About The Barnyard Midwife

The story of my joUrney

First farm

It seems I was always destined for farm life. Being born on two rural acres in north Sebastopol to my back to the land parents who already had goats, bees, chickens and a huge vegetable garden, its easy to see that my roots dug deep. I always loved going down to the barn to milk the goats and collect eggs with my mom. I could milk our two big white dairy goats all the way by the time I was 10. We raised a turkey for thanksgiving a couple times and all of us were there for the big moment and then helped to pluck it. My dad would go abalone diving and he would get all us kids pounding out the meat for what seemed like hours. I have always connected the land where I live to where my food comes from.

Herbal medicine

“Food as Medicine” is a tenet of my life. Herbal medicine is so tightly interwoven with holistic nutrition for me that they feel inseparable. My parents gave me an upbringing rich with folk remedies. They were always giving us real food and talking about what it fed in our bodies. When I was 3 I had my first (and Only) earache and my mom put warm olive oil and a small clove of garlic in my ear and covered my head and ears with a handkerchief for a few days, it was better that night but they persisted for a few more days to make sure it wouldn’t come back. And I absorbed deeply when they told me that if they had given me antibiotics that the ear aches would have continued to come back. I remember the bitter goldenseal powder and vitamin C chewables my dad would always give us when we had anything slightly off. “You gotta feed your immune system” he would say. At 20 years old I took a year long herbal apprenticeship and those foundational lessons in medicine making and herbal actions still resonante through my practice today. At 24 I got the honor to live with an amazing medicine maker and study at home every day, the lessons went into my body through my hands doing the work and my mind understanding the plant’s jobs.

Nature spirit

That term “the Great Outdoors” has always made so much sense to me, it IS pretty great! My very early childhood was mostly spent outside with my big sister. I was always climbing the apple tree overhanging our garden, picking teensy wildflower bouquets, swinging so high that my toes could touch the tips of that apple tree, digging in the silty soil under the house, picking blackberries and ollalie berries till my fingers were almost black with the juice. As an older kid and teen I remember spending hours with my notebook sketching the wildflowers or my toes in the grasses and writing poetry. The calm quiet of a walk in the woods has always caused a deep reverence in me that still to this day can bring me to tears.

ceremony

In Sonoma County the 90s saw a community of public pagan ceremony that was nondenominational and non dogmatic. I started attending the many rituals of the wheel of the year and this fed me so deeply to connect my spirituality to the earth rhythms. Finally feeling it resonate in my bones to celebrate my ancestry with the seasons, the elements and the directions and connecting those with altruistic intentions for the planet. At 16 I was initiated as a Celtic Wiccan Priestess and my cells felt alive with my heritage and my calling to lead my community in earth based ceremony. I brought these traditions to my family and have raised our children in the wheel of the earth year where we celebrate the cycles of the seasons and our journey around the sun. For the last 5 years I co-facilitate a women’s New Moon Circle with 4 other moms in my heart family and have co-created some amazing ceremony for dozens of women. I have also continued to study different Native and Latin American traditions of earth ceremony under a Quiero Apache “auntie” who is a Medicine Woman and an Ecuadorian Curandera who have expanded my understanding of prayer and ritual.

Permaculture

My deep love of earth led me back from the woods to the garden. I was a core member on the founding board of Planting Earth Activation, a local nonprofit started by 9 of us local 18-21 yr old kids. We gathered donations of seed, soil and plants to install and teach about organic, heirloom, open pollinated gardens in west Sonoma county resident’s front and backyards. We tore out lawns and took down fences and neighbors created community super gardens all over sebastopol. At 20 I took my Permaculture Design Course at The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center with Brock Dolman and Penny Livingston and it gave me a lens to look at every landscape and structure and business through. All 9 of us board members took our PDC between 1999 and 2000. Still using permaculture principles to guide and inform my plans today, I teach people how to keep water in a landscape and “slow it, spread it, sink it!”

Arts~

Mindfulness~

Family~