[00:00:28] Speaker A: Welcome to the mushrooms, apprentice. My guest today is Sean Padreg O'Donoghue. Sean is an herbalist, writer, poet and teacher, and an initiated priest in two traditions. He lives in the mountains of western Maine. Sean's approach to healing weaves together the insights of traditional western herbalism and contemporary science. He regards physical, spiritual and emotional healing as deeply intertwined. Prior to becoming an herbalist, Sean was a political organizer in movements for peace, human rights and global economic justice, and a freelance journalist documenting the human and ecological impacts of us policies in Latin America. He grew up near Boston, a short distance from where his great grandparents first landed when they arrived from Ireland. Since childhood he has been an avid student of irish history and folklore. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1996 with a degree in english literature and creative writing. His website is otherworldwell.com where he offers consultations and courses through his school, otherworld Hedge School. He is author of the book courting the wild queen and he has a new book coming out in July titled the Silver Branch. And that book can be pre ordered on Amazon. You can find Shawn on facebook and also on substack where you can bathe in the beauty of his writing and his gorgeous poetry. Welcome Sean.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Thank you. So grateful to be here with you.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Oh, this is an honor. And before we get into this amazing work that you do, I would love first for you to talk about your, your roots, your background, your irish heritage. So I'm just going to give you the floor.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Absolutely.
Well, it's my dad's people through for whom the irish lineage has been the strongest. My dad grew up in a mostly irish neighborhood in Lynn, Massachusetts. It was the same neighborhood that my great grandparents arrived in at the beginning of the 20th century.
And the O'Donohue's from after the battle of Clontarf in was it 1100 up until and just still many remain now have been centered around Killarney, which translates to Church of the Slowberry, church of the Blackthorn Barry and our branch of the Owen Ox tribe, which is the tribe that traces back to Owen more and to the blessing of the sovereignty goddess, who is the mother of the midsummer and who is the breath of the meadowsweet and the presence of the blazing sun.
And so the woman shape shifted into a deer.
And so our family traces back to that lineage, to that blessing.
And my great grandfather, Daniel O'Donohue was a captain in a secret fenian organization, most likely the irish republican Brotherhood, but we don't know exactly. At the age of 21, he had to flee with a price on his head and came to this country, where, in Massachusetts, he met Nora O'Mara, who had grown up just a few miles from him.
We don't really have the story of how they met. They definitely both did have relatives who probably would have known each other in Killarney, who were also living in the area. So that might have been part of it. There also was the likelihood that they were both involved in support for athenian and republican struggle from this side of the country. The census records show unrelated irish men living for a year or two in their home throughout the 1910s and 1920s, and so pretty strong likelihood that they were directly involved in that cross atlantic support.
And Nora, to anybody's memory, never spoke a word of English in North America. Whether she ever spoke English in Ireland or not, we don't know.
But of her children, only her eldest son, my great uncle Jiggs, had any irish.
And we don't know for certain how this came to be or how my grandfather and his other brothers communicated with their mother.
But we can somewhat surmise the likely events, because my grandfather would tell the story of being a very young boy out with his father on high rock Tower in Lynn, Massachusetts, which is the highest point in the city.
And Daniel had chosen to live there both because there was an irish neighborhood, but also because he could look out over the harbor and see if any british ships were coming into the harbor. Because he spent his whole life thinking that eventually they were going to come for him.
But who actually came for him was the Ku Klux Klan. They came into the neighborhood and they burned across at high Rock Tower to try to terrorize the irish community.
And my great grandfather was out with my grandfather, walking up to look out over the harbor when he saw the men in their white hoods coming up the hill. And he took my grandfather, and they hid in the bushes until the clan was gone.
And I think about. There are similar stories here in Maine about people who, as children during the same era, were told by their parents not to speak French because the Klan had been to their town.
I don't know whether the same thing happened in the main Gueltat, which was quite strong. In fact, the film director, John Ford, who made the movie the quiet man, grew up as a monolingual irish speaker in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
But we can surmise from that that there's a strong likelihood that that was today, that there was a conversation about the boys are not going to be speaking Irish. But Jiggs was old enough that he already had the language.
And he became an amazing musician, a he played the Boska kill of the squeezebox.
And would have sessions around his house. Where the other guys who worked first for the gas company and then for the electric company were also Irish, would come and play.
And the very first time I ever heard music played live in my life was my great grandfather took me to see Jiggs and his wife, Tessie, when I was probably about two years old. Tessie was an amazing woman in her own right.
Jiggs had gone over to Ireland.
I'm guessing. I don't know exactly what the dates were, but it was sometime shortly after independence, looking for a wife. And when he got there, because he had the language and because of the way he played the music and the way he danced, everybody assumed that he was born and raised until he said otherwise. And he met Tessie Finn. And was she Finn? No, the Finns were her cousins.
He met Tessie, who as a child, had been a gun runner for the IRA during the civil war. And married her and brought her back over here. And so, in some ways, even though I am a third generation, some of those close family links still exist.
And now my sister is. Is learning the language at the same time that I am. And so we have the language coming back in our family. And I can feel the way that that shifts the relationship with the ancestors profoundly.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: And one more spiral with my great grandfather. His name being Daniel, which would have been. Which be Donald as Guelca.
He was the namesake of one of the most famous chieftains of our lineage.
Who was one of the last open practitioners of magic among the chieftains of his generation.
When he was reaching middle age, he fell from a horse one day. And having fallen from the horse, he became aware of his own mortality and determined to find the way around it. And so he began studying all of the ancient arts. And probably began relating with a figure who may be the root of our family name. Even though the books will tell you that our family name means brown warrior dun, which means brown, was also the name of one of the sons of Mil, the first of the Gwelga speaking people to come from Galatia and Spain. And he was drowned before they came ashore.
And so he was the first of the Gwelga speaking people to die in irish waters. And he is said to preside over Takhtulin, the house of the dead passed through on their way to the other world.
And so I've always speculated. And I was surprised to find in a book by a distant relative, Rod O'Donohue, who runs the O'Donohue Society and lives in London called heroic landscapes, that he also has had the same theory that the family's name actually relates to a connection with and devotion to dungeon, rather than simply to the color brown.
And so that likely was part of in seeking to evade death, what Donal O'Donohue began to delve into.
And apparently he came very, very close.
And when we look at the really ancient texts, we look, which, of course, are filtered through a christian lens, because they were all written down by monks at the time that formal Christianity was trying to be established in Ireland.
We have references to the gods and the not gods among the people who came first. And the gods were said to be those who had mastered the arts.
Where we go to, what art did they master? Well, most likely the magical arts we go to. What was the magical art that was most important from them to master.
And as the old text, we might say, not hard, shape shifting, because, well, shape shifting and the memory of all previous incarnations. Because we can look at things like the song of Amorgan, where the importance of establishing your right to work with the forces of nature and work with the spirits of the land is based on your knowing, the fullness of who you are and your kinship with all beings.
So we know that toward the very end of his life, Donal had mastered the art of shapeshifting.
And his wife had been concerned about what's Donal doing there in this room all alone?
I've actually stood outside this room in Ross Castle, which is our castle in Killarney, and felt something strong there.
And so she begged and begged. And finally he said, you may watch what I'm doing, but it's of absolute importance that you do not make a single sound.
And she watched him standing over his books and making his incantations.
And at a particular moment, she saw a horrific vision that caused her to scream.
And when she screamed, that broke the spell.
And Donal and his books and his altar and everything that he was working with disappeared into the waters of Loch Lane.
But interestingly, the story doesn't end there. And in some ways, I pre shadowed that without thinking about the fact that I pre shadowed that when I said not hard, and gave two answers. Because when the old text, whenever.
Whenever there's a question about how something works, the answer will be not hard, and then it'll be followed by a triad.
And so the third aspect of the triad of that past, that sacred path, that mastery of the art, is the ability to be called upon by your descendants in their times of need.
And so there are stories that say that Donald O'Donohue is seen to appear on La Beltana on the 1 May every year, rising from the water, which was the same day that he vanished from the world.
And there are stories told up until at least the 1890s, of descendants of his and people who would have simply grown up with the stories in the name, facing down the landlords and facing eviction, and going to the edge of the lake and calling out, and a strange man coming and bringing them a bag of gold. And they brought the gold to the landlord, and the landlord's clerk would enter the gold into the register, and then as soon as the gold was entered into the ledger and the tenant had left the building, it turned to dust.
So it would have been. And so those stories like that was my great, my great grandfather was born in the 1890s, and so his being named Donnell, in addition to being part of the tradition of ways names are repeated in families, would have been a very conscious and deliberate choice. And when we think about that fenian movement and the irish republican Brotherhood and everything that was attached to it, yes, it was a political movement, and yes, it was a movement building towards the armed struggle that was launched in earnest in 1960, seen several, many years after he had left the country.
But it also was a cultural movement. It was a movement of preservation of language. It was a movement of preservation of the music. It was a movement of revitalization and preservation of the old sports, which is part of why the Gaelic Athletic association is still, for many people, an organization connected with values of sovereignty for all people, and part of why you see irish sports fans so connected with support for Palestine right now.
And additionally, there was also a resurrection of the old stories. There was a telling of those stories in a place where you could point in the landscape to, well, Finn and his warriors did this, and Finn stood over there.
And so, bringing back powerfully of the spirit of the land with the complicated support and participation of people like William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory, who were of the aristocracy and were not native irish speakers, and who put some of their own gloss on things, but also played an essential role in liberation. Another thing we see in this is that everybody is ostensibly catholic in the movement, with the exception of a few Protestants.
That never involves, not relating to other stories and other beings. And we can see him.
1916, Patrick Peartz having his school, where he was teaching young boys the irish language and irish culture, and his writing the lyrics to Oro Sherwa Hawaii, which will become the marching song of, of the 1916 uprising and of the republican movement subsequently. And when you read the lyrics, which are set to an old jacobite tune, they are in fact a spell of summoning.
And in the first verse, they speak of Ireland in the manner of the old aisling poetry, of the woman coming as a vision, who is the spirit of the land and who has been wrong.
And then the next verses, we hear about Gran Yawal, Rehs Omali and her thousand warriors who are coming back over the waters. And so it's a summoning song of the spirit to come and aid them. And the last bit I'll spiral around with this is when I finally got to Killarney several years ago.
One of the places I really wanted to go was to a bridge where two of my grandfather's cousins and a third man were killed during the civil war. They were strapped to the bridge by the Free State army, and bridge was blown up.
And nobody had heard of the bridge until the very last day. My Airbnb host said, oh, well, you know, there's a bridge up the road with a plaque, and I've never stopped to read the plaque. And he took me there and worth that bridge. So I went and bought white roses at a florist shop and brought them there. At the time, I had maybe five words of Wilga, still only Gupta Volkwagen, but I laid the roses at the marker and sang the chorus of Akna and felt the presence and the response of those who had died alone there. And the memory of their vision, which, if you go to the 1916 proclamation, was the first, as far as I know, foundation of a western nation that was supposed to be based on equality of men and women.
We're just barely getting there now in terms of where our society is moving and was really about one land for all the people.
And that vision, to me, when I think about Patrick Schier and the others, James Connolly and Joseph Mary Plunkett, and all of them gathered there, organizing that initial uprising. They were listening to the spirit of the land, just as their ancestors had, might have come in different terms, but it was the same spirit speaking in the same way, and it was living vision. And I think that vision is still alive today, and that the invocation of that matters tremendously, whether by people born and born in and living in Ireland or among the diaspora.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Thank you, Sean, so much for sharing that. I am struck also because so many of us have lost the stories of our roots, of our generational story. And to hear this is very stirring.
And I wonder if you've read the book by Daniel Corkery. Called Hidden Ireland. It's about the poets. It's huge.
I'm going to send you a copy of it. It's out print. Find it. But Daniel speaks also to what the Irish endured for almost two centuries and not that long ago. The starvation and just the, oh, just the horror these poor souls were put through and regarded as not human.
It's just incredible, man's inhumanity to man. And it's across the world, every culture has their story.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: Well, and there's also another chapter of it that people are just beginning to talk about, which is that in the wake of that, people who had been under the authority of an occupier for so long looked to what other institutions could establish authority, and they looked toward the official church.
And the relationship of Ireland with the official church is a complicated one. Like, we think about, especially Irish Americans, we think about the strong identity of Ireland with Catholicism.
It's like, okay, well, first of all, the question is, what does that mean? That looks very different to different people in different places.
And we forget that actually the norman invasion of Ireland was justified when the one english pope gave license to a norman earl to go over and try to establish order in Ireland. And why were they trying to establish order? Because there was a church there where women were treated with respect, where there was a married priesthood, where there was a relationship with the land, and where there were all kinds of ways of weaving syncretically together, old ways and new ways.
And while that managed to be suppressed within the english pal, which is the area around Dublin and where our phrase beyond the pale comes from, like, if you're beyond the pal, it's because you aren't.
You haven't been successfully subjugated to english law and in a handful of other large settlements, in a handful of large monasteries that existed. But up through the 19th century, a different form of syncretic Christianity with stronger relation to the land, and which didn't deny what had come before was the norm in most of Ireland, especially in irish speaking Ireland, you can hear cryptic references from people in the Grailtalk now speaking in English to the fact that, well, you know, our concept of things is a little bit different still, they'll say, particularly Billy McFly, the brilliant folklorist who grew up speaking in an english speaking community in Limerick and married into the irish speaking community of the Dingle peninsula. In an interview with the brilliant irish autistic podcaster, blind boy talks about the fact that when Latin and English weren't the language, there were, the people were speaking, except in church and in commerce, there were certain concepts that just didn't find their way as deeply in. And that there are certain senses about cultural norms that remain different in the Guelph. To Nanki stops there, probably for very good reason, because there are certain things that are best spoken of sideways, as one will find in many conversations in Ireland, and which is also what you'll find in any community that has endured that kind of attempt at cultural erasure over time.
But, you know, it wasn't until and got to more the great hunger that we call the irish potato famine in Ireland.
We call the irish potato famine in the US, which, yes, began with the blight on the potatoes, but was an enforced policy of mass starvation. Ireland was exporting food throughout the entire time of end guarantee, and people were not allowed access to that food. And you could only be fed if you took the soup, which was going to the anglican and presbyterian soup kitchens, and agreeing to convert in exchange for the soup, or if you forged nettles and seaweed and hunted what you could hunt and fished what you could fish, as some people did, and that's why there were any survivors.
But it was in the wake of that that the institutional church really began having a stronger hold on the culture. And we see this wherever there's large scale cultural trauma.
I was in my activist years. At one point, I had the privilege of getting to know and drive around Dennis Halliday, former assistant secretary general of the United nations, who is from Ireland, and he talked about being stationed in Afghanistan right before the rise of the Taliban, and how he had been in Afghanistan before the war of the eighties, and had seen a society that was really reaching towards pluralism. And then when people had that violence inflicted on them, they turned in a more fundamentalist direction to somebody who had a story that would explain it, which was, you're being punished for your unrighteousness. Come be righteous.
And then he was stationed in Iraq during the sanctions that followed the bombing there, which ended up resigning because he said that he was becoming an accessory to genocide.
And he said he was seeing the same thing there, and he was saying this to me like ten years before ISIS, but he was seeing that this pluralist society had suddenly begun turning in a fundamentalist direction. And so I think when we look to the turning toward the official church in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in an irish context, we have to assume some degree of that dynamic. And that was when they started establishing the Magdalen laundries, where.
Where young women were sent to be punished, sometimes for the rest of their lives.
And that wasn't so long ago. Sinead O'Connor was in the laundries as a teenager.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: I heard the last one closed in either 76 or 80, 619, eighties.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: And so the cultural hold of a large institution with the power to punish and control to that degree was very, very strong, and has just in the past decade, begun to break with the revelations of what happened in the laundries, with the granting to women the right to choose, with recognition of same sex marriage, and with it was first with legalizing divorce that the cultural hold of the church began to break. And there's been such an amazing renaissance of music and poetry, especially from young irish speaking people in the time since. And such a beautiful revitalization of the culture.
[00:34:12] Speaker A: Yes. There's a group called Shaolin. Have you heard of them?
[00:34:17] Speaker B: From Ireland? Oh, yes. I love them. Yeah, they do.
[00:34:20] Speaker A: You are speaking of that beautiful ballad that was sung all those years ago, the lead singer. Oh, gosh, the way he sings that is just. You just feel it in your bones. It's so beautiful. It's so powerful.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: Yeah, well, when she was speaking about learning Chandnow songs, Sinead O'Connor said, you have to let the ghost of the song come and live in your body.
And I feel like, yeah, that's. There's an example of that. And, you know, there's that beautiful film of granite that was made about the Shen no singer, John Haney, which is, I think, still available on a lot of streaming services.
I won't plug any of the streaming services here, but that's showing elements of the tradition. And one of the elements of the tradition that I find so beautiful, and my sister was just over in the west, Kerry Grill tucked says that she still sees this happening, is that when someone is singing a shen no song, very often they will go into a kind of trance state, and while they're in that state, they will close their eyes and they'll reach for the place that song lives in their body.
And there's someone else who is holding their hand and slowly turning their hand in order to kind of both ground them, but also keep the song flowing. And who knows how old that tradition goes.
My sense is that probably, and we have no way of proving this. And, you know, the academics will always poo anything that we don't have a way of directly proving. But if we think about the language and the music were kept alive generation to generation, and were kept alive also in the hedge schools, which were the secret schools held often under literal hedges during the time the language was outlawed.
Those hedge schools have teaching traditions that go back to the bardic colleges.
The bardic colleges were trained with Fila, who, and Phila is irish for poet, but also one of my irish language teachers calls them the prophet poets, because poetry and prophecy were not distinct from each other in ancient irish culture, which is still reflected in the way that when you say that something is fated, you say Tasha non, it is in a poem.
And all the teaching there was by memorization, by rhythm, by meter, by oral transmission. And so I can imagine that this way of remembering and bringing forth the song was probably.
There's a strong likelihood that it has roots that trace back to that ancient teaching method that's still alive as a way of bringing forth memory.
And what's remembered will don all kinds of different cloaks over time in order to remain hidden enough to stay alive. But there are people who say there's nothing we can trace back to a pre christian tradition.
And sure, from an academic standpoint, from a western rationalist standpoint, that might be true.
And while I don't think we can meet that standard, I think that we can very clearly both infer and feel things that go far, far back.
[00:38:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree.
Well, let's talk about going. We won't go too far back, but let's go back to your childhood, because you were an unusual child, I think, with some very interesting gifts. I would love for you to just talk a bit about your childhood, and then we'll get into the herbalism and all the other good stuff.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's very interesting because I'm autistic. And what that means is that I have a brain with elevated levels of serotonin, which, incidentally, is an analog to psilocybin, and vice versa.
Lower levels, probably, of monoamine oxidase. That breaks down psilocybin, and hence more open sensory gates and a tendency to create more rapid and nonlinear branching structures within the brain, which, as with everything, is a degree of a blessing and a degree of a challenge.
It means that I can see patterns and perceive things in the world that other people aren't perceiving, but also, like, try doing your taxes after a large justice. Psilocybin. And you can see where some of the challenges exist.
But there was no understanding of this when I was a child. There was an understanding that something was different. And I went to all manner of specialists who put together individual pieces of the puzzle, but had no idea what to do with them. And for a long time, I wish that people had understood and then I realized that, oh, when people understand now, what they try to do is train you to mask it through reward and punishment, because there was nobody there to do that, and because I was simply the strange, precocious child who knew things he shouldn't know and didn't know things he should know. Kind of like the way changelings get described in the old stories.
And spent my time immersed in history and marine biology. I was interested in marine biology because the whales and the dolphins, I knew were beings who had something to say. And I think at some unconscious level, I understood that I was having trouble translating my internal experience into the experience of the humans around me. And if I could speak to other beings that weren't human, then maybe I could learn to speak to humans, too.
So that became. That was a deep fascination of mine.
When I was eight years old, I saw the clency brothers on PBS for the first time. And then my dad took me out to buy my very first record. Well, it wasn't my. My very first records were Sesame street records and such, but the first record that I bought with my allowance was Quincy brothers rising into the moon.
And so I became very immersed in the music and the magic. And simultaneously, I would spend time out in the swamp and the woods behind my parents house, where very often I felt like there was some shimmering presence just beyond my perception.
In addition to that, I felt the pain of the world quite strongly.
At five years old, I was weeping for endangered species.
At seven, I was living in fear of nuclear war. And finally, when I was 13, my friend's mother, who was involved in the local peace movement, well, you know, there are things you can do about that. And invited me to a meeting. So it was a childhood immersed in things that are not often considered part of the childhood world and where there was a lot of time spent with very old voices, human and other than humans, and Yeats and Tolkien were the first two people who I came across who were speaking of the same kinds of things that I felt and experienced and so on.
[00:44:10] Speaker A: Beautiful.
When did you find your way to the fairy tradition?
[00:44:25] Speaker B: So it came in layers. I mean, there are some ways in which there are things that I came in with that are related to the nature of who I am and the nature of what I would gravitate toward.
But I was devoutly Catholic twice in my life.
So up until the age of 13, I was a much more devout Catholic than the rest of my family.
But I began seeing that the church was spending a lot of time talking about what people individually were and weren't doing with each other and very little time speaking about war and poverty. And I look at what's unfolding in the world.
Look at what is present in the teachings that you say that you're embracing.
How can you be silent in these ways? And I also got an argument with parish priest about the intelligence of whales and dolphins and the existence extraterrestrial intelligence, because he said that God created humans at a supreme position.
And I said, but what about these other intelligences? And he said, they're not. There's no way that they could be as intelligent because that's not the way God made things.
And so I was already, like, 1ft out the door when that conversation happened. But then the more I watched horrors unfolding in the world, and the more I walked to church that seemed silent in their face, the more I felt like I couldn't stay. So I spent some years as a wanderer through buddhist tradition and taoist tradition, spent some time with Quakers. And then when I was a couple years out of college, I heard about a group of Catholics who had broken into a shipyard here in Maine and fit to carry out an act of disarmament of and among them were. Was one of the two people my parents told me to avoid when I first became involved in activism, Philip Berrigan, who I was told to avoid Phil and his brother Dan, because they were trouble.
But I began going to visit Phil in jail in Portland, Maine, and having these really profound conversations with him and seeing that there was this whole movement that was trying to espouse the values the church claimed to espouse.
And I felt like, okay, I will come home. I will come back to this traditional, that I will work with this part of this tradition, which I did very deeply for a number of years.
And then I had a crisis of faith when I.
We were working. I was meeting with a group of people, and we're working with a text called Marx and the Bible. And the story being told was, at all of history is an arc toward perfect justice.
And at the end of history, Jesus will return and bring that perfect justice. And whatever unmerited suffering we bring upon ourselves in solidarity with the poor will speed the coming of that day.
And I know people who believe this very deeply and very devoutly and who continue to do beautiful and brave things based on this vision.
But I couldn't get past the question that a lot of people have as children of how can an all loving, all present, omnipotent gods allow this suffering to occur and want us to have to do these things to earn the end of it.
And so I spoke to one of my mentors about this, and he said, well, when I feel these doubts, I pray. And I pray I believe. Help me in my unbelief.
So I took that counsel.
I also took a significant dosage of a semi synthetic, fungally derived compound along with those pairs. And I found myself in the middle of winter by a friend's fireside. And in the flames, I saw a woman with a glowing presence and red hair and bright eyes who said that she was brigid and that there was another path to sacred that was available to follow.
And so that was when I began my first steps onto a different path.
And those early years after that, I found.
I found books and I found people who began to lead me in some interesting directions.
And wherever I would follow what felt most compelling, I would come back to this reference to Sahri tradition and to Victor Anderson.
Victor Anderson was a blind shaman born in New Mexico in the early 19 hundreds, who lived until 2001, who carried very strong memories of the lifetimes he had lived, and who wove together elements of disparate tradition, working with people to remember where their spirits were and to bring back what he called the Stone Age magic. He said, if you look at the cave, our tradition is the cave paintings come to life.
And so after many years, I came closer to that traditional and spent a while delving into things with spent a while delving into things. I'll leave it there for now. And then, at a moment when my life was again falling apart, when I had been following the path for a number of years, my friend and teacher initiator Cornelia Benavides, felt prompted to reach out to me out of the blue, and we began her beautiful work together. And she was someone who spent two decades really close, closely with Victor and Cora Anderson in their home, learning the heart of this tradition.
[00:52:49] Speaker A: That's wonderful. Oh, my goodness. What a grace, what a blessing. And also to be called through the fire in a high trance state, I think, is a very pure way of being, really. It's like an invitation.
[00:53:10] Speaker B: I've been so blessed with at every crucial moment in my journey, the right teachers, be they human or other than human, showing up in my life.
But I think that the world has always worked that way. I think there have things that have always been alive and always been true. And when someone is willing enough to listen, which often only happens when they have followed everything in their society to the edge of its possible logic and found it wanting, then at that point where there's the openness, because there's nowhere else to turn. And sometimes, just in other moments of grace, those teachers and those teachings arrive.
[00:54:04] Speaker A: Yes. Yes.
Well, how did you find your way to herbalism?
[00:54:11] Speaker B: It was another one of those winding paths and another one of those taking things as far as I could until they no longer worked.
And so I had already left behind Catholicism.
But I. But activism was still very much at the center of my life.
And I had tried everything that I knew, through ordinary activist means, to bring change in the world. I had been in jail for blocking the entrance to weapons plants. I had gone to the edges of war zones and gathered people's stories of their suffering, and then traveled to tiny church basements across New England, speaking the stories of what I had heard, and sat down with members of Congress and told the stories of what I had heard. I had organized, I had lobbied, I had written, I had worked for candidates.
I had walked away from electoral politics and tried pretty much every means that I could imagine.
And it was close to salon, and I felt that things just really weren't working.
My body was also in a state of health clocks.
I was in the grips of horrendous depression.
I was dealing with sometimes near fatal asthma and with susceptibility to respiratory infections. That brought me right to the edge every year. And I was doing absolutely nothing to tend to my body, because I was still feeling very much that, oh, my body is just an instrument to carry me through this life and this world. And I'm not so sure how much I want to be here anyway.
So use my body to do what I can while I'm here.
And just before salon, I found myself just feeling at a breaking point. And I called to Bridget to break me open in the ways that would show me the way.
A few days later, there was a journalist close to my age named Brad Will, who was in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, where he had been covering the uprising that happened when the teachers of Oaxaca had gone on strike, not only because they weren't being paid enough, but because they were teaching children who had nothing to eat and who came to school with no shoes, and because they were watching everyone they taught have to leave and come to the United States or Canada to work, can send money back.
And they also were witnessing the beginning of the destruction of the traditional crops there, and the beginning witnessing the land being divided and taken away from people.
And so they rose up. They were on strike. They were camped in the center of the city.
That June, the federal police, who were really a military organization came in and began beating the protesters.
When people around the city heard the sounds of the beatings, they came and responded.
It was actually the oaxacan police. Had the federal police at that point, occurring at the beatings, and they grabbed whatever they had, they could grab, and they came and they chased the police out of the city. And then the same thing happened all across the state. And so from June through October of that year, Oaxaca existed in a de facto autonomous position, where people were organizing community by community, all of their essential services and living outside the domination of the larger culture. And Oaxaca is a very strongly indigenous region.
It's also the region that our modern knowledge of suicide comes from.
So Brad Will was there covering, documenting people's resistance. And there were death squads who had been hired by the governor, who were going around and attacking communities.
And Brad filmed his own executions by the death squads.
The United States government refused to intervene, said, we can't tell what happened. The mexican government blamed it on the rebels, and they sent in the federal police, who are our military, to bring Oaxaca under occupation.
And when I read about Brad Will's death, I felt like somebody needs to step into that position.
And then a few days later, an organization that I had already worked with called Witness for Peace.
They were looking for volunteers for an emergency delegation to Oaxaca. And so I signed up, and I went, and we met with people in hiding, gathering their stories of what they were experiencing. And then we went up into the mountains, into a village that the police had not managed to take back.
And we met with zapotec people there who were keeping alive their ancestral traditions.
And one of the things they spoke about was, well, there are two things that really struck me there.
One was young people painting an image of a sapothec war God, a wind God, rather, on the side of a building, and people carrying the memories of those old traditions and saying, this is our inheritance. Our inheritance is resistance.
And then the second piece was hearing people talk about the corn, because that was the place where corn was first grown in the world.
And they said that they had kept the corn intact through all those thousands of years. And then when NAFTA came, the US began sending genetically modified forms as part of the food aid program to supposedly deal with the help the communities deal with the economic impact. But nobody told them it was modified.
And if you give a farmer corn, yeah, they'll eat some, but they'll try to save as much as possible to plant so they can feed their families in the years to come. So people planted those seeds, not knowing what they were.
And they said, but the elders can walk among the cornrows. And tell which plant doesn't belong, which plant does, and pull them up.
And my rational colonized mind thought, that's a beautiful story. I wish it were true.
And I felt the heartbreak when I thought that. Because I felt the way in which a deeper part of me knew that it was. And knew that that was actually knowledge was the birthright of everybody. But that had been taken from us. When we were separated from the community.
So I was broken wide open, and I came back to the states. And I don't enjoy social events in general. I am neurologically incapable of small talks.
And yet, for some reason, I decided it was a good idea to go along to a dinner party in Boston.
And, like, 24 hours off the plane. And I felt even more out of place there than I did normally. People knew I had been somewhere. And kept asking me how my vacation was. And the first people I found who had heard of Oaxaca. Talked about what a shame it was. That there was graffiti on all those beautiful colonial buildings. And I kind of wanted to shake them and say, do you even hear the word colonial in your sentence?
And so I was even more alienated than usual. But there was someone there who seemed to have a different kind of presence.
And eventually, as the night wore on, um, we gravitated toward each other. And we began speaking. And she told me that she was an herbalist. And she told me about learning to listen to the plants. And about learning ways of helping people. And especially women. Begin to have sovereignty in their own health again.
And I felt like, this is more radical than any blockade I've ever been part of.
And this is exactly what people are speaking about. In the alpha, there are people who do this.
And I was blown away. And then the night ended. Went home, went back up to Maine.
Proceeded to get very severe bronchitis. That became pneumonia, which was both a very real physiological condition. But also related to the grief my lungs were holding.
And on New Year's Eve, that herbalist called me out of the blue.
Having made several calls to different people with my name across the state. To figure out which one was the right one.
And we had a beautiful conversation.
And then we hung up. And a few minutes after we hung up, she called back and said, I was hearing the way you were breathing. And there's an herb who can help you. And her name is Ella Campane. And she has a deep resinous root and a bright yellow flower. And she draws up what you're holding on to. In your lungs so you can move it out.
And so I went that afternoon to the health food store before they closed early for the, for the day and bought my first ounce of hella campaign tincture.
When I came back home, as soon as I felt the first drops of the tincture on my tongue, long before there could have been any pharmacological action, not only did I feel my breath began to open, even though I was still very sick, but I felt the unraveling of the story, that my body was broken and that there was nothing that could be done about it. And nothing has been the same since.
[01:06:11] Speaker A: Wow. Oh, Sean, that's incredible.
We're at the end of the first hour, so I'm going to invite listeners to join
[email protected]. for the second hour, where I'm going to have you get into the animism of herbalism and so much more. So I hope you will join us.
