For 18 months, in 1991-93, I lived in a village on a ridge on the western side of the Arun River, in northeastern Nepal. The village was a hard five-day walk to the nearest road and then an eighteen-hour bus ride to Kathmandu or an equally hard two-day walk to an airstrip to catch a Twin Otter flight to Kathmandu. This was before long before cell phones and WIFI. Maybe there was email I could access when I went to Kathmandu, which was every three months or so. I don’t remember.

In Hedangna, I had an Indian fountain pen, which I loved, and had purchased for maybe $1 at a store in Kathmandu, and several jars of black ink. And I had lots of hard covered black notebooks that I could find in one bookstore in Thamel. I organized the notebooks by topics. One was for transcribing interviews. In another I wrote observations from my days wandering the village. I had one for personal feelings and reflections. I was there trying to understand the villagers’ relationship to the land. And so I also tried dividing the notebooks by subject: one for politics, one for farming practices and trade, another for shamanic journeys and village rituals.

Despite the labels, written on a strip of surgical tape I stick to the binding, the distinctions never stayed intact. Observations from hauling firewood with a group of women became longing for home. Conversations with Chute Rai about the land dispute that involved half the village spilled into a detailed description of the ritual for new rice or reflections from something I’d read in one of the books I’d brought to the village. Books carried in a metal trunk by a porter I’d hired in Khandbari and now had lined against the floor of the small room where I slept. These reflections then spilled into a translation of the shaman’s song, which was supposed to be in another notebook, but were here because I couldn’t find the other at the time. I kept striving for organization, yet it kept eluding me, a fact I bemoaned again and again when later, I was home trying to sort through my notes to determine what, in fact, I had learned.

It sounds so exotic now, as if I’m sharing this as a badge of honor. I’m not. It wasn’t easy. My days usually began with me doubting myself, wondering yet again, why I’d chosen to come to this village of 1500 people, and whether I would ever really understand what fieldwork was and the right way to do it, let alone the right way to organize my notes. I doubted, always, what I was learning. There was always so much more to understand and to know.

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The day then unfolded as they did, with a chance encounter, perhaps, that led me to join a group planting rice or hauling firewood or digging a field for millet or harvesting potatoes or rice. Or a conversation around a fire, perhaps drinking jad (millet beer). All of which I would try to capture at the end of the day in my room, by the small candle lantern I brought, in one of the notebooks. And, so often, a day that started with sharp homesickness, would end with incredible gratitude to be here, unable to imagine anywhere else in the world I would rather be.

I’m sharing this now because suddenly I realize how rare it is. To be on my own, the only outsider, living in a village of around 1500 people who had lived their entire lives in this place. Except for the handful of schoolteachers, usually Chetris from further south, there were very few people who weren’t Yamphu Rai living in the village. One other outsider had lived there for three months before me, studying the language. Otherwise, I was the first to live there.

When I was there, I could write and receive letters. But the mail was unreliable and I maybe received five during my entire stay. I was married. My husband, who stayed back in the US, and I corresponded when I reached Kathmandu, but for the most part we were each in our own worlds.

And so, day to day, there was never any world I was translating my experience to or comparing it with. It was just me, experiencing what I experienced. Sure, I compared myself and my work with that of other anthropologists working in Nepal or elsewhere at the time, wondering who’s stay was more remote or more challenging or more meaningful or more fun. But the comparison was a reflection of my own insecurities, compared against my own imagination.

I had 18 months, okay, say 16 with the times I went to Kathmandu, living inside my own questions, exploring them as I did, never quite sure it was the right way, always sure there must be some elusive right way until finally, toward the end of my stay, I realized, maybe this was the point, that there was no right way, there was no complete story, there was only what was here now, as Chute Rai said to Raj Kumar and me my last night in the village. We were sitting cross-legged on Chute Rai’s mud porch, translating a song from Yamphu Rai to Nepali with Raj Kumar’s help. Suddenly across the fields, a full white-yellow moon, huge against the horizon, stopped us mid-sentence. We watched silently. Until Chute Rai waved his hands across my notes, “You have it all, here, bahini (younger sister); it is all here, in the song.”

I can’t count how many black notebooks I brought home, now stored in a plastic bin in the closet in my office, notebooks I value so much that I included them in my will as part of my daughter’s inheritance.

For so often I’ve evaluated my time in Hedangna by what I did or didn’t learn, what I did or didn’t experience. I haven’t really thought about how I learned, and how that experience shaped me in ways that are almost impossible to obtain now.

This post isn’t about the travails of a world of social media and AI and constantly being in touch and always having people know where we are from an app on a phone.

But I do want to acknowledge what is lost. The inner worlds we miss out on. The chance to let those voices develop and deepen. The chance to learn on our own, by making mistakes, correcting them, and making those same mistakes slightly differently the next day. How I learned to trust myself, to trust my questions, to trust my curiosity. To trust, maybe it was mostly this: my intuition and my ability to follow a thread even though I had no idea where it would lead.

I didn’t gain these skills overnight. It’s only really now, when I think about how clear I am about the questions I’m asking, how focused I am on one set of questions, questions that I know, without a doubt, are my questions to ask, that I see, maybe, that the roots for this clarity were formed during my time in Hedangna.

It took years for them to take hold and grow. But maybe that knowing, which is not in the content of the notebooks as much as the fact of them, handwritten in Indian ink, that is really what I want to will to my children.

by Ann Armbrecht

We begin SHI Monthly Meetings with someone leading us on a plant journey. Participants turn off their zoom cameras or close their eyes and settle into their chairs while we are led into our bodies and, through our bodies, to the earth, often to a place on the earth we love, our garden, a forest near our home. For a few minutes, 5 or 10, we settle. We’re invited to notice a plant that may appear. We’re invited to notice certain things about the plant and to see if it offers insight or guidance or grounding in some way. We thank the plant and then are led back into the room where we sit and to the screen that connects us all.

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When I lead these, I never know what others are experiencing. When they turn off their screens, I have no idea if they are checking messages or deep in conversation with angelica or black cohosh. I do know that I am always grateful for the time when someone else leads. I’m grateful for the stillness, for the invitation to pause, which I always mean to do but in fact I rarely do. And I’m always grateful for the insight, as small as it might be, some something that helps me see whatever I am working on in a different way, from a new perspective or with less anxiety and more clarity.

These journeys can be a stretch for those not used to traveling in their mind’s eye to meet a plant. I am sure they can feel awkward for newcomers to SHI. I may have stopped doing them except I’m not the only one leading them. Guido Masé, principal scientist at Traditional Medicinals, often leads them. Sometimes he and Angela Willard, co-founder of Harmonic Arts, do them jointly. And then in the small business working group meeting, I wasn’t necessarily going to begin with a guided journey, but Chris Alstad, owner of Eclectic Herb, offered to lead one. And so I know they matter.

These plant journeys are many things. First, they are a moment to pause. A chance to quiet our brains and be still in the middle of our workday. That in itself, to me, is worthwhile. They also are a way to bring the plants as plants into our circle. Everyone in these meetings works with plants in some way, as roots or leaves to source, as stories to tell in marketing, as constituents in a lab, as supply chain challenges. Rarely do they spend time with plants as plants. And so these journeys are a chance to do that. To just meet the plants as plants. And to bring them into the circle. I like to think about what difference inviting these moments of connecting with plants makes in our conversations.

They are a lovely pause but I felt that we did them as a way to remember the aliveness of nature more than because they had any direct impact on our day to day work.

The Awakened Brain

And then recently I heard Lisa Miller, the author of The Awakened Brain, speaking with Shankar Vedantam on the podcast, The Hidden Brain. She spoke about how spiritual practice awakens certain neural circuits. The first step of this she said is to quiet our mind, that kind of presence is the threshold of the door we need to pass through to experience what she calls transcendent awareness or the awakened brain. She described the three networks that then are activated: our bonding network through which we feel and know we are loved; our ventral attention which means shifting from control to asking what is life showing me now which leads to a sense of being guided. And finally, the realization that we are all part of one whole and that we are never alone.

Listening to Miller, I thought about the plant journeys.

Lemon Balm

Just that morning, I had invited lemon balm. She appeared immediately.

“Thank you. I know I don’t always offer you much,” I said.

“Attention is an offering,” she said. She took me by the hand and led me down a path through a green meadow, snow peaks in the distance.

“Follow me,” she said. “Follow me: my scent. Don’t worry about where we are going.”

I’d just been wondering where we were going.

“Follow me and focus.”

“Focus on what?” I asked.

“Well, the beauty, always,” she said. “Never forget anywhere the beauty. Even when there is none, there is some, always, and be grateful for that. As a shift from the agitation that underlies the distraction.”

We continued for some time. And then at the end, she said, “You have all of us, here.” She gestured to the other plants in the circle. “All of us. Do you understand that? Do you really? You aren’t alone.”

“Everyone on earth has the capacity to be in a deep transcendent relationship through which they know the deeper force in life,” Lisa Miller said in the interview.

This shift, Miller then explained, is at the foundation of moving from a transactional way of life, from: ‘What do I want and how will I get it? And how will you help me get what I want and I need?’ To, when we experience a loss or disappointment, asking instead, ‘What is life showing me now? What is the universe directing? What am I being asked to do? Am I asked to love more deeply? To listen in a different and deeper way?’

In this way, Miller says, we become discoverers of our journey, able to let life unfold in extraordinary ways.

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What This Means for Our Work

At SHI we talk about shifting from transactional relationships in business to those based on respect and reciprocity, and about the steps to do that: contracts, fair prices, etc. As Miller spoke, I realized that our ability to make this shift begins in how we show up in ourselves. We need the planning brain that is looking at strategy and taking care of our needs. But if we only bring that part of our brain to these conversations and to this work, we will never make the changes needed in ways that can be sustained.

I am able to visualize a future where we have succeeded at the work we are doing, where plants are sourced in ways that create thriving, resilient communities where everyone is well, from the forest and field to the shelf.

But I can’t see the pathway there.

I know that the plants guide me as I navigate this journey, yet I’ve thought of them as particular journeys, personal to me. I feel hesitant to share them because they feel too precious, like I’m claiming I received insights from a plant.

But, I realized, plant journeys aren’t just an aside. Nor are they magical thinking about how we can be in conversation with plants. They offer a way to experience what Miller calls the awakened brain.

Miller’s comments helped me shift my focus from my personal encounter with a plant to how that encounter is building my capacity to navigate that pathway by staying open and in dialogue with life. This means in conversations and meetings to not only bring the parts of myself that provides structure and direction, but also those that are able to listen and be guided. It means seeing the ways we are connected as we talk about differences. And to know that I’m not alone.

“You have all of us here. All of us. Do you understand that?” lemon balm asked.

“Do you, really?”

Nikita Agarwal and I are so glad to share the SHI Toolkit 3.0: Best Practices for Sustainable and Ethical Sourcing in the Herbal Products Industry.

(For those of you new to the Sustainable Herbs Initiative: we’re a community of herb companies, farmers, wild harvesters, and researchers working to shift the botanical industry toward relationships built on trust rather than transaction. I have a separate Substack focused just on SHI work, but thought this was valuable to share here as well).

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[Download the SHI Toolkit 3.0 here]

We built this toolkit from hundreds of hours of SHI member conversations, in Working Groups, Learning Labs, Monthly Meetings, and on Learning Journeys around the world. Sitting with farmers in Nicaragua, walking fields in Oregon, listening in circles after long days of travel, we kept hearing the same insights surface again and again. This toolkit is our attempt to gather those insights and share them in a form that others can use and that we can more intentionally use as a guide ourselves.

From the start, SHI’s goal has been to change the botanical industry from transactional to reciprocal relationships, where value and respect flow in all directions. We believe every actor in the herbal value network has intrinsic worth, and that healthy trade depends on healthy ecosystems and communities.

So this toolkit asks:

What are the concrete tools we can use to implement practices that support and respect stakeholders through the sourcing network? How do we make visible the risks borne by different stakeholders and help reduce those risks? What can each of us do to build resilience rather than extract it? And how can our actions become examples for others?

Our shared goal is to develop industry wide best practices that strengthen trust, transparency, and shared prosperity throughout the herbal value network.

Much of what’s in here comes from the perspective of primary processors, the people closest to the source who often have the least visibility at the brand level. Nikita Agarwal, the lead author and designer of this Toolkit, is Product Manager at Herb Artizan, a primary processing company in southern India has ensured that that focus runs through the whole toolkit. In particular the chapters on True Costs, Certifications, and Marketing, are written from her experience and conversations with other primary processors involved with SHI.

While some chapters are written specifically for people in sourcing and purchasing, we think there’s something here for everyone, from finance to marketing.

Follow along to see how we apply these practices in our work at the Sustainable Herbs Initiative!

The Toolkit is thirteen chapters and covers the ground we hear about most from SHI members:

• Core SHI practices

• Five sourcing principles

• True costs and fair pricing

• The importance of supplier visits and building real relationships in sourcing

• A sourcing relationship health assessment

• Mapping sourcing risk

• Certifications in the herbal supply chain

• Quality from the perspective of all stakeholders

• Marketing for primary processors

• A reference guide on certifications for primary processors.

Some chapters are frameworks to think with. Some are worksheets to fill out with your team.

If you’re not sure where to begin, start with the Sourcing Self-Assessment, or with the questions on evaluating your relationship with your suppliers. Both ask you to look honestly at how you’re doing in your sourcing relationships, and to map out where you want to go and how to get there.

We hope this toolkit helps value and respect flow a little more freely through your own sourcing relationships. Let us know what you find in it.

With gratitude,

Ann and Nikita

by Ann Armbrecht, SHI Founder and Director

I am just home from the fifth Sustainable Herbs Initiative Learning Journey, this time to visit l’Herbier du Diois, a supplier and processor of organic medicinal and aromatic plants in the Drôme region of southern France. The Learning Journey was co-organized with Hélène Wostyn, head of international sales for l’Herbier.

We have had Learning Journeys in Appalachia, southern Oregon, and Nicaragua. What stays with me is how unique each region is. We have visited wild collectors hauling sacks of black cohosh up steep mountain slopes in eastern Kentucky, small-holder Nicaraguan coffee farmers diversifying their income by growing turmeric and ginger for a global market. We have spent time on the first Regenerative Organic Certified herb farms in southern Oregon to the small fields of thyme, savory, lemon balm, and sage nestled in the hills of southern France, scattered between limestone villages along the Drôme river.

I’m struck by the qualities of each place and the people working with the plants and how those qualities become lost when the plants reach the global market: thyme is known just as thyme, regardless of where and how it is grown. Turmeric is just turmeric.

Giving Place and the Plants a Voice

I started SHI to tell these stories because I believe they matter in the quality of the finished product and that they might help us become more responsible customers. And I began these Learning Journeys because I believed that place matters. The people harvesting the plants matter. These journeys to source are ways to experience that difference and to do it with others also working in this industry, to see what we might collectively do to bring the realness of the source back into an industry that is increasingly disconnected from that source.

As Ben Levine said after the first Learning Journey in Appalachia, “Why do we as an herb industry find ourselves in Las Vegas or right next to Disneyland for our biggest industry events? Sinking into the rolling hills of Appalachia was a welcome contrast. How did being in the woods shape our conversations, our decisions, our connections with one another?”

These journeys are on an entirely different scale than a trade show. Twenty-three people gathering in France or Nicaragua is not 80,000 attendees at Anaheim. It’s not clear what impact that can have, but for now I am trusting the oft-quoted saying by Nobel laureate, Ilya Prigogine, “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”

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A Different Way of Seeing

For five days, twenty three of us from around the world (Britain, Canada, India, France, Namibia, the Netherlands, Peru, and the United States) immersed ourselves in the work of l’Herbier du Diois, an herbal processing center in France.

I opened the first evening with a story I have told many times, one told to me by a village priest/shaman in Hedangna, where I lived in the upper Arun Valley of northeastern Nepal about the origin of the differences between humans and the ancestors, which, it turns out, has to do with seeing.

Humans can only see the physical object. Ancestors can “see double”, which, the priest explained, means seeing both the physical object and all that our eyes can’t see that sustains that object. Not seeing the invisible, the story goes, makes humans selfish.

Listening

We had come to l’Herbier, I continued, because, more than any processing facility I have visited, the company is designed within the context of a living system, in general but also in particular: the ecosystem of this valley.

I invited everyone in the circle to spend the week trying to see double, to see the ways this larger frame informed decisions at the processing facility and to be aware of our own ways of seeing and listening and to ask what we need to shift in ourselves to “see double”.

We then went for a solo silent walk on the land to help us each connect with this place in our own way. And then we did a dialogue walk with another person in the group, someone we didn’t know well, each sharing for 10 minutes 2-3 events or experiences in the past few years that have been important to them. These two foundational practices helped us begin the week by listening to the land and to each other, before we speak ourselves.

We then gathered in a circle on the deck of the farmhouse and shared our intentions for the week. This as a way of creating a container for our time together.

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Owl Eyes and Eagle Eyes

The next morning, I shared a simple practice from the Wilderness Awareness School: owl eyes and eagle eyes. I showed how to hold fingers up on our peripheral vision and walk in that way. And then to put the finger right in front of your eyes and walk in that way. I then invited everyone to spend 5 minutes or so practicing moving between the two ways of seeing, noticing in particular how each way of seeing makes you feel. This is a simple exercise that begins to encompass what it takes and what it means to “see double”. Back in the circle, people shared how owl eyes shifted them into their hearts and to perceiving the whole whereas eagle eyes sharpened their mind, focusing in on the details. Both ways of seeing are key to the work we are doing.

We then walked to a field of savory above the farmhouse where we stayed. Flora, the farm manager, spoke about farming practices on the farm. Then we did a plant sit, each sitting in silence with a plant. We gathered again and walked silently down a steep path to another field, this one of thyme, where we gathered in a small group to reflect on our experience.

I was with Ramesh Uniyal, from New Delhi, whom I thought was least likely to connect with this part of the Learning Journey. And yet, he shared a story about a researcher who was stuck in his research on higher constituent levels in a particular plant. Finally, when he was about to give up, the researcher was visited in his dreams by the plant he was working on, with the message to harvest it now. The researcher woke up, harvested and tested the leaves, and achieved the results that had been eluding him. My surprise was a good reminder of the many ways I wasn’t seeing double myself.

Organic as a Way of Designing

Later in the afternoon, we gathered upstairs in the impressive new processing center at l’Herbier. Farmers take a huge step in not working with chemicals in their fields, Tijlbert Vink, CEO of l’Herbier, explained. Too often, that investment is then lost in the second step, which is processing. He believed it was important to bring the same attention to this second step, to bring the version of not using chemicals in fields, both to the buildings and to the practices of processing.

He saw how difficult it was to farm in ways that respect living systems, yet the farmers still did it. And so, it was really important for him to show it was possible to do it in the processing. It wasn’t easy. For example, they spent 600,000 Euros to study whether it was possible to build straw boxes to use for insulation and years getting the necessary permits to be allowed to build in this way. But he was 24, he said. He had a lot of energy to fight.

To him, the idea of organic is not just the herbs, he continued. It is in everything they do with their work from their wage policy (the gap between the lowest and highest wage is 2.6) to building boxes for insulation from straw from the region as a way to support local workers to rewarding employees for biking to work to designing drier boxes to minimize handling of the material and thus reduce chances for microbial contamination to using the warmed air beneath the solar panels in the driers, thus reducing the electricity needed. This last step is still in process. Among other things, it involved buying food-grade roofing since the air touching those panels will be circulating with the herbs. Everywhere we looked, there was intention behind the decision.

This video, Circles of Sustainability, produced by filmmaker Terrence Youk from an earlier trip to l’Herbier provides an overview of the company.

He described how he has set up a structure that creates what he described as a red line around selling the company. The structure can’t block a sale, but it can help slow it down by forcing up to three conversations about whether he really wants that sale. This is a way to protect against when he is older and may change his mind, he said. He doesn’t want to be critical of others who may do things differently and end up selling their company, but he doesn’t want to do that himself. I was struck by the intention needed to put structures in place to protect against our future selves.

Patience is what allows him to do things the right way, he said. And when you do things the right way, they last longer. Also, if you grow more slowly, it isn’t as stressful.

Importance of a Dream Team

A dream team, 5 or 6 others who can imagine what is possible, is key. He had no idea whether they would be able to run the factory on solar power. But he had to try. And having a few others willing to dream with him, to imagine what isn’t yet there, gave him the courage to try.

Right now, his biggest worries are the weather, a few years ago the heat caused fires in the region, and increasing energy costs from the Middle East War. But he added that little projects are always more powerful than big ones. That gives him more hope. He hopes small companies can change the system.

After that, we gathered in a large circle at the end of the day to share our reflections and what stayed with us from the day. Some of the reflections shared: seeing how the values and beliefs are at a cellular level, built into the foundation of the company, not just actions to fill check boxes. That the ethos of the company is not an option, and the brilliance of how it is all put together, their creativity in solving problems and coming up with solutions that meet their vision.

Later, Ton Vink, Tijlbert’s father, spoke about the vision when they founded the company. Their vision was always bigger than just growing herbs. It was about tending the larger ecosystem of health and believing that making relationships between different cultures and agriculture is a way to achieve that health.

Visiting Farmers

The next morning, we had a long drive to some of the farmers who sell herbs to l’Herbier. I organized the rides so that different people are in the vans together with a question as a discussion prompt. We then drove an hour west to the farm of Samuel Gachon, a third-generation farmer growing vegetable seeds, cereals, organic herbs, and walnuts, and raising sheep.

Eighty percent of the farming in this region was organic five years ago, he told us. But now more farmers are going back to conventional farming. We asked why. Too much paperwork, he said. The auditors just check the paperwork and don’t go to the field. He continues farming organically because they have contracts, and they have always been organic. It is in their DNA.

Someone asked about the challenges of organic farming. Without hesitation, he said: weeds, Ecocert (the auditor), and finding labor. “Being a farmer in France every day is a risk,” he said. Gesturing across the land, he said he keeps doing it because of the view. And because he is his own boss.

Another person asked what he would like customers using products from the herbs he grows to know. “We do our best and everyday we take care,” he said. “And we hope you can see this when you see the product.”

In preparing for these farm visits, we had talked about the differences between visiting farms to get to know the farmer as a whole person and visiting them to get information. Later, Ellie Thorne from Blue Sky Botanics mentioned how hard it was not to be extractive in farm visits, especially when we were such a large group. We had considered meeting in smaller groups or doing farmwork as an exchange, but both would likely have been more of an imposition, not less. And so, we settled on these conversations in a circle, trying to be considerate in our questions.

Later, they each told Helene they loved our visits. They appreciated our thoughtful and serious questions and that we seemed to genuinely care.

Manu Jean, the second farmer we visited, shared similar feelings and concerns. His father started farming in 1995, with sheep, wine, and herbs on 40 acres. This year, because of the heat and the lack of rain, he’s had to irrigate already. Normally, he doesn’t irrigate until the end of May or June.

We asked about challenges: finding labor is more and more difficult. The price of gas is increasing. And climate change, he added. His margin is dropping as costs increase.

But he can’t imagine doing anything other than farming organically.

“I love my job,” he said. “I like to be with the sheep, in nature, listening to the sounds of the sheep at 6 am, seeing the herbs grow, smelling them, and the view. And I love the view,” he added, echoing Samuel.

He explained that he works with the moon, following the best time to weed and to harvest. His father worked with the moon as well. He isn’t certified Demeter (biodynamic) because he doesn’t do the preps, and he also can’t do any more paperwork. Thirty-five percent of his time is paperwork, he said, echoing what others shared.

Pine Buds

The next morning, we had a longer drive. Different groups and a different question. We drove high up a ridge in the Ardèche, looking out across the valley. We walked up the ridge where we gathered on rocks. I invited everyone to sit with the land or a plant in stillness.

After gathering in a circle and sharing something from our experience, Max Bouillet, the collector, shared about his work. He collects buds from March to May. In the summer, elder flowers, st john’s wort; in the fall, ash, red vine leaves; in the winter, laurel leaves and rosemary. Three-quarters of his time is spent wild harvesting. One quarter is spent growing herbs. He grows oregano, daisy, wild pansy, and tarragon. Someone asked how he got started. He had a background in agriculture but never thought of becoming a wild collector until he visited a friend years ago who was collecting hawthorn flowers. He liked it and so he began doing it as well.

If a person doesn’t harvest in a sustainable way, he said, that person is the first one to suffer from the unsustainable practices.

Labor is hard. A lot of people are attracted to the job, they come to train, but it takes 3-4 years to make a living out of it, and few stick around that long. The price of herbs hasn’t increased. But he is more efficient, so he can make more money in less time. There is a balance between being efficient and respectful of the plants.

It is very important to have a 3-year contract because it takes time to find a good place to collect, and it is a lot of work if only for one year.

He explained the challenges: harvesters are getting older and harder to find. Climate change: they thought they would have time to harvest, but now the buds are ready sooner. Previously, once in twenty years, there would be weather challenges. Now it is 1 in 3 years. And contamination in part from stricter regulations is a challenge.

We then headed off in two groups to harvest pine buds. As we headed off, he said don’t step on the bilberries. Even if they won’t be harvesting them, we need to respect those who will be. That stayed with me during our entire visit. The unseen future informs our present actions.

We gathered in a circle before climbing back in the cars. Someone shared, “Different people, different plants, and places all over the world, but the same situation.”

Dreaming

On the last afternoon of our week together, we gathered in the garden at l’Herbier where staff ate their lunch. I invited everyone to journal and then share in a small group, then journal and share again. We then gathered in a circle, shared our reflections, and discussed how we can each dream bigger and have more courage. We suggested having accountability buddies to help us stay on track and follow through on what we envision. For starters, I said I would share my dream for SHI with the group in hopes that they, as Jeff Higley, co-founder of Oshala Farm, outlined, could help me make that dream happen.

Something happens on these Learning Journeys that emerges from the place, the plants, and the people, but is difficult to articulate. We slow down, we pay attention differently. We listen more deeply. People are open, curious and committed to taking what we learn into bringing about the changes needed. Maybe it simply comes down to Max’s simple reminder to us: to twenty-three people from eight countries to watch where they put their feet because where we placed them would impact the livelihoods of those coming after us.

I’ve attended many of the Presencing Institute virtual offerings. The second session of their spring series, Reclaiming Human Agency: When Love is What Doesn’t Break, was one of the most inspiring and thought provoking that I have attended. Below are some highlights from notes I took during the session. They are not a complete overview of the discussion. For that, read the Presencing Institute’s recap and watch the recording here.

Otto Scharmer opened by naming what so many of us feel: that we are living in a moment of civilizational crisis, one that touches the core of what it means to be human. He then invited two guests to respond to that moment: Tristan Harris, founder of the Center for Humane Technology and the Human Movement, and Nipun Mehta, founder of ServiceSpace.

Tragic optimism

Tristan talked about his early days in Silicon Valley, what he called the “race to the bottom of the brainstem.” He watched as a small group of engineers in the Valley were essentially designing the psychological commons of humanity, the shared inner space where attention lives, and he saw the moral weight of that responsibility. He tried to change things from inside. He couldn’t go far enough. “The technosphere,” he said, “was built for extraction. It was not designed to care about the biosphere.”

“We are in a liminal place,” he continued. The old paradigms don’t have the capacity to scale. Conscious capitalism is not going to get us through. And so, what do we do?

“First, we grieve,” he said. Tragic optimism means actually feeling that grief, not bypassing it. We grieve our way through the crisis. And on the other side of grief, he said, there is love. From that place, the question becomes: how can I be in service of what I love? And then be unattached to the outcome, because we might not make it through. Every day he orients as if there is a way through.

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Deep data platform of life

Nipun picked up that thread and went deeper into it. He talked about awakening what he called the “deep data platform of life,” which I understood as the knowing of the heart, the intelligence that lives below our metrics and our spreadsheets. He talked about practicing inner coherence so that we can meet the inner coherence of others. That is the ground, he said, from which real change becomes possible.

He described three levels of change. The first is awareness: knowing, for example, that buying the cheapest herbs almost certainly means poor quality. The second is impact: beginning to source only from suppliers you actually know. But the third, transformation, is where it gets interesting, and harder to measure. Transformation, he said, emerges in a field. It is a grace. Like gardening. You do your five percent and trust that nature does the rest.

He told the story of the Dalai Lama visiting Gandhi’s grave after fleeing Tibet. Standing there, he had a vision, an experience that emerged from the field and that changed how he understood his role as the head of a nation in exile. Nonviolence not as strategy but as a way of being. That is the kind of transformation Nipun is pointing toward.

Trusting inner coherence

Nipum’s comments about measuring impact has also stayed with me as it is something I struggle with at the Sustainable Herbs Initiative. “I would never ask what is the impact of your mother,” he said. “I as a human am the impact of my mother… By not insisting on measuring, by not trying to put those impacts in a box, you let them move into the complexity of the world.”

His frame for leadership is not about reaching critical mass. He talked instead about critical yeast. Yeast is small, it is humble, it does its thing quietly. But without it, you can’t make bread. That is the kind of leadership that is needed now: present, humble, open to its own blind spots, and trusting the field of coherence.

I keep coming back to how much of what they were describing connects to what we try to hold at SHI. The work of sourcing herbs well, of knowing where they come from and caring about the people who grow and harvest them, is not primarily about metrics. It is about the quality of attention we bring to relationships. It is about inner coherence meeting inner coherence, whether that’s across a supply chain or across a conversation.

If you have a chance to join any of the remaining Presencing Institute sessions, I’d encourage you to do it. These are some of the conversations right now that help.

Into the Desert

We turned off the main road in the late afternoon, heading deeper into the Anza Borrego Desert in southern California. We drove along a sandy road to a spot Tyler Wauters had discovered several years ago when he first came to this desert. We were coming from the chaos of Expo West, the natural products trade show that brings 60,000 people from around the world to Anaheim, California, to spend three nights in the desert for the first Sustainable Herbs Initiative (SHI) Wilderness Immersion.

Our intention was to spend our time listening deeply to the land and the plants and to allow that experience guide our work at SHI. I first learned to sit and have a conversation with plants as a student of herbal medicine. Sharing these journeys can feel quite private, not relevant to leadership or decision making.

Yet a few weeks after our time in the desert, I heard Nipum Metha, founder of ServiceSpace, speak in a session for the Presencing Institute about inner coherence — attuning ourselves deeply enough to let the more-than-human world speak through us. “We need to do less, to be more, and have deeper trust in coherence,” he said.

I recognized immediately what we had experienced in the desert.

Listening to Plants

Our home for the next few days was a flat valley ringed by rocky hills. We turned off the cars and were met by the deep stillness of this place. I had imagined a desert as only sand, but desert plants spread across the valley: cholla cactus, with sharp thorns that caught the morning and evening light so the plants looked like they were glowing. Ocotillo, an amazing Dr. Seuss tree I’d never heard of or seen: long spiky branches rising from the base, deep red flowers blooming on the end. Agave. Desert lavender, so much wilder than the lavender I know. So many plants spread across the valley floor, growing in sand, abundant but not crowded. There was space, stillness, sky, wind, which when it came could be fierce enough to blow away our tents, so we added stones to the stakes to keep them secure.

We had a loose structure that guided our days. Each day was structured around a plant sit. For these, we would walk into the desert, find a plant or a series of plants, and ask: “What is it you would like to tell me? What is important for me to know?”

Then we would just listen. For some of us that meant drawing or singing or moving. Or it could just be sitting quietly and observing the plant. After some time, we would come back and share what we heard.

What the Land Said

Ben Nahar grew up in this kind of landscape. And so on our first plant sit, he walked straight across the valley floor, toward an ocotillo forest against the hills on the far side of the valley. I wanted to follow, but I’d never been to the desert before and was too afraid of snakes and scorpions and spiders and whatever else might be hiding in the sand. So I stayed closer to the sandy road.

I often sit with plants and ask them for guidance. But this landscape was so foreign to me that it was hard to find my way in. I first stood next to ocotillo, nothing. Maybe it was the wrong plant, I thought. So I tried another. Still silent. Maybe I was doing it wrong, I thought, so I asked a different question. Still silent. I shared my gratitude. I shared my hesitation. But mostly I could only hear my doubts and questions.

I finally tried to set my questions aside and just notice what was here – the wind, the sun, the sand, the sky, the vibrancy in this land that I always imagined to be empty. Letting in the amazing gift of three days in the desert sitting with others who also believe that the path forward for our work together begins with listening to voices that aren’t our own.

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Finding the Thread

That evening around the fire, I passed around archetype cards, each of us drawing one in answer to a question we held. My question was how to find my way back to connecting with plants and how that can guide me in leading SHI. I drew The Thread: a person’s arm emerges from darkness holding a deep red cord that reaches toward a rainbow in the sky.

“The path,” Kim Krans, the creator of the deck writes. “Life is a tangle. So much happens simultaneously and circuitously, leaving us grappling for meaning and direction in a network of distractions. When we connect to the energy of The Thread… our whole being responds to its tug. We remember who we are and what we came into this world to do.”

Prickly Pear

And so, the next morning when we went out again for a plant sit, I followed the thread. This time, I left the sandy road and walked deeper into the valley floor toward the ocotillo forest. Asking where to go. Following signs: a stick pointing in a different direction, following the stick, following what caught my attention without overthinking where I was going. And then I came across a prickly pear growing on its own in the sand. It was smaller than the other plants growing nearby: creosote, cholla, ocotillo. All of them near but not too close. The prickly pear seemed on its own. One or two flowers were in bloom, a deep magenta. Several buds, even more lovely than the flower, were almost ready to bloom, the dark purple pink of the petals emerging through the green.

So, I stopped.

To not need to be the center, but to hold the center. I have small thorns to invite respect, but more for a pause. To pause as you enter. Not intended to hurt, like the thorns of cholla. And my flowers so beautiful and abundant. I hold a presence. I hold my place. My flowers just are. I just am, shaped by the soil I’ve grown in, the water I have and haven’t had. The sun and the wind. I don’t need to tell stories about that. I just let my flowers bloom.

Feel into me. Feel into my stillness. What you notice when you come into this valley, that quality of presence. That quality of stillness and aliveness. It’s from all of us, but I especially hold it. Do that in your work. Own it fully.

Who knows how it works or what actually transpires when we sit next to a plant and ask for guidance or insight. But I received what I needed in that conversation. Insights into questions I was asking about how to lead SHI, about what sort of container to hold. Wisdom into how to be.

You all are writing a new language that begins with resonance. It begins with vibration and with bringing together those who sense and respond to vibration.

Trust that. And build. Tend gardens in different ecosystems that arise from and respond to the vibration of that place.

Learning the Language of this Land

Later in the circle we each shared what we learned. Ben spoke of the difference of speaking for the land and speaking from the land, having the land speak through each of us. Others added their own images: the strong flexible spine of ocotillo. Vulnerability that allows others to see and be open. Branches not resisting the wind but singing with it and in the singing, creating something more. Thorns that create boundaries – that say pause, don’t trample what is living.

On the final afternoon, we each sat on our own to listen to the land and let the land inform our work together at SHI. As I sat on a rock in the late afternoon light, I thought about the shift between my two plant sits, and how I found prickly pear because I was able to listen more deeply and to trust where I was led.

I saw that the gift for me from this time in the desert was about learning more deeply what listening for that emerging future means. That leading SHI isn’t about implementing a strategy as much as it is about defining a way of traveling. A practice of following the thread of my intention, and then paying attention, listening, seeing what I notice, trusting that that process will lead me, and in turn the Sustainable Herbs Initiative, where we need to go.

The tree spirit suddenly walks into the clearing. He nods when he sees me. I put down my pen and paper and begin to follow him. We walk silently through the woods, sun shining through the tree trunks, too early yet for leaves. The teenager is there, the little girl is too, but I realize this is a journey for the teenager. Her backpack is filled with notebooks and articles to read. The answer isn’t in them, I know that now, but knowing what has come before matters. I’m glad she’s here and that she is taking it so seriously.

I’m tracking spirit. We are all tracking spirit, following the footsteps of a tree spirit on a journey that is unfolding. I want to see around the bend but I can’t, ever. And so I keep walking.

I look up suddenly, not sure why.

In a flash I know that it matters that Willow believed in fairies because that means she kept the pathway open, the possibility of magic, that what we see isn’t all there is to see.

Recognizing that, how do we walk? What do we follow? To whom – and to what – do we listen?

I am sitting in the clearing with the tree spirit. This time there is a shaman there as well.

“What went wrong?” I ask. I had come to ask about an experiment I’d been part of.

“I’ll show her,” the shaman says. He hands me a rock. I know right away that it’s the rock I didn’t take from Kelekpa, the shaman in Hedangna. He tried to offer it to me when I left the village, in exchange for the t-shirt I had given him with Cultural Survival written on front. But I had been too shy. I didn’t accept it. So now, all these years later, I have it at last.

This shaman isn’t like the tree spirit. He’s more distant and more scary.

We travel through time and space and soon arrive at the base of a mountain. I recognize it: Makalu, the milk blue lake at the base, the grey ridge, blue, blue sky, towering snow covered peak.

“I love it here,” I say. “I feel so alive, so clear. One step after the other, stripped to what’s essential. The wind and the rain and the wet.”

“You thought that’s what you were building.” he says. “You saw a stone mud hut on a hillside overlooking a farm, but others saw other things. And you all brought ideas of sustainability and the belief it was a place you reach with effort.”

We travel to the top of the ridge, the one the shamans and priests told me about when I lived in Hedangna. There is a pond. It isn’t blood as I’d been told in the village. It’s water but it is black, black as night. More stars than I knew existed shine in a sky that otherwise is as black as the pool.

We sit on the shore, the shaman at my side. My eyes slowly adjust. I see that shamans and witches and priests sit shoulder to shoulder around the edge, in a circle as far as I can see, disappearing into the darkness.

“How does this help?” I ask.

A look from the shaman silences me.

So, I look back at the black, black water. I see ripples across the surface, like the breath of the water, the breath, I realize, of the earth.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” I ask.

The shaman says nothing, just keeps watching the water and the ripples, barely perceptible on the surface. The earth is breathing. The earth is alive.

I suddenly know. This place, this pool on the ridge of the fifth highest mountain of the world, is the place or a place where we get instructions on how to live sustainably. Not from offices or plans or anywhere where we can’t feel the earth breathe. The ripples are so subtle, barely noticeable unless I squint my eyes just so, all of our operating instructions about how to live on earth come from this breath.

“We weren’t even close, were we?” I ask.

“You were,” he said. “You were because you had Dana as a guide, who saw so clearly and deeply but ultimately saw only with her mind. Even love, it was the last chapter of her last book, not the foundation of all the rest, not the point from which all plans must flow - not small love, but love of breath love, the heartbeat of the universe.”

“We all know it,” he says. “Yet we all only listen as and when we will.”

“As a parent you are closer,” he adds. “Always only a cry away from the breath of your child which is the breath of the world.”

Without a language for this breath, we forsook it, got caught in our plans and visions for raising sheep and growing food and ploughing fields with horses not tractors, not pausing to notice that sheltered beneath a bush was a moss-covered altar where prayers had been placed by a child.

We are still sitting in the dark around the black water in the shadow of the youngest and highest mountains on earth.

I feel the earth breathing. Bearing witness to the breath of the earth, which is the sacred, which lives in us all. I remember the moonscape of West Virginia mountains blown off for their coal. And the men and women standing watch, bearing witness to their devastation. It starts with that. With our presence, wherever we are.

I’ve finally found this place, after all these years of searching yet I know I’m not meant to stay here. Already I realize it is time to leave.

I take a deep breath. I take the stone and walk to the water’s edge. I toss it into the center of the pond, wondering if it will lead me as the stone and walking stick led the two brothers who first founded Hedangna.

Then I see the yellow flowers, they spiral on the surface, and then they also disappear. The shaman hands me a prayer stick, like the one Kelekpa used to travel into the realm of the ancestors, a small rock attached to the end.

“This is your guide,” he said.

“Call ‘Shade! Shade! [1] And you will find your way, where you need to go, what you need to see and hear and do. The vibrations will lead the way.”

[1] Shade means Namaste in Yamphu Rai.

I am in the clearing in the forest. I ask the plants, none in particular, “Can you show me the story, to tell your story of how you are to be used as medicine? How you are used for healing?”

Motherwort is off to the side of the clearing. It seems like she wears a silver green cloak. A garland of flowers in her hair. She turns and begins walking down the path through the forest. I follow. The little girl is with me.

We walk through the forest, not really on a path, walking over low plants growing. We move quickly to not lose motherwort.

I have no idea where we are going or what will unfold. The trees begin to get smaller, more shrubs and it becomes harder to walk. We come to the edge of the forest and now stand on the edge of a meadow.

Motherwort is in the center of the meadow standing with others in a circle. Trees surround the meadow. Someone from the circle invites me to join them on a stone in the center. Motherwort places a garland of flowers on my head.

“This is our blessing to help you in this next next ness, to bring the magic of the message of us, of this place of herbal medicine intact. The essence of herbal medicine which is not a product. It is this,” she gestures, “a meadow of aliveness. It is receiving a garland of flowers. And in that garland, perhaps, are the plants you need to heal. Which may be about beauty. But may also be something more.”

I remove the garland to see what plants are there. As I look, each plant steps forward:

Black cohosh – “I am memory of home,” she says. “Of intact forest, of wholeness.”

Rosemary comes forward – she is beautiful, dancing. “Boldness,” she says. “Of not being shy or hesitant, of saying I am here.”

Blue vervein steps into the circle. Tall, willowy, tipped with deep sapphire. “Connecting to the heavens,” she says, “And to the invisible. Like a tuning fork.”

Meadowsweet – is working work, hard work, physical shifts, building blocks. The money and resources needed to achieve the vision of why you are here.

A pause.

Goldenseal and Solomon seal come forward together. Powerful root medicine. Forest shade.

Goldenseal is a bit separate. “I can create what you need. I will bring the resources I’ll go into the world and show the value which people don’t know but they will. Because my medicine is powerful.”

Garlic pushes forward too. A little squat. “And I also am pungent and will keep out what is bad. And keep your vision true.”

Wood betony is shy and on the side. “I awaken your sight and your insight so that what you share is clear and true and comes from heaven and is more than you and what you do.”

And Zinnia. Deep red. “I am beautiful and I awaken love.”

The plants gather close.

Motherwort steps before me.

“I am the center. I am the stalk that holds the garland together. I spread. I have tiny thorns and beautiful flowers. Small. My leaves are bitter but healing.

I am the voice of the heart that weaves it all together.”

The late Donella Meadows often spoke about the power and importance of beginning with vision.

“Vision is the most vital step in the policy process,” she wrote in 1994. “If we don’t know where we want to go, it makes little difference that we make great progress. Yet vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our whole culture. We talk about our fears, frustrations, and doubts endlessly, but we talk only rarely and with embarrassment about our dreams.”

And so before a recent meeting with the Sustainable Herbs Initiative Stewardship Council, I traveled five years into the future to envision the herbal products industry if our work has succeeded. What does that world look like? And what is my part in that world? We then did the exercise together as a group, which was a powerful and inspiring way to then focus and guide our actions. I share some of my vision below.

I am in a field, it’s a trade show and I’m surrounded by people, like all trade shows, but we are outside. It is joyful. Vibrant. Real. Not extravagant. We are remembering our roots.

And then I am visiting Finn Rautenbach in villages with harvesters of pelargonium at Afrigetics in South Africa. They have the support they need so they aren’t always just getting by, always needing to cut corners to make ends meet. They have a buffer and so that pressure is gone. There is respect.

I move out to the whole industry now. Fraudulent cheap products fall away because that respect and fairness means people don’t feel the need to cheat or cut corners. And so there is more ease.

Overall there is less. And what there is is distributed among everyone, not just those at the top.

The focus no longer is about trading plants for products. Now the plants are a vehicle for connecting communities. They’re conduits for building and creating resilience, everywhere, throughout the steps from source to finished product.

Value goes to things that are valuable. Resources are used to create good livelihoods for everyone.

The flow of energy is different. Not a sucking, not plundering but replenishing. That is the key shift. Life creating life all the way to the source so people aren’t drained in their work. They are nourished by that work. It is not a system that is extracting as much as possible each step of the way. Instead it is feeding and in the feeding we are all nourished. Profit is a pathway to that nourishment not the end goal.

SHI is a networked structure weaving connections between people and places, with the plants as guide. We aren’t trying to change others. We are the change.

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The herbal products industry right now is far from this vision. Those closest to the source - harvesters and farmers - are squeezed by those the furthest away. Companies trying to do the right thing must compete on the shelf with those who aren’t. Trade shows are inside casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada or on the edge of Disneyland in Anaheim, California. SHI is only a small player in a huge system. And the most active members are some of the smallest companies.

“Of course having a vision isn’t enough,” Donella writes. “Of course it’s only the first step toward any goal.”

Yet, she also says, “I have stopped challenging myself, or anyone else who puts forth a vision, with the responsibility of laying out a plan for how to get there. A vision should be judged by its clarity of values, not by the clarity of its implementation path.”

As Donella told me years ago, it was the early 1990s, I’d just returned from Nepal and wasn’t sure what next to do. “Vision my future,” she said. And then share it, with her and with others. By sharing it, others can then join me in making that vision real.

Which is why I’m sharing this vision now.

I love this video we just completed telling the story of the in-person gatherings that the Sustainable Herbs Initiative is offering.

Find out more about the Sustainable Herbs Initiative and our work here!

Weaving Webs of Light

Cleaning my office recently, I found a piece of scrap paper from seven or eight years ago on which I had written:

Year One: My theory of change is that speaking what is real and true becomes a campfire around which others gather. And that the fire weaves webs of light that nourishes the seeds planted in our gatherings. I then wrote that I didn’t know how those seeds would grow or what exactly would unfold, but just that the seeds, the web of relationships created, and the structure to hold them were key.

Seven years later, I realize that this is exactly what the Sustainable Herbs Initiative is now doing. People come to this work because they envision a better path for producing herbal products made with plants sourced from around the world. The core group that began gathering spoke what is real and true and this has created a structure for others to do the same. These seeds are growing.

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Does it Bring Love?

“There is so much that must be silenced to do business,” Nate Brennan, Manager of Foster Farm Botanicals, said on the final day of the Learning Journey in Nicaragua in November 2024. “We can’t pretend not to hear it anymore. We need to keep asking, ‘Why are we doing things this way? Is it the right way or just because it is set up that way? Does it bring love? Or does it bring pain?’”

The first three SHI Learning Journeys, first to Appalachia, then Oregon, then Nicaragua, were about asking these questions and listening to answers from those we don’t always hear from. We mapped the challenges and leverage or acupuncture points and made lists of actions to address them.

This past June at the fourth in-person SHI gathering, after a morning of steeping ourselves in living systems awareness, we had four sessions where we discussed what made it difficult to address these challenges in a meaningful way. We shared ideas about what, even with industry constraints, we could do, and we created some, in the words of Raj Vable, founder of Young Mountain Tea, called safe-fail project ideas. In closing, we each shared the actions we will take, individually and collectively, to address these deeper structural problems.

Creating the Container

We began on Tuesday evening with an opening circle at Oshala Farm, a stunning location under oaks, beside fields of lemon balm, chamomile, calendula and more. I shared a few words to frame our time together and then Jeff and Elise Higley introduced us to the land and this place. We each greeted the land in our own way and came back to the whole circle. We shared our intentions for our time together and then paired with someone we didn’t know well for a dialogue walk.

I love these walks, which we have done at the last three Learning Journeys, a Presencing Institute practice introduced by Julie Arts. We are invited to each share three events in our life that have shaped who we are. We talk about them for ten minutes, with the other asking questions. Then we switch and the other does the same. Each time I’ve ended up walking with someone I have worked closely with for at least a year, but this invitation allowed us to go deeper, sharing more openly than we otherwise might.

We came back together, ate dinner sitting on hay bales looking over the fields of Oshala Farm and listened to music on the porch as the sun set.

Living Systems Thinking

The next morning, we gathered in a circle outside the farmhouse at Oshala Farm. I read a passage from “The Language of Animacy,” a chapter in Robin Kimmerer’s well-known book, Braiding Sweetgrass. Just to share one part of that passage here, “To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive…”

Clinical herbalist, Erika Galentin then led a 3-hour workshop on Goethean plant studies. Drawing on Craig Holdredge’s book, Thinking Like a Plant, and her studies at the Scottish School of Herbal Medicine, she talked about moving from object thinking to living systems thinking, which is about perceiving and being in relationship with the aliveness of the world.

“Why do we think we can know a plant when we know its name?” Erika asked. “Does someone know us when they know our name?”

She continued, “Think about a relationship where you are doing all the talking and none of the listening. So often, that is how it is in our relationship with plants.”

She then led us through a set of practices to meet one particular plant that we were not to name in its fullness. We observed it growing in the fields; we shared details about the plant visually; we tasted the plant. We smelled it. We drew it. We moved with it.

Living Systems Thinking in Economies Based on Object Thinking

What stayed with me was how easily we all opened to seeing the plant as a whole, outside the box, as Erika said. And yet, almost every person in that circle works for a company that exists because it successfully puts plants in boxes.

That tension is at the heart of SHI’s work. How can we hold on to living systems thinking in companies that must also operate in an economic system that depended on buying and selling objects?

Navigating Purpose through Challenges

That afternoon we gathered again in a large circle under the oaks to hear stories of how individuals and companies have navigated key challenges: Angela Willard, co-founder of Harmonic Arts, Chante Weigand, VP Science and Education at The Synergy Company, and Jessie Dean, founder of Asheville Tea Company.

Jessie spoke about how their connection to their mission and to others in the community who believed in their mission has helped them navigate rebuilding their entire business after their building washed away in Hurricane Helene. She talked about what she called the ROI of grace and trust and investing in relationships, investments that have proven to be as important has the healthy financial systems and structures they invested in.

In speaking about a challenging time for Harmonic Arts, Angela said she has trusted that life would not take away what they had woven with a cloth of love. And Chante talked about how Synergy is developing what she called an intentional sourcing “trade off” matrix to navigate decision making in tough economic times. This matrix will help them prioritize their non-negotiables as a company. When they go into hard times, they can have a clear sense of decision making and alignment.

The discussion that followed was rich, as others shared more openly about how they have navigated challenges in their companies and what has helped them stand up for what they believe and value. Later in the circle, Erin Smith, founder of ES Botanicals, commented on the power of these gatherings, we are all allowed to come out of our professional selves to show up as who we are as people. And that is the place from which we do the work.

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Embodied Action

The next day we had two sessions, each focusing on key leverage points that have emerged in previous Learning Labs and Learning Journeys: supporting support smallholder herb farmers, domestically and internationally, and supporting thriving wildcrafting communities now and into the future. These sessions, facilitated by different SHI members, focused on taking the challenges we have observed about truly partnering with sourcing communities over the past three years into actions that we can each bring into our own work.

In a final session, facilitated by Angela Willard and me, focused on specific actions we each were going to take. But we wanted to make sure those actions emerged from an embodied experience of listening and learning, that they arose from our experience of this and previous Learning Journeys, not just our ideas of how to fix the problems.

I shared stories of what had been shared during our time together, inviting everyone to journal on what resonated or moved them most about each story. And then from that, asked everyone to write down actions/commitments they would take around self, their work in their company, and with SHI and beyond.

Each person then came to the center of the circle and spoke their commitments out loud as they placed them on a tree drawn on paper, surrounded by flowers.

I had no idea how this part of our gathering would go. We’d always run out of time at the end of previous Learning Journeys when it came to outlining the actions we would take.

But this ceremony was beautiful and moving. It felt like an important next step in creating a network that models a living system.

Listening

In my book, Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, I describe how my then husband and I traveled across the US to document stories of community connections with land that was being stewarded with support from the Trust for Public Land. Among other places, we spent time at a Nez Perce reservation that had had land returned to the tribe. I wrote, “I wanted to know what would happen if we lived in a way that listened to the voices in the land – of the pine, the oak, the ancestors singing as we walked down the valley where they, too, once walked. What kind of world could we create if we believed that the world around us was alive?”

I wrote this book almost 20 years ago. And it is remarkable to see that that question is at the heart of the work I am now doing. Not only that, but that by asking that question, I am finding others who are asking it as well.

In his brilliant closing poem written from words and phrases gathered over our time together, Andy Thorton, co-founder of Silvan Ingredient Ecosystem, asked, “Can we listen to the language of the Birch people, the Bird people, the Rock people?”

“Now that we are living-thinking,” he continued, “[We asked what happens when we are truly tested.] A tradeoff is not a weakness. It is knowing what really matters.”

And he closed with the words Angela had shared the previous day, “If you weave your work with a cloth of love, you cannot fail.”

Buddhist scholar and activist, Joanna Macy died on July 19 at the age of 96. I didn't know Joanna Macy, but I attended one of her workshops in the early 2000s in Hartland, Vt. And her telling of the story of the Great Turning, which she says is arising through our resistance to the desecration of life, informs all of the work at the Sustainable Herbs Initiative (see this recent SHI blog post for more).

Last year sometime, while searching in an old filing cabinet, I came across a file: Letters to Keep. I pulled out the folder, quickly forgetting what I was looking for in the first place. As I glanced through the papers, I saw an envelope with the return address of Joanna Macy. I was astonished. I had completely forgotten ever receiving a letter from Joanna Macy. I opened it. It was a letter thanking me for my book, Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, which I’d sent the previous year as thanks for the workshop.

It had taken her over a year to remember to read it, she wrote. She then said a bit about how the book had impacted her and she thanked me for writing it.

I'm sharing that now, not because of what she said about me or my book. But because she took the time to read a book sent by one person among the thousands of people who have taken her workshops over the years. And because she took time to write me about it, letting me know what it meant to her.

She ended her letter, "with strong, glad wishes for your life and work."

I am trying to work on the Impact section of the updated Sustainable Herbs Initiative website and so I've been thinking about how to measure the ways our work matters. And about about what makes a difference when around the world the crises all seem to keep getting worse.

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I think of a story that Lauren Nichols-Sheffler, Sustainable Sourcing & Senior Purchasing Manager at WishGarden Herbs, shared at the recent SHI Oregon gathering, about how participating in SHI has helped her find the courage to speak up about things she believes. And about the story shared below, of a promise between two founders of tea companies and the impact that standing by that promise has made.

Joanna's letter, written in 2010, makes a difference to me now. It helps me trust myself a bit more deeply. Helps me find a bit more courage to speak out just a little more loudly. Because how do any of us know, really, which of our actions might make the differences that are needed?

Weaving Webs of Light

Cleaning my office recently, I found a piece of scrap paper from seven or eight years ago on which I had written:

Year One: My theory of change is that speaking what is real and true becomes a campfire around which others gather. And that the fire weaves webs of light the nourishes the seeds planted in our gatherings. I then wrote that I didn’t know how those seeds would grow or what exactly would unfold, but just that the seeds, the web of relationships created, and the structure to hold them were key.

Seven years later, I realize that this is exactly what the Sustainable Herbs Initiative is now doing. People come to this work because they envision a better path for producing herbal products made with plants sourced from around the world. The core group that began gathering spoke what is real and true and this has created a structure for others to do the same. These seeds are growing.

Does it Bring Love?

“There is so much that must be silenced to do business,” Nate Brennan, Manager of Foster Farm Botanicals, said on the final day of the Learning Journey in Nicaragua in November 2024. “We can’t pretend not to hear it anymore. We need to keep asking, ‘Why are we doing things this way? Is it the right way or just because it is set up that way? Does it bring love? Or does it bring pain?’”

The first three SHI Learning Journeys, first to Appalachia, then Oregon, then Nicaragua, were about asking these questions and listening to answers from those we don’t always hear from. We mapped the challenges and leverage or acupuncture points and made lists of actions to address them.

This past June at the fourth in-person SHI gathering, after a morning of steeping ourselves in living systems awareness, we had four sessions where we discussed what made it difficult to address these challenges in a meaningful way. We shared ideas about what, even with industry constraints, we could do, and we created some, in the words of Raj Vable, founder of Young Mountain Tea, called safe-fail project ideas. In closing, we each shared the actions we will take, individually and collectively, to address these deeper structural problems.

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Creating the Container

We began on Tuesday evening with an opening circle at Oshala Farm, a stunning location under oaks, beside fields of lemon balm, chamomile, calendula and more. I shared a few words to frame our time together and then Jeff and Elise Higley introduced us to the land and this place. We each greeted the land in our own way and came back to the whole circle. We shared our intentions for our time together and then paired with someone we didn’t know well for a dialogue walk.

I love these walks, which we have done at the last three Learning Journeys, a Presencing Institute practice introduced by Julie Arts. We are invited to each share three events in our life that have shaped who we are. We talk about them for ten minutes, with the other asking questions. Then we switch and the other does the same. Each time I’ve ended up walking with someone I have worked closely with for at least a year, but this invitation allowed us to go deeper, sharing more openly than we otherwise might.

We came back together, ate dinner sitting on hay bales looking over the fields of Oshala Farm and listened to music on the porch as the sun set.

Living Systems Thinking

The next morning, we gathered in a circle outside the farmhouse at Oshala Farm. I read a passage from “The Language of Animacy,” a chapter in Robin Kimmerer’s well-known book, Braiding Sweetgrass. Just to share one part of that passage here, “To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive…”

Clinical herbalist, Erika Galentin then led a 3-hour workshop on Goethean plant studies. Drawing on Craig Holdredge’s book, Thinking Like a Plant, and her studies at the Scottish School of Herbal Medicine, she talked about moving from object thinking to living systems thinking, which is about perceiving and being in relationship with the aliveness of the world.

“Why do we think we can know a plant when we know its name?” Erika asked. “Does someone know us when they know our name?”

She continued, “Think about a relationship where you are doing all the talking and none of the listening. So often, that is how it is in our relationship with plants.”

She then led us through a set of practices to meet one particular plant that we were not to name in its fullness. We observed it growing in the fields. We shared details about the plant visually. We tasted the plant. We smelled it. We drew it. We moved with it.

What stayed with me was how easily we all opened to seeing the plant as a whole, outside the box, as Erika said. And yet, almost every person in that circle works for a company that exists because it successfully puts plants in boxes.

That tension is at the heart of SHI’s work. How can we hold on to living systems thinking in companies that must also operate in an economic system that depended on buying and selling objects?

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Navigating Purpose through Challenges

That afternoon we gathered again in a large circle under the oaks to hear stories of how individuals and companies have navigated key challenges: Angela Willard, co-founder of Harmonic Arts, Chante Weigand, VP Science and Education at The Synergy Company, and Jessie Dean, founder of Asheville Tea Company.

Jessie spoke about how their connection to their mission and to others in the community who believed in their mission has helped them navigate rebuilding their entire business after their building washed away in Hurricane Helene. She talked about what she called the ROI of grace and trust and investing in relationships, investments that have proven to be as important has the healthy financial systems and structures they invested in.

In speaking about a challenging time for Harmonic Arts, Angela said she has trusted that life would not take away what they had woven with a cloth of love. And Chante talked about how Synergy is developing what she called an intentional sourcing "trade off" matrix to navigate decision making in tough economic times. This matrix will help them prioritize their non-negotiables as a company. When they go into hard times, they can have a clear sense of decision making and alignment.

The discussion that followed was rich, as others shared more openly about how they have navigated challenges in their companies and what has helped them stand up for what they believe and value. Later in the circle, Erin Smith, founder of ES Botanicals, commented on the power of these gatherings, we are all allowed to come out of our professional selves to show up as who we are as people. And that is the place from which we do the work.

Embodied Action

The next day we had two sessions, each focusing on key leverage points that have emerged in previous Learning Labs and Learning Journeys: supporting support smallholder herb farmers, domestically and internationally, and supporting thriving wildcrafting communities now and into the future. These sessions, facilitated by different SHI members, focused on taking the challenges we have observed about truly partnering with sourcing communities over the past three years into actions that we can each bring into our own work.

In a final session, facilitated by Angela Willard and me, focused on specific actions we each were going to take. But we wanted to make sure those actions emerged from an embodied experience of listening and learning, that they arose from our experience of this and previous Learning Journeys, not just our ideas of how to fix the problems.

I shared stories of what had been shared during our time together, inviting everyone to journal on what resonated or moved them most about each story. And then from that, asked everyone to write down actions/commitments they would take around self, their work in their company, and with SHI and beyond.

Each person then came to the center of the circle and spoke their commitments out loud as they placed them on a tree drawn on paper, surrounded by flowers.

I had no idea how this part of our gathering would go. We’d always run out of time at the end of previous Learning Journeys when it came to outlining the actions we would take.

But this ceremony was beautiful and moving. It felt like an important next step in creating a network that models a living system.

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Listening

In my book, Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, I describe how my then husband and I traveled across the US to document stories of community connections with land that was being stewarded with support from the Trust for Public Land. Among other places, we spent time at a Nez Perce reservation that had had land returned to the tribe. I wrote, “I wanted to know what would happen if we lived in a way that listened to the voices in the land – of the pine, the oak, the ancestors singing as we walked down the valley where they, too, once walked. What kind of world could we create if we believed that the world around us was alive?”

I wrote this book almost 20 years ago. And it is remarkable to see that that question is at the heart of the work I am now doing. Not only that, but that by asking that question, I am finding others who are asking it as well.

In his brilliant closing poem written from words and phrases gathered over our time together, Andy Thorton, co-founder of Silvan Ingredient Ecosystem, asked, “Can we listen to the language of the Birch people, the Bird people, the Rock people?”

“Now that we are living-thinking,” he continued, “[We asked what happens when we are truly tested.] A tradeoff is not a weakness. It is knowing what really matters.”

And he closed with the words Angela had shared the previous day, “If you weave your work with a cloth of love, you cannot fail.”

Find out more about our work at the Sustainable Herbs Initiative’s work here!

This post is a deep dive into the sources of pau d’arco. It is part of the Sustainable Herbs Initiative Plants in Commerce series, a series that tells the stories of the journeys plants make from source to finished product.

The inner bark of species traded under the Portuguese name ‘pau d’arco’ are now placed in the genus Handroanthus, with their formerly widely used Latin names in the Tabebuia genus now considered synonyms. These towering deciduous trees with beautiful flowers, purple, yellow, and pink, depending on the species, are native to tropical regions of the Americas. The Handroanthus genus has about 353 species. They are slow-growing trees and are considered some of the most vulnerable species to logging in Amazonian forests because of their low density and slow growth rates.

The inner bark of two species primarily traded for use in herbal medicinal products, are Handroanthus impetiginosus (syn. Tabebuia impetiginosa), which is the pau d’arco of Brazil, and Handroanthus serratifolius (syn. Tabebuia serratifolia), which is the tahuari of Peru. Popular common names for the species include pau d’arco, taheebo, lapacho, tahuarí, tajibo and ipé. The Portuguese name ipê seems to be most popular when the species is used as a source of timber and ornamentals. Pau d’arco is most commonly used when the medicinal uses are being considered (1).

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Medicinal use of pau d’arco

The pink or purple flowered pau d’arco (H. impetiginosus) is typically used in the European and US herbal products markets. Though the most common species in trade, different Handroanthus species are found in ethnomedicine, like the yellow flowered pau d’arco (H. serratifolius) native to South and Central America, are considered to be similar biochemically, each producing lapachol, and are likely to be similarly efficacious (2).

The inner bark of pau d’arco is the part used as medicine and is believed to be antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, and anti-tumoral. Pau d’arco has been used by several groups of indigenous peoples in South America for a variety of conditions including stomach aches, fevers, colds and flu (the leaves), leishmaniasis, dysentery, and (with other species) diabetes. Others report use for “various maladies, especially cancer,” as an astringent, and for liver cirrhosis (3).

The inner bark of yellow pau d’arco, much like other species of the Handroanthus genus, is a natural source for lapachol, a compound that has been studied for anti-inflammatory, anticancer,antiparasitic and immune-modulating activities (4).

Pau d’arco in the logging industry

Pau d’arco trees, generally referred to as “ipê” in trade, produce very hard, heavy, durable wood that is highly valued in the market. It is sold locally for constructing houses, bridges, flooring, decking and handicrafts. Internationally it is primarily used for decking (5). The inner bark used for medicinal products on the international market Is a by-product of the logging industry.

Once the trees are logged, they are floated by river to urban areas for further processing. Because the wood is so heavy, buoys are used to keep it from sinking (6).

Brazil is the highest exporter of ipê, which are some of the most expensive species used in logging on the market in Brazil. The timber is referred to as the ‘new big leaf mahogany’ (Swietenia macrophylla), which was listed on CITES because of declines from overharvesting. This has increased the price and demand for ipê and led to its listing in CITES Appendix 2 as well. The US and European countries are the main importers. There are no plantations of ipê and so all of this wood comes from natural forests. Over harvesting of the trees and deforestation from demand for agricultural land are the major threats. Habitat loss from fires, development, and conversion to pastures for livestock also threaten the species (7).

Over 525 million kg (or 469,613 m³) of ipê timber products were exported from Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Peru between 2017 and 2021. Most ipê is exported from Brazil, which accounted for 96% of the trade (based on volume). The low natural density and the low growth rate of H. serratifolius (Ipê Amarelo), as well as H. impetiginosus (Ipê Rosa), typical of most of the other species within the three CITES-listed genera (Handroanthus, Roseodendron and Tabebuia), combined with high demand for international trade, habitat loss and degradation, has resulted in populations being negatively impacted. In the forests of northeastern Brazil, H. impetiginosus and H. serratifolius have shown drastic population declines, with no evidence of long-term population recovery. H. serratifolius is categorised as globally Endangered in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species on the basis that it is threatened by international trade and is predicted to experience a population decline of at least 50% over the next 100 years (7). H. impetiginosus is assessed as Near Threatened, noting that its populations have declined considerably as a result of unsustainable exploitation for the international timber trade, with population declines of at least 25% expected over the next 100 year (7,8).

Unsustainable logging of the trees has led to significant declines in the population of the trees. The species also has a difficult time recovering from logging. In addition, the IUCN/Traffic have found evidence of illegal harvest and trade of the species as well as potential fraud in logging permits in Brazil (9). They also found that logging companies overestimated the sustainability of harvesting practices (10).

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Conservation status of pau d’arco

Since 1997, H. impetiginosa has been considered Endangered, while H. Incana and H. serratifolia are considered Vulnerable. In 2015, a Working Group in which PEBANI participated, proposed a new Official List of Categorization of Threatened Species. In 2016, through Ministerial Resolution, this list was put up for consideration. All species of the genus Handroanthus maintained their categorization as Endangered or Vulnerable (11). The species has since elevated to international protection and monitoring of export trade as per the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

The three genera Handroanthus, Roseodendron and Tabebuia were added to in CITES Appendix II at the Nineteenth meeting of the Conference for CITES of the Parties Panama City, November 2022. Entry into effect however was delayed by 24 months, i.e. until 25 November 2024. CITES Appendix II “lists species that are not necessarily now threatened with extinction but that may become so unless trade is closely controlled.” It also includes so-called “look-alike species”, i.e. species whose specimens in trade look like those of species listed for conservation reasons (see Article II, paragraph 2 of the Convention)(12). International trade in specimens of Appendix-II species may be authorized by the granting of an export permit or re-export certificate. No import permit is necessary for these species under CITES (although a permit is needed in some countries that have taken stricter measures than CITES requires). Permits or certificates should only be granted if the relevant authorities are satisfied that certain conditions are met, above all that trade will not be detrimental to the survival of the species in the wild. (See Article IV of the Convention)” The CITES listings came with Annotation #17 which limits the scope to logs, sawn wood, veneer sheets, plywood and transformed wood. This means that the inner bark used in traditional herbal medicine is excluded from CITES controls (13).

However, the inner bark is obtained as a by-product from felling entire trees for the logs, which still links this medicinal plant part to the overall controls and monitoring. Because the entire Handroanthus genus is listed in CITES Appendix II, it is supposed to go through a series of controls when transporting to the city. Because of potential fraud in logging permits, this is not a reliable method of ensuring that the trees have been harvested according to CITES guidelines.

CITES and the Peruvian Service of National Forest and Fauna (SERFOR) do not consider pau d’arco inner bark as commercially restricted. SERFOR requires a forest management plan for this product, which must be approved by them, along with field and warehouse inspections (11).

Sourcing of pau d’arco

Historically, the pau d’arco of commerce originated from the inner bark of H. impetiginosus trees native to Central and South America primarily obtained as a by-product of the logging industry in Brazil.

Though export trade of logs and wood from the trees are regulated by CITES, because of concerns over permitting fraud, buyers must ensure that they are purchasing from companies that know the source and are abiding by CITES regulations, such as a forest management plan and controlled harvesting. Other concerns are that the outer bark is mixed with the inner bark, which is the part of the plant that has the necessary constituents.

Companies typically purchase pau d’arco through a broker and so it can be difficult to get much information about harvesting practices.

I was able to get some information through a US based company who contacted their supplier who in turn answered my questions via email. They explained that they work with a network of trusted suppliers across Brazil, primarily in the regions in North and Northeast Brazil. They explained that the Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis (IBAMA), the environmental agency overseeing the harvesting process, plays a crucial role in preserving both the local forests and communities. Through sustainable harvesting practices monitored by IBAMA, this supplier wrote, communities can continue to earn income and sustain their way of life.

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Responsible sourcing

In the initial report that recommended inclusion of all Handroanthus species in CITES Appendix II, the authors didn’t find evidence that the trade for herbal remedies impacts wild populations. Logging and habitat conversion remain the main drivers. But ethical sourcing of pau d’arco can create a market for sustainably logging the ipê trees by ensuring that they are harvested only when a forest management plan is intact that accounts for harvesting levels and replanting practices. The company must also demonstrate that sourcing the material adheres to the guidelines in their forest management plan.

US based companies with whom I spoke who currently source their products from Brazil expressed their concern over the lack of visibility into the market for pau d’arco and an interest in finding traceable supplies.

Pebani, a Peruvian company, is currently working toward FairWild certification for yellow pau d’arco and offers an alternative source for this product (14). Pebani was started in 1996 to improve the livelihoods of rural communities in the Peruvian Amazon and Andes through the sustainable sourcing of medicinal plants. Cesar Barriga, the founder, a forest engineer, believes that the best-preserved forests are in the hands of indigenous people. Pebani is working to show indigenous communities that there is a market for products that are sustainably harvested and to provide these communities with the tools needed to source them.

As in Brazil, the main threats that facing pau d’arco in Peru are illegal logging, illegal mining, and subsistence farming. There is growing migration from the Andes to the Amazon because it is easier to work with crops in the Amazon. According to Paulo Barriga, Cesar’s son and Chief of Operations at Pebani, 90% of the deforestation in Peru is from burning to clear the forest for small farms, from 5–30 hectares. There is a value in providing ways of making a living through harvesting medicinal plants that require the forest to remain intact.

Pebani finds supplies of pau d’arco first by identifying local communities that are both well established and that have legal tenure to the area. This is difficult in Peru because many communities don’t have ownership rights to the area where they live. And so, as a second step, Pebani works with the community to help them get the ownership titles needed.

They then do a preliminary survey of the forest to see how many pau d’arco trees are in the region. They extrapolate from this number to the whole area. That then determines whether Pebani believe it is worth the investment of doing an in-depth forest management plan which will determine how much they can harvest from a particular area. The forest management plan involves walking the entire area and putting a tag and GPS marker on every tree.

Pebani presents this plan to the government to get the permits needed to begin working in the area. They also need to submit annual operating plans documenting their harvest. There is quite a bit of bureaucracy to get permits and other requirements from the government. This is very important, Paulo explained, because it helps the government control the process.

Harvest

Once Pebani receives an order, they identify those in the community who are willing to do the work. It’s difficult to find people because the work is hard. Once the trees are cut, the harvesters cut out the outer bark to harvest the inner bark. It is dried in solar driers in the field and then sent to Lima for further processing. Rather than selling the timber in the market, the harvesters are able to keep the wood to use for local construction. As part of the management plan, Pebani replants three plants for every one cut.

Pebani pays the harvesters by the kilo for the dried product. They work with collectors as long as there is an order.

Much of Pebani’s work is in the community with training. Because the trees take 20 years to grow, Pebani is also working in the communities to help them grow other crops like cacao, that can be grown in an agroforestry setting. Pebani staff are working with community members to develop different drying processes to bring more value to the community. Pebani invests in the communities in other ways as well, by providing water filters because the water quality is poor and a boat so that villagers can travel more easily.

Challenges

Some of the main challenges Pebani faces are the lack of ownership titles, the bureaucracy, and potential adulteration.

Another ongoing challenge for Pebani is the lack of demand. This means that they cannot provide a steady income to the harvesters, who then turn to other work, like clearing the forest for farming and livestock. Pebani pays a good price yet, Paulo explained, if they can only sell 100 kilos a year, they are still not able to provide a sustainable livelihood for the collectors. And so, paying fair prices is only part of the picture. There also needs to be a steady demand.

From Pebani’s perspective, it is good for companies to buy CITES products. Paulo said, “Some people believe that if something is listed in CITES they shouldn’t touch it. But even if you don’t touch it, people will still illegally harvest it. And wild harvesters who might sustainably harvest the tree will simply shift to another source of income like growing corn. It also means that when bigger companies are willing to source the species sustainably under CITES, they will be required to implement a plan to replant the trees and invest in the overall preservation of the area.”

To prove his point, Paulo mentioned an article by someone who bought a huge area of land in the Amazon, yet this person said that buying land wasn’t the best way to protect it because he didn’t necessarily know what was happening on that land. But if you are sourcing something sustainably from the area, you have to go there, you have to know what is happening on the ground. You need to work with the local communities and the government to make sure following the regulations.

FairWild certification

In 2022 Pebani began the process of becoming FairWild certified. They decided on the FairWild certification after speaking with Josef Brinckmann from Traditional Medicinals. So far, in working toward the certification, a risk analysis for pau d’arco and three other medicinal plants from the region were carried out, hired trainers to help them prepare the necessary documents and are provide training for the collectors. As soon as they complete the trainings for the communities, they will schedule the FairWild audit and begin being able to provide FairWild certified products (15,16).

I once asked Paulo what would a partnership based in mutuality and trust emphasize with a brand? He explained that Pebani is looking for collaboration with both brands and buyers. They hope to find buyers who are open to sharing the process around what they do around quality control, etc. to help Pebani better understand how they can add value to their process. In other words, Pebani is looking for buyers who work with them the way that Pebani is working in the communities from whom they source.

References

1. Bussmann R. Assessment of equivalence of Tabebuia serratifolia (Vahl) Nichols and Tabebuia impetiginosa (Mart. Ex DC.) Standl. William Brown Center, Missouri Botanic Garden; 2012.

2. Gentry A. A synopsis of Bignoniaceae ethnobotany and economic botany. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden. 1992;79(1):53-64.

3. Rodrigues E. Plants and animals utilized as medicines in the Jaú National Park (JNP), Brazilian Amazon. Phytotherapy Research. 2006;20:378-391.

4. Jiménez-González FJ, Veloza LA, Sepúlveda-Arias JC. Anti-infectious activity in plants of the genus Tabebuia.

5. IUCN/TRAFFIC. Inclusion of trumpet trees Handroanthus spp., Tabebuia spp., and Roseodendron spp. in Appendix II with annotation #6. IUCN/TRAFFIC Analyses of Proposals to CoP18. 2019.

6. Barriga P. Personal communication. March 18, 2024.

7. Hills R. Handroanthus serratifolius. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2021. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2021-3.RLTS.T61985509A145677076.en.

8. Hills R. Handroanthus impetiginosus. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2021. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2021-3.RLTS.T144297143A173394208.en

9. Brancalion PHS, de Almeida DRA, Vidal E, Molin PG, Sontag VE, Souza SEXF, Schulze MD. Fake legal logging in the Brazilian Amazon. Science Advances. 2018;4(8).

10. IUCN/TRAFFIC. Inclusion of trumpet trees Handroanthus spp., Tabebuia spp., and Roseodendron spp. in Appendix II with annotation #6. IUCN/TRAFFIC Analyses of Proposals to CoP18. 2019.

11. Barriga C, Barriga P. Email communication. April 12, 2024.

12. CITES. Appendices. [Accessed May 3, 2024]. Available from: https://cites.org/eng/app/appendices.php

13. CITES. Index. [Accessed May 3, 2024]. Available from: https://cites.org/eng/app/index.php

14. Pebani website. [Accessed May 3, 2024]. Available from: https://www.pebani.com.pe/

15. FairWild website. [Accessed May 3, 2024]. Available from:

16. https://www.fairwild.org/

17. Schippmann U. Risk classification of species proposed for FairWild certification. Summary Data Sheet: Pebani, RA20200208 by IUCN Medicinal Plants Specialist Group. March 18, 2022.

The vision for the Learning Lab was planted in studying herbal medicine with Rosemary Gladstar. I was drawn to herbal medicine because of the values at its heart. I had recently returned from research in eastern Nepal and I started studying with Rosemary Gladstar. It felt like a cultural framework for healing that was rooted in an ecological vision of wellness, one that recognizes that we can’t be well until the planet is well.

With filmmaker Terrence Youk, I co-produced the documentary film Numen to celebrate this vision at the heart of traditional Western herbalism. We called the film Numen, a Latin term that means “the animating force in all things living.”

To us, this concept expresses what is most important about any tradition that uses plants for healing – that it is a way to encounter the mystery of nature and the aliveness of the world. And that ultimately that encounter is at the root of healing. I wanted to know whether that aliveness showed up in herbs sourced from around the world. And, if so, where to find it.

Imagination

And I was inspired by the Wendell Berry quotation. At the Watershed Gathering in 1996, writer and farmer Wendell Berry once said, “As a nation we are struggling with a profound lack of imagination. We don’t see the forests being cut down to build our homes, the lakes being drained as we fill our tub. We live on the far side of a broken connection.” Not seeing the people and places on the other side, not seeing the moral and ecological consequences of producing these products, he continued, makes it easier to consume them. “Healing this broken connection,” Berry concluded, “begins with seeing beyond what the market wants us to see.” Which begins with an act of imagination.

Note, Wendell Berry said we are suffering from a failure of imagination. Not a lack of information.

Because we don’t see the consequences of our actions, we are able to ignore or forget the moral and ecological consequences of those actions.

Another way of saying something similar: We use pesticides on plants that we intend to use to heal and we think that is okay.

Seeing the Impacts of Our Ways of Living

A wild harvester at Runo in eastern Poland.

Having the imagination to see – and the willingness to look – behind the object to see what lies in its wake, in the wake of all of our actions and all of our impacts, is the key to the shift needed.

I began following herbs to the source to explore these two questions:

• What happens when we see the conditions behind the products we consume?

• Is it possible that that relationship with the plants, with the aliveness of the world at the heart of natural medicine systems, can be found in an industry that sources herbs from around the world. If so, where? And how will I know it when I see it?

Following Herbs to the Source

I began my journey by visiting FairWild companies in Eastern Europe and then over the next few years visited producer groups and farmers in eastern Europe, Germany, the UK, the US, and India. I saw huge range of issues. Some companies were sourcing herbs in ways that respected the plants and the people involved. Many were doing nothing of the sort.

I thought it would be a question with an answer. And yet, as I listened to the voices of different stakeholders sharing their perspectives and challenges, I found that wasn’t at all the case. Part of that is just that sourcing any raw material is complex. But sourcing up to one or two hundred botanicals from around the world, each species with different needs from different places, is mind bogglingly complex. There were no simple answers.

My vision was to share information that could transform the industry for the better. My goal was large scale change.  But I began to see that scaling up was what created many of the problems I was seeing.

And so I began to wonder whether large scale change maybe wasn’t the way to get there. I wondered whether enduring change in fact involves a lot of smaller changes everywhere, especially in one-on-one relationships. I then began to ask:

• What are the conditions needed to make these relationships possible?

• What does it take to create and sustain those conditions?

• What is needed to do business in a way that truly honors people and plants and the planet, all the way to the source?

What is Needed for Enduring Change

And then the answers became less about what to do: this or that certification, a contract or not. And more about how to be: How to listen. How to be respectful. To be honorable. To keep your word. To treat people as people and plants as alive.

We needed to change our ways of thinking. Ways of thinking that consider that some things, some people, some places are expendable, are not worthy of our respect, while others are.

I organized the Learning Lab as a place to bring different stakeholders in the herbal products industry together to create a container to build deeper relationships on these other qualities.

I wanted to see what happens when we shift the place from which we do the work. What happens when we begin our journey from a place of awe and gratitude and respect? From a deep sense of being in relationship to the aliveness of the world?

Reprogramming our Minds

How can we then seed something that arises from this different kind of connection, one that holds our relationship to plants at the center?

In her 2004 keynote talk at Climate Day, Living Systems, Living Values: The Lessons of Indigenous Regenerative Ecosystem Design, Lyla June said “The secret is not how you manage the land or the technology you use. The secret is the heart with which you manage it.”

“We need to reprogram our minds to become organized around reciprocity, restraint, reverence,” she continued. “Around respect. Responsibility. Regeneration. Relationality. These are the key components of the software that is needed.”

The Learning Lab focuses on developing the software needed. And then, from this place of respect, to ask: What do we want to grow? What are the conditions needed to sustain this relationship with ourselves, with the plants, and with each other?

The post Seeds of the SHI Learning Labs appeared first on Sustainable Herbs Initiative.

The Sustainable Herbs Initiative’s Wild Plants Working Group has been meeting monthly for a year and a half. Our goal is to share the stories of wild harvesters from around the world and to help find solutions to the challenges they face. We are doing this by conducting interviews with wild harvesters of 14 different species, to see what is unique about these species and also what the patterns and parallels are.

At the heart of this work, we are exploring how any actions we might recommend for addressing the challenges arise from a paradigm that senses the inherent aliveness of the world. And so I thought a good place to begin is with that aliveness, by asking the forest and the plants how they would design a system for harvesting their medicine that recognized and respected their aliveness.

What follows emerged from the process of writing. I share them because regardless of the source, they are wise words for any of us harvesting plants from the wild.

I enter a clearing in an Appalachian forest. Everyone is here. Oak. Maple. Birch. Fox. Blue cohosh. Black cohosh. So many more.

I ask black cohosh, “If you could design a system that honored you, your roots in the forest, your roots in community, what you design?”

Without hesitation, black cohosh answers,

“Roots are more than something you weigh. More than something you exchange for profit. Roots ground in a place. They connect you to the community in that place. Rooting as verb. The action I play in the forest is my medicine. Not just what I am. And even what I am is of the forest.”

Oregon grape root, whom I don’t know well, speaks up, bringing along that high western meadow air, just as black cohosh brought the lush Appalachian forest.

“That moment of taking is key. How the taking happens. Are there connections, a weaving of a web, or is it a snap, no thread of connection?

What is the quality of the taking?”

“How does that matter?” I ask.

They all look around, because this is the key. They need to get it right, so I can understand.

A small plant, eyebright?, steps forward.

“Some of what we offer is bounty. A gift for anyone. Some of what we offer is our lives. So, first, in the taking, recognize the difference.

You aren’t the only ones taking. So even with the bounty, be aware of others who also want to partake.

If we don’t grow abundantly, don’t take abundantly.”

Blue cohosh comes forward and adds,

“We have more to do and be than medicine for you. That is one thing, our gift to you. But it isn’t the only thing. See that. Honor that.

The taking can be an invitation for connection.

An invitation to use the harvest to go deeper, to follow the threads of how each of us relates to every other one of us. Use the taking not to leave, but to enter.

To turn towards us.

To remember we are all part of the same world.”

It can be hard to see how the day to day work at the Sustainable Herb Initiative matters in any real and enduring way given what is unfolding in the world right now. And so, as always, I was grateful for Otto Scharmer’s framing of this moment in time in “Presencing Series 2025: Sensing and Actualizing the Future that is in need of us,” a six-part series which just began.

Otto talked about how there are two narratives in the world right now: One is of destruction and is about all that is ending. The second is about what is being born.

The narrative of destruction is getting all the attention, he said. The narrative about what is being born is far more powerful than we understand. And it is the least well told story at this time.

In the SHI working groups on wild harvesters, sourcing risks, quality and sustainability, we are asking how to do this work in ways that arise from a world view that sees the world as alive, that treats plants and people from source to shelf as living entities with which to have a relationship, not as resources to extract for a finished product that will bring a profit.

Otto’s framing helped me remember that this work is part of the new narrative of what is being born.

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Otto then talked about the necessity of tending the social soil. The quality of the harvest, the quality of what we see in our communities and the world around us, is a function of the quality of the social soil, of what goes on beneath the surface. The quality of that social soil is directly related to the quality of the awareness we bring to our relationships, he said. Change happens, we create “islands of coherence,” by paying deeper attention to that social soil. We do this through practices like awareness, listening, dialogue, imagination, and presencing.

These practices also are at the heart of the work SHI is doing.

This past week a new SHI working group on storytelling and marketing met for the second time. Sixteen individuals from SHI member companies like WishGarden Herbs, evanhealy, Pure Synergy, Traditional Medicinals, Gaia Herbs, Motherlove, Harmonic Arts, and many more to reflect on how to better tell the story of the deeper purpose of our work, individually and collectively.

The companies in this circle depend on, work within, a capitalist system where to survive they must sell products. Many of the companies in this meeting compete with each other for those customers who are willing and able to pay a higher price for herbal products produced by purpose driven companies. And so, the fact that they were here seeking ways to collaborate was an important first step.

Herbal supply chains are complex, more complex than most consumers standing in front of a sea of products each calling to be bought have the time or the energy or the resources to grasp. Sustainability stories typically don’t do as well as stories about how plants can be used. And so I thought we perhaps needed to begin with values and the vision that brought us all together.

I began the meeting with a brief journaling practice, inviting everyone to do a free write on these words: consumer, citizen, healing, sustainability. I read this passage by Joseph Keifer and Martin Kemple from Rosemary Gladstar’s gorgeous new book, The Generosity of Plants: Shared Wisdom from the Community of Herb Lovers:

“Perhaps the future does not lie in more

And more complex methods of information transmission,

But in the simple understanding that this planet is our home, and that we live here

Thanks to a miraculous and complex web of life.”

I asked everyone to reflect on what resonated from the words and then opened it up for discussion.

David Gordon commented on how what he wrote had been informed by the passage. That was encouraging, he said, because it reminded him that what we read, what we hear, matters, that the context can inform what we see and what we value. And so, by telling stories of other ways of taking care, perhaps, we can contribute to strengthening this second narrative and that by strengthening the narrative, we can help bring it into being.

Tracy can Hoven commented that now more than ever people are listening to what is going on in the world. People are thinking about where their products are from. Ed Fletcher added that people are paying attention in a different way. He said we have been trying to talk about the livelihoods of the collectors and growers for years, but suddenly now people are aware that where things come from matters. That supply chains matter. They realize that maybe we all need to be paying better attention.

The story we are trying to tell is so big, Simla Somturk added. And that complexity can pave the way for simplicity. All of her responses held this natural tension, she added. And, as an example, she read here response to the word consumers:

“Take, take, take. More, more. Want it all for free if possible. Too busy to think, too overwhelmed to feel or even hope.

And yet, what’s really there is craving and crying out for connection, for meaning, for substance, for mattering, for trust, for ease and simplicity to live, to care, to connect.”

She then talked about the tension between how so much of our consumerism heavy economy feeds things that are so superficial. And yet, that economy creates complexity. That complexity drives the need for ‘easy’ for prepared meals and microwaves. We don’t have time to recycle.

“And yet deep down,” she continued, “I don’t think anyone feels good about that. Deep down, it’s that tap root of the common things we all want. How do we come back to addressing that real craving and that real need? How do we act as conduits and messengers to go deeper, recognizing what’s going on on the surface, but being brave and also figuring out how to dig deep.”

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Tracy commented on the tensions of these stories and also the fear as a brand of being tone deaf, of talking about products with everything else that is going on. And yet, as I listened to what everyone shared, I felt that what we were sharing is part of that new narrative that Otto mentioned. That each of us is trying to share a story about the new world we are trying to bring into being, where companies are not just extracting and exploiting, but where they are part of building a larger system that is about taking care.

Others also spoke about the tensions in each of the words. As those in marketing, they perhaps live in that tension more than others in their companies, holding the balance of the pressure to sell and the awareness of the complexity beneath the stories created to sell. Acknowledging that complexity isn’t easy. If one company steps forward and say things are more complex, we don’t have it all figured out, then they risk losing customers to companies that don’t acknowledge that complexity.

Part of what SHI is trying to do is to create a context in which we can tell the truth about what is working along with what isn’t yet working. It is to help create a context where we hold that tap root that Simla spoke about, the tap root of what we all want, to forge deeper connections with ourselves, with each other, with the planet. Which can, in turn, be part of the new narrative that is being birthed.

I go to the tree spirit’s clearing, frustrated by my trip and the challenge of meeting collectors in any meaningful way. I have my notebook and pen. I sit on a wooden stoop.

“It’s not hard to imagine,” the tree spirit said. “You saw enough. Maybe the people would look different, but it’s the same everywhere. It’s a building at the end of a dirt road. There are sacks of dried herbs. The head of the collecting unit reaches his hand in to check that the herbs are dried, looks to see if other plants are mixed in. Some will do this carefully. A lot more will not.”

He gets up and starts walking. I follow along. He seems impatient, more gruff than usual. I wonder if I’ve done something wrong. Even the little girl is subdued.

“It’s not interesting or exciting,” he said. “Herbalists claim it is - wild collectors doing some traditional practice. No one ever traditionally chose to harvest sacks of herbs to sell for money. There was a market and so they did it. A few people made money, so more people did it.”

“It’s a short story and you are trying to make it long,” he added.

We keep walking back to this clearing. I can feel the little girl’s hand in mine. She squeezes it.

“He’s mad because he’s a tree,” she told me. “Wild collectors are taking too many plants and not caring for them. They’re leaving them on the side of the road where they get dirty and dried out. They’re careless. That’s what you need to talk about,” she told me, “the importance of taking care.”

August 1992

My skin was like wet tissue paper. It peeled off with my socks, pulled off under the damp bandage. It came off from between my toes, from the soles of my feet, and from the edges of my heels. The exposed new skin was raw and tender. There was too much of it to cover and nothing solid or dry to hold down a new bandage. I had never seen anything like it and had no idea what to do. I glanced up with despair and saw the women already lifting their bamboo baskets and filing barefoot into the early morning mist. Pain was preferable to abandonment. Wincing, I pulled on my last dry pair of socks and laced up my soggy boots. I stuffed my jacket into the top of my pack and followed in the direction of the women – day number two on our pilgrimage to Khembalung.

Khembalung refers to several places. It is Makalu, the fifth highest mountain in the world and the home, so the villagers in Hedangna say, of Lord Shiva. At night in their dreams, Yamphu shamans and priests say, they travel to a cold, clear lake on the right shoulder of the mountain. Witches travel to the ridge as well, but they bathe instead in a lake of blood. When they are done washing, the shamans and witches and priests stretch out on the rocks, drying themselves in the moonlight and arguing over who is the most powerful.

Khembalung is also a bhayul or hidden valley of Tibetan cosmology, a pure enchanted land set outside the destruction and corruption of time. Here, so the legends say, one will find refuge from the enemies of religion and attain eternal youth, beauty, strength and fertility.

These bhayuls are physical places hidden deep in the Himalayas and rendered inaccessible by the magic of the Tibetan yogi, Devimayasambhava. What pilgrims see on their journey to these sacred places depends on what they are capable of seeing. Some encounter rocks and trees, mountains covered with snow. Others who cross the same terrain see mysterious landscapes shimmering with jewels and awesome mountains floating above clouds of light.

What they experience when they arrive in the valley of Khembalung also depends on what they are ready to experience. Most find a peaceful and fertile land with room for five hundred people to settle. They receive a blessing of good health, long life, fertility, and strength; their desires will be fulfilled. Yogis who enter the same lush valley have sudden visions of the nature of realty, flashes of insight that are fleeting, but that strengthen and deepen their spiritual journeys.

Entrance to the innermost realm of Khembalung is reserved for those who have reached the highest level of spiritual fulfillment. Here the physical landscape corresponds to the body and mind of the pilgrim. When travelers enter this place – a place, so the guidebooks say, where there is no distinction between life and death - they acquire the clarity of mind and openness of heart needed to attain enlightenment.

Few attempt to undertake journeys to these hidden lands. It is too dangerous, and they fear they will never return. But many make pilgrimages to the places believed to be ‘gateways’ to these valleys. Two caves carved out of a granite cliff 1,000 feet above the high-altitude summer pastures of Yangle Meadow, a day’s walk south of the base of Makalu, are said to be entrances into the hidden valley of Khembalung. Whether they are or not, these caves are believed to be sacred places where gods have stayed and are among the most important pilgrimage sites for Hindus and Buddhists in the upper Arun valley.

Priests and shamans, lamas and yogis are able to make the journey to Khembalung in their dreams or through intense spiritual practice, but everyone else must get there on foot. And so at the height of the monsoon, I set out at dawn with twenty-five villagers from Hedangna on the annual pilgrimage to the Khembalung caves at the time of the full moon.

The Yamphu with whom I traveled know that the caves are connected to the hidden valleys of Tibetan cosmology, but they described themselves as Hindu and referred to the site as Shiva’s cave. Two Brahmans from a less remote village to the south joined us. These men were tall and thin and not at all suited to the long, hard days of walking. One of them complained incessantly, saying the trail was too hard and the trip too difficult. Each time the Brahman complained, Jadu Prasad, one of the oldest Yamphu men in the group who was on his sixth pilgrimage to Khembalung, replied matter-of-factly, “It wouldn’t be a pilgrimage if it wasn’t difficult.” By the end of the trip we were all repeating, sometimes with laughter, sometimes without, “It wouldn’t be a pilgrimage if it wasn’t difficult.”

While yogis and lamas travel to hidden valleys to escape samsara (cycle of death and rebirth) and attain eternal bliss, the pilgrims with whom I traveled had more modest goals. The men and women were going to Khembalung to ask for a son, a daughter, a job, a good harvest. I hoped to learn more about their pilgrimages, about what they did and why. But, like the others, I soon began to talk less as we walked. Like them, I found myself mumbling repetitive chants, over and over, to keep myself moving across the rocky terrain.

I carried a down sleeping bag, a Thermarest, a toothbrush, a pack cover, a flashlight, a notebook, iodine, four pairs of socks, long underwear, a Synchilla jacket, a camera,and rice. My boots were soggy, my socks were soggy, and the wet, soft skin on my feet continued to peel. There was nothing I could do, so I simply ignored the pain as best I could. Every time I unpacked and repacked, the women gathered around to comment on each item I had brought. Each of them carried a hand-woven woolen blanket, a bamboo mat to keep out the rain, rice, some spices, and a pot. All were barefoot. They had bundles of string and bits of cloth, shawls, their finest clothing to wear on the day we climbed to the caves, and raksi, a type of spirit made from millet. That was all.

Each morning we awoke in the dark. We walked all day along steep narrow trails, fording icy streams that overflowed from the monsoon rains, and climbing from 5,000 feet in Hedangna over two 16,000 foot passes and up the Barun valley. In five days, we covered the same distance that I had traveled in two weeks the previous spring while trekking with my family.

We stopped only at dusk, when we had reached a cave large enough to hold all twenty-five of us. We ate one meal a day, f rice mixed with wild plants gathered along the trail. While hiking we snacked on roasted corn flour. Occasionally, we drank black tea.

On the third afternoon, we arrived at Yangle Meadow, the grazing pastures below the Khembalung caves. We sat on the grassy floor of the narrow valley, at 13,000 feet, flanked by towering granite cliffs. Our words were swallowed by the roar of the Barun river, which carves through the center of the valley. Jadu Prasad pointed out an invisible trail going straight up the vertical rock face: the path to the caves. I sat silently. A chill that had been with me the entire trip slowly crept up from my stomach. The two oldest women in the group, both in their seventies, looked at the cliff and then looked at me. “Don’t go,” they said. “Don’t do it; the trail is too hard. Stay below and wait.”

I know how to rock climb, I know what to be afraid of, and I shared their concern. “If these grandmothers can do it, of course you can,” Jadu Prasad said. Having spent much of the past year trying to keep up with these same grandmothers while collecting firewood and stinging nettles in the jungles around Hedangna, I was not so sure. But the men promised that we would all go together and that they would look out for me. If I could go with them, I agreed, I would give it a try. We lifted our loads and went in search of a dry cave in which to spend the night.

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The next morning we awoke in the dark. It was drizzling. It had rained all night, and I had slept fitfully, dreaming of slippery mud and slippery rocks. I found Jadu Prasad and asked again if he thought I could make it. Again he reassured me, so I joined the women to bathe. The women were used to doing things on their own; they were strong, and they assumed that I was equally strong. I could not count on them for help on the trail. They seemed to be taking their time bathing, and so, after a perfunctory bath in the icy water, I returned to the cave, which was empty. I waited, thinking that the men must have gone to bathe as well.

Finally, one man returned. He was surprised to see me and said that the men had left and that he had come back to get something he had forgotten. I grabbed my bag and scrambled after him. We walked silently and rapidly through the drizzle, turning off the main trail onto a narrow overgrown path that climbed toward the cliff. We caught up with Jadu Prasad and the two Brahmans. They greeted us as we approached and told me that the trail was too slippery for my boots and that I should walk barefoot; they then returned to their discussion of whether the two menstruating women in the group should climb to the sacred caves. I was curious to hear what they had to say, but was distracted by the trail and, now, by my bare feet. I had always imagined the pain that comes with walking barefoot over rocks and roots. Until now, I had never thought of the cold. The soles of my feet were numb, so numb that I did not feel the stones underneath.

Soon the trail disappeared into the base of the rock. Those ahead had been slowed by the climb, and the women coming from behind caught up with us. Hands gripping the rock, we slowly followed the others up the cliff. Along with our group of twenty-five from Hedangna, there were Bhotiyas (Buddhists) from the northern Arun valley and Chetris (Hindus) from the south. Together, sixty or more people were making their way up the rock face.

In the West, we climb rocks with rope and protection. We wear soft rubber under our feet. We are on the rock, but not on the rock. With these pilgrims I climbed to the Khembalung caves barefoot, with no rope. Perched on a tiny ledge, Jadu Prasad reached down to pull me over difficult sections. I clutched his hand as he hauled me up the cliff, not letting myself think about what he, in turn, was holding on to. At a particularly rough patch, one of the grandmothers looked at me with concern and suggested that I go down. But then a man appeared with a twelve-foot piece of rope. He knelt above the difficult section and held the rope as I used it to climb up the crack.

Once, at a Quaker wedding I attended, the father of the groom talked about thin places, places where one’s nerve endings are bare. People make pilgrimages to thin places, places where gods have made their mark on the land. As the legends of the hidden valleys make clear, these journeys are internal as much as external. What the pilgrims encounter – the blessings they perceive – depends as much on their receptivity as on the sanctity of the land they pass through.

Two hours after leaving the valley floor, the trail leveled and we began to climb the final section through thick clumps of juniper. Spiky roots and sharp stones under the juniper bushes reminded me of my bare feet, by now accustomed to the cold. While climbing, we had been able to see only the rock rising immediately ahead and the valley receding below. As we came over the last incline, the most sacred site in the upper Arun Valley – the Khembalung caves – suddenly loomed before us: an immense amphitheater carved out of the cliff by a torrent of water pouring from an opening at the top of an enormous cave. Buddhists say that Padmasambhava meditated here on his way to Tibet. Hindus say htat Shiva bathed here the evening before his wedding to Parvati. Now, snatches of the high-pitched chants of the Chetri pilgrims drifted down from the base of the amphitheater.

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We approached the cave from below, first stopping at a cairn where we hung narrow pieces of colored cotton cloth. Then, in single-file, we walked through the waterfall. Those before me stood directly under the cascade and drenched themselves in the freezing water. It was still drizzling and cold. Already chilled, I skirted the edges of the waterfall, hoping that no one would notice, and followed the others up the last rocky stretch and into the cave.

The air inside was cold and dry and laced with the sweet smell of burning juniper. Red and green, blue and yellow prayer flags brought by the Bhotiyas and attached to long sticks rose out of a pile of stones in the center of the cave. Smaller bits of cloth had been tied to sticks or rocks. Candles, clumps of wildflowers, red tika powder, coins, even a watch were placed haphazardly on the pile of stones beneath the prayer flags.

Until now, we had been quiet, focused on the trail and the destination. Once we were in the amphitheater, the atmosphere changed. There was work to be done. Two women pulled out clumps of string that they coiled into bundles, dipped in ghee, and lit as candles. One couple carefully placed a small tin trident below the prayer flags. A young man who had come on the pilgrimage to assist his mother, sat off to the side, staring at the opening in the ceiling of the cave through which water flowed. There was no way people could make that hole, he told me. Only a god could have done so, which is why we had to give offerings. A middle-aged man who had moved to Hedangna from southern Nepal paused in his preparations to scan over the amphitheater. He had heard about this place since he was young, he told me. “Now that we are finally here,” he said, “we have to take our time and make sure we do things right.”

The time spent in the cave was not what I think of as spiritual. There were too many people, too much commotion, too much concern about this piece of string and that piece of cloth. I was too preoccupied with how we were going to climb down the cliff. Still, the cave was awesome. Now, the voices and din echoed off the high ceiling of the cave, but I imagined being here alone, with only the sound of the wind and the torrent of water spraying against the rock. The ground dropped steeply, and all I could see was the Barun River, silver and silent, winding its way through the green meadows far below.

We left Shiva’s cave, walked down a narrow path through the juniper, and continued around the ridge to a smaller cave set in the rock face. Both caves are considered part of the sacred site known as the Khembalung caves by Hindus and Buddhists alike. For Hindus, this is the cave in which Parvati lived and is said to have bathed in the water falling from the rock above. For Buddhists, this is the cave in which Yeshe Tsogyel, Padmasambhava’s consort, is said to have stayed on their way from India to Tibet. We took turns crawling into a space that would hold only there or four at a time. Flickering light from string candles dipped in ghee and set on the floor illuminated exposed chunks of crystals along the inside of the cave and the air was pungent from the burning butter. The rest of the cave was in shadow. Several red plastic bangles and a white cotton shirt sewn by a tailor in Hedangna had been placed amidt the usual bits of cloth and coins: offerings brought by a couple seeking a child.

Outside, more juniper was burned. One of the Brahmans chanted prayers for the well-being of our group, we tossed bits of uncooked rice into the smoke, and the Brahman wiped ashes on our foreheads as a tika (blessing). We then began the descent, taking a path that was not nearly as steep as that we had ascended. I paused to pull on my boots and followed the others to the cave in which we had slept the previous night. The menstruating women who had been prohibited, by tradition, from visiting the sacred sat by a smoldering, smoky fire. They added some wood to the coals to heat water for tea and we snacked on roasted corn flour mixed with sugar. The two oldest women said they were too tired to continue up the valley and that they would wait for us there. We packed our loads and set out once again.

The floor of the Barun Valley was brilliant green from the summer rains and there was finally a bit of blue sky. The air on my bare feet that morning had dried the skin, and the raw parts felt less painful. With the climb to the caves over, I felt carefree for the first time in days. As we walked up the valley, one man speculated that the weather had turned because of the particularly strong dharma (spiritual practice) of someone in our group. The idea that sun and rain responded to our thoughts and actions reassured me and helped me feel less alone in the vast landscape. We walked until early evening, stopping at a huge open cave at 15,000 feet to spend the night. The next morning, we hiked a few hours to bathe in the headwaters of the Barun at the base of Makalu on the morning of the full moon.

**

Another long day walking in misty rain, another night spent sleeping in yet another cave. There had been confusion over a bag I had left with the grandmothers, whom we now discovered, had decided to head home before us. One of the women reprimanded me for not taking responsibility for my belongings. A man who had told me the previous day to leave the extra weight, looked at me with disdain and said that he had told me he would carry the bag. I turned away and walked to the river’s edge to fill my water bottle. It was dusk, and the sky still was overcast. I stood on the banks of the Barun river, alone. I thought about how hard I was trying to get it right – to walk fast enough, to say the right thing, to understand the right way. In Hedangna, I had novels to read and a tiny room with a door that I could shut, a door that, oddly enough, protected me from this stark realization of my solitude. For the past few days, these barriers had been stripped away, and this sudden and complete exposure made me acutely aware of the gap between my world and that of my companions.

I stared at the cold, gray rapids thundering through the cold, gray fog. Why was I here, alone, in the middle of nowhere? Why did I keep going out on my own into the wind and the rain and the wet? I inhaled the cold, moist air and searched the shadows beneath the Khembalung caves, searched the thick fir trees clinging to the edge of the valley floor. The mist moved swiftly and silently along the banks of the Barun. The silty river roared. Then the clouds suddenly opened, and a shaft of light broke through the fog, turning the gray water o silver, the black fir to deep green. An angular cliff appeared out of the clouds high overhead, the red-gray granite, softened by the yellow evening light, was framed by heavy dark clouds. Just as suddenly, the fog closed over and night set in.

I took a deep breath, turned, and walked back to help prepare dinner. In the cave, a younger woman approached me to say that, unlike me, they were with their families and neighbors, for them it was as if they had never left home. They forgot it was different for me, and she realized that sometimes I must feel lonely or homesick, and hoped I was okay.

During the trip, I felt an ache in my chest, a longing that would not go away. I thought there must be a place, somewhere, where I could be held, here, on the inside. As soon as I arrived at that place, I was sure, the yearning would disappear. Now, I realized that the longing would never go away. It was what had brought me here, to one of the thinnest places I had ever encountered. It was what let me know I was on the right path, what kept me walking even as the skin peeled off my feet. It was what let me experience the sacred.

Several months earlier, I had been sitting on the banks of the milky green Arun River to witness a cremation. As we watched the burned body float down the river, the mother of the dead man held up her hand in front of my face. It was cracked and dark. “We all feel love,” she told me. “We all feel pain. We all bleed when we are cut. It is only the mindhum (oral traditions) that is different.”

The skin contains the blood, creating the distinctions that enable us to live. But it can become too thick, letting us forget the blood pulsing underneath and keeping us from sensing what Roberto Calasso calls the “connection of everything with everything else, which alone gives meaning to life” (1993:284).

We experience the sacred not simply by visiting places that are sacred. We enter the sacred when we let go of the fear of being exposed and begin to open our hearts to the world around us. Only when I gave up trying to hide what was inside did the boundaries between the other pilgrims and me begin to dissolve. And in the moments I felt most alone, I realized that I was never alone. “Longing begets belonging,” writes Mary O’Kane (2000). The sacred, as Calasso writes, is always there “waiting to wake us and be seen by us, like a tree waiting to greet our newly opened eyes” (1993:280. It is simply up to us to let ourselves see.

* *

Having reached our destination, everyone was suddenly in a hurry to begin the trip home. Rice fields had to be weeded, millet had to be planted, and houses had to be looked after. We left early the following morning; walked for twelve hours, over a 5,000-foot scree pass; and then descended steeply past grazing yaks and shepherds’ huts. We walked on after dark for an hour searching for a place to spend the night. Finally, ten of us crowded into a small, empty bamboo hut. I was the only one with a sleeping mat, so I kicked away the cow and goat dung, spread out the mat on the dank floor of the attached livestock shelter, and tried to sleep. We again woke before dawn and walked hard and fast until we reached another shepherd’s hut where we stopped to drink sour buttermilk. Since climbing to the caves, I had given up bandaging or even looking at my feet, but by this time, I was no longer the only one limping. The women leaned heavily on walking sticks and groaned with each step. We joked and laughed to keep our minds off the pain.

The trail descended steeply. Yaks gave way to water buffalo and cows, and we began to meet shepherds from Hedangna. Finally, we could see the village, far down the ridge. We had been rushing and rushing, and now the women wanted to linger, to hold onto the remaining bits of time that were outside regular, routine time. We paused on top of the ridge to eat the last of our corn flour. One woman sighed and said that she was so happy up here, in the meadows and the mountains, that she did not want to go home. Two women separated the tiny wildflowers they had collected from the fields beyond Yangle Meadow to give to friends who had had to stay home. Two others divided a bottle of water, taken from the headwaters of the Barun. The sun was beginning to set.

We began to walk the last stretch, down and down. We came across leeches for the first time but were too tired to pull them off. An hour later we entered the edges of the village, in the dark. I was the only one with a flashlight, but the batteries were weak, so our pace slowed to a crawl in the dim glow. The trail wound beneath thick clumps of bamboo towering over the stone and mud houses. People broke off from the group as we passed the narrow paths to their homes. Eventually, it was only the two grandmothers and me, walking down to the houses at the bottom of the village. We finally arrived. I dropped my pack and leaned it against the stone wall of Ganesh and Jaisita’s home. Someone went inside to cook rice. The children gathered around while I sat on the mud porch to unlace my boots. My socks were wet with blood. I carefully peeled them off, so the air could begin the slow process of healing – and thickening – the exposed raw skin.