The evanhealy team with stewards and botanical advocates
Our summer has kicked off. I hope you follow along. This week we’re spending time with our frankincense stewards in Vermont, then later this month on to Oregon for a week with forty friends and colleagues associated with the Sustainable Herbs Initiative (SHI) and a few days as participants we’ll join 150 others at the Oshala Farm Herb Camp. In August we’ll be traveling to Morning Myst Botanics, Washington – the farm of Jud and Anne Carlton – to host a dozen retailers and an equal number of advocates and stewards from all over the world – California and Oregon as well as Morocco and Ghana.
In setting my intention for our summer’s journey I found myself drawn to a December 2024 Substack post by SHI founder Ann Armbrecht titled “Transformative Learning in Nicaragua. A Sustainable Herbs Initiative Journey.” It reports on a journey she co-led with Jefferson Shriver, founder and CEO of Doselva, a supplier of organic spices in partnership with smallholder farms in Honduras and Nicaragua.
Their journey told of dialogue walks and community building with 17 members and a forestry professor from Virginia Tech. A visit to pre-Columbian archaeological sites, reflections on land, heritage, and colonization. Processing herbs and harvesting coffee alongside workers. Reflections, intentions, and finding magic while in the forest. And from the group’s shared visions for transformative change, Ann writes that
‘I found myself gathered with others on the forest floor. Though I couldn’t have described it, I realized this had been my vision. For all of us to be present on the forest floor, present to what arises, listening to that arising and tending it, creating a structure that contains the flow, so that our work is aligned with all that is living. I didn’t do anything. I followed my own longing for depth and connection and that led me to others who felt that longing as well.’
My personal journey brought me to skincare. Like Ann I didn’t have a clearly articulated vision. Rather I sensed that skincare could be a vehicle to deepen my connection to my dharma. Over time, perhaps the first decade, I saw how our approach fostered a way of being in the world. Our approach struck a deep chord. Our customers wanted to purchase ‘that’, though my sense was that ‘that’ wasn’t a thing, rather a feeling. Yet it only seemed to make sense that as a company selling skincare products that ‘that feeling’ must be the products. So our products sold, and our customers engaged with them in a kind of ritual, something out of the ordinary vein of a commercial transaction. Funds were exchanged, yet the experience was something closer to sacred.
What was it? Was it our heart-felt intention? If it was, it was too early to have been a clearly articulated one. Was it the plants and herbs? Perhaps. We were still early in the process of sourcing directly from farms, villages, co-operatives. Was it our consciousness? Our way of seeing the world, engaging with it?
David Gordon, ceo / cofounder of evanhealy with Ann Armbrecht, founder of SHI
At each step of development I paid attention. I have never been drawn to what others are doing. I would never be able to keep up. There are so many different ideas, some smart, others not. My teacher Maharishi taught me to meditate and act. Deep silence followed by action. Don’t think too much about it. I remember him saying ‘see the job, do the job, stay out of the misery’. Follow your path. Pay attention to what’s in front of you. Mary Oliver, in her essay “Upstream,” wrote that “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” To pay attention is to engage with the sacred.
Is it possible that when a company pays attention that it enlivens the sacred? If so, is that restricted to its products, or does the sacred expand into the world with everyone that it connects with? Customers, vendors, stewards, affiliates, fellow businesspeople and so on. I like to think so.
Next week a handful of us travel to Vermont. We’re going to spend a day distilling frankincense resin with the folks from Boswellness – founders Madhi and Jamie and colleague Casey. We’ve been working with them for fifteen years. I believe that Jamie and Casey visited with us twice in the last decade, the last time three years ago in our Carlsbad facility. Mahdi came to Canada from his native Somaliland decades ago as a student where he met Jamie. Wanting to maintain a connection to his homeland, and prompted by a dream of his father, he identified the frankincense trade. A way to harvest deep ancestral knowledge from his homeland while honoring the sacred traditions of stewardship of Somaliland’s people.
The next day we’ll spend time with Sustainable Herbs Initiative (SHI) visionary, writer and anthropologist Ann Armbrecht; Guido Masé, principal scientist, chief formulator, herbal educator at Traditional Medicinals; and Nate Brennan, Manager Operations & Sales, Foster Farm Botanicals. Plus Northern Harmony Naturals broker-sales team president Jen White and her 3 colleagues. Taking place at Foster Farm Botanicals, it’s an informal day of catching up on SHI initiatives, identifying shared interests, and future SHI gatherings.
- David Gordon Co-Founder CEO evanhealy
