Nature Evolutionaries

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/

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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.

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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/

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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.

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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 

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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.

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Lauren Valle, O.N.E. Vision Council Member,  shares about her experiences as an environmental activist in her 20’s and her evolutionary journey to become a Sacred Earth Activist, and the importance of the internal source of activism.

The source of our activism is equally as important as the action itself.  Although fear, anger, outrage etc. can certainly serve us at times, action initiating from our connection within nature is an effective and sustainable model for environmental change.

Lauren is a healer and community herbalist dedicated to bringing the healing powers of plant medicine and nature to her Cape Cod community. She is the founder of Kinship Herbal and Holistic Healing. Prior to founding Kinship she worked in the field of ecological engineering, working to build ecological wastewater and water remediation systems around the world based on the intelligent design of nature. She received a B.A. from Columbia University and during her college years and early twenties she worked as an environmental activist focused on issues of environmental justice, fossil fuel consumption, and natural resource depletion. She has also lived and worked on two organic farms and has a longstanding interest in permaculture and whole system design. She is deeply committed to a mission of visioning and creating a healthy future for all through reconnecting to the earth and our biological heritage.  She currently lives on her homestead with her husband where they raise chickens, grows an abundance of good food, and many of the medicinal herbs she uses her in practice.   

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Terry Mock, of Archangel Ancient Tree Archive,  shares his story of taking action for the world’s most important old-growth trees. Terry has worked for decades with David Milarch, as they’ve cloned the champion trees of the world — the largest, the hardiest, the ones that have survived millennia and were most resilient to climate change-- before they are gone.

Part of their mission is to reforest the Earth with the offspring of these ancient trees and archive their genetics in living forest libraries around the world.

These champion trees are excellent at sequestering carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen, and providing beneficial aerosols and medicines. They are essentially a global warming solution.

 Archangel has successfully cloned some of the world’s largest and oldest trees — among them coast redwoods and giant sequoias. They have also grown seedlings from the oldest tree in the world, the bristlecone pine Methuselah. Many of these cloned seedlings have been planted in climate compatible areas and there is even a “super grove” of clones in Oregon from over 70 individual champion coast redwoods and giant sequoias.

Since the 1980’s Terry has developed a variety of residential, commercial, industrial, and recreational land development projects which employed innovative sustainability technologies, including a specialty in native plant preservation and restoration techniques.

In 1997 Terry co-founded the Florida Champion Tree Project and in 1998 was appointed as a founding Executive Board member of the USDA South Florida Community-Urban Resources Partnership.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Terry completed a three-year term as Director of the International Society of Arboriculture and stepped down as the Founding Executive Director of the non-profit Champion Tree Project International to become certified in permaculture design, establish Tree of Life Sustainable Development Consulting, work with Sustainable Land Development Today magazine, as an Editorial Board Director and SLDT Newsletter Editor, and co-found Sustainable Land Development Initiative.

Terry is now developing a sustainable home and permaculture eco-forestry research, education, and recreational project overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the largest remaining old-growth forest on the southern Oregon coast.  

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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. 

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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.

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