Garden giants

     I admit it:  I am a creature of enthusiasms.  My family and friends know this about me; they are never shocked when I come up with yet another wild hair idea.  There is a certain amount of eye rolling and sighing that goes on and even some heel-digging resistance to getting recruited into my enthusiasms.  But resistance is futile and many of them get swept away . 

     So it is with mushrooms.   They have been calling to me for some years and this fall in particular, I am heeding the call.  They are by nature wacko-weirdo, creepy, fascinating and downright beautiful.  My friend Rain spoke recently of walking with her two year old son around their wetland property.  They came across some mushrooms fruiting profusely.  Hawk leaned over and stuck his face in them  and said loudly: “What is THAT?”  You don’t have to be two years old and seeing mushrooms for the first time to feel the same way.

     For many years I was an armchair mushroom freak.  There are a lot of good mushroom resources:  I love David Arora’s book All that the Rain Promises.  Paul Stamets’ book Mycelium Running is another wonderful read.  But after some years of  reading about mushrooms, I decided it was time to get my hands in the soil and on the mushrooms.  So this spring, we planted a bed of Stropharia annulato  or King Stropharia aka Wine Caps or Garden Giants.

   We didn’t get started until early  May.  Ideally a stropharia bed should be in by March 1st.  But I struggled to find wood chips and finally bought some alder sawdust from the local bark store.
     For this  project we recruited our gardener friend David.   As a professional gardener he knew about plants, but had never put in a mushroom bed before.  I hadn’t either, but put together my best guess from all the reading I’d done.
     We put the bed in at the end of my herb garden. Stropharia likes to have plant friends nearby and lots of edges, so this seemed like the best place.  A place of dappled sunlight, up against the foundation of the house, and with a soaker hose laid in; all these factors seem to create a likely spot.
     So in a  4 foot by 3 foot space,  David dug out all the soil down the subsoil;  the idea here is to removed any other fungal elements that might compete with the stropharia.  He put down a layer of  alder sawdust, then sprinkled in the stropharia spawn, a commercial product that is full of the fungus to get started. He then repeated the process, topping off the bed with 2 inches of alder .  We then soaked the bed well; this being May in western Washington, we knew the rains would keep it well watered for several weeks, which turned out to be true.  By early July the dry season finally began and we switched over to using the soaker hose for an hour twice a week.  Then I sat back and waited.
     I went out regularly to the garden and saw  nothing.  Nada, zip. I was discouraged.  Paul Stamets says the soil needs to be at least 60 degrees for the mushrooms to pop up, so you can expect to see them in mid or late July.
    I checked in July.  Nada.  I checked in August.  Nothing.  I was getting depressed.  Then I put them out of my mind as a failed attempt.

     In mid September I needed to collect some mugwort.  I went out to the garden and OH MY GOD there were several clumps of stropharia, tangled in with branches of mugwort.  We had pulled it off!  We had put out an invitation to these mushrooms and they graced us with their presence.
   And how graceful it was.  Through early November in an unseasonably warm fall, Glen went out to the garden and regularly collected a half pound of mushrooms every two-three days.  We learned how to cook them:  sliced in a pan of butter & olive oil, sautéed 5-7 minutes until the pan is dry and the mushrooms are golden-brown with crispy edges.   We  put them in a sauce and poured them over roasted Delicata squash.  OMG.  Glen made polenta cakes and we poured the mushrooms over these.   We put them in stews and soups and stroganoffs.  OMG.  You get the point.
     And to  every  recipe that we made,  they added a rich, complex nutty flavor.  They were an excellent meat substitute.  And though not much is known about the medicinal qualities of Stropharia,  I believe all mushrooms at the very least provide important adaptogenic support to the immune system.   I think they keep our immune systems tuned up against all kinds of attacks.  As an herbalist, I believe that the best way to take herbs ( and mushrooms) is as food built into our daily lives.  And so it proved with our friend Stropharia.



Janet Partlow
 Resources:
photo of sawdust spawn from Field & Forest Products
"Beauty shots" of Stropharia by Pam Kaminski
All other photos by Janet Partlow and Glen Buschmann
Field & Forest:  www.fieldforest.net/
Fungi Perfecti:  www.fungi.com/
South Sound Mushroom Club: www.southsoundmushroomclub.com/
A fabulous YouTube video of stropharia growing in time lapse photography:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Oq82zrQB04

Clearing Cooties

The Columbia River meeting the Pacific Ocean

     In the world of the shamanic healer, there are some basic techniques that are part of our daily work, part of the standard “job description” .  One of these techniques is called extraction work:  this means that we find and clear foreign energy from the field of our clients.  I refer to it (somewhat frivolously) as clearing cooties. 
  
      Energetic healers such as shamanic healers work with the human energy field.   This unseen field encircles the physical body.   Normally it flows like a powerful river;  I think of the Columbia river as it carves its way through dense columnar basalt in the Gorge.  That river is strong, goal-directed and potent.  It not only carves up rock,  it breaches into the Pacific ocean, making that sea give way before the power of the river.  This river  knows who it is and where it is going.  It is like the Wei Qi  energy field described by Chinese medicine practitioners:  a powerful protective surge of energy and life that helps keeps us healthy.

The Columbia carving through Basalt

     However, this energy field can be blocked.  Think again of the Columbia river:  the ancient landslide near the Dalles that filled the riverbed with huge boulders and nearly diverted its course.  Think of all the dams that have been built on the Columbia that block its flow.  Think of the Colorado river, whose flow has been so drained to fill the swimming pools of Los Angeles, that it can no longer feed the estuary at the mouth of the Sea of Cortez.  These blockages happen to rivers, and they can happen to people as well.

The Q’ero indigenous people of the high Andes in Peru called these dense energetic blockages hucha.  For them, people are normally beings of shining light.  But when  foreign energy intrudes, we can lose our light, and lose our way in life, as well.  Our light gets overwhelmed by the density of hucha.

The Holy Light of the Sun

     The most common way we pick up these blockages is simply through the course of ordinary life.  It’s like picking up the common cold:  you go to the mall on a busy holiday weekend and ten feet in front of you, someone with a nasty cold blows a big sneeze.  There is a five foot sneeze cloud left behind and if you walk through it, you can easily breath in virus particles. 
     Foreign energy blockages are like that.  If you hang out in bars a lot, you can be easily exposed.    If you spend a lot of time under the influence of substances, you can easily be vulnerable to hucha.  Other common places where stuff can be picked up are hospitals, cemeteries and courthouses.

       It happened to me that way.  I had just had major joint replacement surgery and was in the hospital for four days, recovering.  While lying on my bed, weakened from surgery and blood loss, and gorked out on pain meds, I picked up some energy that was not my own.
      I was sluggish, very exhausted and my mood was low.  I had trouble finding my usual enthusiasm for life.  My healing was slow, too.  It was easy to miss the energy intrusion, since all these things could have been part of the surgery recovery.
      As it turned out, shortly after I left the hospital I had an appointment with my teacher/healer Mary Blankenship.  She saw the problem and quickly cleared it.  After her work,  I started to feel great, to sleep great, to have better energy.  My healing from surgery took huge strides forward.  Best of all, life once again was worth living.

     People often ask how to do this work themselves.   The good news is that that Wei Qi energy field I spoke of earlier does do a good job of clearing out many minor energies before they can get a foot hold.  However if something has truly become stuck in one’s energy field, it requires a shamanic healer who does extraction work to clear it out.  It’s sort of like repairing your own car;  you can do routine maintenance, but you wouldn’t dream of doing an engine overhaul by yourself.  The same is true with this type of shamanic work.

     So how do shamanic healers do this extraction work?  It depends, of course, on each healer.  My approach is to sit and talk with the person,  looking at how their life is working, or not working for them.  Are things stuck?  Is their mood low? Are they having trouble sleeping, with intense/scary dreams?  Are they having trouble moving forward in life, bringing their vision to fruition?  As we talk,  I am tracking their energy field, sensing the places of blockage and planning how to clear them.
      After this conversation,  the client gets on the massage table.  I call in Great Spirit, my guides, my plant and stone medicine helpers, and together we work to clean out the “cooties” and restore the river of energy back to a more normal flow. 

      Most people notice a big difference afterwards.  They feel lighter, more buoyant and optimistic.  As the healer, I see their own clear and bright spiritual light shining out from their eyes.  In the next days and weeks ahead, the person  begins to see that they are moving forward in their life;  old stuck things are falling away and they start to move to the rhythm of their own season. 

      This is the power of “clearing cooties”.

Janet

Resources:
Photos by Nancy and Janet Partlow

Earth Day at our Sacred Water

Today is Sunday, April 22nd.  It is Earth Day,  and our local planet has dressed up in its finest spring duds to make us maritime Washingtonians very happy.  Here in the late afternoon, it is 72 degrees, all of the trees are sprouting fresh green growth, and the sun is pouring heat out of a cerulean blue sky.

     I  spent the afternoon at Bigelow springs, an obscure pocket park on the northeast Olympia hills, overlooking Budd Inlet.  Here is a picture of the park, looking west towards the Black Hills.  The spring emerges from the ground to the right of the picture, then trickles down in a gentle stream to the left, then is piped (sadly) to East Bay.  It is Artesian water, part of the large aquifer that lies under much of Olympia and Tumwater.  If you go to the Garfield  stream ravine  and see the water draining off the steep hillsides, if you drive through seepy drainage pools off of West Bay drive, much of this water is coming from the Artesian aquifer.  Or of course, you can go the Artesian well along 4th avenue and drink the water clean from the pipe.  All of this is our water.

     This is ancient water.  Studies done by the Friends of the Well have found it to have a chemical signature that makes it about 2,000 years old.  In times past, this water fell on the uplands around the Salish Sea and drained into the aquifer under our feet.  This is ancient water.

     I went to Bigelow Springs with a group of Faery women.  We wanted to honor Earth day, but also the sacred waters and Great Mother Brigid.  She oversees not only all water, but also healers & herbalists & midwives (which roughly describes our group).  This custom of honoring sacred springs is a very old tradition in Ireland & Scotland.  All of us who came today to honor the springs have genetic roots to these homelands.  Today we reached back to our ancestors, connecting with our roots, and brought this heritage forward.

     This spring was no doubt revered by the Squaxin Indian people whose land this is.  But when  early Olympia settler Daniel Bigelow took out a homestead claim in 1851, his 160 acres encompassed the springs.  While he shared the water with his neighbors, it’s unlikely he welcomed the Squaxin people to come and do regular ceremonies to celebrate the water.  We think it has been a long time since anyone did so.  

      We kicked off our shoes and sat on the ground next to the springs,  reveling in the hot sun, and listened to the water gurgle gently past us. I borrowed Joanna’s Peruvian  rattle and led a shamanic journey to the Spirit of the Springs, introducing ourselves and  asking how we can honor this water.  We were told to bring flowers and float them down (Jess found golden dandelions to gift to the water).  We were told to gift the springs with silver ( that tradition of putting coins in a fountain comes out of the Celtic world), to give beautiful stones,  to leave hazelnuts and cream and Irish whiskey (traditional Faery gifts).  We were told to get our bare feet in the water;  the Spirit of the Spring especially enjoys the feet of children. 

    We followed an Irish tradition of walking a pattern clockwise three times around the well,  earth-stained bare feet on the grass, feeling the Great Mother beneath us, the water tumbling past, a male robin singing us around the circle.

     Here under the hot sun, Faery women of all ages:  maiden, mother and crone; come and go in the great circular pattern of life.   Here Julie played her Irish bodhran, the sound of the drum echoing down the hill.   Here Mia passed around water from the downtown Artesian well, helping us cool off from the unaccustomed heat.  Here I sang an Irish invocation song, calling in and praising Great Mother Brigid.  Here the women walked up and down the springs,  leaving gifts, leaving their footprints and taking home a potent sense of their Celtic roots.  And along the way,  we weave again an age-old and powerful connection to the water that infuses all our lives.

Resources:

•  Olympia’s Artesian Well:  http://olympiawa.gov/city-utilities/drinking-water/water-quality/Artesian%20Well%20Olympia.aspx

•  In Search of Ireland’s Holy Wells by Elizabeth Healy

•  photos by Nancy Partlow

Breaking Dormancy

It is nearly the end of March. And a cold, wet, gloomy & rheumy one as well. My spirits have been as low as the weather, and from what I hear around me, many of us are also feeling the same way, at least here in the Pacific Northwest where La Nina has presented us with yet another ugly spring. These are hard times for healers and our clients alike, as we all struggle to emerge from the cold, stagnant, closed-in days of a fading winter....

And yet...

• Last week we had a rare sunny day; by afternoon the temperature had climbed into the high fifties. I went outside WITHOUT A COAT and sat on the south-facing deck. I was basking in the golden sunlight, feeling a little like a hot biscuit all slathered with melting butter, sliding down onto the wooden bench. Around me a newly emerged Yellow-faced bumblebee queen flew in circles, checking out the crocus blossoms in our yard and then methodically searching the garden soil Glen had just dug up for possible abandoned mouse holes to nest in.

• And then there are the Bewick’s Wrens. This is a nondescript, sneaky little brown bird that lives year around in Northwest gardens; you might not even know they were around except they have a wide range of vivid, piercing songs.
I was sitting by the front window, looking gloomily out at the gray & rain, when up popped a pair of them in the mock orange bush next to the glass. They were clearly a mated pair, sitting very close to each other, gleaning bugs and also clearly picking through the moss for bedding for a nest they were building.
The wren was a sacred animal to the Celtic peoples of the Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Tom Cowan, a noted shamanic healer and Celtic scholar, writes this about the wren: “In the depths of winter, in the cold thrall of bitter weather, the wren sings. Alone among birds, the wren’s voice slides across joyful notes while nature is otherwise somber and silent. And in her song she reminds us of the beauty of spring, the mating calls of other birds who return in warmer days, the brightness of ever earlier dawns when all the world turns green again.” As I read this passage and remember the pair of wrens at my window, I realize how effective they are in lifting the gloom of winter, and reminding me that green spring is surely on its way.

• Then yesterday in a rare break from the rain I walked around to the sunny side of the house to check out my medicinal herb garden. I hadn’t looked at my plants for months, and was greatly heartened by what I saw. Both the rue and the helichrysum, native to warm southern Mediterranean lands, had survived the winter, a little beaten up to be sure, but still alive. At the base of last year’s dead fennel stalks, vigorous green shoots of new fennel are bursting through. And the mugwort, queen of my garden who is often slow to awake, has pushed through some vigorous green stalks of growth.

All of this makes a difference. I feel warmer, the blood moving more strongly through my veins. The cranky cold aches & pains of winter are subsiding, and I feel more energy pushing through, much like the stalks of mugwort pushing out of the cold ground. My spirits are lifting, and I once again find joy in the sight of the bumblebee, coming back to life after months in the cold ground. All around me, life is finding its way. And I , too, am breaking dormancy...


Janet Partlow

Resources:
• Wren photo by Nancy Partlow; all others by Janet Partlow
• Tom Cowan website www.riverdrum.com “Reviving the Wren”