One of my favorite “live action” lessons I had the awareness to recognize happened while I was going tubing with friends a few summers ago. We got to some rapids and one of my friends yelled, “Hold on tight!” and everyone gripped their tubes and jostled around the rocks and a few fell into the water. Not me. I decided to sit criss-cross-applesauce in the middle of my tube and put my total trust and faith in the river to guide me safely through. As I prayed to the river I seemed as if cradled by it, floating through the rapids without being jostled at all. When I got to…

The year is 2011 or 2012… Ayla Rose attended her very first (out of a total of 2) music festival. Growing up somewhat isolated on a horse ranch surrounded by woods, the second day of festivities overwhelmed her and she retreated into the surrounding woods. She found a little spring with a tree bowed down over it. It was just like the spring and the tree from Parlama, a small piece of the woods behind the barn, passed the pond, and through the prickers, that Ayla named, played in, and wrote stories about when she was a child. And so, she laid across the bowed tree and looked into the…

Those that know my history know that my longest battle has been for the health of my lungs. I had to have my lungs collapsed within the first few moments of my life and as a kid there was a limit of how far I could run before my lungs hurt. Ancestrally, my paternal grandmother died from lung cancer long before I was born. I smoked cigarettes for many years, vaped for many as well, before finally quitting in 2021. As a teenager, I smoked cannabis out of tinfoil bowls and scraped resin and plastic out of 2 liter bottle gravity bongs to smoke. I’ve had a chronic cough for…

We have a lot to be thankful for on the Hearth & Heart homestead. This year has been so full! I’m thankful for my health, of course, and how much the plants have come to support it this year! Breastfeeding has taken a lot out of me and I feel like I was sick at least once a month until I started taking the Mushroom Trinity daily. When I was sick, so many plants nurtured me back to health. My lungs needed the most support, and I am so thankful that the plants helped me heal from pneumonia without antibiotics. I am thankful for my partner, Adam’s, health. About a…