Katrina Blair is a blessing to humanity. More than any guru, healer or spiritual teacher I’ve met, Katrina is an awakened embodiment of the bodhisattva vow. The plants — in particular the wild weeds — are her teachers.

In a world where we dump herbicides into our neighborhoods, into our own yards, into our fields… the wild weeds fight back to recover the soil to heal the ecosystems back into diversity and health. In this episode you learn how to re-enter a symbiotic relationship with the weeds and trees outside your door.  The problem – the weeds – are the solution.

I rap with Katrina Blair:

• What Burdock taught Katrina
• Why you want to awaken your Primal Palate
• What the Pioneer Plants are… and what they are doing in your ‘hood
• Healing Depression and disconnection by connecting to the plants outside your door

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• How common weeds can help realign human integrity
• What you can do to create organic lands and parks in your community
• What nutritional benefits wild plants have for us

Links

• The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival
• Dandelion Festival
• Thistle Wild Edible Food
• Thistles: A High-Nutrient Weed
• Turtle Lake Refuge
• Connect on Facebook

Show Highlights:

• 03:00 – How to reconnect with nature when we feel we are out of control or disconnected
• 5:14 – Local wild plants feel different to us but they are full of nutrients and wisdom when we use them as teachers
• 07:00 – Depression is disconnection. Connection is uplifting. If we isolate our palette from our ecosystem there’s a level of connectivity we don’t have
• 08:50 – Cate and Katrina discuss the concept of rewilding and rewilding our palettes and how the wild plants have so much to teach us
• 11:00 – Cate and Katrina discuss thistle, what it is and how we can all parts of the plant for nutrients; for example it can regenerate liver cells
• 14:58 – Self care industry has an idea that “everything needs to be just right” but thistle shows us that that doesn’t need to be so
• 16:37 – Cate and Katrina discuss the concept of reconnection through wild plants to what we already know on a deeper level
• 20:13 – Katrina talks about her experience with Burdock root and Cate discusses Oregon Grape Root
• 30:00 – Katrina talks about how urban dwellers can connect to wild plants
• 44:15 – Katrina discusses what’s going on in her area in terms or creating organic spaces for the community

Favorite Quotes:

• “When we start to eat the very earth from which we live, we become the earth” – Katrina
• “Depression … is a state of being that anyone can go into, but anyone can also get out of it” – Katrina
• “The degree of disconnection is the degree of palette distortion” – Cate
• “Everything that we need is right outside our door” – Katrina

BIO:

Katrina Blair began studying wild plants in her teens when she camped out alone for a summer with the intention of eating primarily wild foods. She later wrote “The Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants of the San Juan Mountains” for her senior project at Colorado College.

In 1997 she completed a MA at John F Kennedy University in Orinda, CA in Holistic Health Education. She founded Turtle Lake Refuge in 1998, a non-profit, whose mission is to celebrate the connection between personal health and wild lands. She teaches sustainable living practices, permaculture and wild edible and medicinal plant classes locally and internationally.

She is the author of a book titled “Local Wild Life- Turtle Lake Refuge’s Recipes for Living Deep”, published in 2009 that focuses on the uses and recipes of the local wild abundance. Her latest book is “The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival” published in 2014 by Chelsea Green.