My time spent in the woods and wilderness has been my greatest teacher, mentor, spiritual guide and therapist. It's what heals me and where I feel contact with a reality beyond the dullness of superficial reality. I am fortunate enough to live in a relatively wild place that is a habitat of extreme temperatures, rainforest amounts of rain and snow fall, and an array of untamed wonderments that exist within an immense vastness of trees, hills, mountains, rivers, streams and lakes. It is here that I have not only grown to learn the beauty of putting roots deep into the soils of family, friends, community and love of place, but also where I have evolved the focus of my soul's practice as a wandering pilgrim, a colonial exile, and devotee to the divine mystery. 

I have spent more than two decades now studying plants and their medicines. These years have been a great journey that has had many utterly beautiful gifts as well as many intense and growth generating challenges. Every person’s experience and contact with the green nations is unique and for me it is always a sacred activity. By sacred I mean that I have found the beauty, character, qualities, and healing virtues of plants, as well as the whole of nature, to be a dimension of divine creation that, if we are reverent and conscious of, we can become connected with. It has been my experience that with patience, practice, devotion and a heart-centered focus we can begin to perceive and become aware of our innate capacity to understand a meaning and significance of what would normally be invisible or disregarded.

First of all, I had no idea that I was walking on a bog in the beginning. We had just arrived in Ireland and I was anxious to get out on the land.

It just looked like a field any normal field in central New York State where I live. We had asked a local server at the pub why the “holy well” shown on the map seemed to be on private property and how did others access it.

His answer, “Fences are for keeping the sheep in, not people out.” So we climbed through and through and through.

Many of us think of the Japanese tradition when we hear “Tea Ceremony” and they definitely have one of the worlds most beautiful and sacred ways of making tea a healing practice. Tea ceremonies have been done in different ways in many other cultures also. The English are famous for their afternoon teatime and a tea culture exists in many other countries where tea making is sometimes ritualized and sometimes just a part of daily life as is our American coffee culture. Many ‘hip’ communities in the United States now have “tea rooms” where people can gather and drink tea together while relaxing and visiting. There is even an “American Tea Ceremony” now that has been adapted from the Japanese version.