Traditions In Western Herbalism Conference
Final Updates

The TWHC is only a little over 2 weeks away now, and it’s great how much excitement we’re hearing expressed from people coming!  There’s some important news below for those of you already coming to this unique event, as well for anyone still considering it.

Time Running Out To Register

There is only a short while left to register, with registration officially closed on the 16th of September, the day before classes start.  To get one of the limited number of tickets remaining, please go to the Registration Page at:

http://www.traditionsinwesternherbalism.org/pricing.html#Registration

TWHC Booklet

We just spent the last several days focusing on creating and uploading what has turned out to be a heavily illustrated, 86 page Conference Booklet, containing all the pertinent info you’ll need including teacher bios, class descriptions, and 43 pages of informative class reference and notes.… expensive to print, but free this year only to everyone attending.

Website Updated

Check out the many changes at the TWHC website:  www.TraditionsInWesternHerbalism.org

Conference Concerts Update

Included on the website are descriptions of the herb-focused flamenco performance as well as of our last minute addition, Tina and Her Pony (the great women’s mountain-folk band band filling in for Arborea now that they’re unable to make it).

Check The Revised Class Schedule!

The days and times of the presentations have been adjusted, so please be sure to look over the newly posted schedule on the site when planning your time at the conference.  Note the exciting new courses we have added, one taught by Rosalee de la Foret and another by Julie McIntyire.

Arrival

Please check in with our site manager Resolute Michaels at the Registration Table in Social Center when you first get there, before going to your camping spot or rooms.  She will provide you with your:

1. Conference Booklet
2. Site Map
3. Name Tag

Lodging and Meals

If you haven’t reserved a room at Ghost Ranch, you will need to either pay a small fee to them for camping, or reserve a room nearby (see the TWH site for motel contact info).  And you need to contact Ghost Ranch directly to let them know if you anticipate buying your meals at their cafeteria.

Audio and Video Recordings

We will have our own volunteer video crew filming the evening events as well as portions of some of the daytime classes, interviews of willing presenters and attendees, crowd shots, etc., with the intention of:

1. Editing for short TWHC 2011 promo pieces for YouTube

2. Audio CDs of the classes for sale, DVDs of the concerts

3. Possibly using in a future TWHC full length documentary

If you don’t want to be filmed just say so, otherwise you will be asked at the time to sign the usual waiver for our uses.

2011 TWHC: Sept 16-18th

Finally, response has been so encouraging that we’ve made the commitment to try to make this work again in 2011, September 16-18.  We’re going to try for a balance of well received teachers from this year, along with an approximately equal number of other leading herbal healers and speakers.  We’ve already begun the selection process, based on numerous factors including freshness of ideas, quality of presentation, practicality of material, attendee’s preferences and needs, and especially our need to see certain topics covered.  Let us know if you have any recommendations, or if you would like an application to present.

Finally

Thank you, to everyone who is registering, and thereby making this event possible in 2010 and beyond.  And thank you as well, to all of you who aren’t coming, but who have done so much to help spread the word.  You’re great!

Warmly,
Jesse Wolf and Kiva Rose, TWHC

Our Traditions In Western Herbalism Conference, Sept. 17-19, is blessed to have not only 20 of the most respected and cutting-edge teachers of herbal medicine… but also two nights of live music featuring bands we know our registrants will love.  Perhaps the most energetic of these acts, Rising Appalachia, will be doing their Afro-Appalachian soul-twang punkabilly forest-activist boogie thing on Friday night, following our longtime friends Carlos Lomas and Gioia Tama of FlamencoWorldCompany and their heartful Nuevo Mexicano flavored Flamenco song and dance.   Saturday night is planned to include the truly enchanting psych-folk couple Arborea, though they are having trouble finding a ride here (see below).  Given the chance that they may not be able to make it, we did an extensive local band search and are pleased to have found and hired Taos musicians Tina Collins and Her Pony to play.  Tina and her partner Quetzal play mostly original tunes, a mix of vocal harmonies, cello and guitar, propelling a contemporary woman’s take on old time mountain style.  Click on the bolded names above to be directed to song samples on Amazon, or do a search on iTunes to enjoy their many recordings… you’ll likely be delighted you did.

Above we have a photo of the deft Carlos and evocative Gioia, FlamencoWorldCompany.

Above is a photo of Tina Collins and Quetzal Jordan of Tina and Her Pony.  And below, a montage of Chloe and Leah, the core of Rising Appalachia.

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Round-Trip Ride Needed

From New England to The TWH Conference for Our Band

ARBOREA

Shanti, Buck and their child

Musicians, on the whole, have seldom been fairly treated in this country, with even the relatively few high paid performers having to deal with predatory labels and management fiascos.  Indie groups in the age of file sharing have an even harder time making a living, selling CDs at small venues while often at the mercy of undependable booking agents.  Like musicians for centuries, Buck and Shanti of our conference band Arborea have faced unforeseen difficulties, without losing their drive to share their creations with attentive listeners.  Like their peers and predecessors, they do what they do for the music first and foremost, out of service to the muse, and in honor and celebration of green energy and the magical natural world.

RIDE SOUGHT

We’d like to find someone in the New England area planning to drive to and back from the upcoming Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference, that  Shanti, Buck and their child could ride with to and from the event.  We’d need you to have a vehicle large enough to hold them and their instruments, and most importantly, feeling honored and happy for the opportunity to be of help in this way.  They would need to arrive on or before July 16th.

If you are interested, we would need to know no later than Aug. 3rd, for their sake, but also to know whether to include them in the Booklet being printed for every attendee.

Thank you much.  Look forward to a most wonderful conference and music.

-Jesse Wolf and Kiva Hardin

The below video will give you a small but vivid taste of what you can look forward to if you plan on attending this September’s upcoming Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference. It includes a look at our outstanding selection of teachers, a glimpse of the beautiful site in the high desert of New Mexico and even a chance to hear the earthy and intriguing music of our two of our featured bands, R.I.S.E. (formerly Rising Appalachia) & Arborea. So take a moment to sit back, relax and enjoy a brief but magical journey into the enchantment yet to come…

This amazing video was brainstormed and created by TWHC Sponsorship Director, Animá Medicine Woman Mentorship student and practicing herbalist, Rosalee de la Forét, and we’re so grateful for her hard work, astute insights and infectious enthusiasm.. thank you, Rosalee!

If you’re excited about the conference and the opportunities it presents, whether you’re able to attend this year or not, please take the time to forward or share this clip whenever and wherever appropriate! You can send them to this post, or directly to the youtube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXNR7_k-vNo

Let me take a moment to emphasize here that the conference is an international one and not necessarily specific to to the American West or Southwest, there’s something for everyone here. Registrants from as far away as Canada, the UK, Alaska, Hawaii and possibly even Central America will be in attendance!

Thanks so much to all of the generous individuals and organizations that have helped spread the word and increase awareness of the Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference, your assistance and generosity makes all of the difference and means so much to us personally, thank you!

~Kiva Rose

Note: if you’re an email subscriber and have a hard time seeing this from your inbox, just click on the title of this post to be taken to the actual blog site and you can watch from there. Or use this link to go directly to youtube to watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXNR7_k-vNo

Please Download, Print & Share
THE NEW COLOR POSTERS

for the

TRADITIONS IN WESTERN HERBALISM CONFERENCE

Your help is kindly requested, sharing the new trifold brochures for the conference, and making time to put up some of the matching posters. TWHC CoDirector Jesse Wolf Hardin spent nearly 20 hours designing and creating them, with his logo framed by a selection of his and my medicinal plant portraits. The background earth-tones are from his photo of volcanic cliff-rock near the Animá Sanctuary, but was picked for its ability to evoke the earthen pastel tones of the beautiful hills surrounding the Ghost Ranch conference site.

Write us to request whatever number of brochures you can put to good use, ideally handed to herbal and health related business owners who may want to participate by sponsoring, vending or practicing there, or left in small piles in herbal stores that will agree to keep them out. We can send you the files if you would like to print them off yourself, though you would need to know how to print on both sides.

The color posters come in 2 sizes, large 11×17 ones that we hope you can get store owners and health practitioners to commit to keep up in their windows or on their counter fronts from now until the event next September. We will be selling these as art posters at the event, but will also be happy to give a signed copy as a gift to you along with however many copies for you to post in your region or on your travels. The smaller version is 8.5X11, and is available either by writing us, or by downloading and then printing the linked poster file.

Ideal places for posting the large and small posters are herb stores, natural health stores, natural food stores, health practitioner waiting rooms, herbal and healing school foyers, university student union buildings, university medicine and botany building bulletin boards, and culturally conscious cafes. Please don’t feel like you have to take on a load… if a goodly amount of you could commit to posting even 5 or 10 – and to checking back to make sure they stay up and aren’t covered over – that would be a huge contribution!

That so many people want to involve themselves and help, is essential to making this conference a success and to ensure their will be others in subsequent years. It is also satisfying in itself, the connection we feel in this alliance of purpose. Thank you dearly from us both.

Kiva Rose & Jesse Wolf Hardin
TWHC
Kiva(at)TraditionsInWesternHerbalism.org
www.TraditionsInWesternHerbalism.org

DOWNLOAD SMALL TWHC POSTER HERE

Call For Help with Conference Sponsor/Vendor Outreach

Free Registration, Acknowledgment & Unending Thanks Offered to Volunteers

doing outreach to potential event Sponsors, Vendors & Practitioners

and

Any Amount of Help Welcomed from Anyone

who is willing to send a Sponsor or Vendor Invite and Application to any business or nonprofits you personally know of

The TWHC is getting huge amounts of buzz on the internet, participants are already arranging rides here from as far away as New England and Canada, and we received so many requests to speak that we filled all the spots the first week.  There will be a deep ecological and conservation element, with the help of United Plant Savers. The website has been upgraded, a special blog built just for conference announcements, a first batch of flyers and brochure went out, and more are in the works.  And finally, Mt. Rose Herbs and LearningHerbs.com made the first good sized sponsor donations.  That said, we have a number of tables/spaces to fill, and we could use more financial sponsors to ensure the event’s success.

There are 3 essential elements to this work:
-researching related businesses, nonprofits and health practitioners in NM
-Sending materials email, or snail mail when necessary
-making followup calls to be sure they got the material, encouraging them to commit

We could especially use more help contacting places BETWEEN NOW AND FEB 1ST , the deadline for Sponsors to be included on the first 1,000 20″ posters, in the first 1,000 revised color trifold brochures, and in our Sponsor Drive Director, Rosalee’s slide show video due to be made available through YouTube and through herbal and healing portals.

And those of you who understandably can’t commit to filling a Volunteer Position in this way,

we would still welcome your help sending out to any business, nonprofits and health practitioners you know:

a) TWHC Sponsor Invite

b) TWHC Sponsor Application

c) TWHC Vendor Invite

d) TWHC Vendor Application

You can click on any of the above to download them, the send them yourself and let us know you contacted.  Or alternately, simply send us  the contact name and email and phone, and we will get ahold of them ourselves.  Please try to think of what business, healers, educators and advocacy groups you know of that might value an opportunity to be involved with this conference and promoted as its essential supporter.

Thank you ever so much!  As with all of this work, it is only accomplished with the help of you, the larger Animá tribe.

Click here for more information on the TWH Conference

(Forward freely)

Announcing (please post and forward):

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN

for the Sept 17-19

TRADITIONS IN WESTERN HERBALISM CONFERENCE

Expanded to 3 Full Days of Classes!

Discount Early Sprout Registration: $250

The first 100 Registrants to request them (just email Kiva) will also receive the following bonus gifts:

Signed Limited Edition “Medicine Woman” color art print by Jesse Wolf Hardin ($35 value)
Foundational Elements in Traditional Western Herbalism Ebook by Kiva Rose ($15 value)

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER NOW

Featuring:

Rosemary Gladstar • Kiva Rose • Paul Bergner • Phyllis Hogan • Jesse Wolf Hardin • Matthew Wood • Jim McDonald • Howie Brounstein • Phyllis Light • Charles Garcia • Donna Chesner • CoreyPine Shane • Pam Hyde-Nakai • Darcey Blue French • Monica Rude • John Gallagher …and more!

Friday & Saturday Night Concerts

Two nights of deeply inspirited music and heart-welling celebration featuring

Arborea & R.I.S.E. (formerly Rising Appalachia)

Location

The TWHC takes place N.W. of Santa Fe, New Mexico at the enchanting Ghost Ranch, onetime home of artist Georgia O’Keefe and now a relaxed conference center surrounded by beautiful open spaces and sculptured crimson hills.

Classes & Schedule

There will be 3 FULL days of 30 or more in-depth classes Saturday and Sunday, presented by the 20 or so teachers, each 1.5 to 4 hours in length, including hands-on workshops and native plant walks. Specific conditions will be addressed, as well as energetics, diagnostics, preparations and formulas, cutting edge discoveries, ethics and spirituality, the role of the community healer, and plant and habitat conservation.

For more information go to the

Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference Website

or

REGISTER HERE NOW

Thank you for sharing this with others…

Introducing the Music of

Arborea   &   R.I.S.E.
the Awesome Groups performing at the Sept, 2010
Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference

We are ever-so-excited to be featuring Arborea & R.I.S.E. at the first annual TWHC in Fall of 2010, promising two nights of deeply inspirited entertainment and heart-welling celebration.

With their commitment we’re now sure to have the ideal soundtrack for this amazing first-time event, music that evokes the wonder as well as healing capacities of nature, and stirs the wild hearts of the awakened human audience.  Their selection and invite, however, followed dozens of hours researching and considering every possible genre of music and known group.  We went through not only our own literally thousands of digital albums representing styles from around the world, but also volumes of Google searches, and nearly every page of offerings on CD Baby, iTunes and Amazon.com.  All of us here in the canyon are way into music, and thanks to my years of performing we know a vast pool of intensely competent artists from an oud player and ashiko drummers to unrepentent rockers and rapt reggae rastas, including some eco-troubadors we would love to host in the future like Alice DiMicele and that soulful baritoned advocate of wilderness Walkin’ Jim Stoltz.  I wanted to get in touch with songstress Jenny Bird whom I enjoyed playing with years ago, or to find a way to reach the semi hermetic flamenco master Carlos Lomas and his dancing partner Joya.  Rock would lift conference goers out of their seats, Fado could evoke the depth of passion that lovers of nature and practitioners of healing feel, the full on mix of the pain of loss and the nearly unbearable ecstasy of connection and purpose.  Native American flutes could summon the feel of New Mexico, true Land of Enchantment, and the ancient energies that seep through the living land then and now, Hispanic guitar would describe without words a community of land based seekers, and the Celtic pipes could raise the pitch on each listeners heeding of their personal calling.

The first need was for acoustic music, a presentation of meaning and soul that can be driving and danceable as well as sensitive or relaxed, in keeping with the vibe of the event as well as resonant with the energies of the Ghost Ranch and the high desert mountains it lies nestled in.  The second was for styles that bring to mind and heart traditions – of music and cultures just as of ways of healing – while demonstrating and inspiring in others personalized expression, melding, re-forming, adding to and breathing new life into textures of time and sound.  The third need was for music that either lyrically references and reverences or instrumentally suggests the natural world, green beings or the processes of helping and healing.  Fourth and last, was for musicians who would be as thrilled to be performing for this special audience, here in this special place, as we are thrilled to have and hear them!  And with both of 2010’s groups, all four needs have been magnificently filled.   We hereby welcome not just performers, but new extended TWHC and Animá family, sharing heart and the larger cause and vision.

For Friday Night, Sept 17th:
R.I.S.E.
(formerly Rising Appalachia)

Leah and Chloe are the heart of R.I.S.E., sisters with individual ideas and unique expressions of a shared gift, in agreement about employing music as a vehicle of awakeness, personal growth, social and environmental action, building community and celebrating tribe.  Their rhythmically propelled performance has the intent and energy of an Ani DiFranco show, though instead melding tweaked rustic Americana with global sensibility and world beat grooves.  Incredible and incredibly potent vocals stir more than soothe, while delighting and rewarding the fortunate audience.  As so often with our favorite new acoustic tracks, the lyrics are underpinned with minor-key banjo, played by Leah more like the old South actually feels than the ways we’re used to hearing that instrument used in traditional mountain music.  And the fiddle, the instrument that closest mimics the sound of the human voice in all its range of emotion, milked for all its worth by the intense Chloe.  Crowd pleasing acoustic rocker RISE songs include their “All Fence & No Doors” and the infectious Miles Davis tinged “Castle to the Barracks,” but they also turn all too often redundant covers of classics like Bill Wither’s “Ain’t No Sunshine” into distinctly RISE arrangements, with an almost North African hand-drum back beat and their trademark tingle-producing harmonies.

Unlike many bands, they have a cause, a reason beyond making incredibly enjoyable music.  You will find it in the lyrics of some of their cuts, and unabashedly in their between-songs insightful banter.  It is their cause to inspire people to waken to their gifts and destinies, to become empowered in the face of an in some ways repressive political and economic system, to reach those born to care with the motivation to act on their sentiments, to stand up for whatever it is that person believes.  And what R.I.S.E. would seem to believe in is an equality of spirit, in balance with a diversity of form and expression.  Justice for women, for the dispossessed and unheard, for tribal peoples, for wildlife as well as those green growing beings threatened by insensitive development.  They have chosen a path of working with grassroots organizations and activist groups, performing for less income than they would get elsewhere at women-centered and herbal and healing focused events, including the much loved S.E. Women’s Herbal Conference.  In their live performances it becomes impossible to sit motionless, our hopes and spirits lifted, answering the music’s call for us to rise.

Get their music.  Go to their shows.  Hear and enjoy!

For more information about R.I.S.E., please go to:
www.myspace.com/risingappalachia
To download their songs or order their CDs, we recommend CD Baby:
www.cdbaby.com/artist/risingappalachia and ALSO:
www.cdbaby.com/artist/RISErisingappalachia

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For Saturday Night, Sept 16th:
Arborea

Arborea is a very much in love couple, Shanti and Buck.  They are, as we know through their original music, in love not just with each other but with an archaic sense, with dark art and light hearts that carry the stories of mountains and glens, human history and natural history intertwined, destinies inseparable, individual callings waiting to to heard and responded to.  If there were a soundtrack for the Appalachian country healer bending to gather her wild herbs, or the Ozark Granny-Woman handing out healing tinctures with hard to hear and much needed advice, this would be it, with a natural nod to the heaviness of life and purpose that somehow helps carry us forward to the healing and wholeness, to the impossible to resist lift of birds and bliss.  And if it is the classical and Americana dreamtime instrumentation that captures our attention, that paints the landscape for our every wakened feeling, it is Shanti’s siren vocals that tell the story we are called to such an enchanted place to hear.  Trading off on guitar and banjo, they each do their mated part to enchant us with modal moods, ebbing and lifting in organically structured cycles of composition dynamics, a conscious provocative intercoursing of feet-moving tempo and then relaxed pace, rhythmic heartbeat accentuated by the precious moment of silence, of depth and height, from the dream of a white victorian dress in a shadowed grove, to the truth of bared shoulders bent to touch the fertile soil in new day’s light.  If there is a haunting in the artisan efforts of this many times blessed pair, it is only the necessary application of aural fairy dust, the bewildering/bewilding of the too oft distracted human mind, the musical inspiration for each person’s reenchantment.

It can be read in their very name, Arborea, the green energy of this Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference, oak wise and sprout hopeful, reaching out with leaf dressed limbs while rooting securely to the truth of the earth and willingly taking in its nutrients.  It is a tune-built green arbor beneath which we ache and laugh, help and heal, where we stretch and grow into a self that is somehow more vital, intentional, responsive… and thus real.  We trust to follow their trail of seeds, to a vine and tendril draped portal not unlike Alice’s fabled rabbit hole opening up for the adventurous listener, enticing us into the always personal experience of a more natural and authentic, nature-informed and sensory filled, wholly attended and vitally realized life.

We highly suggest you check out Arborea’s enchanting recordings, you won’t be disappointed. For more information about Arborea, please go to:
www.myspace.com/arborea2
To download their songs or to order a CD, we recommend CD Baby:
www.cdbaby.com/artist/arborea

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Note: Musicians make very little income from their work, and we encourage you to support them with direct sales as well as spreading the word about their efforts to your contacts and friends.  Thank you… and enjoy!

For More Information on the Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference go to:

www.traditionsinwesternherbalism.org

-above profiles and intro by Jesse Wolf Hardin