Our newsletter offers reflections from Earth Medicine Alliance members. This month's reflection is offered by Julia Elizabeth Jones, an EMA volunteer staff member who was raised on a 100-acre ranch nestled between Sunol Valley and Mission Peak. She is currently serving the Bay Area landscape through Our City Forest of San Jose, an urban forestry non-profit, and is training in the application of shamanic practice in psychotherapeutic healing.

 I am so happy and blessed to be introduced to and so warmly welcomed by the Earth Medicine Alliance community! Becoming a part of the Alliance is so perfectly tuned with my intentions as a human being that I am still feeling a reverberating sense of surrealism in its mere existence. All my life I have been engaging with the world in an animistic manner, feeling quite spread apart from others who live similarly, and here I find an entire localized network of very deeply embodied animistic caregivers of the Earth. Another piece of my lifepath in place. Thank you, thank you, thank you to the powers that be, and to all of you who now read my words.

I thought it would be most fun to share a short story from my life that I think illustrates what it can be like to live with attention to the land and the spirits of place while in this modern world.

My manager's farewell party was set in just a few hours' time. I had really enjoyed his company over the past year, and wanted to acknowledge him in some way. As I followed this desire deeper into my contemplative mind, I heard a great voice speak with authority, "Chris has worked on this land for many years. The land knows him, and has a gift for him to carry forward." With this in the back of my mind, I set out from our store, walked east through the Ohlone College campus, and entered into the wild hills of my birth. As I am wont to do, I left the trail and enjoyed each step into a grove of Quercus agrifolia, the ground thickly blanketed in the prickly crunch of its fallen leaves. Having walked quite a ways at this point, I tuned into the earth again, and saw the energy of my calling go down into a dry creek bed and upstream.

I walked for what felt like a long time, my curiosity peaking higher with each creekbend, and started to feel a bit like I was being led on a wild goose chase! Perhaps my guidance was leading me away from the farewell party for some unforeseen purpose... Just as I thought that, I looked up, and there on the shore was the decomposing body of a wild boar, returning to our Mother Earth. Oh, how I wanted to harvest its bones, its teeth, its hooves! As I bent over to start the collection, the voice strongly returned. I was to take one tooth, and one tooth only. One molar. And this molar was to be given to Chris along with a book of animal medicine, so that he could tap into the energy of the boar. This is what the land saw in him, and this is what the land wanted to awaken in his awareness.

"Can't I have just one tooth for myself?" No.

In the middle of a gathering of Starbuck's corporate managers, I presented Chris with a tiny box containing one boar molar and the story of how I obtained it for him. May he walk with the boar for the rest of his days.

(By the way, it was this same voice that told me to type "Earth Medicine" into the Google toolbar just one week before the 2011 conference.... Cheers!)