Here is the play list for our first ever program of Forest Halls Celtic, slightly updated for current airing. Episode 1 offers the playful natural magic and beauty of springtime, a ninth century Irish poem, and Jane Valencia’s retelling of the Irish myth, “Airmid’s Herbal Cloak.” Hear harp in the music of Ann Heymann, Mary Macmaster and Patsy Seddon (in Clan Alba), and Shelley Phillips (in Orison).
01:21 Paul Machlis – The Magic Horse
05:01 Bonnie Rideout – The Hen’s March
12:03 Natalie MacMaster – Paddy Le Blanc’s Set
18:15 “Sunshine Through my Window” – Irish, 9th c. poem
20:02 Steve Baughman – Dans Keff Avec
22:28 Cíana – An Dro in Em / Breton March / Bus Stop
27:25 Anúna – Home and the Heartland
31:33 “Airmid’s Herbal Cloak”- storytelling by Jane Valencia
Music: Chris Conway – Airmid’s Herbal Cloak
38:12 Kim Angelis – Frogsong
43:07 Ann Heymann – Hawk of Ballyshannon
45:00 Eve Goodman – Dacw ‘Nghariad
49:20 Clan Alba – Canan Nan Gaidheal
53:36 Orison – The Butterfly
The Pacific Women’s Herbal Conference is a magical gathering of women and girls of all ages. For a whole weekend (and longer, if you wish to attend the amazing pre-conference workshops) you can explore the wonderful, welcoming world of the plants and their medicine, and receive the medicine of one another with laughter, dancing, delicious food and nourishing infusions, heart-connecting song, and women’s wisdom — all in a beautiful forest and shore location on Vashon Island. The Conference takes place on Sept. 20~22, 2019.
As a nature instructor, I happen to work at this location every week, and let me assure you, this 400 acre location (Camp Sealth) is a place where magic happens. Perhaps Eagle sings overhead, or Otter lets you glimpse him heading to the beach, or Deer bask in the moonlight. Perhaps the trees lean in to whisper a message especially for you. Perhaps you find a wishing stone, a listening stone, or feel the mist rising off the Salish Sea to welcome you into your ocean nature. This enchantment and more opens to those who come together with intention, loving hearts, curiosity, playfulness, generosity, and gratitude. And that is what the Pacific Women’s Herbal Conference brings together from start to finish.
Here are the workshops I’m teaching:
Jane Valencia with the small dragon, Wings
Hildegard of Bingen’s Herbal Energetics for the Family Herbalist
The medicine of Hildegard of Bingen,12th century German physician, visionary, abbess, author, and saint, relied on an understanding of our bodies as gardens, and the work of healing as tending a garden In this introduction to a practical, compassionate, nature-based healing practice, we’ll adventure in the basics of herbal energetics to better support our family members and ourselves.
Tree Secrets: A Walk into a Pacific Northwest Ogham
In the early medieval Irish Ogham, or “tree alphabet,” each letter embodies a particular tree or plant spirit. In this Celtic-infused workshop we’ll pass time in the company of trees, both those named in the Ogham and our native trees. We’ll explore firsthand their energy, teachings, folklore, and medicine uses by way of our senses and connection, and begin creating our own Pacific Northwest ogham. If the trees are willing, we’ll even craft ogham sticks. Expect sweet enchantment and deep wild wisdom!
As an herbalist and practitioner of what she calls “Deer Medicine Ways,” Jane Valencia loves welcoming women and girls into the magic of the green world that surrounds us. Through forest and garden learning adventures, writings, and illustration, she helps the herbal curious to get down and dirty getting to know the plants and their healing ways and to discover what the plants reveal about our truest nature. An instructor with the Vashon Wilderness Program, Jane is the creator/ mentor of VWP’s herbal girls camps. Sacred plant medicine and traditional Western herbalism are her well-spring. Jane is author-illustrator of Paloma and Wings: a Kids Herbal Comic.
Find out more about about Jane’s herbal and healing ways offerings, including writings on her blog, please visit: SingingDeerHealing.com
I’ve started a personal library! It’s called the Greenwood Library in Forest Halls. The first book I scanned into the collection was the children’s herbal fantasy, Wise Child, (wise woman Juniper also plays the harp!) and the first book loaned is Flowers and Fables: a Welsh Herbal (both pictured here). You’re invited to browse the library. I’ll be adding many more items over the coming weeks — so easy to do with the app on my phone! Loans are available to on-islanders and other local folk. If you live out of the area (as many of you do), I hope this library will point you to some of the great resources that are available out in the world.
First book entered into the system, first book loaned. Bookmarks are serve as reminders that these are library loans.
My 11-year-old self is in heaven. As a sixth-grader abandoned at the start of the school year by my until-then best friends (who, during the previous summer, had embarked on a mission to become popular), I deepened my friendship with the girl across the street. We spent many recesses, lunch hours, and after school hours reading and imagining together, and much of that time was in our school library. My best friend Jenny had been helping the librarian with the circulation cards. When Jenny shared this part of her world with me and I started helping too, well, that opened the door to a new kind of awesomeness!
With my library, with its online catalog linked to the global world of books, my twenties self is in heaven too. The jobs I loved most as a young adult were the years I worked as a Library Specialist in Interlibrary Services at the Stanford University’s Green Library. My work involved tracking down and retrieving books and making photocopies of articles from the myriad campus libraries and from Green Library’s mysterious stacks and labyrinthine regions (some so little used and remote that you had to snap on the lights when you entered some areas, and snap them off when you left).
And quite happy too, thank you very much, is my inner dragon and voracious lifelong learner self who has always loved books, gathering information, and prowling the long shadowed corridors of the anima mundi, nudging open the compact shelving of the heart with secret words, and discovering the hidden treasures that nestle within each one of us and which glimmer and ring with the true nature that is the world.
It seems that with the opening of this library, I’m saying yes to my imagination. So here is fair warning to you, and an invitation. With the opening of this library, I dedicate this blog to fully expressing my magical life and peculiar take on this world, and to welcoming you into a story of myth and medicine, true nature and kindness. This walk through the woods and words, however, isn’t a one-directional path. It, I hope, is a conversation, a polyphonic and polyrhythmic musical improvisation, a reciprocal sharing of resources in terms of tales and imaginings and illuminations, such as is enjoyed in book and article form by the research libraries for whom I once served. I look forward to hearing your stories, your ways of perception, the heart of the world as it expresses within your singular and beautiful dragon nature.
Wonders at the Heart of our Nature – art by Jane Valencia
How is magic and sweet surprise alive and well in your world? How do you live it out in your daily life with family, friends, community, and with nature? How does your unique take on life and your way of being nourish the children, help heal culture, and better our world? How do you experience yourself as Nature, as a child of the earth, imagination, and the Sacred? How can you and I grow our magical nature — our medicine selves — in service to living out our responses to questions such as these? What are your dragon nature questions?
These wonderings are the waters from which this blog springs.
I invite you to record your musings in the comments box below.
