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THE BOOK OF LEAVES by Morgan Caraway

10/31/2020

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REVIEW by Pegi Eyers


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The Book of Leaves: Reflections on Dying and Change by Morgan Caraway is the perfect companion for these days of autumn, the time of Old Souls, Samhain, and letting go. After the passing of his mother into the halls of the Beloved Dead, Morgan Caraway was inspired to create an oversized book of reflections, and stunning, one-of-a kind mandalas, or kaleidoscopic leaf designs. He says that early in life “he searched for absolute answers to the bigger questions,” but with aging has found a new-found peace in living with the unknown, and “accepting the ambiguities of life.”  Responding to the mysteries of death must surely be a key component of living, and Morgan’s contribution to this process is exemplary. 

In the first chapter “What is Death?” he outlines the contradictions imposed by mortality, the inadequacy of religious answers, and how we belong to a society having an inherent fear of death. What happens after we die?  We really don’t know, and yet throughout time humans have tried to conceptualize this key experience.  He concludes that although dogma (gnosis) offers support, strict beliefs also limit our freedom, and that boldly facing the unknown (agnosis) can be just like life – both empowering and terrifying  at the same time.


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"Disintegration" by Morgan Caraway

In terms of the natural world, Morgan points out that dead leaves go through a process of disintegration, and eventually become part of the nutrient cycle in the soil that gives rise to new life.  He asks the important question, "How are our bodies any different?" Change is the eternal  law of nature, and each being has an important purpose that contributes to the whole. And yet because of our human ability to over-conceptualize and see ourselves as separate from Earth Community, we have become fearful of death, and create elaborate burial practices that "seek some form of permanence."   Morgan reminds us that the life spark and "elements that make up our bodies are immortal," as energy is neither created nor destroyed.

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"Daystar" by Morgan Caraway

In his search for understanding and to allay his fears, Morgan studied near-death experiences, and discovered that some are radiant and transcendent, and some are not. Again, he concludes that acquiescing to the Great Mystery offers the most freedom. "I feel it's best to honor death by not pretending or assuming to know it."  Instead of holding fanciful ideas or overwhelming emotions in relationship to death, we can just cultivate patience, as all will be revealed in the end!

A great storyteller, Morgan offers a heart-rending narrative on the last days of his Mother's life, and the many epiphanies and realizations that arose from that grief-filled experience. Those who have lost loved ones can relate when he says, "It had been a long, grueling journey. It taught me a lot about living, loss, and even grace." The main lesson he shares is that life is a gift, and that we need to seize the day~! It is within our ability to have compassion in the face of our own inevitable death, the loss of other people, and the absolute, unfathomable unknown.  Thank you Morgan Caraway for your wisdom and fine art!
The Book of Leaves: Reflections on Dying and Change is a beautiful companion for life.


Morgan Caraway is a natural builder, multi-media artist, and co-founder of Sustainable Life School and Bottom Leaf Intentional Community. The Book of Leaves: Reflections on Dying and Change is available from the author >here< or from Lulu >here<

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Pegi Eyers is the author of  "Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community," an award-winning book that explores strategies for intercultural competency, healing our relationships with Turtle Island First Nations, decolonization, recovering an ecocentric worldview, rewilding, creating a sustainable future and reclaiming peaceful co-existence in Earth Community.
Amazon.com 
Stone Circle Press
    

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HAYTI by Kurtis Sunday

9/7/2020

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REVIEW BY PEGI EYERS


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Hayti is a powerhouse of a book that describes colonial landfall in the homelands of the Taíno, now known as Haiti and the Dominican Republic, on the island of [so-called] Hispaniola.  Ostensibly the first work of fiction from the "New World” circa 1510, apparently over the centuries the manuscript passed through different hands and translations to be published by Cambria Books in 2017.  And yet Hayti is a strange mystery. Who exactly is Kurtis Sunday the author?  There is no mention of that name as either novelist or translator.  But what is crystal clear are the two separate narratives woven together – Sor Lucrezia di Marchionni, a Hieronymite nun, and Fray Hugo de Montenegro, a Dominican monk - who describe in painstaking detail the first contact period, in all of its conquering greed, “glory” and brutality, and the original beauty of the island – a beauty so exquisite our modern minds can hardly comprehend the lush paradise that was once Ayiti ("land of high mountains") before the Spanish took control.  

“Life abounds here.  Never have I laid eyes on such fecundity.  It is what they call the rainy season now, but every now and again the rain ceases and the grey clouds part and the sun appears – never for very long, but long enough to give one an impression of its reported ferocity at these latitudes – and everything becomes suddenly bright and lustrous and glistens; and the world fleetingly appears as it perhaps appeared, newly created and glorious. And I look with a sort of childish wonder on it all; the verdant grass and palm trees in our nunnery garden, the flowers so delicate and colourful, the white mist enveloping the hills to the north of us, and the glittering surface of the sea in the bay.” (Sor Lucrezia di Marchionni)

Peculiarities in character development aside, i.e. how did a Hieronymite nun have influence in the patriarchal Catholic Church of 1510 (?) and the stereotypical portraits of Taíno individuals, the rich detail in Hayti reads like an eyewitness account. The pristine condition of the ocean, rivers, jungles, mountains and low-lying areas; the Indigenous Knowledge of the Taíno, rich in animist and earth-emergent wisdom; the centering of travel by ocean passage; the sailing fleets important at the time and the great Armadas of soldiers, colonizers and African slaves constantly arriving; the struggles of the Taíno as their social equilibrium is destroyed by enslavement and genocide; the Eurocentric lens and racist worldviews of the explorers, military and early capitalists backed by twisted religious proclamations; and the Castilian greed to dominate and destroy are all outlined in incredibly animated and evocative prose. 

In the narrative Columbus is still alive - alternatively revered as a God or despised as a despot - and running through the novel (or is it a memoir?) are elaborate scenes on the making and reading of maps; early colonial architecture; religious observations and governance; medical care;  early agricultural operations; the breeding of horses, cattle and sheep; early manufacturing, wine-making and other industries; armaments and gunpowder; and the production of religious ikons and statues for the Castilians, who were "scruptulous in performing devotions before drawing their swords and shedding blood.”  Laid bare are the Spanish patriarchs who took pleasure in cruel and violent acts toward people of colour; the banking cartels; the race to claim the riches of “the new world;” the overwhelming greed for Caribbean gold; the rapacious desire for precious metals, jewels and other plunder to take back to Spain; the conversion of natural resources into mercantile products; and the imperative to accumulate vast fortunes, build gigantic estates and live like Kings on stolen land.

Elements of the Catholic belief system such as doctrine, homilies, canonical scriptures and rituals are highly repetitive in the text, and seem incredibly disconnected (or in their view “elevated”?) from the realities of the natural world and Indigenous epistomologies. The Taíno integration with the land, TEK (traditional ecological knowledge), intimacy with plants and animals, ancient mythologies, and oral traditions were all achievements within a social organization of chiefdoms led by principal Caciques, and through the guidance of seers known as Bohiques. The occasional European who "went native" and “married into” the local tribes is mentioned as an oddity, being the first wave as colonists continued to arrive, and an entirely new 
tri-racial Creole culture was born from the union between Taíno, African and Spanish peoples. As a clash of worldviews in 1510, the religious commentary and Eurocentric superiority in the pages of Hayti  (by turns condescending and paternalistic) alternates with detailed descriptions of wondrous landforms, waterfalls,  magnificent trees, food forests, exotic plants, flowers, butterflies, insects, birds and animals - all creating a disturbing context for the disaster to follow.

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Engraving of Columbus arriving at Hispaniola (US Library of Congress).

As Fray Hugo de Montenegro (and Sor Lucrezia di Marchionni to a lesser extent) become increasingly disturbed by the senseless brutality, murder and greed on display, their protests run concurrent to the resistance efforts of the Taíno freedom fighters and their allies, escaped African slaves imported to work on the new sugar cane plantations. And yet the uprisings are doomed to fail due to superior firearms, betrayals, and the machiavellian scheming of religiosos competing for advancement within the entrenched hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Often overlapping, the triumvirate of soldier, priest and merchant represent the Spanish ideology and colonial agenda (“god, glory and gold”) that is forced on the Taíno with military might, religion and capitalist commerce. The double narrators, even though seemingly sympathetic to the Indigenous population, are still drawn into debates on the humanity of the Taíno, and by elaborate dialogues on conversion and saving souls, exhibit their own blatant racism and Euro-supremacy.  
 
“Souls, millions of souls in darkness, countless millions, yet to be brought to Him. That is the great task now.” 
Don Cristobal Colon (Christopher Columbus, "The Pharaoh of the Ocean")


From a modern perspective we can be grateful that there were dissenting voices at all among the Spanish colonizers, and how Fray Hugo de Montenegro and Sor Lucrezia di Marchionni detailed the horrific greed and brutality of the Spanish conquerers, and made clear the agenda to either destroy, enslave, or convert the “savages” and “heathens."  With demeaning and dehumanizing comments on all aspects of Taíno life, the "Indios" were not seen as human, and demonized as “devils" with the assumption that they needed to be converted to Catholicism (or would have the desire to be converted to Catholicism). Denying that all people have their own sovereignty, belief systems and agency, the Spanish exhibited a complete lack of imagination that Indigenous societies could have their own epistemologies completely outside of European or Catholic systems.  In acts of absolute power the Taíno were infantalized, sacred Indigenous Knowledge held for millennia was called the work of “demons” and “witches,” ownership over the Taíno was normalized as "senseless brutish labour,” and assimilation was forced with religious hegemony. And as a final insult, throughout Hayti the Spanish tone of superiority compared everything in their new environment with European norms and expectations, as they yearned for the “refined and civilized life" as compared to the “wild” that surrounded them. 

Of course in Hayti the authentic voices of the Taíno are missing, and the record of their resistance in the face of annhiliation is extremely one-dimensional.  As usual, the colonial white lens obscures the true story, and depressingly draws a direct line to how the colonial powers still view oppressed societies today.  In 1510 there were royal decrees from Spain to “treat the peoples encountered on the islands very well and lovingly, and to refrain from causing them any harm” but the colonizers on the ground broke those proclamations in a thousand different ways. The  deceit, plunder, robbery, murder, rape, genocide and greed by those claiming to be Catholic is beyond imagining. In addition to how Hayti implicates forever the criminality of the Spanish as we consider retributions and restitutions today, the takeaway from the book is the devastating heartbreak and trauma of a world lost forever. And for what? In the end, pristine ecosystems were traded for a couple of trinkets, and to establish a resource colony for a civilization that went on to destroy the Americas. Spanish landfall in the Caribbean was overwhelmingly brutal and dictatorial, and with the skilled exposition and immediacy of its prose, Hayti is testament to that destruction. 


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The exquisite "Hispaniolan Macaw" was driven to extinction by the colonial powers.


A review copy of "Hayti" by Kurtis Sunday was sent to Stone Circle Press from Cambia Press in Berlin, Germany.

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Pegi Eyers is the author of  "Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community," an award-winning book that explores strategies for intercultural competency, healing our relationships with Turtle Island First Nations, decolonization, recovering an ecocentric worldview, rewilding, creating a sustainable future and reclaiming peaceful co-existence in Earth Community.
Amazon.com 
Stone Circle Press
    

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The Cull of Personality: Ayahuasca, Colonialism and the Death of a Healer - KEVIN TUCKER

1/25/2020

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Review by Pegi Eyers

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Finally – a brilliant work has arrived that will reconfigure the entire ayahuasca industry with its in-depth look at dire colonial realities! Kevin Tucker places Sebastian Woodroffe and the heinous murder of Maestra Olivia Arévalo squarely within an ongoing history of erasure and commodification, and throws the contemporary spiritual seeker experience into question. The Cull of Personality: Ayahuasca, Colonialism, and the Death of a Healer is a synthesis of many powerful truths, and offers an excellent understanding on the far-reaching consequences of our modern yearnings, and what our choices in self-empowerment really mean in terms of impact on Indigenous lands and peoples. For the best thinking in Decolonial Studies today, please read this book!

The Cull of Personality: Ayahuasca, Colonialism and the Death of a Healer is available from Black and Green Press.  See Black and Green Press for Primal Anarchy podcast, Wild Resistance Journal, and updates on the work of Kevin Tucker and Natasha Tucker ~ plus ordering and bookstore information.


Black and Green Press

Your home for anti-civilization, pro-wildness, and primal anarchist publications, critique, and insights.
 
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Pegi Eyers is the author of  Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community, an award-winning book that explores strategies for neurodecolonization, social justice, ethnocultural identity, building land-emergent community & resilience in times of massive change. 
PURCHASE LINKS
Amazon.com 
www.stonecirclepress.com
 


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British Home Children

10/24/2019

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BOOK REVIEWS BY PEGI EYERS


The Street Arab: The Story of a British Home Child
Sandra Joyce
Welldone Publishing, 2011
 
Caroline: An Extraordinary Lady
Gloria Fidler
Cornerstone Publishing, 2015


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Through various migration schemes from 1830 to 1940, the influx of British Home Children was a major contribution to the historic rise of Canada, and over 10% of Canadians today are descended from this diaspora. Narratives of sacrifice and suffering as endured by these early Empire-builders have been reclaimed in our time, and we now have a modern perception of the “Child Migrant” programs as mercenary, opportunistic, traumatic and unfair.  Children in poverty were marginalized, homeless and orphaned due to the Industrial Revolution, wars and other displacements in the UK, and arrived on Canadian shores to years of servitude as domestics and laborers through an agenda akin to child slavery.  Once taboo and unrecognized, there has been an explosion of research and fictional accounts in recent years that uncovers the truth of our common heritage, and begins to reconcile this painful legacy. 
 
Storytelling is a wonderful way to honor our ancestors, as we may know key dates and the places where they were living, but not the more intimate details of their lives.  For those who share a passion for genealogy, filling in the blanks with a fictional treatment or composite can inform, entertain and pay tribute. One of the best accounts of the British Home Children era is Sandra Joyce’s The Street Arab, a story that captures the reality and atmosphere of village life in Scotland, and how an unlikely combination of events can lead to hard times.  Based on the experiences of her own father after WWI, Joyce traces the journey of young Robbie James to a “new life in a new land” in Canada, where he meets with condescension and mistreatment during a series of placements as a farm laborer. Not all British Home Children encountered hardship, but when they were released from servitude at age 18 the majority went on to have productive and even successful lives.

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Caroline: An Extraordinary Lady by Gloria Fidler also brings the emigration era alive with her novel based on the life of a real family member, a widowed mother of five who risks all to realize better opportunities for herself and her children in Canada.  Like so many who were separated from parents and siblings, the children left England separately and were reunited after many years apart.  For an entire cohort of new Settlers, keeping the bonds of family alive was the most heart-wrenching challenge to self-identity and continuity. 

With well-researched and potent fiction such as these two examples as a starting point, you can also explore the heritage of British Home Children at
http://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com .
 
The Street Arab: The Story of a British Home Child ~ See the author’s website at www.sandrajoyce.com  for ordering and bookstore information.

Caroline: An Extraordinary Lady is available from the author Gloria Fidler at
kfidler2@cogeco.ca


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Pegi Eyers is the author of  Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community, an award-winning book that explores strategies for neurodecolonization, social justice, ethnocultural identity, building land-emergent community & resilience in times of massive change.
PURCHASE LINKS
Amazon.com 
www.stonecirclepress.com
 

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Circle of Eight by Jane Meredith

8/4/2019

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BOOK REVIEW BY PEGI EYERS

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Circle of Eight: Creating Magic for Your Place on Earth
By Jane Meredith
Llewellyn Publications, 2015


For holistic place-based cultures all over the world, human spiritual practice arises from, and is informed by, wild nature and the land.  In contemporary Pagan Community this approach varies, and it can be ambiguous how important wild nature is to our diverse traditions and religion(s).  Yet for at least a decade in Australia a small and dedicated group have created a spiritual tradition from the ground up, and Circle of Eight: Creating Magic for Your Place on Earth is the result of that collaboration between land and people. While musing on the local reverence for standing stones and other sacred sites on a trip through England, Priestess of the Goddess Jane Meredith had an epiphany. It was clear to her that Europeans had a special way of belonging to the landscape, and she wondered how she might apply that same deep knowing of place to her own Australian homelands.
 
So the Circle of Eight was born, a brilliant system based on ancient Celtic principles that can be embraced anywhere in the world, by any group of people. The Circle of Eight is a magical system that incorporates the unique features of each location – the weather, seasons, flora, fauna, elements, and other special conditions.  Beginning as a structure for magic and ritual, and with participants holding the positions, the Circle of Eight engages magically, energetically, and literally with the cardinal and intermediate compass directions. True to the specific landforms that surround each community, layers of meaning and activity continue throughout the neo-pagan Wheel of the Year, with explorations, ritual workings, earth magic, animism, local magic, storytelling, nature walks, ceremony and festivals. The Circle of Eight becomes a real, living and immediate experience. 
 
Intermixed with wonderful memoirs, and passages akin to the best in the genre of “nature writing,” the delightful chapters in Circle of Eight are also eight in number – Grounding, Casting a Circle, Elements, Invocation, Ritual, Myth, Inner Work and Release.  Meredith takes us on a journey through the structure of the Circle of Eight in both the southern and northern hemispheres, how to form and facilitate a circle, how to map a geographic circle, casting the circle, how to incorporate special elements from locality into the circle, invoking the living land, correspondences in the circle, festivals during the Wheel of the Year, working with myth, exploring inner work, endings, and letting go.  The author is deeply aware of previous claims to the land in Australia and the Indigenous Knowledge of those who came before, and at many points in the book expresses her deep gratitude for diverse First Nations and their teachings.  Circle of Eight takes the most honorable and correct approach, which is for European Australians to form their own deep bonds to the land, to “allow its presence to well up within us and begin to inform us more and more,” without appropriating any elements of traditional culture.

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Of course there are unique challenges to acquiring land-based knowledge in Australia, such as volcanos, brush fires, tornados, mudslides and other extreme weather events.  Meredith points out that Air, Water, Earth and Fire in Australia are nothing like the benign forces as portrayed in popular Pagan books!  Each part of the landscape and each element has a unique quality and personality, and we feel them “like energetic anchors in the landscape, present to inform, support and guide us as we work.”  As our practice widens and deepens, we discover features in the land that correspond to our own heritage and mythic traditions, and the Circle of Eight system can revive our own ancestral memories based on the sacredness of the land.   Especially thrilling is realizing how the ancient European practices of marking the land with great stone circles and the ley line tradition can live on today, by incorporating the “lore of the land” into our ceremonies, rituals, magical practices and everyday lives.  Wherever we are located, forming intimate relationships with the land feels familiar, and Pagans, Wiccans, Animists, Green Seers, Druids, Polytheists, Goddess Devotees and Reconstructionists alike will resonate with the superb teachings, guidelines, advice and wisdom found in the Circle of Eight: Creating Magic for Your Place on Earth. 
 
“Both European fairy tales and local, indigenous stories seem equally alive and potent, and equally imminent in the magic of this place by night.  The mountain breathes and its dreaming unfolds.  Frogs, lizards, and small marsupials own this place of red earth, old volcano, and tall trees.  Owls and maybe bats are here too.  And we are here.  Taking a few hesitant steps onto the edges of this realm in this place that formed all the earth far around it, erupting as fire many years ago but now resting, given over to the enormity of life unfolding and the deepening of magic.”  (Jane Meredith)

www.janemeredith.com


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The Circle of Eight ~ Offerings to the Land
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Jane Meredith

This review originally appeared in SageWoman magazine.

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Pegi Eyers
is the author of  Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community, an award-winning book that explores strategies for neurodecolonization, social justice, ethnocultural identity, building land-emergent community & resilience in times of massive change.

PURCHASE LINKS
Amazon.com 
www.stonecirclepress.com
 

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"A Child of the System" Volume 1 & 2 ~ Lynn D. McLaughlin

10/3/2018

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A Child of the System: Little Lynn's Story
A Child of the System: Life as Adult Lynn

REVIEW BY PEGI EYERS

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For many of us, putting our life story out in the public domain for all the world to see, is a good way to empower our healing journey.  Against all odds, this is exactly what Lynn D. McLaughlin has done, with her dedication to charting the stages of her life and drawing the reader in, as a witness to her story.  "A Child of the System" Part One, Little Lynn's Story and Part Two, Life as Adult Lynn describe in great detail her chronology of events, and Lynn is braver than most as she delves into the displacement, sexual assault, abuse, addiction and other trauma she has experienced.

Lynn's keen memories begin when she was a toddler, and even as the abandonments and assaults begin to stack up, her sense of injustice never wavers. What emerges from these tragic narratives is the sense of a spunky little girl who demands to be seen and heard, and who tries to keep her balance in the midst of trauma and betrayal. Among parents and other family members struggling with poverty, alcoholism and issues of their own, Little Lynn suffers neglect, illness, violence, rape from her step-father and uncles; and witnesses the death of an infant sibling from meningitis. She experiences racism and a lack of freedom, and when her parents are unable to care for the family, at age 6 Little Lynn becomes a Children's Aid Society "case" - entering the precarity of foster care until reaching adulthood at age 18. With the "mismanagement of the authorities" in charge of her life, she is shunted between various foster homes and the homes of relatives, alternating between school, home life, the occasional time of "normalcy" and outright horror.

Lynn traverses the disappointments and loneliness of her various adoptions, and is subject to archaic punishments, cruelty, confinement and medical errors. She does not feel safe either with family or in various foster homes, and is terrified to speak out about the predators and pedophiles that surround her. In recent times we have seen growing awareness on toxic masculinity,  rape culture and domestic assault, and positive developments in transformative justice and community accountability with the #MeToo, #BelieveSurvivors, #WeBelieveYou, #BreaktheSilence, #NoConsent movements, and other strategies to end sexual violence.  But when Lynn was a child growing into a young adult, complicity and "keeping silent" about  sexual abuse was the norm, with taboos in place against reporting to family members, the police, other authorities, or (heaven forbid) seeking support. Falsely labelled a "problem child" for understandable patterns of rebellion, numbing out, running away, alcohol abuse or encounters with the police, Lynn develops the PTSD that affects her life for many years. What is PTSD?  It is being pushed beyond one’s physical, emotional, mental and spiritual limits not once, not twice, but repeatedly: over and over and over.


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Despite injustice, risky encounters, extreme poverty, incarceration in a "girl's school," early pregnancies, alcohol and drug use, Lynn freely examines her own mistakes and role in the abuse she has suffered - all aspects of the person she is today. Overall, Lynn SPEAKS TRUTH TO POWER, and ultimately, what Little Lynn's Story outlines is the absolute failure of the Children's Aid Society in Canada to respect the children in their care, to offer them safe space, or to provide them with protection from predators and other forms of domestic violence.  Instead of being agents of human rights, the CAS are complicit with the neglect, abuse and confinement of children, and deny any evidence of sexual assault (or don't care). Lynn experienced gaslighting (blaming the victim) from the CAS, which is the opposite of compassionate service ~!  Both as a testimonial and a call-to-action, Little Lynn's Story and Life as Adult Lynn compel us to interrogate the services and function of the CAS today, and the shameful legacy of such "social services" in Canada.

Lynn's healing journey begins in earnest when she connects with her beloved Indigenous Elders Vera Martin, Linda Post and others, and finally receives the encouragement, support and ceremony she needs, embedded all along in Anishnaabe and Odawa traditions. In the Kawarthas area, she discovers the Indigenous counselling centre Niijkiwendidaa Anishnaabekwag Services Circle (NASC),  Nogojiwanong Friendship Centre, social workers and strong Anishnaabe Kwe (Indigenous women and sisters) as incredible sources of love and support.  The transformational importance of restoring Indigenous Roots and cultural recovery for healing trauma cannot be understated, and Lynn also finds a beautiful source of unconditional love and support when she is blessed with the presence of a wonderful man in her life.  No one is immune to the difficulties of life, and yet those of us with white and/or class privilege cannot possibly imagine the extra burdens of oppression and poverty forced on Indigenous people. And at the same time that we celebrate Lynn's healing journey, we must make reparations, take responsibility for the harm caused by colonial agencies such as the CAS, and make sure that these tragedies do NOT happen again.

Ultimately, what we take away from Lynn's introspection and willingness to share, is that many of our perceived shortcomings are not ours at all. We are NOT inherently flawed ("nurture"), as conditions of the wider society ("nature") dictate the trajectory of our lives.   Daily impacts include systemic conditions of racism, discrimination, oppression, poverty, marginalization, dis-empowerment, disenfranchisement, and lateral violence - in addition to the stereotypes placed on members of the human family by a "higher power." And that "higher power" has a name - it is the white supremacy of European Settler-Colonialism in Canada, that has had terrible and toxic affects on Indigenous people. 

For all those impacted by the intersectional oppressions, connecting the experiences of life with a critique and analysis of colonialism is incredibly empowering.  "I have had the honor of witnessing our people link the circumstances of their lives - how they experience the personal trauma of colonialism through the child welfare system, the state education system, gender violence, addictions, poverty, the prison system, or mental health issues - to the larger structures and process of settler colonialism. These are powerful moments to witness, and in my own person these moments have been the most generative."  Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, "As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance," University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

I honor Lynn D. McLaughlin's impulse to get it down on paper, to chart her life story - the suffering and the healing as an act of courage - and to say, I AM HERE! I survived, every act of violence, betrayal, abandonment and trauma made me who I am - I am proud of my survival, and of thriving to be a better person. Every event in Lynn's life is a mark on a psyche of the utmost resilience, proud to have persevered.  Thank you and Chi Meegwetch for sharing your truth, Lynn, and for shining your light into the dark corners.


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Lynn D. McLaughlin at her home in the Kawarthas

Lawsuits and Class Actions Against the Children's Aid Society
>Click Here<


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Pegi Eyers is the author of  "Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community," an award-winning book that explores strategies for intercultural competency, healing our relationships with Turtle Island First Nations, decolonization, recovering an ecocentric worldview, rewilding, creating a sustainable future and reclaiming peaceful co-existence in Earth Community.
Amazon.com 
Stone Circle Press
 


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Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being by Philip Shepherd

7/25/2018

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BOOK REVIEW BY PEGI EYERS
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Radical Wholeness is a timely guide to stepping outside the official "story" of western civilization, and a rich resource for reconnecting to the original "wholeness" of our bodily knowing. Philip Shepherd has done a wonderful job of naming the many aspects of western ideology that separate us from our senses, intuition, wild nature, and the Cosmos. Since the time of the Greek philosophers, an emphasis on the “mind” and all that is linear, left brain and cerebral has been reflected in the macrocosm of our civilization, with its unsustainable disregard for natural law and the Dreaming Earth. 

The top-down authority of "analytical over embodied," "brain over body," and "intellect over instinct" is the bias at the root of our humancentric society, and has led to the cascading economic and environmental crises we face today. For millennia our social conditioning has worked overtime, keeping rigid boundaries in place between intellectual knowledge and the co-creation of our body's own intelligence. Human beings possess both head and heart knowledge equally and for good reason, and we need a balance, or weaving between the two, to flourish and thrive.  And yet, here we are, immersed in a world based on compartmentalization and the machine model - false beliefs that disrupt a healthy sense of self-identity and the functioning of community. Radical Wholeness is a monumental survey on how this “dysfunction of division” came to be, and the beliefs and practices we can recover in today’s world to reclaim our bodies, our sensory knowing, and our “ordinary grace of being.”
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The truth is, we continue to be enveloped in the "wholeness" of creation, and even after centuries of thinking and acting apart from nature, this remains our intrinsic reality. Our civilization is based on a mistake, which over time has disabled our senses. We have been immersed in "wholeblindness" as we fixate on the past, agonize over the future, and dwell on the ownership of material things. The western world has denied the fact that humans ARE part of the living, breathing, ever-changing world - not “above”  or “apart” from it - and this bypass has led to countless acts of denial, separation and destruction. 

Radical Wholeness is focused on what authentic "wholeness" can look like, how we have been desensitized to it, and what we can do to reclaim this sensitivity in ourselves and others. Drawing on the timelessness of tribal worldviews, mystery religions and other animist traditions, Shepherd delves into the pronounced difference between Indigenous Knowledge (IK) and Western Mind. Remembering our "bodyworld," resting with our stillpoint, recovering our "holosapience" or ecocentric abilities, and partnering with the sentient world attunes us to the whole, which is the ancient way of knowing common to all Ancestral Traditions.  Also, accessing  the holistic nature of intelligence found throughout Earth Community and the Cosmos, links us to deeper levels of intraconnection that allow for synchronicity and "magical" events to occur.

Shepherd charts how the binary themes in western thinking have expanded and become normalized over the centuries, and acknowledges the patriarchal theory of "head = masculinity" and "body = femininity." He describes this dynamic as a "heinous, ludicrous cultural imbalance."  As an extension to this, and what could have been included in Radical Wholeness I think, is that from the beginning western thinking has been a male-dominated process, translating not only into oppressive gender bias toward women and the LGBQT2 community, but more deadly notions of  dominance and hierarchy.  During the Enlightenment-Humanist epoch and the spread of Euro-Empire worldwide, western science entrenched the  ascendancy of empirical knowledge and white male heteronormativity by developing "race theory" as justification for the slavery and genocide of millions of BIPOC. Including this important fact in the conversation makes the link clearer over time to our responsibility as social justice activists today, and the importance of dismantling the patriarchy and the intersectional oppressions. 

"The white male European Colonizer considered himself lucid, rational and forward-thinking, in stark contrast to Indigenous peoples, the African Diaspora and Turtle Island First Nations (the Colonized), who were considered 'less than,' in a 'primitive state'  (i.e. having heart or body knowledge) and 'impulsive, superstitious, childlike and savage.' These toxic stereotypes and false perspectives have been in place for centuries, and still are, in racist and unprogressive circles.  It cannot be stressed enough that the entire panoply of emphases on the cerebral and 'living in the head' arise primarily from the white, male European elite, and these fantasies have been the deadly driving force behind racism and white supremacy.  And as BIPOC have been attacked and oppressed, so has the natural world!  In every sphere today (including academics), the social justice conversation needs to happen, as white folks everywhere wake up to the unearned privilege we hold, interrogate Empire, decolonize, and question the very structures of our civilization."  
(Ancient Spirit Rising)

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As we re-learn how to become fully present, embodied human beings who feel and live in grounded inter-relatedness, Radical Wholeness contains guidelines of ultimate value, such as the collection "Wholeness in Sixteen Parts" and the comparison chart "Brain in the Belly/Brain in the Head" to keep us inspired. As Shepherd reminds us, "to feel the present as a whole is to feel your being as a whole living within the Wholeness." He suggests moving through the four stages of our embodied remembrance, which means coming home to ourselves, coming home to the present, returning to the core, bottom-up breathing from the pelvic zone,  and finally, integrating the energies. As we widen our sensory awareness and partner with the mindful world, we acknowledge what nature loves, and begin to actualize the principles of wholeness in our society, by changing the structure of business, consumerism, politics and education. 

Our central conundrum and challenge today (!) is how to reject the brutal linear patriarchal logic of the western world, as we continue to find new ways to decentralize our thinking and decolonize from Empire.  Instead of blindly accepting the fragmented life we have known, that places the abstract and embodied in opposition, the time has come to embrace the genius of the body, natural magic and Ancient Mind, and integrate these aspects into a harmonious whole. Highly recommended for ongoing study and practice, Radical Wholeness is a truly revolutionary book ~!!

There is no need to achieve wholeness; it's all that exists.  You are held by wholeness in every moment of your life.
Philip Shepherd
 

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Access Philip Shepherd's website Philip Shepherd: Bringing Clarity to a Chaotic World for exciting news, dialogue, videos, endorsements and blogs! 

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Pegi Eyers is the author of  Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community, an award-winning book that explores strategies for neurodecolonization, social justice, ethnocultural identity, building land-emergent community & resilience in times of massive change.
PURCHASE LINKS
Amazon.com 
www.stonecirclepress.com


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Ecological Awakening

4/5/2018

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BOOK REVIEW BY PEGI EYERS
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We cannot dispute humanity’s incredible achievements and expertise, but the current wave of social and environmental disasters are the result of errors in our thinking.  As we face an uncertain future, clearly it is time to transition forward (or back) to knowing ourselves as embedded in Earth Community once again, and Morgan Caraway’s new book Ecological Awakening is an excellent companion for the journey.  He identifies the root cause of our separationist thinking as part of the ancient shift to agrarian from hunter-gatherer societies, and how the arrival of patriarchal imperialism divided us from the natural world.  He points out that the conceptual thought behind religion and other systems has alienated us even more, and as capitalism continues to commodify nature, our toxic worldview of disconnection is at an all-time high.  With keen insight and wry humor, Caraway points out the idiocy of destroying the very elements in nature that give rise to life itself  – the air, forests, lands and waters.
 
It is fascinating how Caraway recognizes the narrow scope of popular self-help movements, and how modern spirituality has left out the earth connection! He says that “finding personal happiness is important, but keeping the Earth livable is at least equally crucial,” and goes on to say “that a spirituality or philosophy that doesn’t include nature isn’t complete.”  With a concise and enjoyable style, Ecological Awakening makes clear links between current statistics on climate change (2017), primal survival conditioning, the integrated outlook of indigenous societies, “wild mind,” non-duality, sustainable off-grid building practices, renewable energy, reducing our carbon footprint, neurodecolonization (changing how we think), thoughts on countering despair, and the universal need for belonging and community. 

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Author Morgan Caraway
In a set of wonderful chapters Ecological Awakening reminds us of what really matters, or more succinctly, what is essential to all life, and explores our human relationship with the elements of air, water and earth – and our material culture as sourced from the land such as food, clothing and shelter. 
Ecological Awakening charts a pathway to shifting from the Me to We by “highlighting the intrinsic, unbreakable connection between all things, ourselves included,” and how true understanding of this dynamic can bring about an almost mystical awakening.   Knowing ourselves as ecological beings once more “has the potential of simultaneously solving both our social and ecological problems.”   Caraway offers valid solutions to the cascading crises by engaging with social change, inner transformation and readiness for collapse. Resisting business as usual and the insanity of putting economy ahead of ecology, he urges us that the time to act is now, and that it is imperative for humanity to come together across ideological, racial, national and political lines.  Ecological Awakening is a clarion call that leads directly to personal action! 

The fact that Caraway continues to have faith in humanity is ultimately inspiring, and Ecological Awakening is an amazing accomplishment from a true eco-warrior who not only models how to live sustainably on the land, but care deeply about the Earth.  He invites us to continue the conversation, as “ecoawakening is a grassroots movement - it’s really about each of us.  Our modern economy and worldview hangs on this false conceptual model of reality. Realizing that this view is absurd and that we are connected to each other (and the Earth) has the potential to revolutionize our lives, our way of relating to each other, and everything else in between.”


Ecological  Awakening is available on Amazon Kindle >here<  and print edition >here< 
Website for Morgan Caraway ~ Sustainable Life School  >here<


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Pegi Eyers is the author of  Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community, an award-winning book that explores strategies for neurodecolonization, social justice, ethnocultural identity, building land-emergent community & resilience in times of massive change.
PURCHASE LINKS
Amazon.com 
www.stonecirclepress.com



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Witches and Pagans by Max Dashu

12/13/2017

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BOOK REVIEW BY PEGI EYERS
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Believe it or not, there was a time in recent memory when powerful women were not
part of the cultural landscape.  For those of us coming of
age in the 60’s  and 70’s, discovering historical figures and role models for the first time was like bestowing a
set of phantom wings to our bodies, as we floated free
and rose from the abyss
after centuries of collective 
feminine soul loss.
 

I remember walking through Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1982 and thinking, why did I not know about my own motherline, or the other incredible accomplish-ments of women throughout time?  And I was not the only one! After an initial period of grieving, and facing down the terror of charting new terrain, modern women got to work. Artists, feminists and scholars in  Matriarchal Studies, Women's History and Goddess Spirituality began to produce a monumental body of work, and our worldview changed forever.

One of these towering and influential figures is Max Dashu, who has spent over 48 years excavating the western canon for evidence of women of power in Old Europe, early medieval history and indigenous societies. She founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970, and her ongoing research engages Herstory worldwide, placing women at the forefront where we belong.  Women who were repressed, banned, hidden and obscured - the priestesses,  clan mothers, healers, shamans, water-witches, oracles, myth-makers, philosophers, warriors and rebels from our ancestral motherlines - have come to life through Max’s relentless dedication to "restoring women to cultural memory." As author, activist and artist, she  continues to offer a rich collection of  visual presentations, exhibits, courses, workshops, webcasts, and keynote talks that highlight women's resistance to patriarchal oppression, challenge stereotypes of race and class, and interrogate the structures of Empire.


Over the years, Max has slowly worked toward publishing this monumental body of work, and Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion 700-1100 is the first installment in the highly-anticipated series entitled Secret History of the Witches from Veleda Press. As an independent scholar, Max explores history, myth, archaeology, art, linguistics, pagan traditions and diverse spiritual philosophies, and makes this knowledge accessible by bridging the gap between academia and grassroots education.
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Max Dashu
From my own perspective as a writer and educator on ancestral empowerment, the most beautiful aspect of Witches and Pagans is how it gives modern women permission to recover, restore, and rejuvenate pre-colonial traditions in our lives today. We are witnessing the failure of the patriarchy in the late-stage capitalism, massive change and climate disaster that surrounds us, and alternatives for creating a new sustainable society can be sourced from our own  roots - in women’s work, women’s power, women's knowledge, and women's ceremony. The renaissance is underway, and Max's work affirms the innate capacity of the feminine to embody the ideals of reciprocity and care, and to mentor others in justice and earth remediation.

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"The Cailleach Bhéara" art by Max Dashu
From roots in paleolithic times, Max illuminates the unique abilities and skills of women connected to the wild, and the magic of the cosmos. From a wellspring of deep mysteries, the healers, witches and seers of Old Europe held a vast repertoire of magic, and earth-based healing practices in service to their own communities.
With powerful connections to the Goddesses, elements and spirits of place, the wisewomen in our female heritage worked with chants, poetry, songs, charms, divination, rituals, herbcraft, plant medicine and other tools. The Suppressed Histories Archives has a special focus on female iconography from all over the world, and the origins, or etymologies, of key words such as "wicce," "pagan" and wyrd." Much to my delight, Witches and Pagans has become  the definitive sourcebook for creation myths on the megalithic "Old Shes" and powerful Celtic women in my own Scots Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon traditions!

Within a vast complex of traditions, for millennia the ancestral "Old Goddess" in northern Europe was considered a primordial being, a Creatrix more ancient than the Earth. Having super-human strength, vitality and endurance, these mythic "Old Women" or colossal giantesses could harness the elemental powers of stone, wind, water and fire. In Ireland and Scotland, the many versions of the archaic Cailleach myth speak of matrilineal origin stories, Elders who "carry all the knowledge," Crones who help travelers in distress, protectors of wildlife, and guardians with extraordinary powers. The Irish Cailleach Bhéara and Scottish Cailleach shaped the landforms and waters of the region, and built megalithic tombs, passage graves, womb-like crucibles, earth formations, sacred sites, monuments, standing stones, cairns and mounds. Alternatively, the "cailleachan" were nomadic herdswomen, spinners and weavers, supernatural women connected to animist sanctuaries, or associated with the Scottish deer goddess (Glaisteag).


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"Pictish stone with Snake, Mirror and Comb" ~ Art by Max Dashu
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Pictish Serpent Stone ~ Aberlemno, Scotland
Reading through the amazing compilation of Celtic Goddesses, primordial myth-makers and wisewomen in Witches and Pagans, my own soul memories were awakened, and I could feel the potential of my motherline once again.  Many of the tales felt familiar somehow - some as close as my own skin - and astounding revelations rose up from the female sphere of power. I knew these women, and I knew those places, and I have experienced that deep time!  The spirit guardians of sacred springs, shines, holy wells and groves of trees; shapeshifters and animal ally-companions; storytellers, peace-keepers, rune-readers, midwives, and shamanic women that travelled in the spiritual worlds -  all these are marvels that sing to the soul.
In an epic collection of narratives from the ancient beginnings of European indigeneity to practices kept alive through the centuries, Witches and Pagans provides the threads for reclaiming our mystic talents and abilities as the witches, wisewomen and Elders of today. 
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"The Weird Sisters" art by Max Dashu
Stories of the Earth Mothers, Goddesses such as Arianrhod, the Wyrd, Morrigan and other raven shapeshifters, the Faerie Faith, sorceresses, soothsayers, enchanters, diviners, dream-readers, witch-herbalists, encounters with healers in nature sanctuaries and Mother's Night Traditions are all incredibly inspiring. "All that is old is new again" and we can continue to commune with the ancestral dead and the spirit world; visit sacred trees or holy wells; practice divination and healing rituals by invoking the pagan deities and powers; create weaving and spinning magic with spells, omens, amulets and prophecy; and enliven our practice with wands, staffs and oracle bones.

And yet uncovering these treasures has not been easy. History and myth is incomplete, with many gaps and missing pieces. For centuries, women's wisdom and mysteries were systematically demonized by the leaders of the Christian hierarchy in Europe.  Most of the written records that survive had one sole purpose - to  obstruct folk religion, and reinterpret European paganism according to a patriarchal worldview. Scholars who worked with this material historically (and in our time) have also been patriarchal, which has continued to marginalize women, earth-based spirituality and the sacred.


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(C) WITCHES AND PAGANS: WOMEN IN EUROPEAN FOLK RELIGION
In the face of this erasure we are indebted to Max Dashu's particular talent, which peels back the layers of rhetoric and propaganda, and uncovers the empowered female realities hidden deep within.  It takes an astute scholar to decolonize the western canon, someone who knows exactly how the patriarchy operates, and yet can delve beneath the damaging layers of religious pressure and patriarchal oppression to find authentic narrative and meaning. As evidenced in Witches and Pagans and the upcoming volumes in the Secret History of the Witches series, separating out the  hidden strands of folkways, matricultures and animist customs from the "diabolist ideology" of white capitalist-abled cisheteronormative patriarchy is at the heart of Max's work. 
 
Her ethnohistorical approach to integrating myth, folk religion, philosophy and the archaeological record provides a truly unique portal into our spiritual past.  Throughout the long grim years of Christian domination, Empire-building and witch hunts, the wide-ranging narratives in Witches and Pagans recover and reinstate the ancient memories, symbols, mythic folkways and essential lore that continued on in Europe, and that can still nourish us today. For all those practicing cultural recovery work and nature-centered spiritualities, this brilliant series will heal our separation from each other, our European ancestry, and Earth Community.  In my own work, my heart soars knowing that the divine otherworld female has been retained and expressed in our Celtic consciousness and tradition. 

Thank you Max Dashu, for this incredible gift to the world!

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Highly recommended, with extensive notes and exhaustive references, Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion 700-1100 is available from Veleda Press.


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Pegi Eyers is the author of  "Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community," an award-winning book that explores strategies for intercultural competency, healing our relationships with Turtle Island First Nations, decolonization, recovering an ecocentric worldview, rewilding, creating a sustainable future and reclaiming peaceful co-existence in Earth Community.
Amazon.com 
Stone Circle Press
 

3 Comments

Farming the Woods: An Integrated Permaculture Approach to Growing Food and Medicinals in Temperate Forests by Ken Mudge and Steve Gabriel

2/20/2017

0 Comments

 
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REVIEW BY PEGI EYERS
Localization means developing strong cooperative relationships with the farmers in our area, as well as developing new practices of sustainable permaculture, agroforestry and forest gardening. Farming and forestry are seen as mutually exclusive in the modern world, but Farming the Woods demonstrates how forest farms can be extremely productive beyond our delineated garden spaces and plowed fields.  

The local bioregion offers an abundance of native fruits, berries, nuts, seeds, vegetables, mushrooms, leaves, flowers, shoots, roots, herbs, barks, sap and wild rice, plus other wild foods and medicinal plants that contribute to our healing and well-being. Learning First Nations knowledge as related to nature’s gifts, and foraging the local foodshed or cultivating and caring for a diversity of plant communities can enhance both human and ecosystem health.  In co-creation with forest ecology and sustainably-managed woodlots, forest agriculture can also be a form of much-needed rewilding.

Restoring the heirloom or foundational varieties and well-adapted native plants that are part of a region’s biodiversity (plus integrating new crops) will stabilize the soil, provide food and shelter for native wild animals, and offer incredible beauty.  Farming the Woods is an essential guide for farmers and gardeners who have access to woodland spaces and are interested in “filling the forests with food” by cultivating specialty crops, and harvesting and marketing these wonderful, healthy (and delicious!) wild foods.


Available from >Amazon<

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Pegi Eyers is the author of  "Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community," an award-winning book that explores strategies for intercultural competency, healing our relationships with Turtle Island First Nations, decolonization, recovering an ecocentric worldview, rewilding, creating a sustainable future and reclaiming peaceful co-existence in Earth Community.
Amazon.com 
Stone Circle Press
 

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    Book Reviews
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