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My Personal Journey to Herbs
I didn’t come to herbalism out of a back to the land sentiment, or hippie idealism (not that I’m not an idealist hippie, I am!). I came to it out of desperation.
[Warning - detailed female specific medical stuff coming up!]
From the time I was two years old I suffered recurrent urinary tract infections. I was examined at Boston's Children Hospital and Stanford University without any lasting success. When I became a teen these went into remission but it came back with a vengeance when I was 18. I'd have a painful infection for a week, I'd go on antibiotics for a week and suffer all of the gastrointestinal side effects of that, then I'd get a yeast infection which would take about a week to conquer and the final week of the month I'd have my period. After six months of that, I went to the doctor who said that the only alternative to this cycle was a surgery that they generally did on 70 year olds. My mom, z"l, who had witnessed this whole trajectory, suggested that urinary tract infections were a problem women had dealt with for much longer than western medicine and that we should look into what previous generations had done.
She found a book, Healing Wise by the venerable and aptly named Susan Weed. That's how I learned about my lifelong ally, dandelion. I began preparing and drinking dandelion root decoction, and within half a year the infections stopped and the cycle was broken! I learned what triggered the problem and if I had to encounter a trigger I knew what steps to take to tame it. Over time I learned how to treat it at various stages and how to prevent the infection in the first place. This was transformative and liberating! I began to casually learn more, and then in 1991, the Northern California Women's Herbalist Symposium was created. My mother and I attended the very first one at Ocean Song, we went to 10 of these gatherings together and I spent over 150 hours studying from the brilliant herbalist women that the inspired Terry Jensen brought in to teach over that decade. In 2023 and 2024 I taught at four NCWHS Symposia. I’m forever grateful to Terri and her crew for creating that space and opportunity.
When I traveled abroad for the first time at age 21, I returned home to discover a lump in my breast. It was painful enough to keep me from my beloved Jazzercise! I went to a doctor who sent me to a surgeon. That surgeon kept his hands on my knees throughout the exam, called all women including the referring doctor and myself, “girls”, and made an analogy between breast self exams and a local freeway.
He determined it wasn't cancer. Once he verified that he wouldn't be cutting me, he lost interest. I told him I was very grateful it wasn't cancer yet it was still painful and limiting. He said it was “probably fibrocystis”. Probably didn’t feel good enough and so I returned to Susan Weed’s writings and learned about violet as a breast ally. I made and drank infusions and then utilized the warm wet plant mass (known as “the marc” by herbalists) topically as a poultice. In 6 months the lump went from the size of a golf ball to being imperceptible. Now I was totally hooked!
Atava Garcia Swiecicki was another student from the Northern California Women's Herbalist Symposium who, like me at the time, lived in San Francisco. We got together with others, calling ourselves the Urban Herbalists and experimented together making oils, salves and tinctures. I reached out to her a couple of decades later, after she published The Curanderx Toolkit: Reclaiming Ancestral Latinx Plant Medicine and Rituals for Healing to ask how she went about writing about her book. Like me she has different lineages on each side of her family and was deeply engaged in reviving the traditions of one of them. She shared that her (excellent!) book was created largely from notes for teaching classes. This made perfect sense to me, instead of imagining what people might be interested in, I could present information and find out what was not of interest, what people had burning questions about, what they already knew, and so on. Writing that reflects the interrelational nature of knowledge exchange, rather than the musing of a person alone in their garret.
Concurrently with all of this, I was a live theater actor. Beginning at the age of 11, I was constantly rehearsing or performing. I was in the first graduating class of School of the Arts (SOTA) High School with the double major of theater and vocal music and then I was off to conservatory for a theater major and political science minor. I returned home to California as I didn't like the Midwest and it was mutual!
Concurrently with all of this, I was a live theater actor. Beginning at the age of 11, I was constantly rehearsing or performing. I was in the first graduating class of School of the Arts (SOTA) High School with the double major of theater and vocal music and then I was off to conservatory for a theater major and political science minor. I returned home to California as I didn't like the Midwest and it was mutual!
While I was at SOTA I did a children's play that the great Mickey Rooney came to see. He came up to me after the show, clapped his hand on my shoulder and said “You got it kid!”, so when I was 21 and saw an audition notice for a children's theater piece that would support a basic existence I jumped at the chance and began work in the South Bay doing children's theater. I’m a sucker for physical comedy, and I fused my love for theater, the environment, and fish flops, in well over a dozen plays on environmental themes for adults as well as kids. When that gig ended I returned to the East Bay where I began to do improv gigs at the local classic dive - La Val's. I also took all manner of live theater jobs from dance theater to Shakespeare to corporate gigs but it was a meager living. Having grown up as the daughter of a jazz musician I was no stranger to poverty or the beauties of an artistic life. I yearned for both stability and creativity. Some of the people I improvised with had an amazing job using theater as a teaching tool for science at UC Berkeley's public science center, the Lawrence Hall of science. The first play I did there was in 1992, based on the exhibit 1492: Two Worlds of Science, which depicted the sophistication of indigenous sciences along with those of the Spanish. I was drawn by the deep environmental and social themes. Then in many future plays I’d do things like wear a seastar costume that would allow me to evert my stomach and mimic sucking a child’s head out of a paper mache shell. Range!
I often quipped that I would perform for short people in the day (at the museum and schools across California) and for taller people at night (in venues like Shotgun Players, Fools Fury, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, etc.). Through the Hall I was treated to over 200 professional development centers sessions balancing my intensive education in the arts. I got to learn climate change from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, astronomy from NASA, the food pyramid by the National Institute of Health, etc. I also did voiceovers for the National Science Foundation, wrote plays for local and state governments. I got to co-write with the brilliant Gigi Dornfest, my mentor and the creator of the innovative department I worked for and learned so much from. We wrote a chapter about the use of theatre in museums (in this book by the lovely and insightful Tessa Bridal) as well as curriculum about the use of theater as a teaching tool for problem solving and communication skills. I trial tested that at Thunder Road (a lockdown drug rehab unit in Oakland) and we trained teachers in our methods, at a national conference that brought us teachers from Singapore to Scotland who took our ideas to students in places we’ve never been.
Two years into the theatre and educational work, Gigi noticed I often went on solo backpacking trips and that other actors would come to me to ask about what herbs to take for colds and such. And she knew there were no schools to perform for in the summer. She kindly asked me if I'd like to work in the summer doing environmental education. Of course I was delighted to accept. I began to teach about the natural history of California, specifically the native plants and the people who stewarded them and the land so wisely. In order to do that well I had to deepen my learning about Native California people and plants and their relationship. Long before the acronym DEI was known, Gigi knew we couldn't teach kids about the land without teaching about the people who had stewarded the land. Gigi hired Native people to provide us with professional development, to tell us what they wanted us to share with youth about their culture and their relationship to nature. I'm forever grateful for her insight and their teachings. I then studied with Dr. Susan Lobo about Bay Area Native communities. She took our class to the Intertribal Friendship House, I followed up to see how I might be of service and they encouraged me to reach out to a residential treatment center for Native women with their kids (the establishment has unfortunately since folded). I did and spent the next few years going each week to work with them to create healing gardening program, each woman selecting and planting an herb from her tribe and childhood memories. Later I was able to hire a counselor from the program to come and consult about the Native relationship to tobacco for a play I wrote about the effects that industry has in global food production and their manipulation of youth and marginalized communities.
So I’m performing, doing environmental education, and all the while, being Jewish, as one does. In 1996 I ran across an ad for a class about Biblical ethnobotany at Lehrhaus Judaica by a Rabbi Jonathan Seidel, who had just gotten his PhD in Gender, Politics and Magic in the Ancient World. Fascinating! What a pleasure to learn from this warm and deeply knowledgeable teacher, he knew so much about the Jewish texts that spoke of plants. I would respectfully interject botanical insights throughout the course. At the end of the series he told me how he'd valued my input and that he would be teaching the course again in a couple of weeks at the Berkeley Richmond JCC (now the JCC East Bay) and would I co-teach with him? I was thrilled at the invitation and credit him with beginning my professional path of teaching about the intersection of plants and Jewish cultures.
After 18 years (chai!) at the Lawrence Hall of Science, I left to focus full time on the creation of a new family. My beloved husband (also of 18 years, again with the chai!) shared my vision of a dedicated balebuste to focus on the raising of the kids and the generating of a warm, loving home. To return some of this incredible fortune to the community, I volunteered regularly for a wide range of civic organizations and schools. With his support, I was able to spend my time raising our beautiful kids, feeding us all organic, healthy food, making celebratory traditions of Shabbat and the Jewish holiday cycle and doing tikkun activities in the community. My favorite herbal adventure with our kids was when each was 2 years old, we planted an echinacea in our backyard together. When the root was ready to harvest three years later, and they were about to enter kindergarten, we harvested the root and made a glycerite, which protected them from the constant sniffles their peers experienced that year. My time caring for our family is a profound influence on my understanding of maintaining health through foodways and gentle folk medicine. These 18 years are my balebuste street cred, complementing my bookcases of reference materials as a source of knowledge.
In 2020, just like everyone else, my world tilted on its axis. All the volunteer work I’d been doing ceased. I missed being in community and so began taking online writing courses. I enjoyed them and wondered what to write about. During this time, I had begun my work with the Sacred Land Committee. They informed me of a plan to take a course about Jewish ethnobotany, and I was gobsmacked, I’d never heard of anyone else teaching the subject. I signed up for the course given by the marvelous Naomi Spector. It was like looking in a time travel mirror, seeing a woman about 20 years younger than me, with the same name, teaching the subject I had only known myself to be curious about. As I was enjoying and marvelling over this development, who should come on the screen but Rabbi Seidel, who I’d worked with those decades before! I reached out in the chat to see if he remembered me and to my delight he instantly did and immediately invited me to begin teaching with him again.
That’s the genesis of Balebuste Botanicals. I’ve been completely fascinated to read & research, write curriculum, and most of all to do first person research with Shoah survivors, ever since. Thanks for checking out this site and reading my quirky story! I hope you’ll come to a class or event, join the mailing list or introduce yourself and tell me about what you are curious or knowledgeable about.
I often quipped that I would perform for short people in the day (at the museum and schools across California) and for taller people at night (in venues like Shotgun Players, Fools Fury, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, etc.). Through the Hall I was treated to over 200 professional development centers sessions balancing my intensive education in the arts. I got to learn climate change from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, astronomy from NASA, the food pyramid by the National Institute of Health, etc. I also did voiceovers for the National Science Foundation, wrote plays for local and state governments. I got to co-write with the brilliant Gigi Dornfest, my mentor and the creator of the innovative department I worked for and learned so much from. We wrote a chapter about the use of theatre in museums (in this book by the lovely and insightful Tessa Bridal) as well as curriculum about the use of theater as a teaching tool for problem solving and communication skills. I trial tested that at Thunder Road (a lockdown drug rehab unit in Oakland) and we trained teachers in our methods, at a national conference that brought us teachers from Singapore to Scotland who took our ideas to students in places we’ve never been.
Two years into the theatre and educational work, Gigi noticed I often went on solo backpacking trips and that other actors would come to me to ask about what herbs to take for colds and such. And she knew there were no schools to perform for in the summer. She kindly asked me if I'd like to work in the summer doing environmental education. Of course I was delighted to accept. I began to teach about the natural history of California, specifically the native plants and the people who stewarded them and the land so wisely. In order to do that well I had to deepen my learning about Native California people and plants and their relationship. Long before the acronym DEI was known, Gigi knew we couldn't teach kids about the land without teaching about the people who had stewarded the land. Gigi hired Native people to provide us with professional development, to tell us what they wanted us to share with youth about their culture and their relationship to nature. I'm forever grateful for her insight and their teachings. I then studied with Dr. Susan Lobo about Bay Area Native communities. She took our class to the Intertribal Friendship House, I followed up to see how I might be of service and they encouraged me to reach out to a residential treatment center for Native women with their kids (the establishment has unfortunately since folded). I did and spent the next few years going each week to work with them to create healing gardening program, each woman selecting and planting an herb from her tribe and childhood memories. Later I was able to hire a counselor from the program to come and consult about the Native relationship to tobacco for a play I wrote about the effects that industry has in global food production and their manipulation of youth and marginalized communities.
So I’m performing, doing environmental education, and all the while, being Jewish, as one does. In 1996 I ran across an ad for a class about Biblical ethnobotany at Lehrhaus Judaica by a Rabbi Jonathan Seidel, who had just gotten his PhD in Gender, Politics and Magic in the Ancient World. Fascinating! What a pleasure to learn from this warm and deeply knowledgeable teacher, he knew so much about the Jewish texts that spoke of plants. I would respectfully interject botanical insights throughout the course. At the end of the series he told me how he'd valued my input and that he would be teaching the course again in a couple of weeks at the Berkeley Richmond JCC (now the JCC East Bay) and would I co-teach with him? I was thrilled at the invitation and credit him with beginning my professional path of teaching about the intersection of plants and Jewish cultures.
After 18 years (chai!) at the Lawrence Hall of Science, I left to focus full time on the creation of a new family. My beloved husband (also of 18 years, again with the chai!) shared my vision of a dedicated balebuste to focus on the raising of the kids and the generating of a warm, loving home. To return some of this incredible fortune to the community, I volunteered regularly for a wide range of civic organizations and schools. With his support, I was able to spend my time raising our beautiful kids, feeding us all organic, healthy food, making celebratory traditions of Shabbat and the Jewish holiday cycle and doing tikkun activities in the community. My favorite herbal adventure with our kids was when each was 2 years old, we planted an echinacea in our backyard together. When the root was ready to harvest three years later, and they were about to enter kindergarten, we harvested the root and made a glycerite, which protected them from the constant sniffles their peers experienced that year. My time caring for our family is a profound influence on my understanding of maintaining health through foodways and gentle folk medicine. These 18 years are my balebuste street cred, complementing my bookcases of reference materials as a source of knowledge.
In 2020, just like everyone else, my world tilted on its axis. All the volunteer work I’d been doing ceased. I missed being in community and so began taking online writing courses. I enjoyed them and wondered what to write about. During this time, I had begun my work with the Sacred Land Committee. They informed me of a plan to take a course about Jewish ethnobotany, and I was gobsmacked, I’d never heard of anyone else teaching the subject. I signed up for the course given by the marvelous Naomi Spector. It was like looking in a time travel mirror, seeing a woman about 20 years younger than me, with the same name, teaching the subject I had only known myself to be curious about. As I was enjoying and marvelling over this development, who should come on the screen but Rabbi Seidel, who I’d worked with those decades before! I reached out in the chat to see if he remembered me and to my delight he instantly did and immediately invited me to begin teaching with him again.
That’s the genesis of Balebuste Botanicals. I’ve been completely fascinated to read & research, write curriculum, and most of all to do first person research with Shoah survivors, ever since. Thanks for checking out this site and reading my quirky story! I hope you’ll come to a class or event, join the mailing list or introduce yourself and tell me about what you are curious or knowledgeable about.
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