In this week’s episode Stephen Harrod Buhner speaks with Joanna about: medical herbalism and sacred plant medicine, two threads becoming one; the process of eldering; embodying hope in these times; trusting our individual genius and doing the thing that we are called to do out of joy and natural excitement; communicating with the green teachers; becoming vegetalista; visionary experience and the livingness of the world; facing the darkness into the light and developing ontological flexibility.

Stephen Harrod Buhner is an Earth poet and the award-winning author of books on nature, indigenous cultures, the environment, and herbal medicine. He comes from a long line of healers including Leroy Burney, Surgeon general of the United States under Eisenhower and Kennedy, and Elizabeth Lusterheide, a midwife and herbalist who worked in rural Indiana in the early nineteenth century. The greatest influence on his work, however, has been his great-grandfather C. G. Harrod who primarily used botanical medicines, also in rural Indiana, when he began his work as a physician in 1911. He has been the senior researcher for The Foundation for Gaian Studies for the past 30 years. In that time he has explored Gaia’s complex organism interactions and how human beings can reinhabit their interbeing with the Earth, taking their place once more in the circle of life. All of his many books deal with that exploration and what he has discovered on the journey, among others, “Herbal Antivirals”, “Healing Lyme: Natural healing and Prevention of Lyme Borreliosis and Its Co-infections”, “Sacred Plant Medicine”, The Secret Teachings of Plants”, “Ensouling Language” and “Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm”.

“I Can’t Sit Still”, original music by Evarusnik

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