Rosemary Gladstar’s Wisdom on Visibility, Grief, and Money
Rosemary Gladstar is one of the most recognizable names in herbalism. With many decades of experience, she has wisdom and stories to share in abundance. Through her work and life, she models the natural cycles of waxing and waning like the moon, and reminds us that it is natural to have periods of focusing inwards and periods of outward expression.
Through it all her spiritual connection to plants has guided her heart and mind. Just like her grandmother who survived the Armenian death march by using her knowledge of edible plants and faith to keep her alive. Rosemary has held plants sacred to her life with a similar passion.
Danielle and Rosemary discuss making the invisible, visible by clearly naming our work and claiming it. Now that Covid has unmoored all of us, there are many shifts happening. Women have always been doing the work, as healers, life coaches, and so much more resource providing avenues.
The shift of moving these skills into paid work is exciting but also uncomfortable. Part of this shift is moving into a place of comfort in regards to the financial management of our businesses. Rosemary had to change her agreement with herself to move her work into a profit generating business and let go of old beliefs about money. She shares how she has sustained her own healing practices to get her through grief, and now she is embracing being unmoored.
In this episode Rosemary and Danielle discuss:
Making the invisible, visible
Rosemary’s decision to change her agreement with herself about money
How Rosemary’s personal grounding practices helped her through grief
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[00:06:22] Rosemary: It was so beautiful. And I, you know, I also wanna say that the moon illuminates our own paths in life. You know, we don't all always stand in the fullness. I mean, that's natural. We are waning and waxing constantly. And as women, we know that, we know that intimately through our moon cycles, through our cycles of womanhood, you know, from the young woman to the middle aged woman to the chrome, you know those three amazing stages. And within that, all the other stages. So, we're not always in full bloom. That would be totally exhausting by the way. So I think it's good to acknowledge that to start off.
[00:28:08] Rosemary: So when I first moved to New England, I spent a lot of time hiking, being out in the woods in the wilderness, you know, finding plants like Golden Seal and Gin Sing and, which I never found in the wild. It's so rare. Rare. But a lot of the plants that are native to different regions, and again, you know, there's really reflections for humans and.
[00:31:42] Danielle: And it can also be really uncomfortable. So I just, I just, as you were speaking about it, I was thinking like, wow, there's a whole other wave of that happening now, particularly in the realm of things like life coaches and all of these other career paths that 40 years ago, either didn't exist at all or were really, really, really outliers. But the work itself was happening. And so, so much of our work really is about making the invisible visible, right? And really like bringing forward and, and naming and claiming and being able to be resourced in all of these things that we keep working on and working with. So one of the things that you've been, that you were up against and that you navigated in the not too distant fast was going up against the federal courts in order to protect.
[00:47:39] Rosemary: But what I'm trying to say is that's not always has to be you that's doing that, but somebody has to do that for you if you can't do it for yourself. But yeah, that was all I had to do is I had to change my own agreement with myself and then I was able to, Monitor and manage that money better
About Rosemary
All my life I’ve had a deep love and fascination with plants. I started ‘studying’ them when I was in the 7-8th grade and did my school projects both on Native edible and medicinal uses of plants of Sonoma County. These plants have always been special friends of mine my whole life, no matter how far I’ve traveled or lived.
I grew up on a small dairy farm in Sonoma County, surrounded by the lush greenery of the meadows and hills of this special plant paradise. And my grandmother, my mother’s mother, Mary Egitkhanoff, lived near us as we were growing up. She knew her plants! She use to tell us that it was her belief in God and her knowledge of the plants that saved her life. And she meant it literally. She and my grandfather both were survivors of the Armenian genocide. She felt it was her ‘religious duty’ to teach us about God ~ and plants. And what she taught, at least about the plants, stuck with me all my life!
I can’t say I actually knew I was going to be an ‘herbalist’ when I was younger. I mean, it wasn’t actually a career option back then! But I knew somehow intrinsically that I would be called into the service of the green. They began to talk to me when I was very young ~ and, fortunately, nobody told me I was crazy for listening! When I was in my twenties, I took off on a horseback trip with my toddler son and a young girlfriend who I had met up in Canada. We rode horseback from my parent’s back yard to the Trinity Alps of northern California ~ a three and a half month odyssey. It was a great adventure! We rode every day, bedded the horses and ourselves down each night tired but excited, and woke up the next morning ready to ride some more!
The great thing about that journey was that we ‘wild crafted’ our food almost entirely. We had a little pan that we carried with us and we would cook a few greens at night, and eat some seeds and wild fruit we found along the way. The only other food we had was some trail mix that we would munch on when we got hungry ~ and occasionally when we’d ride by a store, which was not often, believe me! ~ We’d buy a jar of peanut butter and scarf it down. I don’t think we could have lived forever on such a diet, but we were sure healthy that summer. Maybe healthier and more fit than I’ve ever been since. And my son, who was 3 years old at the time, had a great time. He looked like a little nature-loving boy, dark and brown skinned but with a golden halo of hair and rosy cheeks kissed by the sun.
It was when I arrived home in the fall from a summer of riding, wild and free, and so close to nature and plants, that I knew I was ready to start the ‘give back’. I felt like I was living in a period of grace and that was good, but now, I had to give back a little of all that I had received. I think that might have been ‘the moment’ when I knew I was an herbalist! That was in 1971. In 1972, with the help of some great friends, primarily Drake Sadler, Rosemary Sutton and Warren Raysor, I opened Rosemary’s Garden, a little apothecary in the back of the Guerneville Natural Food store.
The rest is history!
You can find Rosemary on her website and Instagram
Opening poem read by Danielle: Full Moon by Alice Oswald
Closing song sung by Rosemary: The Spirit of Plants by Lisa Thiel
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This podcast was produced by The Willoughby Co.