Jesse Wolf and Kiva Rose Hardin, Plant Healers
Name: Jesse Wolf and Kiva Rose Hardin
Occupation: Teachers, Authors, Artists, Herbalists
Place of Residence: Anima Sanctuary, Gila Wildlands, New Mexico
Background and Personal History: Jesse Wolf is the author of 11 books, is an early environmental campaigner and entertainer; and with Kiva: artists and designers, creators and editors of Plant Healer Magazine.
Jesse Wolf Hardin is Cofounder and CoDirector of Plant Healer Magazine and Plant Healer events including the HerbFolk Gathering. An acclaimed artist and champion of nature’s medicine, living seven river crossings from the nearest road in a restored river canyon in southwest New Mexico. Wolf has been a leading voice of and for the natural world for nearly four decades, his work earning praise from a wide range of contemporaries from Gary Snyder to Edward Abbey and Rosemary Gladstar.
Jesse has has been a featured presenter at hundreds of conferences and universities, including cross-cultural collaborations, appropriately called “Medicine Shows,” that meld his spoken word with live music. He’s the author of over 600 published magazine articles and 10 books, including his newest The Plant Healer’s Path on the whys and hows of herbal practice; a historical novel for herbalists, The Medicine Bear; an illustrated tale of herbal wisdom and personal empowerment for kids called I’m a Medicine Woman Too! (Hops Press 2009); Old Guns & Whispering Ghosts: Tales & Twists Of The Old West; a book of ecospirituality, Gaia Eros: Reconnecting To The Magic of Nature (New Page Press); and the leading book of plant healer interviews, 21st Century Herbalists. His work is also featured in The Encyclopedia of Nature & Religion (Continuum 2005), The Soul Unearthed (Tarcher/Putnam, 1996) and How Shall I Live My Life? (Derrick Jensen, PM Press 2008). You can purchase his books on the Bookstore page at www.PlantHealer.org, read more of his writings at www.AnimaCenter.org and subscribe to the Anima blog at www.AnimaCenter.org/blog. “Hardin’s voice inspires our passion to take us further —seeing the world whole — even holy.” (Terry Tempest Williams).
Kiva Rose Hardin is coeditor of Plant Healer Magazine and co-creator of the various Plant Healer events. She’s a wilderness-dwelling New Mexico herbalist, author, artist, and culture-shifter widely known for her writings. Her teachings emphasize both the necessary knowledge and skills, and the folkloric and mythopoetic dimensions of plant medicine and intensely natural living. She receives an impressive amount of international attention for her inspiring and informative Medicine Woman’s Roots blog, with her focus on a vitalist approach to local plants, sustainability, whole person/whole plant understandings and earthy, practical ways of teaching people to work with the plants themselves rather than being dependent on experts.
Kiva’s focus is on accessible, grassroots, folk herbalism that empowers the individual and serves the community — both the human and larger earthen communities. Kiva believes in restoring health at all levels, and approaches healing from the understanding that the body is a diverse and intelligent ecology, integrally connected to the planet as a whole. She contributed a number of writings to the inspiring new foundational book for herbalists The Plant Healer’s Path, and has recently been creating enchanting digital sculpture art for your enjoyment.
Current Projects: Plant Healer Magazine, HerbFolk Annual Gathering, and continued publishing with the next book being about heightening the senses, nature awareness, shamanism and healing, and the importance of our re-enchantment: The Enchanted Healer.
“A surprising experience; archaic, fresh, future, wild, refined, all at once. Which should be no surprise — that ‘s how the real world is — my respects to Jesse Wolf Hardin.”
-Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
“It is only through the power, strength, integrity, and courage of people such as Wolf Hardin that our society will be able to change its direction. Jesse’s voice inspires our passion to take us further — seeing the world whole— even holy.”
-Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge
“Wild is the world. No one is better than Wolf at helping us feel that wildness — deeply, experientially, beyond conclusion. Hombre muy fuerte!”
-Ed Abbey, late author of Desert Solitaire
“Jesse Wolf Hardin has a true understanding of embodied spirituality– the sacred spirit in nature and in human beings as natural, erotic, animal life forms on a living planet. Gaia Eros is a must-read for those who want to worship nature not as an abstraction but in ways sensual, practical, and transformative.”
-Starhawk, author of Spiral Dance
“Wolf powerfully brings us into the presence of our animal elders, reawakening us to the lessons they have to teach us in the recovery of our own instincts and aliveness. Fiery… passionate…”
-Paul Winter, world-renowned musician
“Wolf sings us Full Circle to the raw, sweet wildness within, and calls us forward to the future primeval.” -Joanna Macy, author of World As Self, World As Lover
“There is no more important personal awareness, and political movement today, than the strengthening of human communities conscious of place in the natural world. Jesse Wolf Hardin addresses the need of human beings to search within themselves, and within their bioregions, and to make the connections that may save our sanity, and the planet too. I know of no-one more thoughtful or articulate or inspiring; his book Home is both a workbook and a philosophical framework for the rediscovery of our connections to self and earth.”
-Jerry Mander, author of In The Absence of The Sacred
“His word and voice is the haunting cry of a wild-voiced wilderness seer… the ecstatic song of an earth lover, a man intoxicated with the beauty and diversity of life. To our worthy and timely project, the rewilding of alienated humanity, Wolf Hardin has provided a most eloquent and passionate contribution. The high-spirited and soulful voices of the animals, and of the Earth herself, speak and sing through him, reminding us of our ancient heritage of sacred wildness.”
-Ralph Metzner, author of Green Psychology
“I wish him the best of luck with his vision and its realization— a vital gift to the world!”
-James Balog, award-winning photographer, author of Anima
“Wolf’s loving, erotic sensibility allows him to play on ancient harmonies. He sings us into magician morning, calling us to re-enter primal states of being-in-the-world. He seduces us away from the madness of modern, urban based civilizations and draws us into the “great silence,” the way things really are, the Tao. He opens the door of our consciousness and asks us to step out into the fields and mountains. If we are really quiet, Pan comes out of hiding and teaches us the will-of-the-land.”
-Bill Devall, author of Deep Ecology
“In terms of his depth, personal commitment and quality of performance, Wolf is peerless. There are few others have all of his primal qualities. Except for some Aboriginal writers, there are few authors in North America who reflect such depth of being a native to its places— remarkable, given his background as a street kid, with Nordic/Celtic ancestry. He came home to wildness and living close to the Earth. It shows all through his writings and performances. He gives others (such as myself) courage to speak from our own authentic ecological selves. He is a highly productive artisan who is making a most important contribution to the Deep Ecology Movement and a new ecologically responsible culture.”
-Prof. Alan, Drengson Editor, The Trumpeter Journal of Ecosophy
“The best of us understand the old ways, recognize that modern reality is merely a bad dream, see the waving prairie beneath the asphalt, feel the reverberations of ancient buffalo hooves through the night ground. With Wolf you experience one of the best of the best. A man with primal energy running through him in bright bolts. -Dave Foreman, author of Confessions of an Earth Warrior
“Wolf’s work is an illuminating personal record, a broad blast at late industrial civilization and an invocation of the forthcoming ecological epoch.”
-Peter Berg, Planet Drum Foundation
“Jesse Wolf Hardin writes from the place of true authenticity in an age of superficiality– from his experience and from his soul. I recommend this work to any and all who wish to understand the marriage of magic, activism, spirituality and service.”
-Jed Swift, ecopsychologist, Naropa Institute
“My friend Wolf is the head minstrel of the Deep Ecology movement. His poetic ruminations illuminate this powerful path to spiritual and environmental peacemaking.”
-Jim Nollman, author The Charged Border, Spiritual Ecology
“In Wilderness & The American Mind I tried to write a history of our cultural relationship to wildness. In the course of this story I described the contributions of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold. Now Jesse Wolf Hardin has added to our store of ideas. His books deserve a place on the shelf with the best American environmental writing.”
-Roderick Nash, author of Wilderness & The American Mind
“Jesse Wolf Hardin and family are beacons to us; they remind us of the joy, ease, and, ecstatic wonder of being human.”
-Justine Toms, New Dimensions Radio
“The message of the green growing beings, giving standing to the trees, voice to the rivers, helping us to fly fly fly… Howl, Wolf, howl! Wake the dead.”
-John Seed, Council of All Beings
More Places to Find Jesse and Kiva on the Web:
