Northern California Women’s Herbal Symposium

My guest today, Terri Jensen, was an instrumental woman in creating the Northern California Women’s Herbal Symposium. If you have been playing along and listening to the other episodes on this podcast for the last year and a half, then you know that the herbal symposium is some kind of personal vortex of goodness for me. The majority of the guests that I have interviewed have been women that I met at the symposium or through symposium connections. 

The first time I went to the Northern California Women’s Herbal Symposium (NCWHS) I was in my early twenties. A friend from the housing cooperative that I lived at in college told me that I absolutely had to go check out the symposium, and I signed up for the Labor Day session that was happening later that year. 

I didn’t know anybody at my first symposium, but I quickly fell fully in love with the event, the Black Oak ranch land where the symposium is held, and I absolutely couldn’t get enough of the plant people. Now, almost twenty years later, I can count on going to symposium and talking shop about plants all day, any day of the event. I can drop in on a jam session or attend a sing along with my baritone ukulele. I can and do hike with friends to see what’s going on in nature’s backyard. Chances are I’ll do all three in the first hours after I arrive. 

I knew almost nothing about plants at my first symposium, and now plants are one of my most secure anchors, helping to literally ground me as I garden, and feel at home whenever I can recognize a plant friend out and about. Over the years, I’ve grown immensely as an herbalist, and so I usually have quite the shopping list for important medicinals when I arrive at the symposium. 

I used to be afraid to sing, but over the years, I had lots of opportunities to practice singing out.  The symposium wasn’t the only place that I was learning about plants or finding my voice, but it was a reunion several times a year where I had a safe container to lean in, learn, and feel like I belonged. 

And I’ve seen all kinds of wonderful things come from the land. The Prince mushroom was popping up all over the land one year. There were eels mating in the creek. All kinds of plants and animals converge on the land —and there are plenty naturalists on hand who have helped me learn more about this Mendocino County eco-system that I call home. 

The Northern California Women’s Herbal Symposium isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it is surely mine. And I love that I found an event that caters to my interests. I worked the set-up crew for many years and got to see the behind the scenes parts of the event. The more inside I got, the closer I became to a phenomenal group of really amazing, incredibly skilled women who also, for the most part, have experience growing a garden, living close to the land, and taking awesome care of their health with herbs. 

There are other qualities too —there’s a certain way of doing one’s life there; the symposium draws women of my ilk. We are women who don’t shy at peeing outside. We are women who feel confident that we can do pretty much anything that is required of us —in fact, the symposium is where I personally learned to work really hard. I had been an academic and then a mother, and I weaned my son to come work on the crew when he was three. I found myself surrounded by women that could do all the things to make an event happen. There was a lot of good skills acquired from those years, a ton of improvising with duct tape, and after several years, I felt like there was nothing that I couldn’t do. 

Many of the women come from European lineages and some of the important rituals are rooted in ancient Goddess practices from those lineages. All women are welcome at the event, and certainly there are teachers and traditions from all over the world, and many different backgrounds. However, one of the things that has been hard, but vitally important in the past several years is the ways that racism against herbalists of color has to be addressed, even in our symposium community. While dismantling oppressive systems takes time, the effort to check out own privilege, acknowledge cultural appropriation when it is happening, and make herbalism accessible to all women, not just white women, is at the forefront of many discussions that go late into the night both at the event and in related online forums. 

This year the symposium women will gather again at Black Oak Ranch in Mendocino County to share herbal wisdom in community after several years of pandemic cancellation. Besides the plague years, the herbal sisterhood gathered steadfastly for over thirty years. 

Terri Jensen, who co-founded the symposium to create an herbal gathering in Northern California, will share about the initial impetus for the event, the vision that took hold, and the ways that the event has evolved over the last several decades. I hope you’ll enjoy this insight into something very near and dear to my heart.