Living Systems Thinking
A Sustainable Herbs Initiative Learning Journey in Oregon
Weaving Webs of Light
Cleaning my office recently, I found a piece of scrap paper from seven or eight years ago on which I had written:
Year One: My theory of change is that speaking what is real and true becomes a campfire around which others gather. And that the fire weaves webs of light the nourishes the seeds planted in our gatherings. I then wrote that I didn’t know how those seeds would grow or what exactly would unfold, but just that the seeds, the web of relationships created, and the structure to hold them were key.
Seven years later, I realize that this is exactly what the Sustainable Herbs Initiative is now doing. People come to this work because they envision a better path for producing herbal products made with plants sourced from around the world. The core group that began gathering spoke what is real and true and this has created a structure for others to do the same. These seeds are growing.
Does it Bring Love?
“There is so much that must be silenced to do business,” Nate Brennan, Manager of Foster Farm Botanicals, said on the final day of the Learning Journey in Nicaragua in November 2024. “We can’t pretend not to hear it anymore. We need to keep asking, ‘Why are we doing things this way? Is it the right way or just because it is set up that way? Does it bring love? Or does it bring pain?’”
The first three SHI Learning Journeys, first to Appalachia, then Oregon, then Nicaragua, were about asking these questions and listening to answers from those we don’t always hear from. We mapped the challenges and leverage or acupuncture points and made lists of actions to address them.
This past June at the fourth in-person SHI gathering, after a morning of steeping ourselves in living systems awareness, we had four sessions where we discussed what made it difficult to address these challenges in a meaningful way. We shared ideas about what, even with industry constraints, we could do, and we created some, in the words of Raj Vable, founder of Young Mountain Tea, called safe-fail project ideas. In closing, we each shared the actions we will take, individually and collectively, to address these deeper structural problems.
Creating the Container
We began on Tuesday evening with an opening circle at Oshala Farm, a stunning location under oaks, beside fields of lemon balm, chamomile, calendula and more. I shared a few words to frame our time together and then Jeff and Elise Higley introduced us to the land and this place. We each greeted the land in our own way and came back to the whole circle. We shared our intentions for our time together and then paired with someone we didn’t know well for a dialogue walk.
I love these walks, which we have done at the last three Learning Journeys, a Presencing Institute practice introduced by Julie Arts. We are invited to each share three events in our life that have shaped who we are. We talk about them for ten minutes, with the other asking questions. Then we switch and the other does the same. Each time I’ve ended up walking with someone I have worked closely with for at least a year, but this invitation allowed us to go deeper, sharing more openly than we otherwise might.
We came back together, ate dinner sitting on hay bales looking over the fields of Oshala Farm and listened to music on the porch as the sun set.
Living Systems Thinking
The next morning, we gathered in a circle outside the farmhouse at Oshala Farm. I read a passage from “The Language of Animacy,” a chapter in Robin Kimmerer’s well-known book, Braiding Sweetgrass. Just to share one part of that passage here, “To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive…”
Clinical herbalist, Erika Galentin then led a 3-hour workshop on Goethean plant studies. Drawing on Craig Holdredge’s book, Thinking Like a Plant, and her studies at the Scottish School of Herbal Medicine, she talked about moving from object thinking to living systems thinking, which is about perceiving and being in relationship with the aliveness of the world.
“Why do we think we can know a plant when we know its name?” Erika asked. “Does someone know us when they know our name?”
She continued, “Think about a relationship where you are doing all the talking and none of the listening. So often, that is how it is in our relationship with plants.”
She then led us through a set of practices to meet one particular plant that we were not to name in its fullness. We observed it growing in the fields. We shared details about the plant visually. We tasted the plant. We smelled it. We drew it. We moved with it.
What stayed with me was how easily we all opened to seeing the plant as a whole, outside the box, as Erika said. And yet, almost every person in that circle works for a company that exists because it successfully puts plants in boxes.
That tension is at the heart of SHI’s work. How can we hold on to living systems thinking in companies that must also operate in an economic system that depended on buying and selling objects?
Navigating Purpose through Challenges
That afternoon we gathered again in a large circle under the oaks to hear stories of how individuals and companies have navigated key challenges: Angela Willard, co-founder of Harmonic Arts, Chante Weigand, VP Science and Education at The Synergy Company, and Jessie Dean, founder of Asheville Tea Company.
Jessie spoke about how their connection to their mission and to others in the community who believed in their mission has helped them navigate rebuilding their entire business after their building washed away in Hurricane Helene. She talked about what she called the ROI of grace and trust and investing in relationships, investments that have proven to be as important has the healthy financial systems and structures they invested in.
In speaking about a challenging time for Harmonic Arts, Angela said she has trusted that life would not take away what they had woven with a cloth of love. And Chante talked about how Synergy is developing what she called an intentional sourcing "trade off" matrix to navigate decision making in tough economic times. This matrix will help them prioritize their non-negotiables as a company. When they go into hard times, they can have a clear sense of decision making and alignment.
The discussion that followed was rich, as others shared more openly about how they have navigated challenges in their companies and what has helped them stand up for what they believe and value. Later in the circle, Erin Smith, founder of ES Botanicals, commented on the power of these gatherings, we are all allowed to come out of our professional selves to show up as who we are as people. And that is the place from which we do the work.
Embodied Action
The next day we had two sessions, each focusing on key leverage points that have emerged in previous Learning Labs and Learning Journeys: supporting support smallholder herb farmers, domestically and internationally, and supporting thriving wildcrafting communities now and into the future. These sessions, facilitated by different SHI members, focused on taking the challenges we have observed about truly partnering with sourcing communities over the past three years into actions that we can each bring into our own work.
In a final session, facilitated by Angela Willard and me, focused on specific actions we each were going to take. But we wanted to make sure those actions emerged from an embodied experience of listening and learning, that they arose from our experience of this and previous Learning Journeys, not just our ideas of how to fix the problems.
I shared stories of what had been shared during our time together, inviting everyone to journal on what resonated or moved them most about each story. And then from that, asked everyone to write down actions/commitments they would take around self, their work in their company, and with SHI and beyond.
Each person then came to the center of the circle and spoke their commitments out loud as they placed them on a tree drawn on paper, surrounded by flowers.
I had no idea how this part of our gathering would go. We’d always run out of time at the end of previous Learning Journeys when it came to outlining the actions we would take.
But this ceremony was beautiful and moving. It felt like an important next step in creating a network that models a living system.
Listening
In my book, Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, I describe how my then husband and I traveled across the US to document stories of community connections with land that was being stewarded with support from the Trust for Public Land. Among other places, we spent time at a Nez Perce reservation that had had land returned to the tribe. I wrote, “I wanted to know what would happen if we lived in a way that listened to the voices in the land – of the pine, the oak, the ancestors singing as we walked down the valley where they, too, once walked. What kind of world could we create if we believed that the world around us was alive?”
I wrote this book almost 20 years ago. And it is remarkable to see that that question is at the heart of the work I am now doing. Not only that, but that by asking that question, I am finding others who are asking it as well.
In his brilliant closing poem written from words and phrases gathered over our time together, Andy Thorton, co-founder of Silvan Ingredient Ecosystem, asked, “Can we listen to the language of the Birch people, the Bird people, the Rock people?”
“Now that we are living-thinking,” he continued, “[We asked what happens when we are truly tested.] A tradeoff is not a weakness. It is knowing what really matters.”
And he closed with the words Angela had shared the previous day, “If you weave your work with a cloth of love, you cannot fail.”
Find out more about our work at the Sustainable Herbs Initiative’s work here!