Hello folks, Goody Twoshoes here. Been musing a lot about the roots and shoots of Community Supported Herbalism. And while you can get all the “quick and dirty” web parlay about why you should CSH on my website , the long-winded academic in me just had to extrapolate haha. So here’s my not-so-SEO-friendly blah-bitty blahg about the awesomeness of CSH programs and the socio-ecological literacy they help build: enjoy!
Growing small-scale community-based herbalism isn’t just about making awesome salve and tasty tea accessible (although what a super cool benny!!) -it’s about transforming our health perspectives! Programs like Goody Twoshoes’ CSH encourage us to explore new wellness paths and challenge our understandings of how health happens; they also challenge us to grow our socio-ecological literacy! For me spreading the plant love means intermingling our bodies’ healing with an increased awareness of the healing resources around us as well as the disproportional need for healing that’s part and parcel of the generational trauma, racism and violence of this land we call home.
Let me explain, no there is too much- let me sum up: I believe that every “where” is deep. By which I mean beautiful, fraught, and utterly complex. By consciously deepening our relationships with our environment (and its histories) we come to know that depth better. This kind of literacy is a lifelong process and one I hope you’ll join in on! The more I learn about the ecological state of my state, haha, the more I see how complex its stewardship history is. I know that I’m just a small drop in the well of care that comprises stewardship in this place we now call Sacramento. I hope this small effort adds to that well, honors it and encourages it to grow. Further, I think conscious engagement with socio-ecological literacy and community herbalism are important threads in the long road to healing justice. Community-based herbalism is offers wonderful opportunities for skill sharing, ecological literacy building and healing justice work. Hopefully, through honoring each other’s histories, as well as the multiple knowledge systems we come from, we can build more collective wellness in our communities.
Community herbalism is about growing our familiarity with plants and food, yes, but it’s also about resistance! So many decisions about our healthcare seem out be of our hands these days, don’t they? Grassroots herbalism offers us a lil wrench to throw into that corporate medicine machine, a tactic to resist their billion-dollar strategies if you will. What’s more, a locally-focused supportive care and wellness model refutes the disease paradigm in so many ways without ever having to disparage it or get tangled in power plays with its experts. (Yikes!) By making space for plant medicine in our lives (and becoming plant medicine makers!) we can strengthen wellness ecologies in Sacramento and beyond in a caring and positive way. The CSH also offers you a chance to participate in making right livelihoods viable vocations in our community. By joining the CSH you’re helping to make the lovely labor of supportive care and herbal medicine making a sustainable income for me and my children, which allows me to grow the local economy in Sacramento too!
Most importantly the CSH is about doing all that in place, right here, in our (amazingly diverse) community of Sacramento, CA. Here’s to strengthening the webs of care that connect us to one another with beautiful plant-y strands of community wellness! When we invest in local wellness networks we can begin to make space for weaving all kinds of things back into our healing. We can become co-creators in whole-istic wellness!
‘Til Next Time! (Oh, Goody!)