Since childhood I’ve been a gardener, a maker of things, an animal lover... and a sensitive person who just feels kinda sick all the time.
Feeling unwell started in middle school with stomach pain that became chronic into my late 20s. I had joint pain in my knees and back. I fell down a lot, sprained ankles, ran into things. In high school I started getting sick a lot. Then I got headaches. Then bladder pain. Then more joint pain in my shoulder and hips. My menstrual cycle was irregular. I felt isolated and very sad. I couldn't sleep. My mind and heart would race all night long. By the time I was finishing college, I was an exhausted mess. Over the years I went to the doctors many times to try to get some help. They did not inquire about stress, emotional landscape, nutritional status. I felt like hell, but they told me I was fine. It took me a long time to begin to relate my physical pain with my mental health, to begin to understand the bidirectional and web-like relationships between physical, social, emotional, spiritual wellbeing. |
Once I started to connect the dots between the individual, collective wellbeing, and our interdependence on the more than human world, I decided to learn to farm and then to study herbalism. Art/craft, farming, herbalism are healing disciplines that I use to seek right relationship with other living beings and the land upon which we live/rely, to try to be of some good in a world that can be violent and crushingly isolating. Connecting with plants, animals, the land helps me feel like I am of this place and belong here. Plants offer us so much -- beauty, sensory delight, nourishment, medicine. Once you start to learn about them, it's impossible to not feel a spark of joy and support everywhere you go. There are plant friends all around us.
Over the years I’ve started to feel much better but there have been a lot of ups and downs. I was diagnosed as being autistic at 35 years old while completing clinical training at the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. Finding the Autistic community has been life changing. I've learned tons from other autistic people and now have language to explore, interpret, explain what I experience as I move through the world. This makes it possible to understand and validate my needs, communicate better with loved ones, advocate for myself. It has been deeply healing to recontextualize my life story through the lens of Autistic experience. I find the Neurodivergent community to be so sweet, so funny, so Queer, so passionate -- my people, duh.
Over the years I’ve started to feel much better but there have been a lot of ups and downs. I was diagnosed as being autistic at 35 years old while completing clinical training at the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. Finding the Autistic community has been life changing. I've learned tons from other autistic people and now have language to explore, interpret, explain what I experience as I move through the world. This makes it possible to understand and validate my needs, communicate better with loved ones, advocate for myself. It has been deeply healing to recontextualize my life story through the lens of Autistic experience. I find the Neurodivergent community to be so sweet, so funny, so Queer, so passionate -- my people, duh.
I started my formal herbal training with Jane Richmond in 2010 at the Self Heal School of Herbal Studies and Healing in San Diego. Next I attended the Herbaculture Internship at HerbPharm and studied field botany and Southwestern materia medica with Shana Lipner-Grover at Sage Country Herbs. I completed 3-year Clinical Program at Vermont Center for Integrated Herbalism (VCIH) in 2019, studying primarily with Larken Bunce, Betzy Bancroft, Kristin Henningsen, and Ember Peters.
During my time in San Diego, I was the field manager at Suzie's Farm, a diversified organic vegetable farm, for seven years. Landing in Vermont in 2016, I worked in the fields and am now the apothecary production manager at the medicinal herb farm Free Verse Farm & Apothecary in Chelsea, Vermont. I took a break from farming and co-managed the South Royalton Community Garden for three seasons. We started a collective gardening program and shared 1000+ pounds of fresh produce with our local food shelf. |
Circle House Herbcraft came to be while I was living in a one room earthen house with a moss covered roof and garden of trillium, hepatica, blood root, blue cohosh, ramps, geranium, lungwort, motherwort, St Johns wort, goldenrod, new england aster, blue flag, monarda, puffs of various sedges and ferns, dreaming under a canopy of maple, linden, and ash, edged with hawthorns and apples. It was a dream come true. I now live in Tunbridge, Vermont with my partner Caroline on our little farm, Fools Farm. Also a dream come true.
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