Healing Gardens

Laura Donohue was born and raised in Portland Oregon. There she was mostly home-schooled, and read entirely too much Dickens, Austen, Brontë, Tolkein, and Emerson. She moved to San Francisco at the age of 16 where she began her study of herbal medicine, botany, Gaeilge, Celtic mythology, paganism and pretending to pretentiously pick apart art exibits and performances. She moved back to the Pacific Northwest in 2002, and lived at Paradise on Mt. Rainier, in Alaska, and in Seattle before starting school at Evergreen. Here at Evergreen, she has been studying ethnobotany, stewardship, natural history, and outdoor leadership, lucid dreaming, and fractaline synchronicity. She hopes to become a teacher and mentor of natural skills and stewardship. She coordinates the student group: The Center for Environmental and Natural Skills Education. Laura has been known to speak to trees and talk about herself in the third person.

Laura's Blog

http://people.tribe.net/63f73548-1edc-4a70-a7fc-36b7e69bc9a3

Center for Environmental and Natural Skills Education

http://academic.evergreen.edu/groups/cense

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

-Marianne Williamson

Creation Story

"One day, the spirits laughted and said: "Well we have made creatures and planets and worlds, but we have never made a world as a creature. Now is the time." So Gaia was created, and divine creative spark was given to her to do what she would, and time began to dance with her as she danced around the sun.

Gaia, with divine intuition created her flesh and blood out of land and water, plankton and little microscopic organisms. And these little creatures recieved a small bit of divine creative spark, and they lived and received their own motivations. And these creatures laughed and created more and more beings, building in complexity and their own interpretations of the song of the spirits. And thus Gaia began to teem with life. And the rocks and winds sung in awe, watching, watching life, and waiting for their bodies to be eaten and made into cell tissues and the elements in them. And thus death became life to the living, and life became death to the dead. And the spirits laughed and were quite entertained with their most recent creative endeavor.

And the divine spark of earth thus spread through her body and organs through trees and animals, all talking with & eating each other, singing and dancing and swimming. And the creatures laughed back at the spirits.

And the animals gathered together, and the trees gathered too, and the rocks listened and watched. "The spirits have created us laughing, and we can hear their laughter around us, but come, let us use our divine spark to channel their laughter to teach us of their ways with intention: it takes so much time for us to create ourselves, we could do with an intentional creative force here to take care of us."

"I wonder how it will all turn out..." said Raven.

"We cannot tell, but just as death is inevitable, life is irrepressible, and all possibilities must at sometime create themselves." said Mountain.

And thus humans were created to be the caretakers, co-creators, and neurons of Gaia."