The day to day keeping of the household is a central part of Earthly spirituality in many cultural and religious traditions.

Home can mean and look like many things; big, small, old, new, a home can be a tent or small cabin, a city apartment or a camper. Sometimes we may have a home we love and sometimes it may be just one that will do for now.

Either way, we will have to tend to it to some degree or another and in our culture that rewards busyness and long hours of work, the importance of creative hearth/home keeping is often perceived as a menial, boring set of annoying chores.

Sacred householding isn’t about keeping a perfectly clean house or to some external standard; just the opposite. It’s about finding the sacred in the process, discovering what we need to feel calm and at ease in our home while creating beauty in our living space.

In Italian folk medicine and Benedicaria, the keeping of the home is a central element of community and family life because the home is the foundation of all outside activities.

Our home is our sanctuary and refuge. Home is sometimes also the center of social life. It’s where we host meals, receive guests, where we rest when we’re sick, where we take each other, where we argue and work through conflicts,and for community healers it’s where they treat folks that come for help.

In my family, when I was growing up, the home also hosted small spaces of prayer and worship. Every room had a corner, wall, or stand with saint statues, small altars, ancestor photos, prayer cards, and so on.

In animistic traditions the home itself is a being, an entity that is dynamic and alive. When we tend our home in a mindful and creative way it enables us to be in conversation with the spirit of our house and the ground it’s on.

In this book we’ll talk about the Roman animistic traditions of householding as well as the practical aspects of householding from an Italian and Italian American folk medicine perspective.

Italian folk medicine is a collection of diverse vernacular practices belonging to the peasants of Southern Italy and the Italian diaspora. The Italian diaspora in North America and around the world has formulated their own styles of the magic and medicine of their homeland. These traditions vary from place to place but mainly include a few basics tenets from the following:

Ancestral healing techniques:

• witchcraft
• herbal medicine
• pre-pagan/indigenous animism • folk Catholicism

Plants have always been included in all of these areas as food, spiritual allies, medicine, and ritual elements. Human beings co-evolved with plants and, in fact, could not survive without them. Plants are, in a sense, our ancestors as they lived upon the Earth for at least 500 million years.

Plants have had a lot of time here to learn, adapt, and grow with the dynamic and changing conditions of life on Earth.

This ebook describes just a handful of the plants that are a part of Italian culture, both in the diaspora and Southern Italy, and a little bit about their use. The best thing about plant medicine is that it’s so accessible and simple, yet potent. All cultures on Earth used plants as their medicine and all cultures were plant based.

Our culture seems removed from these practices, but when we think about it, plants are still a major part of our society. The entire world is fed by plants or by those that are fed by plants. We just don’t pay much attention to them. Some of the plants listed here are very common and you probably already have some of them in your spice cupboard.

This booklet includes a brief description of seven common herbs used in Italian Folk Medicine along with both their English and Italian names.

The last section is list of simple ways to bring them into your life!

Benedizioni,
Lisa

Fumigazione

The Italian word for fumigation also sometimes called Pulizia del Fumo (purification with smoke), or the burning of plants for purification, protection, and to consecrate rituals and sacred space.It’s a practice that can be found in many forms all over the world and comes from ancient times in the Mediterranean.

This is a 13 page e-book with herbal and traditional uses of 5 plants from Italian folk medicine that have been used for fumigation.

Cooking with herbs and spices is one of the simplest and most inexpensive methods of using herbal medicine. It is also a traditional practice that can be found cross-cul-turally all over the world. All people used their local plants as ingredients in recipes. And, even when trade with other cultures became more accesible, the herbs and spices traded were still likely grown in the same general region.

This ebook is 15 pages and covers a variety of common cooking herbs and spices, their medicinal value, and traditional uses in cooking and as herbal preparations.

This 16 page ebook is a guide to connecting in mutual relationship with plants. Plants and humans have been bound in elemental relationship as long as humans have existed. Humans, in fact, cannot survive without plants and we share the same atomic architecture. Our relationship is interdependent and can be creative when we become mindful of how we can deepen our connection and communication with each other.

Making tea is one of the most ancient means of preparing herbal medicines as well as  the simplest. Teas are made with either dried or fresh plants and water which makes them inexpensive and accessible. Making tea was likely the first method of herbal medicine making and was practiced in cultures worldwide. 

23 pages on making herbal teas and how to make your own blends !

Download this 25 page ebook to create your own Bioregional Profile. This downloads as a PDF file that you can fill in or print out.

Herbal Wisdom for the Dark Times

This small book offers a pot full of herbal remedies, recipes, seasonal wisdom, a bit of Celtic lore and several hand drawn illustrations. It is a collaboration between Lisa Fazio and Scott Ferguson that has woven Lisa's lifetime of herbal practice and study with Scott's innate pen and ink artistry. 

 We are published this book with are own small press publishing company, Many Roots Publishing, and your order will support  this grass-roots, local company that intends to offer many future publications focused on herbal medicine, bioregionalism, re-localization, culture, and sustainability. 

70 pages : 6 original illustrations