Kimberly Gallagher:
You're listening to Herb Mentor Radio by LearningHerbs. I'm Kimberly Gallagher.
Tara Ruth:
And I'm Tara Ruth. Today, we have a special episode to share with all of you. There was recently an online memorial honoring the life of John Gallagher, my previous co-host of this podcast and the co-founder of LearningHerbs. We wanted you all to be able to hear the stories that we shared about John's life, so we took the audio from the recording and made it into a podcast episode. It was a really beautiful event, wasn't it, Kimberly?
Kimberly Gallagher:
Oh, so beautiful. It was organized by Rosalee de la Forêt, and she brought together people from all different eras of John's life. I feel like it really gives a picture of who John was and what he brought to this world. I am so grateful to everyone who contributed to putting it together.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, it was really powerful to get to know John more through the stories people shared, and I'm grateful for getting a fuller picture of John's life and legacy. So we invite you to listen and join us in honoring John's life.
Kimberly Gallagher:
Yes, let's get started.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Hello everyone, and welcome. Thank you so much for being here, whether you're here live or watching the recording. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Rosalee de la Forêt, and I'm a longtime collaborator and friend of John. And of course, we've gathered here today to honor and celebrate the life of John Gallagher, to remember his laughter, his creativity, and that special spark that he carried into everything, from the love of his family to plants and music and just the way he built community wherever he went. As Rosemary Gladstar shared with me recently, she said, "We each know parts of John, but when we hear the stories of his life, especially from different chapters, we begin to see the full richness and depth of who he was." And so, today is just about that, it's about weaving together those stories, those memories and those moments, just to see how meaningful and full John's life truly was.
So I'll invite you to settle in, to take a breath and to open your heart as we remember this extraordinary human being. We're here to celebrate him, to honor his legacy, and to hold one another in the warmth of his memory. Later in our time together, we'll open the chat so everyone can share their own reflections, memories and words, and for now, I invite you to simply be present and listen as we move through these stories of his life. And to begin our gathering, I'd like to invite a friend to offer the Thanksgiving address, which is a time-honored tradition at Wilderness Awareness School. This friend is Cat Cook, who met John at Wilderness Awareness School the day he came to teach her class about Oregon grape root. He became a colleague and a friend, for a time, even her acupuncturist. They also shared a love for music and for Ireland. So please welcome Cat.
Cat Cook:
Hello everyone. As Rosalee said, I'm going to take a moment now to bring our hearts and minds together as one. And as she mentioned, the Thanksgiving address was gifted to Wilderness Awareness School and Jon Young from Jake Swamp and his wife Judy, peacemakers from the Mohawk Nation.
So we've gathered together today from many corners of this globe to celebrate the life of our dear friend, John Gallagher. I'm so grateful we made it here safely to share together today. So with our minds and hearts as one, let us give thanks for each other. And with our minds and hearts as one, let's give thanks to the Earth, the place where we rest and walk and grow and learn. The Earth provides uncountable blessings, so let's give thanks to the Earth. And with our hearts and minds as one, let's give thanks to the waters, from the tears that flow down our cheeks, to the rivers that run, to the potholes filled with water in the streets of Johannesburg where the hadedas bathe, the waters cleanse, and we give thanks to the waters.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Give thanks to the waters.
Cat Cook:
And with our hearts and minds as one, let us give thanks to the plants, the animals, the trees and the birds, beings like the dandelion, which John loved, the badger, which some called him, the Western red cedar and the winter [inaudible 00:04:28] we give thanks to all living things on this Earth. And with our hearts and minds as one, let us give thanks to the wind, to the rain, the weather, the sun, the moon and the stars. All these things shape our lives in very real and sometimes unseen ways, so we give our thanks.
And with our hearts and minds as one, let us give thanks to both the ancestors and the future generations. John is an ancestor now, and we send our love and thanks to him. And to those who are still so small with such big sparks in their eyes, and those who haven't been born yet, they're still sparks in the eyes of their parents, we send our love, our thanks and our promise to continue to make this world better than we found it. And finally, to whatever you call it, God, creator, universe, creativity, connection, or the spirit that moves through all things, we send our thanks to that which is us and so much more than us.
I've done my best today, in this very short time, to give thanks to what feels so vast. It's as if we could give thanks for days upon days, years upon years. We are grateful for all I've said and so much more, and with that, our minds and our hearts are one.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Thank you so much, Cat.
Cat Cook:
Yeah, thank you.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Well, next up, our first story presenter is Tracy Phillips, and Tracy has known John since childhood and the two of them have shared a lifelong friendship. Tracy?
Tracy Phillips:
We have, and Rosalee, it's funny, when you asked, "How do you want to be introduced?" I was like, "That feels very loaded," because John used to introduce me as, "The girl I almost died for when I was 17." So people are nodding, clearly a story he may have told a few times. I will tell that story in a minute, and to be fair, he was not wrong.
But I want to bring you back to the '70s, decidedly the best decade ever, because John and I grew up together in Colts Neck, New Jersey. It's a tiny little country town, literally named after the colt's neck, a horse town, and he was actually my sister's friend. So he was two years older than me, I was the little tag-along girl, and he was always so nice to me, because my sister wanted to have nothing to do with me, and John was always like, "Come along," as John is. And so, we have been, for almost half a century, we were weaving in and out of each other's lives, and so I'm going to bounce around a little bit, because over the 45 years, when you know someone that long, the memories don't really line up neatly, they kind of just show up, kind of like John always did.
And so, when we were teenagers, John was so comfortable at our house that he would stop by when we weren't there, my sister and I weren't there, and he would hang out with my dad in his dark room. And John was a theater kid and my dad went to Juilliard, and so they would hang out, my dad would help him with the production backgrounds and all of these things. And I recently, when we were talking about John, my sister was like, "I didn't even know he did that." And I used to like to joke, because we would go to all of his plays, and I would joke that John was the son that my dad never had, but I have a brother, just to give you... That's how much my dad loved John, and John would come over and call him dad.
But a few decades forward, I'm so glad Jeff Walker's on here, because I thought this was a story that I would only be able to tell from a Jeff Walker stage, and I'm so glad that I get to tell it today, and that Jeff, you're here. Because John and I reconnected, again, in and out of each other's lives, and we reconnected in 2015. I lived in San Diego, John called me, as John does, he's like, "Hey, you're near Phoenix. You should come to Phoenix, I'm just going to be there for a meeting, and then we can hang out for a few days." He's so convincing, I hadn't seen him since my daughter was born in 2011, and I was like, "Yeah, okay." Didn't know anything, didn't ask any questions, just booked a hotel, went to Phoenix, and I was not prepared for what I found myself in the middle of.
And so, I walk in to this room, not knowing anything, the lights are flashing, the music's pumping, people are hugging each other. It was like a Dwight Schrute salesman of the year scene out of The Office, and I remember thinking, oh my gosh. And people were like, "Oh, why are you here?" And I was like, "Oh," very quietly, and I'm not a quiet person, "I'm friends with John Gallagher." And that's when the jaws would drop. And they were like, "You mean Chapter Two? You're friends with Chapter Two?" At that point, I literally was backed up against the door and I was like, "Oh my god, John has joined a cult."
And if you know John, which many of you do, I see Kimberly and everybody laughing, anything was possible. This is a man who never had a resume, he once lived in a yurt. He told me when he was in college, he called me and he was doing mushrooms, and I was like, "John, no, they're bad, they're drugs," because I was a little goody-two-shoes, and he was like, "No, Tracy, they're natural and from the Earth, it's okay." And so, this was a fair assumption, that perhaps John had been pulled into something, and I was like, "What have we gotten into?" But it was not a cult. It was an amazing community of entrepreneurs, a group of incredible people, brought together by Jeff Walker at his Product Launch Formula, and what I learned later, that John just wasn't part of that community, he was one of the legends.
And so, he was the herbal rags to riches story in Jeff's book, again, now I get it, the famous Chapter Two, and in true John fashion, he just didn't invite me into witness it, it's very nonchalant, he brought me in to share it. He opened up a door that I would've never known existed online, and I have a thriving business now today because of John, because he brought me into Jeff Walker's world. And so, I feel like that's a true story of who John was, because he was always pulling people into something bigger and brighter and just full of life.
So now I'm going to rewind, and I promise I won't be talking for too long, but I do have another story, and we're getting back to the almost dying part. We're going to rewind to 1987, the Colts Neck General Store. So again, tiny country store, owned by a man named Jaime Wishnick, as it only could be, and it was frequented by pretty much truck drivers and horse people, and they sold everything. And so, I was 15, John was 17, and for reasons we could never understand, Jaime left us and thought it was a good idea to leave us in charge alone for hours pretending to work.
And as a side note, my sister, again, my sister is also weaving into these stories, my sister refused to work with me because my work ethic at the time was not great, and so John was always like, "I'll do it, I'll take the shifts with Tracy." And so, when there were no customers and we were unsupervised teens, and as they tend to do, we decided to blow shit up. Microwaves were fun then, and so we wanted to experiment and see what made the biggest mess, Bubble Yum, tomatoes, eggs. By the way, the answer is eggs. And then, we would leave the mess for the person on the next shift, which was probably my sister generally, which is why she didn't like to work with me.
But one of the duties that we had when we were working at the Colts Neck General Store was cleaning raw chicken, and when I tell you that this is something that made me body shudder, I don't like raw chicken, I still to this day do not raw chicken, and so I begged John, like, "Please, please, please. I will freeze, I will go into the walk-in, I will stock all the things. Please, will you do the chicken?" And he was like, "Okay," because that's how John was, great guy. And he cut his wrist on a chicken bone, didn't say a word, he was like, "Ouch," we put a Band-Aid on it.
And what I found out later is that night, he got really sick, he got Salmonella, Salmonella sick. And so, he didn't tell anybody he wasn't feeling well, and I can't remember whether it was his brother Chris or his brother Jim, but one of them came home, rushed him to the hospital, and he just made it in time. And so, it is true that John almost died for me when he was 17, and he never let me forget it, ever, every single time in every text, the Colts Neck General Store. But again, to me, it just shows that was John, he was dramatic and hilarious, and he was always ready to turn even a near-death experience into this running joke.
And so, I want to end with a tiny glimpse of humor, because those of you who really know him, he had just such a wicked sense of humor, and sometimes you're like, "Wait, what?" And so, I moved around a lot and he was always asking for my address, he was like, "Where are you living now? What are you doing?" And so, the last text I found with him was, "Hey, can I get your address?" And so, I sent it to him, and then he wrote, "I'm either sending you a card or I'm showing up at 2:00 AM drunk." And here's the thing about John, either could have been true. And those are my memories, I have so many, but I wanted to keep it concise and tight, and to give you my little glimpse of my beautiful friend, John.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Thank you so much, Tracy.
Tracy Phillips:
Sure, thank you.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Yeah, I love those stories, I love hearing about young John. Yeah, I really appreciate that. Well, next, our speaker is Jon Young, founder of Wilderness Awareness School. He's one of John Gallagher's longtime friends and collaborators. And there was a lot of Johns at Wilderness Awareness School, so I was always introduced or spoken of JY and JG. So JY first met JG back in his high school years when John produced a community theater performance and then donated the proceeds to the Wilderness Awareness School, and that early act of generosity really sparked their connection. And then, after college, JG, John Gallagher, joined the core team at Wilderness Awareness School, where he and JY worked side by side to help shape many of the early programs. And of course, they played plenty of music together along the way. So welcome, Jon.
Jon Young:
Thank you, Rosalie. And Tracy, did you go to the Joseph in the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat?
Tracy Phillips:
I did, I went to all of them.
Jon Young:
All right. So that was the play that caused me to meet John. He had a lot of friends who were in the Wilderness Awareness... We called it Wilderness Awareness Club in those days. It was after school at Christian Brothers Academy, where John attended. And as you said, John was in theater, and he thought that his friends were weird that they were doing this creepy wilderness school thing after... He couldn't... "Why are you doing that?" So through his high school years, he didn't really connect with me, I didn't really know him, until he did... Well, here's what I understood from him. He had some kind of, let's just say, personality clash with the guy who was leading the theater program at Christian Brothers, whose name I don't remember, and I'm glad I don't, because I don't want to say anything bad about that person, and what happened was John and a bunch of other theater members rebelled and went and rented a church. Was it St. Mary's in Colts Neck? And that's where they ran the play.
Tracy Phillips:
That's it, it was at St. Mary's, yes.
Jon Young:
Yes. So they ended up competing against the Christian Brothers theater program. And anyway, it was so successful and they made a bunch of money and he didn't know what to do with it. And I remember one of his good friends, Matt Burke, came to me, Matt was in the Wilderness Awareness Club after school for three years, and so were a bunch of other of John's really good friends, and I heard his name from time to time, but I'd never met him, "Hey, we want to introduce you to our friend, John, because he thinks he wants to donate to this Wilderness Awareness thing that you're doing." So I thought that was really generous and met him briefly, there wasn't a whole lot of connection in that moment, but just I was so grateful to him. And our little team, I think Connie Gardoke was there and some others, we were just very like, "Wow, what a generous thing to do."
And then, a couple of years passed by and then he went off to college, and when he came back from college, he looked me up, basically, and he wanted to help, basically. He didn't want to get serious and go to work, he wasn't ready for that, he wanted to do something fun and adventurous, so he said, "Yeah, I'd love to come work with you guys." So he did a bunch of stuff with us in the office, and he helped a lot with putting together flyers, marketing, et cetera. And then, by the way, he was also super helpful to the Elder Ingwe, who was one of really the co-founders of Wilderness Awareness School, and he was often doing errands for him, running around, helping Ingwe shop, whatever. He became incredibly good friends with Jake and Judy Swamp as well, they really loved him like his son, and he was always teasing Judy and they had this really funny relationship.
So Gallagher, I always just called him Gallagher, by the way, Gallagher would organize really interesting things that I would say yes to and that Ingwe would be convinced of, because Gallagher would go and convince Ingwe, "We should do this, we should do this." And one of them was this crazy cross-country tour, where we drove from New Jersey down to West Virginia, across through South Dakota to Washington State, so that Ingwe could fly up and see Denali National Park before he was too old to do it, he wanted to see the mountain. John had such funny stories, because everybody stayed and camped in Washington State while John and Ingwe flew up to go do the final leg of the mission. We stopped in many places along the way, and John entertained with music, he always had this funny way of... It was just a hilarious, funny road show going across the country.
I have a lot of memories, because he was always setting up these really interesting, weird things to do, usually in the form of tours, and anytime we needed to come up with a new idea for how to move things forward with Wilderness Awareness School, he would say, "We need to go cross-country," or, "We need to drive to the Smoky Mountains, because we always get our best ideas when we're sitting in the front seat driving for hours," and that's literally true, some of the coolest ideas came from that, and Ingwe would sometimes come along, sometimes not. But it was really quite a special time.
And then, at one point, he said to me, "Oh, god, I feel really bad, I hope you don't fire me, but I really need to go to Ireland for six weeks. I just really feel the need to check in with my ancestral land, whatever, check on the music and this sort of thing." And I was good friends with a man from Dublin named Jerry Brady, who now... How old is Jerry? I think he's 83 now. I just saw him in Dublin just a few weeks ago, still spry, still kicking. And John went over to Ireland and he said he would be back in six weeks, and what happened was he came back in six months with an Irish accent, and his last name was now Gallaher instead of Gallagher.
So what happened was he connected with Jerry Brady, but he also had this friend over there named Leo who was doing interesting environmental work, and of course, putting on fairs and things like that, John loves events, he loves when things get put on, so I don't know what happened to him, but he just dropped in with the Brady family and just stayed forever and stayed with Leo for a long time. And when he came back, he had his hat in his hand, we picked him up at the airport, it was like, "No. You followed your bliss. Go, man. I totally support you 100%." That's when he came back and just rolled up his sleeves and kicked into high gear, his Irish accent faded after a while and he went back to Gallagher, and I don't remember the moment when that happened, but he was so, so carrying his love for Ireland when he showed back up again, it was effusive, it was contagious.
Then it was time, we were looking for a place, literally, we would open up this atlas of the US, and he would hold, or I would hold, a pendulum over it to see where the thing would spin. And we picked out several locations around the country that we should check out, because we had no idea where to move the school, we just knew New Jersey was not the place, because everything was literally getting bulldozed and all the places we did everything for years were gone. And so, we ended up flying out to Washington to do a workshop and John came, and while I was teaching, he was working the local newspapers and checking out Bellingham and checking out this and that, and we were staying at Paul and Sandy Grumman's place while we were doing that.
And at the end of all this searching, he finally just said, "Well, why don't we just stay here? Why don't we just move here to Paul and Sandy's?" And we checked with them, and they were like, "Sure." And then, it was John Gallagher and Eric Pomenowski that worked really hard to set up, they took all the office equipment, loaded it into an RV that a friend of ours, named Hank, donated to us a couple of years earlier. But it became a rolling office, literally. And then, we had a van and we had a trailer and we had all this stuff, and we had to move the whole thing across the country. And when we landed in Washington, it wasn't easy-going, and if it wasn't for John, we wouldn't have made it, I'm telling you.
Those of you who take for granted how robust and successful what's going on in and around Wilderness Awareness School, John was the backbone and that guy was tireless. He spent so much time working on things and promoting things and doing stuff behind the scenes. He was the director, product manager, of the Kamana Naturalist Training Program and so many of the things that we produced in those years, he was the audio engineer, he was the editor, he was the recordist, he was the videographer, he was the editor, he was the graphic artist, he was doing so much behind the scenes. And I felt bad that he wasn't doing more of the nature side of these things, and I was always trying to convince him. He was like, "I can't do that, no, the school will go under. I have to stay here and do this thing."
And then, as the school grew, John backed away and found his new niche, which I was unaware of his journey into what he ended up doing with you, Kimberly, and then Jeff, and this whole, and I guess you, Rosalee, so I'll leave it there. But I just want to... When we lost him, it was so devastating, obviously, to all of us. But boy, those of us who worked closely, we were just like, "Man, that guy did so much." And he's an unsung hero, he did things that nobody knows he did, that made things work. We had so much fun playing music, and of course, he was hilarious, I totally second everything Tracy said, and he was a great uncle to my children, a couple of them who are here in the audience now, Liam and Aiden, at least I saw, just an absolute natural uncle to young children. He just really knew how to look after him and keep them laughing and keep them growing. Just thank you, John, for all you have done, and we miss you. Thanks.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Thank you so much, John. Well, speaking of our meandering journey, while John was still working with the Wilderness Awareness School, he found himself with EagleSong Gardener as a mentor, and he became a member of one of their first apprenticeship cohorts at RavenCroft Gardens, and EagleSong shares that John brought his vibrant, youthful energy to a room filled with women interested in learning more about living in sync with nature through the deep interaction with plants and people and the Land. And EagleSong has shared a video with us, and it's a memory of John's enduring nature regarding this large cottonwood tree that once lived on the east hedge of RavenCroft Garden, and there's some great video bombing going on. But I won't spoil it for you, we'll just put that video on now for you all to see.
EagleSong Gardener:
Hey there, EagleSong Gardener here. And we've come together today in remembrance of a friend, a student, a teacher, a colleague, a brother, a son, a father. For me, John Gallagher was like an herbal son, and he was in our first year apprenticeship program, the Healing from the Ground Up Apprenticeship Program, our first community-centered herbal program, I think the first one in the United States, and John really got it, and he also had a lot of technical skills that I didn't have, nor did I really wish to get. And John, when he left, in his third year project, he made the herbal medicine-making kit, and he went on to create LearningHerbs, which many of you probably participated in, and HerbMentor, and brought herbs to the people, which was what we wanted to do all along, and so I totally appreciate it.
But I wanted to share one story with you that reminds me so much of John, and I'm sure many of you will be able to relate to this, and that is the day that they were cutting down a large cottonwood tree at the east hedge at RavenCroft Garden. The tree was really tall. The circumference of the tree was 18 feet once it was cut down and we could measure it. Big, old, grand, beautiful tree. And I was awakened that morning by a man beating on my door with two men in the tree with running chainsaws, and I was frightened, it's true.
So I came out, he was screaming at me and wanted to know if I was going to pay for half of it, and blah, blah, blah, and so I called John. I said, "John, I need help," and he was there in a flash. And John helped me move the goats out from their shed into the back of my truck, and he stayed with me the entire day. We had already had a plan to sing the tree down, we knew the tree was coming down, but we had not ever imagined it would be like this. And I think that day taught me so much about John, about the enduring nature of his friendship, his loyalty, his caring for others and for the world we live in. A lot of bumping around here. Anyway, I'm here now under the tree that we planted to take the place of the-
EagleSong Gardener:
... tree that we planted to take the place of the big cottonwood and, right now, we have a sequoia tree that is probably, oh, I don't know, she's maybe 50 feet tall by now, she's going to be here for a long time. We still have the goats, you can see Tillia right there and Ertica if I get around here just right, they are still enjoying the croft. Here, she's coming to see what's going on. And so, the sequoia tree, in the last week, I've decided I will name the sequoia tree John because she is enduring in her nature as he was. He took the words that I could never carry to so many people. He had the technology, the expertise and he had the heart, he really had the heart for bringing herbs to the people. So, I'll always think of John as the green man, I'll always think of John being everywhere and every wind now. I can sit down under this tree and just think John's name if I'm having some problem with my technology and he's right here with me.
I encourage all of you to take this moment to remember John by planting a tree. Any kind of a tree would work but something that's going to go on that's enduring, that's going to benefit people down the road just like he did. He left an amazing legacy we'll all enjoy for years to come and each of us planting a tree will bring that legacy alive. I don't know, maybe you'll name them John. Anyway, I really love herbs, I love being with people who love to be outside and I wish you all well in the challenging times that we're in right now. We have been given gifts that will help many, don't be afraid to use them. All righty, EagleSong Gardener signing off from Ravencroft Garden.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
I love that call to action of planting a tree for John. I'm going to participate in that and look forward to hearing from those of you who'll feel called to do that as well. Well, the next sharing is from me sharing one sliver of John's life and I'll begin with when I first met John which was on April 30th of 2005 and I remember it very vividly. We were actually at a Derek Jensen and Dana Lyons event so it's radical environmental event in Bothell, Washington and I was tabling for a wilderness school and John came up to the table and introduced himself and told me that he was a friend and student of the lead teacher there at that school. And the moment he said his name, I knew who he was because I was a Kamana student at the time and I was very aware of his work at Wilderness Awareness School. And honestly, when he introduced himself, I was a little starstruck, I totally remember that moment.
And then, a few months later, we crossed paths again at the Northwest Herbal Fair and we got to chatting and then one thing led to another and, as these things are, I found myself accepting his invitation to rent a room in his basement. And at that point, I literally had two short conversations with John and I'd only seen Kimberly in passing but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, I was living in Seattle and I was just ready to move out of the city and into more of the country and I, at that moment, had no idea that that decision was just going to alter my life path so dramatically.
And so, when I moved in, John was just finishing acupuncture school and it was a really stressful time. He was studying five-element acupuncture but it wasn't a license for five elements so he had to teach himself traditional Chinese medicine just to pass the boards. And the kids were little, Haley wasn't even two yet and Rowan was about six and one of my memories of that time is John drinking these really big, really potent infusions of lemon balm, which I'm sure Kimberly made him, and he would say, he would attribute those a lot to him feeling calmer which, if you knew John in those days, that was definitely a good thing.
So, Kimberly and I wanted just to bring in this five elements area of his life because it was so important to him. John and I spent countless hours talking about five-element theory especially through the lens of personality and we loved exploring all the elements and the challenges and the strengths there and just also how beautifully that perspective wove into the eight shields model of Wilderness Awareness School. And I can guarantee you any time that John and I spent together, we referenced five element and it was just a way of viewing the world. And once John was licensed, he took his needles everywhere. It wasn't unusual for him to give impromptu sessions to herbalists at conference, for example, and he worked with many people within the Wilderness Awareness School community and in the area of Carnation as well. I was under his needles a few times myself and it was always a really powerful experience.
So, five-element theory, it truly shaped John's view of the world and I'd encourage anybody who wants to understand John and maybe even themselves to spend some time exploring five-element. It really offers a way of seeing the world that just connects us deeply to one another and also to the living world around us as well. All right, well, next up, I would like to open the floor up to Kimberly, John's wife and life partner for nearly 30 years and the co-founder of LearningHerbs.
Kimberly Gallagher:
Hello, everyone. I'm so grateful for all of you gathering here today to honor John and I love that piece about planting a tree for him. And I just want to let you know that there was a tree planted on Wilderness Awareness School land for John and we spread some of his ashes there and John actually has a song that some of you might have heard called Happy Little Tree. So, I just think it's fun that that came into this memorial and I hope that that song maybe gets played later. Yeah, so I'm coming on at this moment to speak about the beginning of LearningHerbs and how that all got started. And Rosalee mentioned that John was in acupuncture school and, before we were in the house that she moved into our basement in, we were in this tiny little two-bedroom basement apartment at this woman's house and John was studying away to get through acupuncture school and I was cleaning the house of the woman who owned this property and we were like, "Oh, my gosh, when is this acupuncture thing going to get finished?" It kept going on and on.
It was the first year of this program, he found this really great school and he was like, "Okay, I'm going to study with them," but it kept taking longer and longer for them to finish the program. And so, we're sitting here, we've got one kid and another one on the way and we're like, "Okay, we really need to start making some money here." And John had this idea, he was like, "I think it'd be really great if we could make this herbal medicine making kit," which then became the herbal remedy kit, "And it'll have everything in it that you need to make a tincture and a salve and a syrup and it'll just get people started with herbalism and show them how easy it is."
And he was like, "I think that's what I wanted when I was starting out as an herbalist was this kit that just had everything in it that I would need so that I could just start making remedies." And so, he started asking people, various friends like, "What do you think of this idea? You think it would sell? Do you think it could help us make some money here?" And people were like, "I don't know, John, that's a little bit crazy. I don't think it's such a great idea." But he brought it to me and I was like, "Yeah, let's go for it." This is one of the things that John and I did for each other, it was just encourage each other to just jump, let's do it. And so, he got all the materials together and figured out the pricing and all this stuff to make this kit and then he was like, "Well, okay, now we've got the kit but how are we going to sell it? We got to actually get this out to people."
And so, that's when he had this idea of making a website and putting it up on the website. So, he found this little company called SiteBuildIt and made a little website and put it up and, sure enough, people started buying this herbal remedy kit. And I can remember we had this table and we would put all of the different components of the kit out around the table and then we'd blast Bruce Springsteen and just walk around the table and put the little echinacea to the bag and tape the tincture bottles together and all the things. And then we'd come up with these kits that we would then take to the post office for all of the orders that were coming in.
And so, yeah, that was this time that we were figuring all that out and then we were really getting tired of this little basement apartment. Haley came along and we had two kids in the little apartment and we were like, "Gosh, we really want to move to our own house." And so, we were looking for another place to move to, and we had found this house that was a teardown but we were like, "Oh, it'll work, it'll work. It'll get us out of this little apartment." And it had a hole in the wall and he was calling his dad and describing this house that he was going to move his family into and his dad was like, "Okay, I'm going to help you guys out."
And he could see that we were getting the finances together, we had our kid, it was selling, John was finishing acupuncture school and he's like, "All right, you guys, I'm going to put down the down payment so you can have a house." So, he did, he got us a ... We searched and searched and found this beautiful little house in Carnation and we moved into the house and then we would put together our kits in the house and then we had this little red wagon and we would put all the kits into the red wagon and cart them over to the post office which was just about a block away, take them and send them out.
And then, sometime after Haley was born, I got this little inheritance from my grandma when she passed away. My grandfather, my grandparents had been farmers but then my grandpa became a banker and became the blue collar worker. And so, there was this money from my family and so we had this idea we're going to make a board game and we're going to invest in this board game. And, again, I think my larger extended family thought I was a little nuts like, "You're going to invest in a board game? Okay. Really?" I think they had stopped really thinking that I was going to do anything that they expected by that point.
And so, yeah, we made Wildcraft which is back here in the back and created this game and we're like, "Okay, this is great. We've got this game, we're going to put it up on our website and it's going to start selling the kits." And so, the games came in the mail, we had to get them made in China because that's all we could afford. And so, we had, I don't know, 5,000 games or something that came to our house and we were like, "Oh, wow, that's a lot of games." We had put them all in the basement and stacked up in the hallway and games everywhere and we put them up on the website and five sold and we're like, "Hmm. Well, we got to figure out a way to sell these games."
So, that's when we connected with Jeff Walker. John was looking online, how do you sell a product online and we found Product Launch Formula and we started talking to Jeff and Jeff was like, "Yeah, come on out to this conference, it's $5,000," and we're like, "Oh, my gosh, $5,000, that's about all we've got." We're like, "All right. Well, what else are we going to do? Let's go for it." Again, John and I, just do it. So, he went to the Product Launch Formula event and came back and was like, "Okay, I know how to do it," and he got down there on the computer and started doing all this stuff and typing things in and we made this launch and then it was amazing what happened after the launch.
It was you could just watch all the orders coming down the screen and we're like, "Oh, my gosh, it worked." And so, the little red wagon then got filled up with board games and over to the post office we went and, slowly, the whole basement cleared and we were like, "Oh, great, this was really good." We sold all these games and ... Oh, one other thing about the games, because we got them printed in China, they were super toxic when you opened them, they had all these fumes smells so we had to open all the games downstairs and let them air out and then put them all back together before we shipped them out because it was like, "Ugh."
Now, they're all made in the United States and they're made with environmentally friendly materials and all that stuff but, back in the day, we just were like, "Oh, a board game company, great." Yeah, so then there came this day when John's dad said, "It's about time. Like we said, I'm going to stop helping you with the mortgage payments," and we were like, "Oh, there was a time when you were going to stop helping us with the mortgage payments?" We didn't really plan for that at all so we're like, "Okay, what are we going to do now?" So, back to Jeff Walker, let's go to another launch meeting, maybe we'll think of something.
So, John flew off and I stayed at home with the kids and he came back and he's like, "Okay, I figured it out, Kimberly. We're going to do this membership site and that's how we're going to pay for our mortgage." So, he made HerbMentor and we just slowly, organically started developing these courses that we were selling and putting things onto HerbMentor and people were coming to learn about herbs from us and it was so exciting because, as a family, we had done the apprenticeship with Wavering Croft Garden and we had been integrating the herbs into our family's life. And with the kids, when they would get a cut or a scrape, we'd use this homemade salve that we had and we're like, "Oh, my gosh, everybody should know about this."
And so, it was this way for us to share something that was so empowering for us to share that with other families and get the word out and then to have these ways to bring in the money that we needed to pay for our mortgage and to raise our own family. And it was such a beautiful thing to be able to do this work that really meant so much to us, that really touched our hearts and that we felt like was a service to the earth which we both were in love with the earth and wanted to do everything we could to help the earth thrive. And so, it was this winning lottery ticket. Here we are doing this little home business that we love, it's the kind of work that we love, it's of service and people are coming and they're enjoying it and they're learning.
And so, it was such a beautiful story, the beginning of LearningHerbs, really, just such a heart story. And then the kids started growing up and Haley got to be about five and I was starting to read her all these little fairy books. She's really into fairies at that time and there were all these different ... The rainbow fairies and the, I don't know, Disney fairies and so John went back to visit his sister and she was also reading the fairy books to her little girls and they were sitting around the pool outside and they're like, "Hey, you should do a series of books called Herb Fairies, just another fairy series. The kids love these fairy series, Kimberly can write that."
And so, he comes back from that trip like, "Kimberly, I got this great idea," and I'm like, "Oh, holy moly, no, no, no, no, no. That's the last thing the world needs is another series of fairy books." But then I realized that I could actually teach something through the writing of these books and so Herb Fairies was born and we have the whole Herb Fairies series with the online learning system and it's just ... This whole company has been such a venture of love and a venture of our own inspiration and it was just such a joy to be able to create a company like this together with John. And he was just such a wizard at the internet marketing and at the tech stuff, as EagleSong mentioned, that made all of this possible. So, that's a little bit of the early stories of learning herbs.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Thank you so much, Kimberly. I love hearing that story and just how much a leap of faith every step along the way was. It's one thing to look back now and see the thousands of lives touched and the success of everything but, yeah, everything being such a leap of faith is a really powerful thing to hear. Well, next I'm going to turn things over to Jeff Walker who's been referenced many times. Jeff is the founder of Product Launch Formula and long-time friend of John's. Their friendship's gone back many years now and it's really grounded in the shared love of creativity, of entrepreneurship and helping others bring their ideas to life.
Jeff Walker:
Thanks, Rosalee. So, oh, boy, I tell a lot of stories in my business and I've got a lot of stories of John and I just want to ... He was such a dear soul in our community. So, I started an online business in 1996 and it started out of ... You just heard Kimberly share the crazy beginnings of LearningHerbs with Wildcraft. I never heard that story of off gassing your games in the basement, that's absolutely hilarious. But anyways, when I started my business, it was out of a crazy desperation and eventually learned a little bit about marketing and then, in 2005, started teaching this thing we used to call internet marketing.
And back in those days, it seemed like it just ... It was a wonderful world but it was also a world of people screaming get rich quick type of things and I never felt like I fit into that. And I published this course called Product Launch Formula and, about a year later, we get an email. My one person on my team, I had a one person team, Betty on my team got an email, and it was from someone who said that they just used Product Launch Formula to launch this game about herbs and I'm like, "This is a different kind of story from a lot of the stories we've been hearing from our clients."
And so, I got a hold of John, we had a couple of conversations, I felt an instant connection to him. Kimberly mentioned him coming out to our very, very first event that was in '07, I remember calling up John and just really trying to convince him to come and he did and just shared an instant connection. And that was the conference where I'm pretty sure he came up with the idea for the membership site and how many lives has that changed over all these years. And Tracy mentioned he's chapter two.
So, this is the book that I came out with and here's John, this is in chapter two, there's the picture of John with the boxes of inventory down in the basement. He'd come out to probably 30 different conferences and workshops and seminars that I put on and he was a hero in our community. So, what I've been hearing in this entire call is he was a hero in Wilderness Aware, he was a hero with his acupuncture, he was a hero with LearningHerbs and I knew all this but what some people don't realize is he was also a hero in the online entrepreneurial world.
We'd have one of those conferences and there'd be 1,000 people in the conference which was ridiculous because there's me up on stage in front of 1,000 people, just crazy the life I've gotten to lead. But John would always be in that back row. He'd be 50 rows back, I could always count on seeing John in that back row. And every time we took a break, there would be 20 people lined up to talk to him and he always took the time to share, to help everyone. And they might be asking how could they create, launch something about meditation or about tennis or about how to quit smoking or how to read echocardiograms, it could be any kind of market you could imagine but they always had questions for John and he was always so incredibly generous. He was always the last person in the bar helping people out, just sharing with them. And then, just over the year ... That very first conference when I was just getting to know John, Tracy, you mentioned the cult-like atmosphere of our conferences. Well, John knew this, I told him this later but, before that first conference, I was going to put on this conference, I knew I wanted to create a different type of experience.
And so, I've been a bit of a Bruce Springsteen fanatic since I was in high school, didn't know that about John, John didn't know it about me. But for the week before that conference, in this room, in this office, I just constantly streamed Bootlegs of Bruce shows just so I could bring that to my conference. And I think we connected on so many different levels, I felt like we were each other's doppelgangers and some of my absolute most cherished memories are playing music with John and the song we would always end up ...
And John, John could actually play music, I could barely play music but he was so fun to play with, he was so accommodating of my complete lack of skill but we'd always end up playing Sherry Darling. And I remember my wife just saying, when the two of us played, it was just like there's this joy bubble of the two of us and I miss him dearly and the world misses him dearly. There's so many stories we've already heard of him just showing up and sharing and serving and helping and he made just an enormous impact in so many different worlds, including my world, the online entrepreneurial world. Amazing, amazing man.
Kimberly Gallagher:
Yeah.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Thank you so much, Jeff. I don't have a lot of regrets in life but I do regret not going to Plat with John. The conferences and the Plat meetings, those were his happy place, he loved those so much and they were really like a tether for him. It was something that he looked forward to so much to go to and that he was always really fired up when he got home as well. Yeah. I'm going to pick up the next thread, continuing on with the LearningHerbs journey and ... I first had my official start with LearningHerbs when I was still living in the basement. John asked if I'd want to write an article for the LearningHerbs blog and I said, "Sure."
And I wrote about rosehip syrup and he gave me a little tiny dinky camera to take photos with and I wrote the article and, yeah, that was just really the beginning of something so much bigger. And, from there, I started writing and sharing herbal monographs and they were absolutely terrible, truly awful. I was just such a baby herbalist back then and I was not much of a writer but John was always encouraging me to do more. And thankfully, I got better in time but it's really he did believe in me early on and always continued to do so. And John was always deeply dedicated to making herbalism accessible to everyone and that was a really big call for him.
I really remember the day he called to tell me about HerbMentor, the membership site, and it sounded so strange back then, he was so cutting edge. Not everyone had a membership site back then and he was just buzzing with excitement about this. And he was just telling me on the phone, I had moved away by that point, and he was just telling me on the phone the whole time, I'm thinking, this sounds so cool, I hope I can afford it. But John said, "Oh, I'll just hook you up," and he got me logged in and, from day one, I was hooked. And I just spent countless hours in HerbMentor learning from other people, answering questions when I could, it was just this general sharing that happened there.
It was really community learning at its best which is, again, something John always believed in and nurtured. And John was just someone who was endlessly inspired, ideas would just bubble up from him all the time. We'd have meetings and we'd just brainstormed so many possibilities and we'd always laugh and it was an ongoing joke that like, "Oh, we'll be busy for decades." We did so many things from creating herbal posters and then more courses and more things and we'd do webinars after webinars. Sometimes our webinars would be three or four hours long and we had such a good time with those.
But yeah, John wasn't just a dreamer, he was a builder and he knew how to take this spark of an idea and then actually turn it into something very real and then I would say also something that always touched people's lives too. He truly was a visionary and he was always ahead of the curve especially when it came to technology and just his vision of how that could be applied to herbalism. And I cannot tell you how many tools and apps he introduced me to over the years, video editing or audio programs or new software for teaching online and he was always just thinking, telling me about the new thing. That is not my gift so sometimes I would get a little bit annoyed like, "Oh, man, I have to learn this new thing again," but it always was for the best. He never sent me on some wild goose chase, it was always for the best. And one thing I was remembering that was in 2008, John called and told me that he'd made these digital herbal flashcards and they sounded so cool because anything John told you about that he was working on sounded so cool.
And so, he told me about them and he said, "But the only way that people are going to be able to get them is by logging into the site called Facebook." And he's like, "So, you got to log onto this thing called Facebook." And I was so annoyed again because I was like, "Man, I already have a MySpace account, why do I need a Facebook account too?" But I really wanted the herbal flashcards, genuinely wanted to get these herbal flashcards so I signed up. So, that was just a funny example I thought but that was just constant-
Rosalee de la Forêt:
So that was just a funny example I thought, but that was just constant with John. He was always telling me about the new thing that we were going to do and eventually we started creating the online courses together. And these were huge projects, like required countless hours, troubleshooting, lots of coffee, more than I'd care to admit probably. Launch weeks when we were doing enrollment were just intense, they're often stressful, but we also had fun, especially when it was over. But yeah, lemon balm infusions, coffee, occasional hops beverage, all of that kept us going.
When John was into something, he was all in. He was so passionate. It was directly through John that I got my first book deal and John was a true partner in that book. It wouldn't have ever happened without him. He also came up with the title. It took many months of brainstorming, but he came up with the title. He asked Rosemary to do the foreword because I was way too shy to do that.
He then learned how to launch a book, which is no small feat. He went all in on that. And that book almost made it as a New York Times bestseller, which was all due to John's efforts. It was just all of his grassroots organizing and just his all-in attitude on that. And now over time, HerbMentor has kept growing, it's reached so many people, I think so many more than we could have imagined back in the day. And one thing I've always loved about HerbMentor is how collaborative it is. John and I, we'd go to conferences and find teachers who inspired us, and before the weekend's over he'd have invited them to work on an article or an online course, or he was there with all of his video equipment filming these plant walks. And yeah, that was John. He was just always connecting with folks, always collaborating, and always just thinking about how to share knowledge and lift other people up too.
And I like to think, John, he did teach herbalism, he always taught from experience, but he didn't just teach that, he really built a home for herbalists, a place where we could all come and learn and connect and feel like we belonged. And I know that spirit of connection continues to go on through HerbMentor and just all the products. So many people started in the herbal world because of the kit, because of the Herb Fairies, because of Wildcraft!, because of HerbMentor. And I know that through his offerings, what he's gifted into the world has then shaped so many people's herbal paths and careers, and that's just one part of the legacy of John. He created this world and this company of LearningHerbs is rooted in generosity, rooted in curiosity, and just this belief that herbal wisdom belongs to everyone out there.
All right, that's that for me. Next up, the next thread, I'm going to pass it over to Jason Knight. He's the co-founder of Alderleaf Wilderness College, and he's been a longtime friend of John Gallagher. They met in 1997 through Wilderness Awareness School. They had both helped to grow the organization and Jason was also involved in many of John's musical projects. He played at his wedding. They played at holiday in celebration jams and Jason also played on his album and they've been in regular contact over the years. They're really supporting each other's life goals and nature skills-based entrepreneurial endeavors. I'll hand it over to you, Jason.
Jason Knight:
Thanks, Rosalee. Gosh, I said I met John in '97 and just what an amazing person. I think before I even moved to Washington, when I called the office, he might've been the first person I talked to. He was the one who often answered the phones if everyone else wasn't willing to or was too busy out in the woods having fun. And I can just remember he had two sides to him. When he would be in the office at Wilderness Awareness School, he ran the Kamana office, like the Naturalist Home Study course before there was online courses, it was all correspondence through the mail and he'd lock himself in there, and everybody else would be like, "Don't bug John. He's got to get that stuff done."
And he'd be the late night crew working on there, keeping the website running, keeping the newsletters going, making all the marketing materials, keeping the database working. He'd be doing maintenance on all the computers, all the stuff... At Wilderness Awareness, it was mostly folks that just loved being out in the woods and teaching kids and adults about all these great outdoor skills, but he was the one who was actually willing to put in the work in the office to keep the office running and do all the hard behind the scenes stuff.
But he got in those modes where he was so engrossed in his work, he got the nickname The Badger, and they even had a little badger label on his door. But then when he was chilling out at home after work, he was also just the most relaxed, welcoming, "Yeah, let's jam and let's do this." And we hit it off because we were both musicians and we're both from the East Coast and we both shared sarcastic sense of humor, and so it was just so much fun to play at holiday celebrations at his house, or at different events we had in the area, or at coffee shops.
And I can remember one fun story is one day he said, "You know, I really want to make my music into an album." And this is before the days where you could actually do that on a laptop where you could record at home. There was like that didn't exist. And I'm like, "You mean go to a studio?" And he's like, "Oh, I got this..." Our friend of ours, Bill Hill, who Bill Hill had one of the first digital studio workstations in the 1990s, where you could digitally record and then burn a CD from what you recorded, and it was so far ahead of his time. And John has the whole idea for like, "Oh, we're going to do this and you're going to play this and that." So he had me playing bass, even though I didn't have my bass with me from the East Coast. He's like, "Oh, you'll just borrow one."
But I'm left-handed. so I'm playing a right-handed bass upside down, but he convinced me it would be fine, and it was. And so, yeah, but he was real serious about it. This is the CD that he made. Hopefully it'll get uploaded onto the streaming services someday, but his songwriting is so fun, his lyrics are so witty and sarcastic and humorous. They poke fun at so many different things. It was such a fun project.
Bill Hill was a character too. Bill Hill lived, he worked for Microsoft, but he was this Scottish fellow who had a big huge gray beard and long gray hair and a ponytail and would wear a kilt, and his house was way deep in the woods. And it was all built of natural wood with no paint and all curvy wood, but it was really well done, and part of the forest was on the inside. There's trees and a stream and the pond inside the house, and he had this studio in the corner, it was all natural wood and just we spent days in there recording the tracks. But just such cool stuff, like someone was mentioning one of his songs called Happy Little Tree, and it's about Bob Ross painting beautiful nature landscapes, and all I have to be is a Happy Little tree.
He had one My Reincarnated Girl, kind of poking fun at New Age spiritual stuff. A couple of lyrics, "Just align your chakras and turn off your auras, and Apache told me aliens recited in the Torah." All kinds of super funny stuff like that. Modular People, just about how all kinds of crazy things are happening and the way nature unfortunately is getting destroyed. But then beautiful lyrics too. He had these songs that he wrote about people that he cared about in his life. And there's If I Had My Way, about all the funny things he would do if he was in charge of things, "If I had my way, there'd be no more holes in my socks, there'd be much cooler prizes in my cereal box. If I had my way, there would be no more battles, everyone would get the day off when it rained in Seattle."
It was just such fun stuff, Here Comes The Aliens Monster Truck Show, The Spirit of New Jersey. He was always poking fun at his home state. Just amazingly quirky stuff. Something that for those of you who know John, I loved how he'd sneak up to you, next to you and then give you the side hug, and he was always just so supportive and kind and loyal and generous with what he knew and just amazing. All the stuff... He eventually hired me to work in his Kamana office, and then I created this program to train instructors to be wilderness skills instructors, and I hired John back to teach the salve making and the tincture making and all that type of stuff.
I remember when he was really diving deep into the learning about medicinal plants. He went to Ravencroft and my wife went there too, and then we also, we both went to a program by Heidi Bowen called the Catkin Moon Medicine Society. And again, it was one of these longer term apprenticeships where we'd go all over the state of Washington and learn about all the wild edible and medicinal plants. And where it was a class of, I don't know, 15 or 20 all women, except for John and I, But we both loved learning about the plants as well, just as much as everybody else.
And gosh, what a marketing guru, so far ahead of his times. He was always so supportive. He encouraged me to start, Alderleaf, this outdoor school. He was super supportive. He's like, "Oh yeah, you get this Site Build It website and I'll do this AWeber thing for your email." And eventually turned us on to PLF as well, and it was always just great to share challenges and ideas and we would get together at his place in Carnation all the time, or at coffee shops. Or when he moved out to Port Townsend, we'd meet up over there and brainstorm stuff, meet at a Sounders game.
He loved life, not just music and nature and marketing, but also sports. He'd be like, "Hey, come out to the Seattle Sounders soccer game." And he was just excited about everything. Loved his family, doing stuff with his family. And just Alderleaf wouldn't be here if it wasn't of John's advice. We wouldn't have been able to figure out all the technology stuff, how to do all the outreach stuff as well.
When my book came out, he welcomes me onto his podcast, Herb Mentor Radio. He's letting his listener to know about my book or my courses. And so, just so generous and so loyal and so fun to hang out with. But I know that it's, again, it's the two sides of him. He'd joke about it too, being a Gemini, being like, "Oh, if you met me and you like who I am, you probably met me at my good side. You haven't seen the other side yet."
But it's just so... But it's amazing that he had that dichotomy. Most people, I find the wilderness skills field, they might love all these nature skills, they're not willing to do all that hard office stuff, but he had both of those. But when you see John on screen, or on a podcast, or read one of his articles, that's the icing on the cake. And what's hard to always know is that probably behind so much of that stuff is thousands of hours of building websites and building systems and staying up all night to troubleshoot things that are breaking and to put together all the nuts and bolts that go behind the scenes.
So there'd be just weeks or months ago, I'd reach out and be like, "Hey, let's touch base." And he's like, "I got this launch coming up, I got all this stuff I got to do." And I'd like, "I get it." He'd be gone for long periods, just locked away in the office, working out all the things.
But like I said, I knew him from '97, in his band, worked together at Wilderness Awareness School, then we both started our organizations roughly around the same time, and he was so supportive of everything we did, and I can't say enough. And even when I'd have work on the peninsula I'd sometimes stay at his place, and it was so cool to catch up and go into town and meet the friends he made at the pubs in town and things like that. And I'm just going to miss him so much.
It's hard, one of our friends, Julie was saying, John has such a good memory and he's been such a part of our lives for so long that he remembers things about us when we were younger, 25 years ago or something, that we even forgot. So it's also losing a part of ourselves, in that he's just so integral to that. But I also am just so thankful for the time we had together, and I know he lives on inside of all of us, we can always think, "Oh, what would John say in this situation? Or what would John do in this situation?"
Like you said, he was always ahead of his time and willing to just dive in and learn a new thing and use it to help people, because it's just always inspiring how dedicated he was to sharing nature skills with others. Whether it was through Wilderness Awareness or through LearningHerbs and HerbMentor, just helping people get that nature connection and using every tool available to him to be successful at that, it's just, it's awe-inspiring, and I hope to just carry forth whatever bit of that I can in how we reach out and do things with folks in the future. And I hope everyone that's... I know that folks have benefited so much from John's work, I know there's a group of us that friends who all have our own little businesses sharing different types of nature skills with others, whether it's Julie and her homesteading website, or Kristi with her birding website. There's just so many of us that were inspired by him.
And I know in the herbal world, there's so many herbalists that got their start from being inspired by LearningHerbs and HerbMentor, and so many of them share with their families and friends and even started their own programs and organizations. So John really does live on in a lot of ways, he's a huge body of work there, between all the videos and courses and projects and podcasts and everything that will continue to inspire new generations of herbalists and naturalists and such.
And so, I think for me, it's sad, this news comes up all the time, but I also try to turn that and be inspired by that, that he's just such a shining example of how we can all make a big difference in the world and the people around us and the things that we choose to do. And I think that his legacy is going to live on for a long time. And I think the planting the trees is also great, it's such a great reminder of these things that are solid and grow and they give life to more new trees that will come up underneath them and down the road. So yeah, I'll just leave it there, I guess.
Yeah. Thank you, John.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Thank you, Jason. Thanks for sharing all of that. I was remembering some of my favorite memories or jam sessions on the holidays, everyone. Yeah. Cat on the vocals. Yep. Thank you so much. And I'm going to continue this thread along with Kristi, our next speaker. And since 1998, Kristi and John's paths were woven together in meaningful ways through herbalism, through community, through business, and of course a shared love of nature. And while it might seem odd to mention a badger and pixie dust in the same breath, it was this magnetic combination within John that altered Kristi's path and became a guiding light for her throughout the last 27 years. Kristi.
Kristi Dranginis:
Thank you, Rosalie. Thank you everybody. It's really beautiful to be with you all and to meet some folks I haven't met before. Tracy, to hear your story about John, just to see this thread that's carried through. And I love, JY, I loved hearing that story about John and how he donated money to the school, to your club back in the day. What an incredible thing for a young guy to do, to think of making a bunch of money and not being, "Sweet, I want to go buy a car. I want to go..." Whatever, he wanted to donate to you. That just speaks so much to me about who he was.
And the reason that I studied herbalism and became a realtor for a little while, and then later had the courage to develop a business online teaching people about birds, was in large part because of John Gallagher, or as people have said, John G or Gallagher, as we used to call him. But the thing is, I don't think that he, or even I was really aware of his influence on me at the time. And like Jon Young said, John was kind of like this unsung hero. And even in some ways to me, a maybe unlikely or unsung mentor, I never realized that that's who he was for me. And so I'll share a little bit more about that.
And a lot of people have spoken already about John and who he was at the Wilderness Awareness School back in the day. And I remember when I first started that I was often the one that was sent in if a change needed to be made, or we had decided something in a meeting and we had to make a change before it went out to print, they would send me in to go knock on John's door. And I was always like, "I wonder why they're sending me to go do this."
And I knock on the door and it was like this kind of growl that would come back out at you, and I soon realized it was because everyone was scared of him. That's why they sent me in to go tell him about the change or whatever needed to happen. And I realized it might make him sound kind of like a grouch, but really, it's not that... Maybe he was a little grouchy. That was probably true. But really I think what it's more about is that he was intensely focused, driven and fiercely authentic. And so, he didn't need you to like him, or he just didn't care about that kind of stuff, but what he needed was to get his work done on time, and that was what was most important to him.
And so yeah, just stay out of his way, he was working on something. And so, what was so beautiful was, Jason kind of spoke to this, but that when the rest of us were out in the woods following bobcat tracks or across the country teaching bird language, it was John that was in the office making sure the world knew what we were doing. And he was the one that stayed behind to make sure that everything ran the way it needed to run. And so, over the years he had this way of showing up. And it's so cool to think that so many people have said this, at just the right time. And for me, I think of it as like sprinkling little pixie dust on my life, because I respected him, I listened to him.
And so, there was this time where after returning from a year abroad, I felt deeply passionate about plants and herbal medicine. And this one day I was hanging out with John and I was sharing it with him, and he just matter-of-factly said to me, he's like, "Well, you should study with Sally and EagleSong at Ravencroft." Just totally straight out. And I was like, "Okay." John said it, so I did it. And that decision to follow through with his suggestion changed the course of my life.
And I bowed at EagleSong and Sally for all that they taught me, but also to John for making that suggestion. And then years later, I came to another crossroads in my life and I knew I needed a change. And so, I was speaking to family and friends, and a few of them even suggested like, "Oh, you should go into real estate, Kristi." To me, at that time, it was telling a horse that they might enjoy being a starfish for a little while. It was just like, "No, I'm a nature girl. I don't do real estate." And then I was hanging out at the local coffee shop one morning, and it was a place that you could often and almost always find John at almost all hours of the day. You could find John working on some big project or another there at the coffee shop.
And so, I was sharing this desire to find what was next for my life, and without skipping a beat, he pointed to this ad in the newspaper that he was reading, and he was like, "You should be a realtor." And he wasn't joking. And I just stood in shock because all the people that had mentioned it to me before didn't know John at all. And so, either I was just exuding strong realtor vibes, or he was tapped into something greater, and for me, I think that was... I'm going to choose to believe that, that he was tapped into something bigger and I chose to follow his advice. It was the third person in this line of people who was like, "You should do this, Kristi." And when John was the last one, I was like, "All right, I'm just going to..." Kind of like Kimberly was speaking, just going for stuff, I'm like, "I'm just going to go for it. I don't know what else to do right now in my life, so I'm just going to try this."
And it actually turned out to be the perfect path for me at the time. And so thanks to John, that's what I followed. And others have mentioned... Well, in this way I'll say that John was really the first person in our little nature-based community there in Washington who dared to reach beyond the tall mossy forests and spread his message to the big wide world online. And it was something that was completely foreign to most of us earth loving naturalists back in the day. But we all watched him almost in awe as he totally transformed the lives of his family through the success of his business, and also introduced thousands of people across the world to herbs. And what was so beautiful was that he showed all of us that our message could reach more people than we ever imagined. And just as importantly that we could make a living doing what we love.
That it wasn't just like, oh yeah, you're a bunch of naturalists and stuff and you just have to stay in the woods and do your thing. It was like, no, we can reach people out there, and look what John's doing. He was that guiding light for us. And here's another funny story that I think connects a lot of us, is that before their big launch, I was actually living in the now infamous basement room that Rosalee also lived in, apparently, in their room. And John pulled me aside one afternoon and he said, "All right, Kristi, here's the thing." He's like, "I've got a thousand boxes coming in the mail and I need your room to store them, so you're going to have to find somewhere else to live." And I was like, "Okay, by when?"
And he goes, "Next week." So literally I had to move out of their house in a week, because John had all... I think it was the games, I thought it was the herb boxes, but now I remember it's the games that were coming and you guys saw the pictures, they had nowhere to put them. So the room I was staying in became the storage for their games. And so, yeah, but it was that way of Johns of just being really just matter of fact, direct, and this is what needs to happen in life, but also of course, caring and loving at the same time, even though he did make me move out of his house.
So now, fast forward seven years, and I was now living in Colorado. I needed to get some sun in my life. And I came up, not came up, but this really clear, beautiful vision about what I wanted to do with my life came to me, and after years of teaching others about birds in nature I knew that it was time for me to create a course and to share what I loved so much in the world, and I wanted it to reach beyond just my local community. And so, before I let my dream get too big, I reached out to John and I was just like... Because I had been watching his courses transform lives. And like Jason said, he was continually innovating and always staying at the leading edge of the online industry, and oftentimes he was the one blazing a new trail ahead for everybody else.
And so for me, when I saw this, I knew that he knew how to keep it interesting, simple, elegant, and totally inspiring. And so, yeah, I called him up and he spent time answering all of my total beginner online marketing questions. And just as Jeff had mentioned, he took the time with me to answer them. And it was just like, yeah, just I felt really lucky in that regard. And one thing I will say as a side note was that the first thing that he told me to do in that conversation was read Jeff Walker's book. He's like, "You have to read that book and follow it to a tee, and then call me back later if you have any questions, but I won't talk to you until you read his book." And then one fall, he came out to Colorado and invited me to this community night at Jeff's Mastermind group, because it just so happened that Jeff and I actually lived in the same town in Colorado, which for me, it was just like, "Oh my gosh, Jeff Walker lives here. This is amazing."
And I literally felt like I was being invited to the Oscars for online marketers. I was just like, "Oh my God, all these famous marketing people are here." It was so cool. So John never knew this, and neither did I consciously, but he was someone that I would think about often, almost on a weekly basis, and I'd regularly ask myself, like Jason was saying, what would Gallagher do in this situation? And not just for business, but also personally, because there was, I remember this one moment where I was really fierce and kind of strong. I had a strong reaction to someone once, and I was just questioning myself, because that's an okay thing to do. And I remember thinking to myself, "You know what? Gallagher's a badger, and I totally respect him for that, and so, yeah, it's totally all right, and sometimes even appreciated in certain circumstances to be fierce like that."
And I just never realized how often I thought about him, or admired his work and approach to teaching and business and relationships, until I received the word that he wasn't with us any longer. And I never thought to tell him how much he impacted me, because I never realized just how much he did. And John was fierce and fun and snarky. He was wildly creative. He was a brilliant, driven, and so much more, and I'm sad to not experience his light in the world, or get to see what wonderful new idea he's going to come up with that would be sure to inspire other peoples to connect in a rich and lovely way with plants and nature and community and everything else.
And so, John, I miss you deeply. And yeah, I literally it was the same... The moment I got a text actually from Jason's wife, Carrie, to tell me that John had passed. And the moment before I got that text, I literally had just had in my mind, "What would Gallagher do in this situation?" I was thinking about something in my business and I was like, "What would Gallagher do?" And then I got that text and I was like, "There's no way. This is just like... What are we going to do now? Who are we going to look to now?" He was the dude. And yeah, so thank you everybody for letting me be here and sharing my thoughts about John.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Thank you so much, Kristi. Well, now we're going to turn things over to Kimberly for a family tribute.
Kimberly Gallagher:
Well, hello again. Yeah, so beautiful to hear everybody's stories about John. And one of the things that I just wanted to say in this moment is that everything that John did with LearningHerbs and in his life came back to his love for his family.
And yeah, he loved me fiercely. He was incredibly loyal and just cared so, so deeply for his family, and the kids were his pride and joy. And this is the third memorial that I've been to for John, and people just come up to me and say, "I just talked to him not so long ago, and he was just telling me about what Rowan's doing and what Haley's doing." And he just was incredibly proud to be a father and to have had the opportunity to be a father and a husband, and he just put his all into caring-
Kimberly Gallagher:
... put his all into caring for us. He took this idea that a man is supposed to be a provider to its utmost. That was what motivated everything he did after he married me and became a dad. Everything was about these kids and giving them the best life he could possibly give them. And I'm just so grateful to have been able to share the years that we shared together and to just try things and learn together and grow together as humans and as parents. Neither of us really knew what the heck that meant, but we were like, "Yeah, let's have a baby. Sure. Jump into that." And that really grew us both up. It's like, "Oh my gosh, we got a baby. We got to figure some stuff out here."
And yeah, we both just loved, loved, loved being parents and loved these babies that we brought into the world, and so grateful to have the honor of being the mother of Rowan and Hailey. And Rowan was going to make a video to share with you all. They can't be present today because they're actually working on co-directing a show in Seattle. It's A Klingon Christmas Carol, and they have to learn Klingon in order to direct, and they're very, very busy with that project, which I know John would be so excited to see. I know Rowan was excited to share this one with his dad, so it will be a bittersweet moment when they put this production on, and John is not able to be there to share in this moment.
But yeah, Rowan was having just a rough time the last few days and wasn't able to bring themselves to the video camera. So no video from Rowan, but his heart is here with all of us as we celebrate his dad.
And Hailey, on the other hand, said, "I want to speak at this memorial." She wasn't sure and she got herself together and she's going to be up next, so I'd like to just turn it over to Hailey.
Hailey Gallagher:
Hello. Thank you, everybody, for coming online today to watch this and honor my dad and hear these stories from these people from all throughout his life. Let's see.
My dad was one of my best friends. We played music together. We had long talks in the evenings on my visits home from college. We would go on adventures when I was a kid with my brother from skiing to riding the monorail back and forth in Seattle just so that I could ride two carousels in one day.
Losing him sucks every single day. I had a whole future plan with him where I was going to run this permaculture farm with an outdoor school on it, and he was going to live there and be in charge of my marketing and we were going to share so many more adventures and laughs, and I'm really heartbroken that that future wasn't meant to be. But I'm also happy that we got to share that dream while he was alive and that we had so many shared interests.
My dad was probably, let's see, the hardest working person I've ever met. He was so dedicated to his work at Wilderness Awareness School and then at his acupuncture clinic, and finally, the LearningHerbs. And he cared so much about his work and making sure our family had everything we needed or wanted. I really wish he could have worked a little less sometimes and found ways to focus on himself a little more often. And I wish he'd given himself more credit for all those amazing things that he did. And I wish that the medical system hadn't failed in supporting him after he supported so many people. I wish that I could call him and tell him about everything I've done since he's been gone and that we could play music together on Thanksgiving this year.
But my dad inspired me to do what I'm doing now. His passion for connecting people with nature has become the heart of the work that I want to do. And if you asked me when I was 10, I would've told you that my passion was horses, just horses, all about horses. That's life. And don't get me wrong, I still love horses and my dad always made it possible for me to follow whatever passion I wanted to follow at the time, but now I want to work in sustainable agriculture and outdoor education, and that's partly because of how he taught me to look at the world from bringing me outside to touch ferns as soon as I was born out in a yurt in the woods on the Wilderness Awareness School land, and to stopping every five minutes on family hikes to take pictures of plants so that he could share them with the LearningHerbs community and show them what he saw that day.
He taught me how to recognize the details even though I didn't really notice he was doing that at the time, and he taught me a lot of things that I didn't really realize he was teaching me. He was good at teaching me without even knowing it, that coyote teaching style that Wilderness Awareness School uses. He just did that naturally. Yeah, it's hard that those lessons can't come anymore from his physical presence and now they're just from the memories.
But death has a funny way of connecting us with so many people from our past and opening us to pieces of the world and life and love that we didn't know even existed. And I've learned a lot these past few months and connected with so many old friends. I went back to the Snoqualmie Valley and visited some people and got to hang out with Jason and his family and play music, which was really fun. And I'm proud of where I am right now, even though some of the days are just plain hard and I just cry all the time, but I'm also proud that I'm still making it through.
And for a while, I was feeling really guilty about that because I felt like, "Man, I shouldn't be happy after this has happened." But since then, I've heard a lot of other folks talk about the idea of feeling that way after someone dies and all the things that opens you up too. But also that it's okay to simultaneously be amazed about those things and all the things you've learned, but also know that you trade it in a heartbeat to get that person back.
So nothing will be able to fill that empty place at my college graduation party this winter or any of the other milestones or ordinary moments that he was supposed to be there for. What we don't get to choose is how our story plays out. Even when we think nothing like that's going to happen in our own lives, it turns out it can. So we do get to choose what's important to us and how we interact with people and what we do in the moments we have.
So now I'll see him all the medicinal plants that I see, every butterfly I see, every song we used to play, and all the beautiful places in nature I visit, and I'll feel him when I listen to his album or watch all the home videos he put together. He used to make hour-long family videos every year of all the things we were doing. We were constantly being videotaped as kids, but they're pretty fun to look back at, so I guess it was worth it.
But man, I'm always going to miss seeing him smile and give me a slightly suffocating hug when I get back to the house that I grew up in from college. So yeah, I miss him a lot, but I'm really glad that he was able to teach me so much while he was here.
Rosemary Gladstar:
Thank you, Hailey. Thank you.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Thank you so much, Hailey and Kimberly. I'm sure I can speak on behalf of everybody. It's really important to hear all of that and it's deeply appreciated.
Well, now I'd love to turn things over to Rosemary, and Rosemary's a herbalist, author, fairy godmother of Herbalism, and one of John's longtime friends and collaborators. They've worked on many projects together, always with this shared intention of spreading herbal wisdom and community. And Rosemary has been a beautiful source of support for me through these past couple of months, and she always speaks of John with kindness and a generous heart. So I'm just going to turn it on over to her.
Rosemary Gladstar:
Thank you, Rosalee. I really want to thank Hailey and Kimberly and Rosalee and all of you who have brought us together to hear these amazing stories. Kimberly and Hailey both, you especially touched my heart so deeply.
And it's so incredible when we come together to celebrate somebody's life, somebody that we love, because we find out so much about them. I know John mostly as an herbalist from LearningHerbs, and I heard about his other worlds, but I just never realized how rich his world was beyond the world that I knew him as. So I'm so appreciative of the stories, starting all the way from Tracy when he was a kid, and we all shared the same story about John. He was incredibly dedicated and generous and heartful and sharing and brilliant. He was all of those things, and still is, actually.
I feel like we miss our loved ones who pass over in this world. We miss them in the everyday, those hugs, those suffocating hugs and the work and the music and all the funny ways that we interacted and incredible ways we interacted with John. But I still feel there's many ways that we can still engage with our loved ones who are on the other side.
And in fact, I think, well, I think about the words of Thomas Campbell spoke. He said, "To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die." And Emily Dickinson, she said the same thing a little differently, a little more poetically but, "Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality." And certainly, if to be loved is a condition of immortality, then we know John's spirit lives on, and not just in this group that we're together and the people telling the stories and the people that are online with us right now, but really through thousands of people. John and Kimberly's legacy is very alive and potent and strong.
He just touched so many people's life with all the stories, with that enthusiasm he had, that incredible dedication, his quirkiness, his joy. He was a man who absolutely loved life, and I think that's something that we can remember him for, how much he loved life and loved his family. I know that a lot of times he was always talking about Kimberly and the kids and what they were doing, as well as his work. I mean, he was an incredibly impassioned man about life and work and love and all the things that he did.
I had the great honor. We've heard so many stories, and I know it's getting late, so I'm not going to tell many, but I did have the great honor of spending a week with John. He came up to Sage Mountain and he asked me if I wanted to do a series for LearningHerbs, and I really didn't. I mean, I was so busy in my life, but I love John so much that of course I said yes, and I think that's one thing that we've all realized. We all just said yes to John no matter what he asked us because first of all, we knew it would be fun, and we knew that we would have a good time, but we also just loved John.
And it was really actually that memory of that week, we worked so hard. I'm a lot older than John is, but I could keep up with him. And we worked from morning till night filming the series that he wanted to do for LearningHerbs. But it was just so much fun and he was so organized and he just... Yeah, I couldn't believe it. We would work all day and then we'd play music. He'd play music or we'd go out to dinner. He would write songs. And my interns were there too, Emily Roth and Summer Singleton and Carly Young, and we just all together, all of us when we remember that week with John at Sage Mountain, it was just so, so full of joy and laughter.
And then of course, like most of his life, he manifested incredibly. He was an absolute visionary. I know we've all said this, but I just have to say it too, a visionary, a creative master, and a manifester.
So yeah, what do they say? "No one is truly dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away." Well, John's ripples go on and on and on and on. They go through a huge pool. So we can also say that his spirit is not dead. It's definitely with us still, and I think that's what we want to nourish. We want to think of those trees that we're going to plant as John living on, creating food and energy and shade and a place for birds to land, a place to take our feelings when we're just really missing him and just need to talk to him.
So yeah, most of us have very little choice of how we're born, when we're born, and even little choice of how we die. But really, what we have is just those moments between the beginning and the end and what we make of those, and John definitely filled that time. He just filled it, overflowing, enough for many lifetimes for certain.
So I just wanted to read a poem by Mary Oliver that, to me, expresses a lot about where I feel John is now. But anyway, it's called Last Night by Mary Oliver.
So, "Last night in the fields, I lay down in the darkness to think about death, but instead I fell asleep, as if in a vast and sloping room filled with those white flowers that open all summer, sticky and untidy in the warm fields. When I woke, the morning light was just slipping in front of the starts and I was covered with blossoms.
"I don't know how it happened--I don't know if my body went diving down under the sugary vines in some sleep-sharpened affinity with the depths, or whether that green energy rose like a wave and curled over me, claiming me in its husky arms.
"I pushed them away, but I didn't want to rise. Never in my life had I felt so plush or so slippery or so resplendently empty. Never in my life have I felt myself so near that porous line where my own body was done with, and the roots and the stems and the flowers began."
And that's where John is. He's in the holy ground where there's no division between the roots, the stems, and the flowers, the stardust, the birds in the sky. Our dreams are thoughts about reality, where they begin and end. We all will miss John, his wonderful sense of humor, his brilliance, his unique way of viewing the world, and his kindness, that other kindness he had to everybody, and his thoughtfulness.
But my guess is this isn't the end, only another beginning. Perhaps we'll all be dancing together again in another reality. Until then, John lives on in our hearts and our memories, how we carry his work out and honor him, with our laughter, our memories, and yes, our tears. Also, how we will support his work and his family still. I think that's one way we can really honor John is by honoring his family and really supporting the work that he's done.
And so, yeah, I would like to just end with these words, "The spirit of transcendence, that which moves within, among, and beyond all of us, points us to our part in the broader cycles of life and death. Keep fresh before us our history as stardust and our future as saplings. What is remembered lives on."
So thank you so much. I'm so honored to be here with you all in this circle. Thank you.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
Thank you so much, Rosemary. Well, what we're going to do now, we're going to have some closing words from Kimberly in just a minute. But first, we're going to open up the chat for folks to type in there anything you'd like, a reflection of John, maybe how his life has touched yours, whatever you'd like to share, just time to open it up. And we're also going to play his song as well that's been reference, so we'll get that set up.
And we can make his music available, absolutely. I think we can do that. But yeah, the chat's now open, so feel free to hit that up and we'll get that music on here in just a moment. Thanks, Michelle.
Also, just want to take a moment to thank Jeff Walker and his crew for getting this Zoom set up for us. I many times thought this is what John would do is get all the technology set up for us, get the Zoom, and it's a funny group of herbalists who we don't normally do this. So really, thank you, Jeff for helping us with that. And thank you for Michelle for getting things set up behind the scene and handling a lot of tech stuff as well. I've relied on Michelle for many years in that way.
And I wanted to thank all the presenters for sharing their stories and for being here. And thank you for all of us who are here, whether live or in the recording, and keeping John's legacy alive and his laughter close to our hearts and the most beautiful parts about him alive as we just walk through our daily lives together.
MUSIC:
I'm a man searching for something.
Searching for something on TV that wouldn't be wasting all of my time.
So I turned on my TV to PBS.
There was nothing on A or NBC or CBS.
If the Discovery Channel was something I could afford.
I'd be a hell of a lot of smarter and a lot less bored.
So I turned my screen to The Joy of Painting.
And what did I find.
A smiling man with a good bit of hair and a gentle look in his eyes.
He told me the ingredients to life were more than just black or white.
You need bromethalin blue bird, crimson red, forest green, lemon yellow, and magenta's all he said.
With every stroke, with suspense, would it be a lake or a mountain?
God, it just made me so tense.
And then Bob said, "Relax."
"Breathe deep."
"And over here, paint a happy little tree."
"A happy little tree."
"A happy little tree."
His words really hit me, cut my soul with a knife.
He could scrape that canvas better than I scrape by in life.
All those years ago in a church and reading up on Buddha.
And those transcendental meditation classes my friends made me go to.
Never put life so simple and easy.
All I had to be was a happy little tree.
A happy little tree.
That's all I had to be.
A happy little tree.
To live in a landscape painted Bob would be more fulfilling than finding a wife or a job.
All I would do is sit by a stream photosynthesized by day.
And at night I would dream.
Of maybe finding my own little island with the view of the mountains with snow piled on 'em.
And all my friends will be jealous 'cause they all live in a city.
And me.
I'm a happy little tree.
Yeah, a happy little tree.
That's all I am.
A happy little tree.
That's all I want to be.
A happy little tree.
Rosalee de la Forêt:
And Kimberly, I'll pass it on to you now for our closing thoughts.
Kimberly Gallagher:
Yeah, we started out this gathering in gratitude with a Thanksgiving address. And I want to end also in gratitude. I want to say my heartfelt thanks to everyone who came to this memorial today, and for all of the panelists who shared stories and brought themselves to this moment to really honor John and the life that he lived. It's so beautiful that we could all gather in this way and do this sharing and so sweet to see your faces and to just be part of this celebration of his life.
And I know his sister said she tried about 30 times to make a video to share with you about his younger childhood and just was struggling too hard and wasn't able to do one. And so I know all of us are just so wanting to share and express the ways that John touched us. And yeah, it's still really fresh and several months have passed, and yet, yeah, it's still really hard to have lost him. And I know we're all moving through that in the ways that we can and are capable of in the moment. And just really grateful that those who came today had capacity to share some stories and help the larger community understand a little bit more of who John was and what he brought to this world.
And I just want to offer gratitude to John for all that he brought to this earth, for his love for the earth and for the green growing things, and his love for his family. It was, as I said earlier, just a fierce, fierce love, and his love for all of his friends, all of you who spoke to his loyalty and the way that he was just there for everyone in so many moments.
And there's just so much to be grateful for in what John was able to bring to this world with his particular genius. He was able to bring together the plants and the nature and the technology and the theater, all of it. His TV, radio production skills. He just mixed it all together in this magic brew and went, "Okay, everybody, here it is," and touched so, so many lives.
I know when we did a little memorial for him on our membership site on HerbMentor, one of our members said, "You know, your logo for LearningHerbs is the dandelion, and I like to think of John as a dandelion." And all of us on HerbMentor are the seeds, and we're just scattering what he brought to the rest of our communities and to the world. And we have this vision at LearningHerbs that there is an herbalist in every home. And so I just see all those little dandelion seeds and I think of John and his dream to just really make herbalism accessible to everyone, and for everyone to feel empowered and connected to the plants and to the whole natural world.
He cared so much about this earth, and I know that was part of the struggle at the end, was this current government administration. And he felt like, "I put all my life's work into helping to preserve natural areas and save this planet and help it to thrive. And it's all being undone so fast, so many years of work." And when the HerbMentor member said that about the dandelions, I thought, "This work, it's not being undone. It's actually blossoming in beautiful ways," and we all carry that in ourselves and in our hearts because we were touched by this man.
And I think, yeah, it's just something to be so grateful for and to give us a seed of hope in these challenging, challenging times. So thank you, John, for your fierce love, for that seed of hope, and for bringing us all together here in this moment today. Blessed be.
Rosemary Gladstar:
Blessed be, honey. Thank you. Thank you.
