From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You are listening to Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com. I'm John Gallagher. My guest today is Kiva Rose. Kiva is an herbalist and teacher who focuses on local plant sustainability and helping people to practically work with herbs. Her blog, the Medicine Woman's Roots at BareMedicineHerbals.com, is one of the most celebrated herbal blogs on the Internet and a treasure trove of information.
Kiva, also directs the Animas Center in New Mexico, which runs wilderness retreats, apprenticeships, consultations, and distance learning experiences. Good afternoon, Kiva.
Good afternoon, Don.
It's, you know, we we've been communicating with each other over the Internet for couple of years. Treasure trove of information.
Kiva, also directs the Animas Center in New Mexico, which runs wilderness retreats, apprenticeships, consultations, and distance learning experiences. Good afternoon, Kiva.
Good afternoon, Don.
It's, you know, we we've been communicating with each other over the Internet for a couple of years here, and it's just, like, so amazing to hear your voice.
Thanks, John. It's great to talk to you too.
One of the biggest kicks I get out of this is I get to, oh, this is what they sound like.
So it's like, you know, it's great. So I'm gonna have you in a different medium. Because I really appreciate you, hopping on the hermentor dot com forums and sharing your wisdom. And and, you know, I I I love reading your blog. I get lost in there.
Oh, thank you. I really enjoy participating in herb mentor dot com. It's such a great resource for so many people.
Thank you. Well, just we oh, let's just stand the interview just complimenting each other.
Well, it's gonna be hard.
You're so great. No. No. No. You're so no.
So, Kiva, you're, you know, I know that, to to do this call, you had to travel to town. Right? You had to get you had to leave your house. So I was like, wow. You must live in a rural area. Tell us about where you live, about the Animas Sanctuary, like, what it's like there.
The Animas Sanctuary is an eighty acre botanical and women's sanctuary, and it's a in holding within the Gila National Forest.
And we're down here in the southwestern tip of New Mexico, and this is one of the most rural areas in the United States, including Alaska.
And so where we live out in the national forest, there's no running water and no electricity and no phone lines, which but it's so beautiful here, and there's a lot of intense wildness that you can't find in a lot of the rest of the country anymore.
And though people think of this as desert, we're actually this is southwestern mountains, and so we have a huge amount of biological diversity. In fact, I think the HeLa is considered the most biodiverse region in all of the southwest.
Oh, wow. So what's like daily life like?
Explain a day, like you get up in the morning and, you know, like I just love to hear about what that's Well you can kind of get a picture of what it's like to be out there.
Most of the year, we sleep outside.
So we usually get up when it gets light and when the birds start, which depending on the time of the year, it could be five in the morning, which is about what it's like now.
And we get up, and Loba starts the wood stove.
And I usually check emails because we have, satellite Internet that's solar powered. We have just enough solar power to run our laptops and and, the stereo so we can have good music. And then I and, usually, a lot of days, I spend a good part of, the morning working with herbs, putting together formulas for clients or talking to clients or, doing a lot of wild crafting. And in the afternoons, I usually devote to doing a lot of stuff on the computer, writing curriculum and working on my book and writing my blog.
And then evenings, it's the hall the water routine again and do supper. Oftentimes, Lobo does a fire outside, and we cook our supper over the fire and eat out there, especially in the summer when it's too hot to have the wood stove going in the cabin.
Oh. And so, you know, we work pretty much dawn to dark, but we love what we're doing. So it seems like a lot of fun too.
It doesn't sound like work, really. It's joy, and it's fun. Yeah.
And we do a lot of in the winter, we do more wood chopping.
And we have to break through the ice to get to the water. All our wash water and drinking water comes from rainwater.
So it's it's a lot of fun. It's very, you know, hands on. Keeps you from getting sucked into the computer too much.
You know, it's it's it's funny because I I was when I was, making breakfast this morning, I had the local radio station on and, they were talking about, like, like, call in. If you know anyone who who, you know, lives out there off the grid with no electricity and, like, makes, you know, and makes it and, you know, you know, has that kind of lifestyle, have them call in to the radio station. We wanna hear about their, you know, and I'm sitting there like, wow, that's really weird. I'm gonna be speaking with somebody in two or three hours. I'm not very same thing.
That's very funny. We've become a novelty item.
Exactly.
I'll have to give you their, their phone number. You can call them next.
So, you know, I there's such you're you're how old are you?
You're twenty seven or twenty I'm twenty seven.
I'll be twenty eight next week, actually.
Oh, happy birthday to you.
Oh, thank you.
A cancer, Yep.
Definitely. I'm a questionable cancer, actually.
Wow. I thought my son was gonna be a cancer, but he ended up being a Leo.
Yeah. My daughter too. Just over the cusp.
Oh, wow. So, you know, when I when I, for so when I read your blog and your your your understanding of the plants and of nature and everything is just, you know, so it's phenomenal. And I I asked your age, I'm like, wow. You know, I can't believe, like, there it's just, I I mean, I don't know.
I'm just blown away by all that. And I just I I I just was curious, like, I wanna know, like, how like, what led to you in this past? Like how long have you been working with herbs and but, you know, but what led and also what kind of formed your your life and your approach and everything? I know it's a lot of questions, but you kinda, like, get where I'm coming from.
Right?
Oh, I think I've answered how you want to.
I think I've been really, really into herbs since I in since early childhood. You know, my mom has told lots of people stories about how when I was just an infant, I could crawl.
I would crawl off the blanket to get I would eat yarrow.
And a lot of my first questions to my mom were, what's this plant? What's that plant?
And, so I studied herbs when I was really young, but didn't really start practicing until I came here to the HeLa.
Mhmm. And, I think the plants here just, you know, talked a lot louder than anywhere else I'd ever been. And a lot of what's really formed my approach is, traditional folk healing, what local Hispanic people have taught me. And even from when I was a child, one of the first things I learned was about using yarrow on my scraped up knees from a local Hispanic grandma lady down the street in the ghetto.
Mhmm.
And so I think that it's really the, you know, the most hands on basic things that, you know, your grandma teaches you about herbs that has informed what I do the most.
Oh, okay.
And so grandma, she's a city person.
Well, one of my grandmas is too, but she was also still in the gardening. My mom loved gardening. We kind of rotated. My family, we moved sometimes we lived in complete ghetto, and sometimes we lived way out in very rural areas.
And in either place, my mom was always really interested in edible plants, And, she didn't know much about medicinal stuff, but she was happy for me to learn. And she gave me my own little garden plot when I was about seven years old and said, well, grow whatever you want. And I grew lemon balm and borage and yarrow and mint mostly.
Well, just doing this, like how did you do would you recall like your conversations with the plants at that age?
Like, what was that relationship? Because I I know how we look at it in our adult mind. It's analytical and we're, like, what's the name of this and what's the uses and I'm gonna look in the book and I want someone to but gosh, the through the eyes and playfulness of a seven year old, Like, what was that like? Do you remember?
Well, you know, I was really, really influenced at that age by a lot of the old European fairy tales.
And their kind of take on the plants as these powerful, magical beings that could kill you or could heal you or and so I kind of approached them that way. From the time me and my siblings were really small. We would name all the trees in our yard, and we thought that there were fairies living inside them. And so that's kind of my perspective on plants when I was little is I was just sure that if I was quiet enough, I would hear them whisper to me. And so I spent a lot of time in my little garden with my head on the ground just looking at them.
And I think that I've probably never really gotten over that particular sense of wonderment of being up really close to the plant. That's still my primary relationship is getting up close and touching them and tasting them and spending a lot of time with them. And that's more than any book and more than any teacher, that's taught me what I know.
And you still follow that?
Oh, yes. Had to take time every day to lay under plans.
That's That's a nugget of gold for everybody on this call, just listen, just take that advice. I agree wholeheartedly.
Excuse me. So, now how did this lead to your work? And you talk about the Medicine Woman tradition.
And I'm curious about that approach and how that evolved and is this something you were mentored in or something you just kind of came to, you know, or spoken to? You know what I mean? Like, how how I'm curious about that approach and how that evolved. And is this something you were mentored in or something you just kind of came to, you know, or spoken to? You know what I mean?
Like, how how did this process happen for you?
Well, I think that once again, that comes back from my childhood of being really enamored of the fairy tales and of that particular archetype that often comes up of the witch that lives at the edge of the woods. Mhmm. Who, you know, people don't think about her very often except for when they need to be healed. And so she lives at the corner of these dark woods, but people go to her door and ask for herbs or ask her to come to the village to help them. And that was always kind of in the back of my mind, and it was in a lot of my writing when I was younger.
And, when I was in my doing some work restoring native plants to a disturbed environment, things like lady slippers and things.
And, you know, and that really started my connection to, healing the land first.
And when I came out here to animal center, you know, the focus was on healing the land and reaching out and healing people through reconnecting them to nature.
Right.
And because we work primarily with women, which was not even a choice really, it just kind of naturally happened that most of the people who come to the center are women.
And as I taught more and more about that connecting to nature and taught about herbs, it kind of started refining itself down to a core set of teachings and understandings.
And it slowly became the medicine tradition based around that archetype of women who are healers and not just healers through, you know, fixing physical things, but through nourishing wholeness with food, with herbs, with lifestyle, and through connection with land.
That's Thank you for that's wonderful.
And so when you recall when you when you knew it was to heal the land too, and can you tell us about like how you reconnect people? You're out there living and like, what are some what's a a method or two you use to help people through that journey? Because I've been with, Wilderness Awareness School, for example, for nearly twenty years, and that's our mission there too. We have all kinds of ways that I've been you know, and I I'm I'm there's I've seen so many different ways of people reconnecting. And I like to use the word reconnect rather than connect because we're all had been connected.
Indeed.
And it's a matter of just recalibrating or something.
Restoring the relationship.
Restoring the relationship. So what's what's what's Kiva's way of of of of of transforming?
Well, people are so different that it often, so it will be each person's way. And so we have a lot of different ways of approaching that because people their their relationship with nature, depending on who they are, will be broken off in different places. And so for some, for a lot of women in our culture, it will be with food because of the body image stuff that comes up for most women, especially, I think, women of my generation.
And so we teach them about wild foods and getting to know your food in person and about the amazing transformation of taking something wild into your body and it becoming part of you and you becoming more of that.
Mhmm.
Or it could be for some people, do vision quests and they go out and they just spend time by themselves on the land with no distractions sitting in one place for days at a time. Mhmm. And that's really connecting through observation and through just taking away all of the daily distractions.
For some people, it's through, you know, learning about herbs from medicine and the realization that they have the power to affect their own bodies.
And for other people, Sometimes it's just just coming out to the place and having a retreat in a cabin and just being surrounded by beautiful nature and eating wild foods and just the whole picture together, just experiencing that is a huge connection. So there's all these different ways, and it seems like there's almost unlimited ways in which, people can do that.
Mhmm.
And the common thread is person outdoors.
Right.
Nature is doing something.
Let's get out there. To get people to to open their eyes and see what's around them all the time.
Harvest dandelion flowers, you know, anything.
Yeah. I think just that, we can be extremely aware and connected to nature in cities, but it can be harder to open the awareness to begin with because there's so much noise and distraction going on for a lot of people. And so to just take away the distractions even just temporarily, to, like, woah. This is around me all the time. What's it saying to me?
You know, to to recognize plants and the land itself as, you know, sentient beings.
Wow. You know, you talk about that. I mean, I know that that, that, you know, I I I mean, everyone has their own ways of looking at things. I know different people have different philosophies about how things are created and how things are in the world, you know, whether whether religion or philosophy, they follow. But, the notion of plants as sentient beings, I'd just like to hear your opinion on that.
Well, I think even from the most scientific perspective at this point point that we know that plants feel, experience, and express.
And when you get to a more subjective experience, even just growing a garden, you can see how different plants have different personalities and how they communicate with each other. You know, a lot of the more recent science stuff about how plants a lot of times aren't competing the way we thought they have been, but rather working in symbiosis through the bacteria in the roots in the soil and giving each other messages of, okay, you grow more, I'll grow less for this season, but next season I grow more and you grow less. And how so many plant relationships are, you know, very codependent, which is why a whole ecosystem is so important.
And then when people come into that, I said often the plants are also trying to tell us things and that, you know, to really understand that, we have to be more plugged in. And I'm not talking about people with or putting people personalities on plants necessarily. I'm not talking about little cartoon plants that talk to you like in, you know, kids' movies, but rather to appreciate their own kind of otherness of being alive and being sentient, but not necessarily like us.
Right.
And so if if we can recognize that, then we can be open to a lot more of what they're communicating to us in different ways, you know, through taste, through touch, through simple observation.
I mean, if you've ever been to the southwest in the middle of the summer and the heat's blaring down and it's frying everything around you, And then you go down to a river where there's cottonwoods growing, and you lay under cottonwood, and the whole quality of the air changes.
And all of a sudden, everything is cooler and wetter, and it has this amazingly sweet, relaxing smell. And, of course, there's scientific explanations for all of that, for all of the chemical process.
But, you know, if we can lay there and think, you know, what's it telling me? What's this tree giving me? What kind of gift am I receiving? Then I think if we can look at it from that perspective, then we understand and can work with the plants on a whole different level.
So that's great because then, I guess, that's where I was kinda wondering because, like because a lot of times when people will say, instead of getting into plants and someone else starts saying, well, the plant told me this, this, and this. And then that person who's just getting into it goes, you mean the plant's talking to you? These people are crazy. I'm out of here.
That is, like, you know, it's it's kinda like, no. No. We mean, you know, there are other levels of communication besides voices. You know?
There's Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly. There's taste. There's touch.
There's And we know that with with animals even too.
We don't expect our dog to come up to us and start, you know, telling us that they want this and this for supper, but they certainly have very clear ways of communicating what they do want to us.
Mhmm.
And I think that's true for most living things that if we're just paying attention to each other, to the earth, to the plants, to the animals, then we'll become more and more aware of that.
So I wanna read you something that I I I from your website.
I forgot.
I don't wanna tie this into what what you're just saying too.
So, you say that, healing begins at home, growing from the same rich soil we spring from. The plants' medicines' lives are intertwined with ours, blooming uninvited outside the front door, growing from the terracotta pots on on our kitchen windowsills and shooting up in the well tended community gardens. And you go on to say traditional healers have known that the starting to think about when you talk about bioregionalism on your site, but also that also was I was realizing what you were just saying, your site, but also that also was I was realizing what you were just saying earlier about, gosh, there's so much more. If we talk about bioregionalism, I imagine you're also talking about right down the bacteria and everything that lives in the ecology and not just the specific plant and its constituents, right?
Yes.
So and so I'd like you to expand on this, about, the importance of learning to use what's growing around us and how we fit into that and why we wanna do that. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah.
I think, you know, if you travel around the country, and I've lived in more than half the states in the United States, I think, they just the huge diversity One a year?
This is out a long time.
Two a year.
I've lived at the animal center for, about four years now. It's the longest I've ever lived anywhere in my life.
Wow. Wow.
So but if you travel around, you see that there's just this huge diversity of ecosystems. And even in the places where we expect them to be barren, like the Sonoran Desert, there's actually so many plants and so much life if we take the time to stop and look. Now, a lot of what's in common use in herbalism is a certain set of herbs that are standard to almost every herbal and that don't necessarily grow where everybody lives.
Mhmm. So part of the premise I work with is that nearly everyone lives somewhere where there's enough herbs to do whatever healing those people need to do, on a daily basis. And Michael Moore has talked about this in his introduction to medicinal plants in the Pacific West of it most curanderas, most traditional healers don't work with more than fifteen, twenty plants. And if you have an intimate relationship with those few plants, then you're doing great.
And that may seem overwhelming at first even for a beginner. Like, oh my gosh. Twenty plants.
You know? But if we start one at a time and if we go out in our backyards or to a local park or to a wilderness area and check out what's growing there, at first, we may only see a couple of things that may register as, you know, quote, unquote, medicinal plants. Mhmm. But that's just because so much of what medicinal plants are has not yet been explored by, you know, the literature that's available.
Right.
And so a lot of people wanna know, like, what do I do with these weeds in my yard? What the heck are they?
You know? And why don't I have some more normal plant like comfrey or even dandelion if you live in the southwest? You know? Right. I mean, now I'm gonna have to go to this big garden because I don't have any of these things. Well, maybe, but maybe not.
So, you know, you may have a really unfamiliar plant that you know from a field guide, but you don't know anything else about it. You can't find it in any of your herb books, but you feel really drawn to it.
And so I teach people this process of going in and learning about that plant, and it may or may not work out to be a medicinal plant that you can use internally, but often it will be. And the first thing I think to do is to hang out with a plant and kind of get into why you feel called to it and what about it seems so intriguing to you and spend a lot of time watching it. And then just get a field guide, look it up, find out the botanical name they've given it.
And an important thing to do is to check and see if it has any toxicity according to them. Don't use field guides as the be all end all the toxicity because some of them are very overcautious, but use it as a baseline.
Mhmm. And then then you find out what plant family it's in. And this is a really useful thing for beginning herbalists is to learn about plant families because often, they'll tell us a lot about the plants.
If you're learning about, say, sage and you learn about the mint family plants.
And some of them are very, very different from each other, but they have a lot of things in common. Many of them are aromatic. Many of them have a profound effect on the nervous system.
Many of them clear stuck energy in the body and so on. And so you learn those patterns. So you find out the plant family your plant is in, and you look at that in that context, and you smell your plant. And if there's no toxicity, you taste it, and you kinda see what's going on and see if that fits into those patterns.
And another really great resource for people, is a lot of ethnobotany texts.
And there's usually this seems like there's an ethnobotany text for every area of the country almost.
Mhmm.
And to check out what the indigenous people of your area used to plant for. Mhmm.
And then also, a free resource that's online is a lot of the old physio medicalists and eclectic herbals that are free for anybody to look at.
And there are these doctors that were using herbs as their primary treatment, you know, a couple hundred years ago. And about a hundred years ago, I guess.
And they have some amazing, amazing insights into many plants that we don't even consider medicinal plants anymore.
When I first started using the Aldo tree as medicine, I thought I had nothing to go on besides the fact that I felt like I really needed to work with this plant. Couldn't find it in any of my books. But when I looked it up in the Physiomedical List, a lot of my original impressions were validated by the experiences of these doctors, and that was really neat. And it gave me a whole lot more to go on. And there's, you know, there's probably a good hundred of those texts, and many of them are online at Michael Moore's website or Henriette Kress' website for free to just look at.
Yeah. And I think I have, links to those in the links section, at least to Michael's and Henrietta's sites on, on the links section on Air Mentor. So you can just quite find click there and then find these texts.
And those are such a great resource and totally free. These huge old books.
And then a really important thing to do is to also ask the people where you live.
And at first, it may seem like no one knows what the heck you're talking about, but I found in New Mexico, especially that if you ask the old people, especially the old Hispanic people, they often know things about the plants that you'll never hear anywhere else, and they're just a profound resource.
Oh.
And I think that can be true even in urban areas.
If you ask old timers who've been living in that area for a long time and whose family has been there, they may only know a little bit about a couple of plants, but they may know things you've never learned otherwise.
And then there's also a lot of bioregional herbals depending on where you live Mhmm.
That aren't real popular otherwise, but there's some good ones for the Appalachians. There's some great ones for the southwest, and so to look up those. And then but the most important important part about connecting to local plants is your own experience. So you've garnered some information. You've put together some, and that can be really valuable.
But just one experience using that plant as medicine will just supersede all of the information because That's true.
You you learn it in your body. They call it learning it organ organoleptically.
And your head can memorize all these these facts, and that's great. And you hold it on as a storage of information, but those facts don't mean much until you feel it in your body or you see it work in someone else's body.
I honestly like, my brain is a sieve when it comes to the information in the books. I can't ever remember anything. The only way I can remember is when I go and pick something and make something with it.
Yeah. And and that's another reason for using a small materia medica. You know, I work primarily with about thirty plants, and every single one of those plants, I've used in my body, and I felt what it does.
If I tried to you know, I really respect traditional Chinese medicine with their huge materia medicas, but so much of that knowledge is based in books and based on memorizing things until you get to know it. Mhmm. And I think that when most people are learning about herbs, the best way for them to get a a grasp on it and to be able to practice it in their everyday lives is through that just a few plants at a time, starting off with one plant at a time and, you know, drinking it as a beverage or taking it as a tincture or eating it as food and seeing what happens.
Mhmm. Because you'll never forget that. You know? One time of treating someone who has jaundice and who looks yellow and is having scary liver problems, give him a dandelion infusion and watch the yellow just drain away. You'll never forget that no matter how many times, you know, you read it in a book. Nothing is profound as logic in that.
Yeah. And then when you've had your own experience, that makes like the other day, a friend came over where his kids were having these digestion issues, and they had this stomach virus thing and all. And and because I've successfully abused, like, chamomile, right, for the digestion stuff in my own kids and had something similar plus experiences of lemon balm, I was able to confidently say, here, take these and do this. Yeah.
And and and then I felt like I was given them, like, you know, with confidence information rather than just Yeah.
Instead of just pass on secondhand stuff. Stuff. I mean, it may be the best in the world that you know, I memorized a lot of information, but I don't repeat any of it back until I've used it. Uh-huh. So I've done it at least once myself.
Right.
And so in my blog, you'll see me say, well, people say this. I haven't experienced this, but keep it in mind.
Right.
But And I love that because they're my favorite herb books.
I can't wait for your books. My favorite herb books are are the ones that are from people who use the herb to their stories.
Yeah. I just think herb works are so that's and for a long time, there was such a dearth of that kind of herbal book too, and so much was what people were buying as herb books was written by researchers and chemists and, people who are just they call them armchair herbalists who just read about it in some other book and repeated it into their book has passed on an awful lot of misconceptions about herbal medicine. And so when I recommend books to students, I say, especially in the beginning, don't ever ever buy any herbs books that aren't written by a practicing herbalist.
Yeah. Yeah.
Because, you know, when you're especially when you're really impressionable on first learning, you wanna make sure that what you're taking in is at least, you know, has a good chance of being correct and is, you know, appliable rather than some weird theory from a chemical test on a rat.
So I usually say, you know, Rosemary Glasser's books, Susan Weade's books, or Gail Edwards, you know?
Or Matthew Wood and, Michael Moore.
Michael Moore, definitely.
Yes. Stuff like that is just the foundation of good herb books right now. And there's more being written by people like Phyllis Light and Jim McDonald that are incredibly important too because we're getting, you know, there's the older generation of herbalists and but now we spend a couple of generations and more and more experience is accruing again because we lost so much for a while. Rosemary Godspell was really and Michael Moore were some of the first to bring back some what we now consider common knowledge, but it was pretty profound when it first came out, you know, in the sixties and seventies.
Right.
Right. Right. So your book, what's the title of your book, Undo B? Do you have that know that yet?
It's called Medicine Woman's Herbal.
K.
And it's a nice simple title.
And and and, I noticed that, of course, you're gonna have probably plant monographs in there, right, about herbs that you love.
Yep.
But, what approach? Like, what's unique about like, because because I also noticed, like, like, some of the gold, like, Steven Buener said once when I took a workshop with him. He's like, he, you know, he's holding up one of his books. He's like, yeah. See the first thirty pages? This is what I really write the book for, and then the rest of it is because the book companies like to have plant monocross.
Yeah. Something like that, he said. You know?
So paraphrasing, but it was that notion that, like, really wanted to wanted to get across this in the first thirty pages.
Yeah. I mean yeah. But sometimes you have to comply with what publishers are telling you to do. But my approach is really simple, hands on, down to earth, very experiential based.
So the first section of the book talks about, just the basics of the philosophy behind using plants for healing, healing as wholeness rather than fixing things rather than curing, food is medicine, and also the connection with nature. You know, all of these, simple basic concepts that the rest of verbal medicine really builds on. And then the second part of the book talks more about, the how to do that, how to use food as medicine, how to use local plants for medicine, how to harvest wildcraft and grow plants sustainably, just like the dirt part of it of gardening and food and, that kind of stuff.
And then I have another part that's how to make medicine, you know, like, in the kitchen kind of stuff.
Right.
Like, you know, how you grind it up, how you make things, you know, as in simple food like stuff, not confusing, complex chemical procedures that require strange equipment, but stuff you can do in your kitchen. And since I have no electricity, a lot of them are based in the most simple ways, you know, stuff that, indigenous peoples and people in third world countries are still using, just the simplest stuff that anybody can do. And then the last part is one carton plant monograph, and I think I'm gonna have about thirty very in-depth ones because I really like in-depth monographs.
I don't want Me too. A quarter page Right.
On something. That doesn't tell me that much, especially when you wanna develop an intense relationship with the plant.
So I was thinking more like, you know, five to seven thousand word monograph so that you have pages on whatever your plant, you know, that you feel called to use. And not that you wanna take my perspective and use it exactly the same way, but so that you have something to start from.
Some really good information instead of just, you know, an overview. And the very last part, some simple ways of approaching, imbalances in the body.
And the part I left out, it's one of the most important parts of the book, is a system of energetics applied to traditional western herbalism.
It's not just conceptual that you can learn through experience and hands on stuff, which seems really, really important to me. It's one of the reasons I chose to write this book.
So let's expand on this then right now because I think a lot of the other stuff you just mentioned, we're kinda we kind of throughout this interview so far, we kinda can you know, a person just listened the first time, you get an idea of what you mean by all that. But let's so you wrote this you're inspired by the energetics.
What are we talking about when we talk about that?
Can you repeat that for me, John?
Well, you talked this last part about energetics and that excited you to write the book. And so what do you mean by that? Or can you give us an example of a plant or what you Yeah.
So energetics, generally, when they talk about herbal medicine, can mean the temperature, the humidity, of the plant, or in the human body. And so if you think of the most obvious examples, like, say, cayenne pepper, what's the first thing you think when you stick a cayenne pepper in your mouth? Mouth?
It's hot.
It's hot.
And it's hot and dry. And you can just tell that by just what your body says. Like, oh my god. This is so hot. Get it out.
And if in the summer, when you're all overheated, if you, take some marshmallow root paste, and it's like, oh, this is so cold. I mean, it just feels that way in your mouth. It's Mhmm. Whatever temperature the the mallow root itself is physically, the way it feels in your mouth is, like, cold and slippery and Yeah. You know, wet. You know, moistening and slippery is like that. And so that's the basics of energetics.
And how that works is that so these herbs have these different properties that you can taste, and they affect the body in certain ways.
And it doesn't even have to touch the part of the body. So if you take mallow and you hold it in your mouth Mhmm. And if you have, a really dry cough or your lungs feel, like, you know, that winter heat thing you get from having a cold and then having the heat on in your house too much. And so your lungs feel totally dried out. When you take some out and you hold it in your mouth, you can often feel your lungs just kind of relax and moisten and chill out.
And so that's energetics, and that's a very basic concept.
And the reason that's so important is that we can talk about this herb for that ailment. You can say comfrey for a broken bone. You can say, calendula for lymph problems. But, okay, there's twenty different herbs for lymph problems. Which one do you want?
Right. Do I want cleavers? Do I want Yeah. Do I want red root? Do I want calendula?
And so the energetics of the different herbs, if calendula is neutral and slightly warming, while cleavers is very cool and red root is neutral, then if you look at the energetics of the body, then you can match it to the energetics of the herb. And so instead of getting a hit and miss of, like, okay. This affects this organ system, and this is supposed to be for this. Will it work? You have a much better idea of what you're doing. You know, you can work on a much more subtle, precise level with the plant.
Okay. And you can still use them as a broadly applied food like substance, but you can also treat, imbalances in the body that are very specific that would be really hard to touch otherwise.
Mhmm.
And so, like, an example of that would be if someone has a wound, like, you the first thing you wanna look at is what's the energy of the wound. Mhmm. Because sometimes it may be red and bleeding like crazy and very hot, and the person experiences the pain as a burning, slicing sensation.
And so then you would wanna use a cooling, soothing herb.
Mhmm.
Probably, you know, something like comfrey or mallow or any number of or rose is a great one for that.
But if the person if it's an older wound and it's not healing and there's not a lot of heat, it's just kind of oozing and sitting there and not going anywhere no matter what you do to it. And you want something that's more stimulating and warming that will bring the circulation back to the wounds so the body can heal it. And so you would want something more like, goldenrod or cottonwood.
Okay.
And so you can see how you can make simple connections back and forth, and it can just make the whole learning of herbs so much simpler.
And I think in a lot of other countries where they have long traditions of herbalism, this is common knowledge. Children grow up thinking this way about food and about medicine and about their own body.
For western herbalism, that's become more of a a harder concept for us to learn. So that's part of the foundation of how I teach herbs now and just basic healing and even how to use food is to begin from the first time someone starts to have a relationship with the plant to talk about energetics, you know, to find this language that helps us understand what the plant's commuting communicating to us and what our bodies are communicating to us.
Okay. Okay. That's that's really helpful. Volume set of the Western Herbs, which can be a healthy resource.
But that's not real Matthew Wood talks about energetics quite a bit too.
The important part about energetics, though, is to not take it just from books. You can look at books and see how they set it up. But to make sure that you're experiencing those energetics in your body. And you if you read the reviews of the different books on herbal energetics, you'll see a lot of disagreements and criticisms and people arguing about it because there's no set system in the United States about how this works. So Okay. At at this stage in herbalism, it's so important for students, the people who are first learning, to experience themselves and not just take it from a chart.
Okay. Well, I can't wait to learn from you and your book. That's gonna be awesome. That's excellent. Yeah.
So, you know, there's a a couple other main things I just want to ask you here too. And one of them was almost going back to what we were a little bit where we were talking about earlier. But Rosalie was, from Erbancer was wondering, actually these next two things are great questions that she had. And she but she has, an example of, like, you know, say there's a plant growing in your area that you're really attracted to or you notice or you see around, And you can definitely find it in a field guide, but you can't find any information at all anywhere about it, like, anywhere.
And have you had that situation?
And I know we were kind of alluding to some of it, but just kind of a more of a road map, simple road map on how you might try to find it. I think that's good I asked this now because that may tie into the energetics a bit, won't it?
Yeah. It it definitely does. And that's part of the point of energetics so that you don't need books to tell you what's going on.
And my my list of steps before certainly applies to this.
But if you can really can't find it in any books and nobody you've talked to knows anything about it, which kind of happened to me when I was learning about monkey flower. And there's a little bit little bit in the flower essence literature, and that's about it for this plant.
And the only thing I knew to begin with that at some point, it had been used as a food, so it probably was not toxic.
That's all I knew. But if you hang out with this plant, it's just got this amazing personality, and it's got these you you probably have it up in the northwest too, but it has these crazy looking little flowers that look a little bit like sage flowers, but are rounder. And it's just like living plant sunshine. I mean, I've the first couple times I hung out with it, wow. This plant is just so happy.
Right. Right. And very you know, just that was my impression just personally and emotionally of, like, this plant is all about happiness and about childlike sunlight kind of stuff.
And but there's nothing about that really, any of the literature.
So knowing it wasn't toxic, I decided to try it. So I tinctured up some of the flowering plants, and I used it on myself, and I wrote down my first impressions. This is really important if you any tincture you use, even if you've read a ton about it.
But put some of the plant, put some of the tincture in your mouth Mhmm.
And just sit with it and record your emotional impressions.
And if you wanna go deeper than that, you can, like, watch your pulse. Keep your fingers on your pulse and see how it affects that, and feel through your body and the different organ systems. Like, is it doing anything? And it you know, some of that will be completely subjective. But if you're really paying attention, sometimes you'll have a complete revelation of, oh my god. I can't you know? Like, with the mallet, like, if you hold it in your mouth when your chest hurts that way, well, how did that happen?
And so I did that with the monkey flower and just that effect of happiness, like a calm, centered, just super childlike joy that comes about when you take it. And then I started using it in other people, especially for people who were feeling the total opposite of that. Either super depressed and, like, the childlike play was about the furthest thing from their mind or people who were in the midst of some kind of hysteria or very traumatic incident, and they couldn't calm down because they were so worked up. And in both cases, I would see the plant, just a few drops, bring people back to their center.
And I wouldn't tell them what it was. I wouldn't tell them what I thought of, but I would just give it to them. And then tell me how it felt to them, and I would see the evidence in them. And through that, I also learned that monkey flower works really well for people who are a little strung out on some kind of stimulant, whether it's caffeine or a too stimulating herb or a drug even. It can help bring them back from that kind of hysterical nervous edge to a grounded place.
And all that's just through experience.
And there's nothing about the herb except for in box flower essences, really.
And I think there's some in the ethnobotanical literature about using it on wounds. But all of what I described is through experience. And so Matthew Wood, one of the ways he does this is he doesn't even take it internally. He'll put a few drops on the person's wrist, and he'll check out and see if their pulse changes or if the quality of their skin changes.
And so part of the ways of learning that is to teach yourself to be super aware and super observant, to pay attention to every little change in the body, in the plant, in the person you're working with. Mhmm. And that's what so much of herbalism and healing and working with the plant is about is awareness.
You you know you know, it's I just I can't believe I really haven't made this connection with using herbs for me personally, but, like, as a five element acupuncture is I where we we we primarily work on a a spirit emotional Mhmm.
And, when Mhmm.
And, when you're saying this, you're like, wow. How come I've never really tried to feel that emotional change within myself when using an herb? I I it's never this is a revelation. Thank you. This is great.
And I think that, you know, as you know from acupuncture, and just in general common sense that there is no real separation between our emotions and our spirit and the body. So if something is messed up emotionally, even something as chemically diagnosable as bipolar syndrome, there's also a manifestation directly in the body.
And so I found that often you can work with bipolar through nutritional stuff, but at the same time, you can sometimes, have amazing healing experiences treating something like MS or Lyme disease through something that supposedly is just affecting you more emotionally.
And so the balance goes both ways and to not discount either when you're working with a person, which is why a lot of herbalists use flower essences. I don't tend to use flower essences. I usually just use a smaller amount of a tincture and just I think of all plants as having the same kind of effect as flower flower essences can and work from that place so that you're affecting physical, emotional, you know, quote, unquote, vibrational stuff all at the same time.
So you're you're putting your intent Yeah.
And I think that every plant, like, how they talk about with flower essences or homeopathy, you know, they'll talk about very specific symptom symptom pattern that will make a plant most appropriate for this person.
And if you work with herbs the same way and take into account energetics, then you're so much more addressing the whole person rather than just a physical symptom Mhmm.
Or just a physically diagnosed disease.
Okay.
Okay. That's that's really that's very that's really enlightening. Thank you.
So so that that that that answers that whole question. Thank you for about the, you know, learning the, see, I'm still I'm I'm I'm it's funny when they're doing an interview, but then you're really getting into what you're saying. And so I have no idea what I was gonna ask next because I because you do an interview, you have to half stay on the world of what you're asking next and what you have in the world.
Well, it needs to be less than an interview.
Wrapped up in what you're saying. I'm like, where am I?
Oh, yeah. That's right. We're recording an interview.
Interview.
So I'll get to so this another cool thing I was wondering about, Kia, was let's see. Now okay, good thing I have some notes, Something I've been impressed on your blog too is your exploration of traditional methods of preparation, like, for example, lard, right, and salps.
Where is that going? Is there something in the book mentioning that? I know you use tinctures, and of course, tinctures is using something that we have to get processed, you know? I mean, a lot of times, we may of course, we don't have, you know, with distilled alcohol and whatnot. So, what about all that? Or do you address that in the book, or is this something Yes.
Definitely. I'm I'm going to use, of course, tinctures in the book because it's so simple for people to do that, and it's a very it's a very accessible way of getting into herbs and getting people to take herbs. But a lot of the whole chapter, that section of the book on medicine making, is called the Medici woman's mano and mitate. And a mano and mitate is, in the southwest, a traditional kind of mortar and pestle made out of huge slab of rock and another round rock that grinds things, specifically herbs and corn and different grains.
And the whole beginning of that section is all about traditional approaches to medicine making, and to make them as easy and as interesting and as accessible as making food and using the same tools for the most part.
Because, like I said, I don't have electricity. I don't have access to a lot of fancy things. And the price of alcohol being what it is, a lot of times I can't afford that either. So I've looked at what did traditional people use before they bought distilled alcohol, before, you know, they used DMSO as a solvent and all this stuff.
So and what's the most sustainable? What can I get from right here? And that's one of the reasons for the lard is it's an animal fat. I already eat wild meat, and I'll I may eat the fat, but in some cases, like a beaver tail, it may make more sense or from a bear to use the fat for medicine because the fat in itself is healing. And to this day, here in Catcheron County, which is one of the most backwoods places in the country, people, if you ask them, you know, what do they use for salve? Is it bare fat?
And so and also to make things as affordable as possible. I mean, what can be cheaper than weeds from your yard and some boiling water?
Mhmm.
So that people don't think that there's some kind of financial investment in herbalism. There's not. I mean, you need some glass jars.
That's about all.
Right.
And so that even children can do it. My seven year old daughter can make an infusion.
She can she knows how to make salve with lard because it's only really a one step process instead of several steps.
And to take it back down to the basics, what can I get here if I didn't have any access to any grocery stores or a liquor store or any of that, if only within my own little canyon, what could I make?
And so I have water, and I have plants, and I have animal fat, and I have fermentation.
And that's the Mhmm.
Mhmm. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Right.
No. But the fermentation is really interesting too. It is through lacto fermentation or traditional, you know, wild yeast in the air fermentation to make wines.
And I've been working with that more and more too of making, you know, what they call the old time tonics.
Mhmm.
Like the elderberry tonic, which is just homemade elderberry wine, sometimes a little bit concentrated. And sometimes I make the wines, and then I add herbs back into them to macerate in the wine.
Oh. So that it's a low alcohol tincture, basically. And so you need more.
But being an organic, natural wine, you're not gonna have much negative effects from it. I mean, unless you drink a whole lot.
Right. And so that's one way that you can make your own easy tincture basically for free. You need some kind of sweetener and an herb and some water, and usually that's all. And it can last for a really long time. And that's one that I haven't seen discussed much because people tend to think of winemaking and fermentation as a very complicated process.
But, I mean, if you look at Central and South American indigenous peoples, I mean That's Cuba.
That's because it got taken over by men, and men make the and they they like the gadgets, and they make the wine stores where they try to sell you all the gadgets you need to pick up. They don't realize well, they don't realize all you need is a plastic. All you need is a bucket.
Yeah.
The problem is, like, so many things have became somewhat institutionalized, and people saw that they could sell you stuff. They could sell you beer, and so they told you you couldn't make it for yourself. And this has been going on for a long time. And, in Europe, you know, it's thousand years ago, the church decided, the Catholic church at that time decided that, you know, you couldn't use certain herbs in your brewing. You can only use hops.
And that right there, the that was the beginning of regulation of, some of the fermentation processes, and that changed already what was going on medicinally with making the homemade wines and things and the beer. Because before they were using, like, yarrow and rosemary and all different kinds of things for different effects, and then they regulated it down to that. And then after a while, they started telling you that you have to buy it from them.
And then for people, it's just like with the health care system, people become very different.
Jesus said Jesus said that thou shall only use hops and buy your beer from me. Yeah.
So the church spread that to all the people.
I don't think you said that.
No.
No. I'm afraid that in that time period, though, when, it wasn't very much about spirituality. It was more about religion as government.
As government. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
But so this is this. It's so simple. And that's really one of my goals to teach people. This is easy.
You can make this phenomenal multiphruvus medicine just by putting pouring some honey over rose petals Mhmm. And letting it sit for a week. You know? And then you have something that you can use for hundreds of different problems.
Preparations.
You don't need expensive things bought from strange companies in other countries.
Okay. Speaking of just something about rose, tell us about your rose vinegar and your sun soother things first.
Well, that's You know, being here in the southwest and having a lot of people come here from different parts of the country and sometimes different parts of the world, they come in summer.
Often, people will get sunburned because they don't recognize how intense the sun is here compared to where they're from. So I've dealt some terrible sunburns, some sunstroke, some things that look potentially very dangerous. And so one of the first things I learned how to do is treat those.
And my first tries were always salves because that's what I read in books.
And I don't some of the herbs seem to help with the healing, but often if you burn yourself on the stove and you put salve on it, it just feels worse for a while, at least that's been my experience.
And so I tried I made rose vinegar for, like, salad dressings and, you know, other medicinal purposes.
And, so I tried it on a woman who had an awful, awful sunburn. Like, her body was blistered, and, unfortunately, the sunburn had gone pretty far along.
But using the rose vinegar, which is just simple apple cider vinegar with rose petals infused in it for four weeks, and applying it to her all the burn spots over and over, probably a full application once an hour for a couple of days.
It all went away. In a day and a half, all of the heat left to burn. And, she barely peeled, which was when you're covered in oysters, it's amazing.
And so I've used this over and over now, and it's become something I carry with me almost everywhere. And you can put it in a spray bottle too. Usually, I dilute the vinegar, so so it's one part vinegar and about seven parts cool water. You can put it in a spray bottle, or you can dip a cloth into it, and just keep that area pretty saturated.
And you'd be amazed how quickly You you make you make you make the rose petals in the whole vinegar, but then after you've made it, you're diluting it and putting it in your bottle.
Yeah. Yeah. I make it like a regular infused vinegar so that if you're using fresh rose petals, you fill the jar to the top and cover it with vinegar and let it sit for four weeks. If you're using dried rose petals, you can use, you can fill the jar about halfway full or a third of the way full and cover it with vinegar. And then usually when I'm gonna I don't strain my stuff that much because I like the plants to stay in there. But so I'll pour off whatever vinegar I want into a bowl or into a bottle and then put dilute it with water. And for every application, I dilute it again because it won't preserve as well, if you dilute the whole thing, obviously.
And, I mean, you can use the straight vinegar, but it's really powerful even diluted. So it's a, you know, money wise kind of solution to making it last longer.
Great. Good. Good. Good tip.
So that's yet another example of just another simple traditional method because you have vinegar, which is something else you can make yourself.
Vinegar is so easy to make. I've made it by accident several times.
I thought I was making, you know, apple wine, and suddenly it was vinegar.
Well, I thought it's such a bad thing in the long run right now.
No. It's great. And if you make if you make any kind of fruit wines, it's very easy to make the fruit vinegars too, which will also work, you know, out of peaches or berries or whatever.
Whatever you accidentally come up with.
Mhmm. Yeah. And that's the great thing about the fermentation too is there's, you know, vinegar is a a side benefit, and it tastes good too.
It's such a natural easy process. People think you need to buy fancy things from stores, the different kinds of yeast, and I have yet to ever even try that. I've only used wild yeast that are on the fruits and in the air.
Oh, wow.
That's awesome. That's great. I'm always so, you know, that for me, it's I I I often I'm like, okay. I don't want it to mess up, you know. So I'm just gonna use this use because, you know, this other time, it acts you know what I mean?
Like, so Sorry for really had it go off yet. But the the thing to do too is if you do it once and you get it really right, well, then you can save some of that wine or whatever, the dregs of it, and use it to inoculate another batch Good point.
Just like with yogurt so that it just keeps on going, and you get that really good ferment every time, which is what indigenous peoples did. They used clay pots to ferment things, and then they didn't wash out the pot when it was when the vessel was empty of Right. The drink. They just left that bacteria down there and kept it in a cool place, and they just refilled it when they were gonna make it again.
Oh, wow. That's that yeah. Of course.
And it's been permeated in the pot and Yep.
Because the clay is kind of porous. I think it holds on to it. There's so much for sterilization. Right?
Yeah. Why? Really? Exactly. Overrated.
At least in this case, yeah.
At least in this case, yeah. Exactly, right.
Oh, definitely a good point.
So before we wrap it up, I was wondering, in our venture this month, we're studying and this is July two thousand and eight, we're recording this. And I was wondering if any experiences with red clover, any wisdom that you had or knew much experiences?
Or Well, red clover grows in small patches along the river here.
And it's not a native plant, but it's a really useful European plant that was brought over. And I don't usually get the huge amounts that people do in other parts of the country just because there's little bits, but Rhiannon, my daughter, especially loves it. And so we always end up gathering some. And whatever she doesn't eat, I get to use as medicine.
And, generally, when I think of red clover, my experiences with it has been as a real general nourisher and really mineral rich tonic. So when anybody looks with, you know, what I call blood deficient, which is a lot of times varying forms of mineral deficiency and anemia and things like that, red clover is really appropriate there. And something that's really nice about red clover is that unlike some of the other tonic herbs, it's very neutral and it's not too drying.
For some people in this climate, nettles and dandelion can be too drying because they make you pee a lot, and it dries out your system. But red clover helps you hold on to the moisture, and it's got a nice sweet taste. It makes a nice ice infusion type thing for little kids instead of Kool Aid or whatever.
And so just for especially for people who look deficient, who feel weak or tired, just to give them a really good, you know, energy boost and mineral boost in the body, which, you know, we consider ourselves kind of an overfed nation because of all of the access to food we have, but we're really a very minerally deprived culture.
And it's so important, and this is one of the reasons infusions have such a, profound effect on a lot of us is because we're not getting the minerals from our food like we should, either because the food is empty of minerals because of farming practices or because we're doing other things like drinking soft drinks or a lot of refined carbs that strip the minerals right back out of our body.
So for a lot of people, just the simple act of drinking drinking something as mineral rich as red clover can have a huge impact on our sense of well-being and general health. And so when I use red clover, I tend to almost always use it in a nourishing infusion.
Mhmm.
And so that's how I usually use the red clover.
I can say the mineral mineral deprivacy. That's exactly why instead of diamonds, gold, you know, those, giving those to my wife for anniversaries and celebrations, I usually give her seaweed because it's it's it's the minerals that really, you know, showing my love.
I I put this little video on Herb Mentor. We just went kelp gathering, and I came back. It was on our anniversary, and I came back with a kayak full of kelp in my happy anniversary.
And and, really, in our culture with the chronic diseases, it's I mean, it's funny, but it's serious too. The one of the greatest gifts we can give our family is real nourishment.
Mhmm.
Because, I mean, where I live in the southwest and there's a lot of Indian reservations and there's a lot of poverty here, You see so many diseases like chronic fatigue, like fibromyalgia, like type two diabetes, especially, and stuff related to that is it comes specifically often from just god awful nutritional deficiency.
I mean, it's with the with insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome, which is one of the biggest problems in our culture, like, one of the biggest medical diseases there are, and it can almost always always be nearly cured by nutritional approaches.
Mhmm. So I feel like that may be the most important thing we can do for our families and for ourselves is good, you know, nutrient dense food, and seaweed is an excellent example of that, which I think is why people throughout the country traded all kinds of valuable items for seaweed, even inland to get those minerals.
Right. Right. They knew. Of course.
And Wow. And all wild foods. I mean, if you look at Chinese medicine, they often consider, any wild foods a tonic food.
And they may not have known why, but they saw the effects of, the mineral density, the nutritional density, having this overall healing impact on the body, especially on people who are deeply depleted.
Right. Right. Right. Right. Well, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you. That's that's x.
Thank you so much. I once again, I'm just getting into the response. I'm like, what am I doing?
It's so great.
I have so much wisdom.
It was you know, I I I wanna share with people too that, you know, you can they can go right now to better medicine herbals dot com. Do you have another URL, or is it just bear medicine herbals for your blog?
For the blog, that's it. I I used to have a different one, but I simplified it into that.
B e a r at there, medicine herbals dot com. And you can right on the top left, there's a little box. You can put your email address in. And every time Kiva has an update or a new article, it will get emailed to you that that's there. You can click and check it out.
And also, I'm happy to announce that pretty soon, and been a bit busy, but pretty soon, we'll be taking bits and pieces and chunks of that wisdom from your blog, and we'll making a column on Herb Mentor.
And, I'm excited. Thank you for letting us do that.
Oh, and thank you for doing it. I'm I'm very excited about it as well.
Oh, excellent. Thank you.
So wow. I mean, any any, last parting words of wisdom for, folks before, on on on using I know you probably said it in so many different ways, but on using, Herb Simply in our lives? Because that's what I'm getting. I mean, I know you your name of your book is, Medicine Women's Herbal Women's Herbal and and even, you know, the name of your blood. But, of course, we mean all people. Right? And I mean, I Yes.
Absolutely.
And And because love that.
Perhaps the best wisdom that I've been able to utilize in my life is to keep it simple, make it about relationships with your body, the plants, and the land, and to make it experience based. I mean, in those three things, if if you keep those as your primary foundation to what you're doing, the whole experience will be rewarding, and it'll be so much easier that way.
Thank you. That's that's that's it. I mean, that's why we just say, learning herbs. Right? Herb herbal medicine made simple. It's the people's medicine, and Susan, we just Indeed. Often.
So, Steve, arose. Go ahead.
No. It's okay.
No. But okay. If you wanna say something else, you go ahead.
Well, I was gonna say that we don't expect experts to deliver our food to us.
You know? We don't need some high and mighty chef to give us you know, to cook our grow our meat for us. We know how to do that for ourself. And we may enjoy somebody else's recipes. We may enjoy other people's cooking. We may need that inspiration from time to time. But when it comes down to on a day to day basis, you know, we have the power to do that for ourselves.
And the basics of healing are the same that we have that we can empower ourselves to affect our health and to have direct relationships with the plants without an intermediary.
Well, that doesn't mean that sometimes we shouldn't ask for help, but it means that the the foundation of it comes from us and our direct experience.
Excellent. And that's what it comes down to. Thank you so much. So Kiva, thanks for joining us today. And it's been really enlightening.
It must be the, Southwest Sun. I don't know.
You bring you brought the sun you brought the sunshine to our to the to the Internet as you as you do. That's what you do. That's what your site feels like. It's like you go there and it's like you're hanging out in the southwest with you. It's like having that sunshine. I love it.
Oh, well, thank you.
Look forward to your books very much, Alvaro. And believe me, if you're a mentor member, you will know when it comes back. We will make plenty of announcements. So once again, thanks so much, Kiva.
Thank you.
Besides her blog and upcoming book, you can also study the Medicine Woman tradition by signing up with Kiva for a year long Medicine Woman core or herbal correspondence course. Courses feature monthly lessons, questions, and assignments, personalized instruction, and whole living as well as the spirit and uses of medicinal plants. And for those interested in studying at the Anima Sanctuary, each summer, Kiva offers a student resident internship that lasts from two to eight weeks. You can get information on all of this at w w w dot anima, A N I M A, center dot o r g.
Kiva offers a student resident internship.
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