GoFundMe Update #5

We hope everyone is recovering from the intensity of the solar eclipse followed by a Mercury retrograde! 

We’re currently working on a big-picture project which is to create a new community co-op membership option so that y’all can be part of the co-op too! Creating a safe, magical community space is the mission that keeps us going every day, and lots of folks have asked how they can be a part of it, so we’re working with the Northwest Co-op Development Center and students at Evergreen College to work out the details to make this happen.

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Temple of Earth Apothecary

We here at The Raven’s Wing are sad to say good bye to our Oakland location but are also excited to see our vacated space transform into something new. Temple of Earth Apothecary will be taking over the space and it’s sure to be beautiful! This week I had the pleasure of interviewing Danielle from Temple of Earth Apothecary in order to get to know her better and find out what her plans are for the space.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background as a magical practitioner?

I am a healing artist and I work for justice, freedom and love for my people. I have been supporting beautiful people with the medicines and healing arts of my lineages formally for the last four years through my practice that I call Evolutionary Medicine. This practice is a natural combination of modalities that my healing journey has brought me to with the guidance of the medicine people on my bloodlines — those of the chronological past, some going back quite ancient, and those of the chronological future, some going unimaginably far forward. I was first brought into ritual spaces in community with my family as a kid. I grew up with aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents who had grown up in the 60s and 70s in Oakland; the adults in my family during my early childhood had activated a cultural, spiritual and political reclamation of their Indigenous African roots, and made big efforts to ensure that myself, siblings, cousins and our friends who were Black and Indigenous all understood where we had come from, what we have survived under colonialism and chattel slavery, and moved with purpose to define for ourselves where we are going. We named who we could name and called forth ancestors of blood and race to guide and bless us at almost every family gathering, pouring libations and speaking the stories we knew. Communing with, elevating and being consciously guided by my wise ancestors has been a foundational part of the way I relate to the universe, and therefore is in and throughout everything I do in my practice, supporting others on their healing paths. I have found myself supporting, especially Black people to feel into and nourish our roots in literally every realm of work I have experienced so far. As ancestral relationship, mediumship, astrology, herbal medicine, bodywork and birthwork have come together quite naturally to steward my own young evolution, I have found myself archiving the trajectory of our Indigenous and diasporic healing ways and holding the treasured line into the far future where the ones who have made it to the destined places we are going are present. As an Aquarius in a family of Aquarians, this type of future-led evolutionary work feels very natural and is foundational to the healing arts I live.

What first called you to work with plants?

I had two tremendous experiences with plants within the first year of the postpartum portal, after birthing my now 8-year-old sunshine Nasiya. The first was when an ancestor I hadn’t been aware of came forward with vivid clarity and taught me to pray when making herbals teas and other medicines, to invite the plants into partnership with my body and with my bloodline. Not long after, I worked with cotton root bark (in combination with other herbs, practices and and spiritual work) and successfully released a 7 week pregnancy. Witnessing my lineages of mothers who had also worked with cotton to release pregnancies in treacherous times for Black/Indigenous people was most tender, sorrowful, potent and empowering. By keeping my heart receptive and attuned to my spirit’s callings, these experiences and many others that preceded and followed them put me on a path of healing with the brilliant support of the plants.

Can you tell me more about your work with Evolutionary Medicine and how you started it?

In my second year of herb school, I found myself supporting friends and family with herbal medicine. Aside from myself, my first and number one client was my child — I worked with Babak of Alembique Apothecary in Berkeley to formulate an oil that would cure Nasiya‘s eczema before he reached two. I supported his asthma with herbal steams, teas and baths. When he went to preschool, yarrow (my longtime best plant friend) supported him through fevers and viruses passed along from kid to kid. Chamomile tea soothed his tummy and rinsed his eyes when they were puffy from allergies. In my last year of herb school at Ancestral Apothecary School, I attended a training with Roots of Labor Birth Collective where I realized that I did not feel called at that time to continue on the path of being a doula/birth companionship, but I did feel very much called to support mamas during the postpartum portal. That was when I launched Evolutionary Medicine offering spiritual, herbal, nutritional, and bodywork supports to postpartum people. When the coronavirus pandemic hit the following year, I continued supporting folks with herbal medicine, adding in astrological reads of clients’ birth charts as a way for me to gain further insight into their health needs. Eventually I began offering free birth chart readings online, and that turned into a new branch to my medicine practice focusing on evolutionary astrology and astro-herbalism. That same year, 2020, I found myself called to learn bodywork to ground and integrate the spiritual healing journey I had been on in a more physical, felt embodied way. I studied at McKinnon Body Therapy Center in Oakland and began integrating hands-on bodywork and energy healing into my practice.

What inspired you to start Temple of Earth Apothecary and can you describe what its mission is?

As I have deepened into many overlapping worlds of the healing arts in my Bay Area hometown, I have patronized, stewarded and even managed several metaphysical, herbal, magical, and otherwise healing retail spaces and schools. My most impactful experiences were these:

The prayerful, rooted Indigenous healing school that my teacher Atava Garcia-Swieckiki cultivated at Ancestral Apothecary School in Oakland was one of the biggest most powerful healing gifts that I have ever been able to experience. I was Atava’s student in her beautiful program called Cecemmana for two years, and offered classes of my own through the school in 2020-2021.

Also tremendously impactful was my experience as the general manager of a leading herb shop in San Francisco in 2018, which emphasized the screaming lack of respectful and safe space for Black folks to access our own ancestral healing modalities — here I was faced with the dangers of white and multi-racial “healing spaces” that capitalize on Indigenous healing traditions while failing to acknowledge or make effort to untangle the roots of the medicines they sell.

It was in these and other experiences that I, along with others, began to dream and pray for our own healing spaces, temples of connection with the land and our bodies, free from a centralized white gaze, honorable to ourselves, our ancestors and the earth.

How has the training you received through Ancestral Apothecary informed your work?

Ancestral Apothecary School’s Cecemmana was a very special program and I feel incredibly blessed to have moved through it in person at the time that I did. The healing that we held together was tremendous. The container was intimate, loving, and attuned, and in this small group of medicine folks learning our ancestral ways, we witnessed how Spirit can move when the prayers are so clear. Atava and the teachers she called in for us were generous, inspired by our collective prayers for justice and healing for lands and one another, and full of integrity. I am forever grateful!