Conscious Choice: HerbFest 2001

October 2001 | Herbs for Health

HerbFest 2001

by Meg McGowan

At the end of August, I attended Frontier Natural Products Co-op’s tenth annual HerbFest at the company’s sixty-acre Organic Research Farm in Norway, Iowa. The atmosphere at HerbFest is a blend of a summer camp, family reunion, continuing-education intensive, holistic retreat, and revival meeting. It is the nation’s largest annual herb conference, with participants gathering from all over the country.

As always, the selection of topics was varied, not only in focus, but in presentation style and in the audience’s assumed level of expertise. Most seminars ran an hour and a half to two hours, with five seminars running simultaneously. This year, five five-hour seminars were offered on Friday morning before the general festivities began, giving attendees an option for more in-depth study. Activities for children and teens were also expanded this year. Care was available for children under four years of age. Older children were grouped by age for ChildFest I (ages four to eight), ChildFest II (ages nine to twelve), and TeenFest (ages thirteen to seventeen). Kathy Keville told stories. Karen Aguiar and Terri Jensen taught a salve-making workshop. Mary Moeller introduced teens to reflexology, and Cindy Parker led them on an herb walk and exploration. Music, games, and crafts were offered as well.

Adults could choose to learn herbal paper making with ethnobotanist artist Lenna Frances Keefer or join environmental educator Roberta Burnes for a hands-on workshop about weaving with herbs. Tim Blakley, formerly the manager of the National Center for the Preservation of Medicinal Herbs, now herbalist, aromatherapist and educator for Frontier, led an aromatherapy workshop. Participants sniffed samples of various essential oils and learned that sometimes you can determine the quality of oils by smell, but often you can’t, and first you have to be trained to know what you are trying to detect in the scent. After being instructed in proportions and blending, everyone got to make something to take home — a desktop diffuser, bath salts, body mist, powder, or a fragrant clay facial mix.

Visitors could join scheduled tours of the entire Frontier Organic Research Farm or focus on individual elements with specific tours. Possible tour guides included Frontier staff members — Tim Blakley, research farm manager Erica Renaud, botanical garden manager Kimberly Dickey, and Diane Don-Carlos and Paul Niedhart, project manager and farm manager, respectively, for the National Center for the Preservation of Medicinal Herbs — as well as several other featured speakers. Herbal author and photographer Stephen Foster and North American herbalist Cascade Anderson Geller each led an herb walk, while Kelly Kindscher, author of Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie and Medicinal Wild Plants of the Prairie, shared his passion on a prairie walk. Another option this year was to pick up a booklet for a self-guided tour. Though the botanical garden was past its blooming peak, it was certainly not without flowers or life. I could hear the buzzing and humming of the garden’s inhabitants almost before I could see the plants — Joe pye weed, pink turtlehead, wild indigo going to seed, rattlesnake master, purple coneflower, and hyssop. The native tall grass prairie was in its late summer splendor with gentian in bloom beside black-eyed Susans, prairie sunflowers, and an abundance of grasses catching the setting sun and the breeze.

We met the speakers Friday night after dinner. Uzuri Amini, a writer, artist, spiritual counselor, ceremonialist and priestess of Oshun (the Yoruba goddess of love, healing, and art), introduced herself with an ancient song. It was not surprising that she spoke with the voice of a storyteller, a keeper of deep truth, as she presented her two seminars, "Accessing Our Healing Ancestors" and "The Healing Power of Water." Both sessions emphasized connections to other generations, spiritual traditions, and nature. If we choose to open our channels of connections, Amini said, to begin a dialogue with our ancestors, we will be given support and wisdom. " But be aware that to open yourself to this experience is a declaration to the universe that you are ready to grow, evolve, and experience life on another plane. You are saying that your family is important to you and that you want the support, knowledge, and responsibility of knowing all of who you are in the world." Though not strictly about herbs, her ancestral presentation, which began with a meditation and closed with participants sharing their experiences, seemed to encapsulate the essence of the festival.

Cindy Parker brought the wise woman tradition of healing to the fest. She is committed to keeping the folkloric tradition of herbalism in the hands of the people. Xingwu Liu, founder of Health King Enterprise and Natural Health Tours, shared his immense knowledge of traditional Chinese herbal medicine. Cascade Anderson Geller contributed the healing folk wisdom of her Appalachian roots combined with twenty years’ European herbal experience. Kevin Spelman and Jennifer Workman included Ayurvedic principles in their presentations. Gregory Tilford and Mary Wulff-Tilford addressed veterinary herbalism and the holistic care of animals. The incredible diversity of the speakers was remarkable, but it was not the most remarkable thing about HerbFest 2001. What struck me most was the fact that there was little that was pure or isolated in the approaches to herbalism that were presented. The speakers had danced with the plants in myriad capacities and learned about them in all kinds of different ways. What we received was an endless vision of possibilities. As a group, the speakers offered more than information; they offered inspiration. Creative thought was sparked along with creative expression. Both were equally important, natural extensions, one from the other.

The keynote speaker on Saturday night was Caroline W. Casey, self-described as a visionary activist astrologer devoted to the principle that "imagination lays the tracks for the reality train to follow." Her presentation was, in my mind, the highlight of the weekend. Though not an herbalist, her message was vital. She said that we are all social change artists capable of creating the world that we want to exist, rather than being doomed to a fixed future that we cannot possibly impact in any significant way. She exhorted us to "believe nothing, but be willing to entertain all possibilities."

Volleyball, bonfires, dancing, drumming, yoga, and massage were available to round out the weekend. Many families took advantage of the space available for camping at the farm. Figures are not yet in for this year, but they will likely be similar to those for HerbFest 2000 when approximately 1,300 people attended from thirty-five states and five countries. (Kind of makes you think it might be worth the modest trek across the state line, huh?) For those who are now feeling as though they missed out on something, audiotapes are available for all of the sessions from Tree Farm Communications at 206-868-0464 or www.treefarmtapes.com. Putting my usual gentle suggestions aside, you must get "Seeding the Culture of Reverent Ingenuity" by Caroline W. Casey. (Her comments on GMOs alone make this worth a listen.) You also want to get her set of published tapes Making the Gods Work for You from Sounds True Recordings. It’s the most inspirational thought I can end with this month.

Note: The quote from Uzuri Amini is taken from her supplementary notes for "Accessing our Healing Ancestors" as published in HerbFest 2001 Proceedings & Survival Guide. The biographical information about the speakers is from the guide as well.

DISCLAIMER: Choosing a holistic approach to medicine means choosing personal responsibility for your health care. Herbs for Health offers a doorway through which to enter the realm of herbal healing, an invitation to further investigation on the part of the reader. It is in no way intended as a substitute for advice from a health care practitioner.

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