Another instalment on our regenerative journey recorded by Co-Founder CEO David Gordon. This time our rag-tag alchemists find themselves on a planetary beauty and healing mission. Side by side we journey not just to learn but to remember, the earth asks for stewards not owners. The herbs call for respect not dominion and so we walk toward the horizon and each other seeking the story that binds us to the sea to the soil to the unseen root of all things.
Our rag-tag alchemists gather with thirty-one of our brokers in our Carlsbad homebase to explore the big questions of life. We enlist Ann Armbrecht, founder and director of the Sustainable Herbs Initiative (SHI), to lead a Learning Journey. She’ll help us explore how our inner and outer worlds connect and to better grasp how we might share this with our community.
Day one starts with an early morning beach walk. As we go through each day, two evanhealy team members go to work. Storyteller Chris shares images and key ideas with Shirley Jo who interprets them and then shares with us on social media. Of the morning walk, they interpret:
At the edge of the world where the tide greets the dawn. Barefoot we gather held by the cradle of sand. The ocean whispers its ancient hymn. A language older than words inviting us to listen. Dolphins rise arching joy into the morning air. A lesson in grace in being, in belonging. The leap, a question. Why are you here? What song will you carry back to the land? Side by side we begin this journey not just to learn but to remember, the earth asks for stewards not owners. The herbs call for respect not dominion and so we walk toward the horizon and each other seeking the story that binds us to the sea to the soil to the unseen root of all things.
After breakfast, peer-to-peer listening walks allow us to better know each other. Settling back into the big hall, plants featured in our products, like geranium and lavender, centerpiece our worktables. We contemplate, draw, and tell their stories. In the afternoon, we select and mix a few of the very herbs and oils – like sage, chamomile, rose petal, hops, calendula, lavender and olive – showcased in our products. Throughout we check in with each other to see what resonates, and how that shapes our thinking.
Later on, at our tables, we map our worldview drawing on the infusions that we had earlier created. We draft other materials – stones, moss, trinkets – to this cause. In small groups we ask ourselves how do we see the world around us? What are the forces at work? How does that shape how we engage in the world? Then we move to reshaping the world the way we’d like to see it.
Ann describes it this way: While this morning was about tapping into our inner story and our own compass, this afternoon is around the system and what’s called 3D mapping. Inner and outer change are inextricably linked. We can’t have one without the other. It takes being rooted in our own self, as well as an awareness of what we are working with and bringing our vision to that with a realistic expectation of what can be changed. Of what the leverage points of change are and then bringing our own action and journey into that larger scope. So the question – or is it a statement – that she challenges us to map is this: evanhealy is on a planetary beauty and healing mission.
Chris and Shirley Jo interpret this shared experience:
Around the table hands meet the wisdom of leaves, petals and buds. Fingers brushing against centuries of sun and soil. The plants breathe stories into the air. Whispering of roots that know the way back home. Grounding someone murmurs. Peace another says and the scent of chamomile rises. A quiet balm for the restless heart. Ann’s voice calls us to listen, to meet the plants not as ingredients but as companions each with a face, a name, a spirit, a gift to offer. We all have our own medicine someone says, and we remember it’s not just the plants we’re blending but pieces of ourselves, fragments longing for wholeness. The room hums with wonder with unspoken knowing that we like the plants are here to be seen, to be known, to heal.
As these two days unfold I sense that we are uncovering the invisible forces at play in our lives. We see their outsized impact on how we think and what we do. That connecting deeply to the vitality of soil and herbs more firmly grounds us. That our simple intentions inform our view of the world. And that the more we grasp all of this, the more we access our deeper self. And in turn this places us more firmly at the center of our stories.
Ann asks that I share a story that has deeply informed my worldview. I turn to a story Maharishi told about a seagull mother whose eggs were swept away by the high tide of the ocean and how her immediate response was to challenge the ocean to return her eggs or that she would drink the ocean dry. Without a response from the ocean, she begins beakful by beakful to empty the ocean dry. Her passionate response draws the attention of all the seagulls and from there the king of the seagulls hears of her plight. From there her pain reaches the god of nature. And with the god’s demand the ocean return her eggs. Ann quietly comments to me that she loves the way the seagull simply acts. Jamie, not so quietly and in perhaps a not-so-polite version comments, Don’t mess with a mother.
Ann tells a story when she was in northeastern Nepal about a time long ago when the ancestors moved away from human villages because humans could only see with their eyes, which made them selfish. The story reveals that humans couldn’t see beyond the surface, whereas the ancestors could see ‘double’. That the ancestors could see the living and the non-living.
I studied with Maharishi from the age of 17. He taught me that inner life supported outer life. That the deep stillness of meditation guided our work in the world.
Ann connects this to evanhealy products. That there’s much more that goes into our products than what meets the eye. From the soil to the intention of those harvesting to how we prepare our products here in Carlsbad. Ann references a book by philosopher Robert Pogue Harrison called ‘Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition’.
She says that Harrison talks about what he calls the lost art of seeing. Specifically that what we see depends on history and culture as much as the shape and structure of our eyes. Seeing what is, Harrison says, takes time. It requires a kind of depth perception that is no longer characteristic of this age.
Ann continues on saying that she doesn’t think seeing double is something that’s only reserved for the ancestors. That the work we are doing in the Learning Journey reveals that this ability is something that we all have the capacity for and that as we cultivate it we are creating conditions for it to arise and thrive.
Ann references another concept, called the ‘laral’ value of a thing, also from Robert Pogue Harrison’s writing. The laral value of a thing is the care that passes from us into the object that makes that object something that we can “live by.”
Ann writes about this concept in her Substack: aarmbrecht.substack.com/p/the-laral-value-of-a-thing: Though our economic system suggests otherwise, any object is what it is by virtue of its relationship with the world around it and no object can be fully understood without understanding those relations. Plants show this more than anything else.
The shape of the stem, the length of the roots, the chemical content of the leaves, all depend directly on the soil in which a plant grows, on the amount of sunlight and rain, on how warm it is or how cold. Not only does the plant, even after it is harvested, carry the qualities of the place where it grew, how it is harvested and handled impacts what and whether the constituents needed remain present as it travels from source to finished product.
The quality of any product made from that plant is directly connected to its life-story, not only in biological terms, but its cultural and economic and political story as well. That we imagine this to be otherwise has to do with what we have been taught to see – or not see – in the world around us. Not because those relations don’t exist.
In her writing Ann continues: In an industry governed by the logic of capital, a logic that depends on severing objects from this nexus of relations, do some products maintain this more-than thingness, in other words, their laral value? How do we know when that aliveness is there or what difference it even makes? How do we tell when it is lost? Most importantly, perhaps, how do we know what we have lost when that aliveness is gone? In our session Ann concludes that this exploration of the laral value of a thing is what has animated her journey of following herbs to their source.
So many of these exercises take us out of our heads and place us in our hearts. Over the years I have come to understand that engaging in the world is different from analyzing it. That engaging with the land, its stewards and plants is different than studying them. I have come to see that we can present the evanhealy brand, not just as a vehicle for transformative skin health, but a vehicle to engage with the world – and in doing so to change the world. We don’t have to know the answer intellectually. Rather a deep inner awareness guides us.
Unseen forces exist for that very purpose. To provide an opportunity, a doorway, to something bigger than ourselves.
A few weeks after our Learning Journey we’re watching the Biggest Little Farm in our Monday morning meeting. The movie chronicles the eight-year quest of John and Molly Chester as they trade city living for 200 acres of barren farmland and a dream to harvest in harmony with nature.
In one particular scene John describes watching Todd, their big-eyed love of a dog, patiently surveying the goings on of farm life from his meadow perch. The depth of Todd’s stillness, his quiet calm patience, strikes John with a realization that when a problem arises that it’s okay just to sit and watch, to see what happens, to see where it leads.
Though I don’t think he says it this way the meaning is clear. Somewhere somehow there are forces at work, unseen, ready to guide us.
