your it's not your main boogie, it's not your main gig that you do in life as far as work goes and all that, but you were drawn in because that was part of your next piece on your journey was to do the ancestor work, which is big work.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_04: No, absolutely.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's yeah, I think it's so true.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_04: They were such healers for me.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_04: And we also just interviewed a different person, Dan Kittridge, who who's doing all of his work is specifically around food, but he just had such a similar message that plants are beings and there's so much more.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that, yeah, I think for people that are just having this bit of a paradigm shift around plants.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_04: I wonder, and I know you have your co-creative partnership with nature program, which I joined this year.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_04: I'm excited to start digging into that.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_04: I know I when you joined, I was like, oh, oh, I'm somebody local.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_04: It's one of those, it's like we communicated last year about it.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_04: And I was like, I just can't bear to spend more time on the computer or something like that.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_04: But also the beauty of technology and being able to share these things more widely, there is, I can really see with my work how powerful that has been.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_04: So I do try to not feel entirely negative about being on a screen or something like that.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_04: But I wonder, is there a just kind of one practice?
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_04: And I know that it could be as it could be really simple, but what would you tell someone who doesn't have any relationship?
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_04: That's not true.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_04: They can't say they don't have any relationship, but really feels like they don't have any relationship with plants.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_04: What's the starting?
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's very simple.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_00: It is so basic.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we all do it.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_00: Breathe.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: Breathe.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: Once you breathe consciously with the plants and you realize that's where your breath's coming from, there's no other oxygen on this planet.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_00: Trees, plants, and sea vegetables.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's where all of our oxygen comes from is plants and trees and sea vegetables.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: So when you walk out the door in the morning and you are there for sunrise, because wouldn't it be nice to have your first breath, get to be with the rising sun?
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_00: Why not?
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you say, You got that nice big white pine right there, and you're like, and of course, you can smell that piney smell, and you breathe that in, as oh, breathing in the outbreath of pine, and then you breathe out, and pine breathes in your outbreath, and it's this cycle of breath.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: So then you bring this into this conscious awareness of wow, I'm the breath of another being.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, yeah.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's intimate.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_03: There's that merging again.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's the merge.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: We're all ready in relationship because we breathe.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_00: Simple.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, and yet when you bring it into consciousness of what's really happening, incredibly profound.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_04: I'm really excited.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_04: Start where you're at.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm really excited to be digging into this course and seeing what the experience is for people that maybe don't live.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_04: I'm guessing there must be people that joined us that live in cities and don't have lots of.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_04: There's a lot that live in cities all over the world.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_04: And they're yearning for it.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that's that's our first episode.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_04: We tell our own story.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_04: And and there was a moment for me where it just as soon as I saw a lot of people that were connected to the earth.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_04: That was it was a group of community gardeners when I was in college, but it was like I just had this aha moment of, oh, I want what they have.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_04: And there was no going back after that.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_04: And so I feel like this is the beauty of this, any of this work is once you feel it, I don't think it's that easy to get disconnected again if people have had these periods of disconnection earlier in life.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: That that's the thing, is like having the experience of it.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because once you have the experience of it, you can't take that away.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's here.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_00: If it's all up here, if it's all just theory and you're just gonna read about it or hear somebody else talk about it or something like that, then it still is it's not, it doesn't land.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: It lands in your body when you have the experience of it.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_00: Then it's here, it's part of your living body.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so the the body of the earth or the body of the plant, which is of the earth, once it arrives here, it doesn't go away.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't leave.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I really think having deep intimate experience with the land, with the earth, with the plants, with the water, is how we come back home to ourselves.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because we are a part of nature.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not, this is not rocket science.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's we we actually somewhere in here there's a memory of it, and we're just trying to wake up to that memory.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like we haven't, we all have indigenous ancestors somewhere along the line.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_00: Our ancestors came from the earth, and so it's there.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: We just have to remember it, we have to wake up to the remembering it.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't feel I don't think that we're like completely void of it.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's just that we've fallen into amnesia, and that's not bad, awful, evil.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's just what happened, and now it's time to wake up.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now's the time.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's so inspiring, and I think people are often surprised by how accessible it can be.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_03: Because, like you said, because it is our collective sort of because that experience is there, it's right under the surface, it's with us all the time, it's living in us, but to bring consciousness to it can be such a profound sort of opening for a new possibility.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_03: So that's all super inspiring.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_03: I'm wondering if you could have had any bit of advice earlier in your path.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_03: Is there anything that comes to mind as something that would have been great advice to receive from an elder?
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_03: Or from anyone, I suppose.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_00: Are you getting so much?
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_04: I guess maybe I would say because we are hoping that this we're hoping that this podcast calls in the people that are feeling they're a little bit on their path, they're having some opening towards a different way of life where they do feel that connection.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_04: And and it sounds like you didn't really have a big stretch of time where you felt much disconnection, but yeah, what kind of advice might you give someone that is is on their path and they're feeling inspired by this conversation, but maybe they're feeling unsure of where to begin or where to go.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_00: What's that?
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_00: Breathe.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, breathe.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's something you can do yourself, and that's easy because you're gonna do it all the time.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: I would just don't be too hard on yourself.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's something that I see a lot with people who come and people are really hard on themselves, as if they come here and they're like, Well, I can't I communicate with plants.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, okay, let me just tell you how long this took for me to come to this point in my life.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: So don't be too hard on yourself.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's and the thing to remember really is these plants, they got your back.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_00: They want you to succeed.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is it's not like people, quite frankly.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: Plants really want, and we've been in this co-evolution with plants since the beginning.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_00: We've plants have always preceded their animal counterparts in evolution.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, angiosperms evolved before mammals did.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: Mammals needed something to eat.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: They needed angiosperms, which are flowering plants.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's happening right now, as far as I can tell, is the evolution in the plant world is of a spiritual nature, you might say, or at least raising of consciousness, raising the consciousness level to jumping it up a notch to the next level so that we can start to remember more.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at the evolution around in the 60s, for sure, definitely solidly by the 70s, plants were really starting to be in the realm of opening doors of perception, psychotropic plants, and all of that.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then there was flower essences, and but it was all a much of the big push with plants, biointelligence, people writing all kinds of books about biointelligence, and but writing books about and really beginning to have the experiences of plants in the bigger realm, not just the chemical constituents.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I look at that and say, oh, the plants are in their evolution, they're in that evolution of a spiritual nature.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's their that's part of these initiations.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_00: The plants stepped up to serve as the elder.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_00: So they're so it's to me that is a level of consciousness raising, of going to the next level.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: The plants are doing that, they're bringing that to people.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that means that if it's like it's always happened that they evolved prior to us, if we just pay attention to them on this level and be guided by them, then that means that we're right on the cusp of our spiritual evolution, of our raising of consciousness to the next level, which I hope that means we stop destroying the planet and each other in the process.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm excited.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: Is that what you asked?
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, oh, yeah.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like if an elder could have said that to me when I was 25, I'd be like, yeah, man, I'm on board.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: I was anyway, but I would have really gotten on board.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, so I feel like that this is a very challenging time to be alive, but it's an extremely exciting time to be alive because we are on that cusp.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: And some would say, Oh, it's the sixth grade extinction or whatever, and the next great extinction and whatever, and blah, blah, blah.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, okay, I could moan and groan about that one.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or I could also look at every single new iteration on this planet.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: The next iteration has always been more beautiful and more complex and more incredible.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:04:40
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's what the next one's gonna be here, too.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna, I guess that humans are gonna be a part of it because there's this whole, well, there's a whole nother piece that we haven't even talked about, which is keystone species.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: So what's happening right now is that in some arenas, a keystone species is a species that has a profound effect upon its ecosystem compared to the abundance of that particular species.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what a keystone species is.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: It has a profound effect, and there's lots of them, like wolves are a keystone species.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_00: So what's coming forward now is that humans have been kind of the opposite of a keystone species, because it has there's the tendency is to take more than you give back.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so anyway, but the movement is to if we step into what we're like supposedly doing on this planet, which is being good stewards, good being the keyword, a good steward, and that if we really take up our role as a good steward, being a part of nature and not being separate from it and not treating it like a commodity, but treating it more like the life giving.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: beingness that it is, that we can transition into, they're actually calling it hyper, hyper keystone species.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that we can have a profound positive effect on the planet as we move into being a keystone species.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the kind of the latest in the evolutionary rap about what it what does it mean that we're just the plants are just preceding us.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what is it that we're what what are we evolving into?
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_00: And what some circles would say now is we're evolving into a hyper because there's a lot of us.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how many billions of us are there now a lot.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_00: Keystone species that once we reach that consciousness level, then we can have a profoundly positive effect upon the planet.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm heading for.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_04: I feel like that's really I feel like your advice is really inspiring because it feels somehow soothing to know that the plants are leading us, that we don't it's like something around we don't have to figure it out all out ourselves.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_04: We just need to listen.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_04: We just need to tune in and that feels yeah just really I don't know I also got goosebumps when you were saying that because it just it does feel like it's a possibility that's being open to us if we can just yeah if we can just hear it and see it and be with it, breathe with it, all of those things.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah that's amazing Pam.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_04: I feel like we could keep talking to you forever.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_04: No we could talk forever but the good news is we live near each other so we should I would love to see you sometime soon.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_04: And I just want to ask is there any do you want to share a website or where can people find you and find out more about your work?
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah okay yeah my website is wakeuptoNature.com just all one big wakeuptoNature.com.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my website that's where you can kind of find out what's going on.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_00: I also am part of the organization of nature evolutionaries.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_00: I co-founded that back in 2013 and we do a lot of educational stuff around nature and that's natureevolutionaries.com that's that website.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_04: Amazing thank you so much this has just been such a pleasure and it does just give me so much inspiration.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_04: And I know that everyone who listens to this is going to go out into the world and breathe differently and just feel how there's no separation there's no disconnection.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_04: It's really it we're connected whether you feel that really consciously or not it's there.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_04: So it just feels really exciting.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah it instills hope for me.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for doing all you're welcome.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well thanks for inviting me I was I was excited when I heard from you about this because I was like oh this sounds like a fun thing to do.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_04: Okay amazing thank you so much.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you for listening to this episode of Homestead and Heal.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_04: If you loved it please help us spread the word by subscribing to this podcast and leaving us a review.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_03: For more information about our work visit homesteadandheal.net we're wishing you the life of your dreams one that feels deeply rooted fully alive and connected to the earth beneath your feet