Smith Center for Healing and the Arts: A Place for Healing, Community and Creativity

By Lisa Simms Booth

Smith Center for Healing and the Arts offers respite from the pressures of daily life, serving as a sanctuary for a wide range of individuals, from cancer patients and survivors to caregivers and those seeking solace, healing, and personal transformation. Established in 1996 by Barbara Smith Coleman, the center was born out of her own experience as a caregiver and cancer survivor, and her conviction that creative expression can play a vital role in the healing process….

Expanding Your Ability to Channel

By Dahlia Rose

Channeling is the process of allowing energy or information to connect with your spiritual and physical body in a way that is then expressed verbally, energetically, artistically, or through movement that can alter your vibration or those around you. This is the art of connecting with higher realms of consciousness, transcending the limitations of the physical body, and tapping into the wisdom and guidance of spiritual entities, guides, and ascended beings. It is an ancient practice that has been utilized by various cultures and traditions throughout history….

Youth-Led Activism in the DMV

By Michelle Alonso, with Local Contributors

From sit-ins to walkouts, mutual aid groups to legal action, street protests to social media campaigns… youth-led activism has a long history in this country. We’ve seen a resurgence of momentum and high profile coverage, especially in the last decade. Gun violence, the climate crisis, racial injustice, LGBTQIA+rights, and threats to our democracy are just some of the issues fueling the fervor of our young people, who are leading movements to make change happen… Youth activism in the DMV is no exception….

Menstrual Disorders Across the Age Spectrum: Recognizing Issues and Managing with Functional Medicine

By Helena Amos, M.AC. L.AC., Euro. Physician

One of the most complex, varied, mysterious and misunderstood components of women’s health is the reproductive cycle. And this is a source of great frustration and concern considering half of the planet’s population was born with a female reproductive cycle; and for the majority of women, it lasts three-quarters of their lifespan… Functional medicine (FM) takes a holistic view, aiming to identify and treat the root causes of health concerns in order to assess specific imbalances, determine appropriate treatments, and monitor progress over time. It’s an extremely flexible and individualized form of care, ideal for reproductive health disorders that can occur at any time across a huge age spectrum….

You Can Heal Yourself – 7 Ways to Take Charge and Do It Your Way

By Patricia Bonnard

You can heal yourself. In fact, patient-centered self-healing is the foundation of many ancient and modern holistic health and wellness modalities…. Consider embracing a whole new strategy. Each of the following seven points reveals an approach, rather than a specific choice of care. Taken collectively, they will increase your confidence and self-reliance, and prepare you to make decisions and plans based on your own personal preferences and level of tolerance….

Frequency Healing 

By Jill Mattson

The body heals itself when each frequency or vibration of something in your body (within a broad frequency range, including tones out of hearing abilities) is in equal proportion. This is what health sounds like. When the body is healthy, it has an ample smorgasbord of frequencies to choose from. Therefore, all chemical processes have the ingredients to digest food, build the body, process emotions, combat viruses and even counteract overabundant harmful tones from cell phones and electric currents. But the body needs its raw ingredients….

Organs, Seasons, and Systems: The Need for Food Rhythms

By Lisa Masé

Nourishment can take many forms. When we speak, breath and vibration combine to create sound, which feeds the spirit. Nourishment is not simply about getting the fuel needed to function. It is about satisfaction, enjoyment, grounding, as well as maintaining the health of the body’s various organs and organ systems. The study of anatomy would like to chop us up into parts. However, we are intricate, somatic beings. What affects one system impacts all the others as well….

Fall 2023: Realizing Your Needs

By Misty Kuceris

Fall is often a time when the energies start shifting from adventure and discovery to preparation and renewal. During the summer months you want to wander. Yet by fall you start feeling winter is around the corner and you want to prepare for the shift of weather….

Food Choices and Our Health

By Michael Tabor

As a farmer selling our pesticide-free produce for over 50 years, I frequently witness people’s poor food choices and concerns…. Too many people bring a sense of complacency when they shop, or they are unknowledgeable and clueless about where and how all these goods and foods get to their tables and homes. Folks who care about what they eat often want pretty-looking produce, but at the same time, want it grown without pesticides. They want it cheap, but don’t care about who grew it (the treatment of the workers), where it came from, how it tastes, or what season it is when it’s ready….

Wheel of the Year, Fall Quarter: Harvest

By Lisa Adams

Our ancestors and past societal generations lived very different lifestyles centered on agrarian living. They had to know the seasons intimately, basing their activities (and survival) on the movement of the Sun, Moon, and Earth, as well as weather patterns…. Our plans for the year, our goals, and our actual plantings are bearing fruit. This is the time to take stock, reassess, and separate the actual and metaphorical wheat from the chaff. Our work and toil are paying off, and we continue toiling towards the culmination of growth. Harvest is time for gratitude and for seeing things through to completion. Harvest also calls us to reflect and go within, even as it requires energy output and continued work….

Your Manifesting Practice & Adjustments for Abundance

By Pramela Thiagesan; edited by Cam MacQueen

Manifesting is a concept of creating an outcome many of us embrace as part of our pursuit for what we desire — be it as broad as world peace, global parity, racial justice, preservation of the planet and all sentient beings, as personal as health and abundance, or as specific as a dollar amount…. There are several ideas on how to manifest; and while there are many ways to be successful, the underlying commonality for success lies in the intention of what we want to manifest….

Become a Spiritual Activist: End Prejudice, Demonstrate Peace

By Trish Hall

Imagine people of all nations, cultures, religions, and backgrounds working side by side in harmony. The power of imagination has been the root of social change throughout the ages; however, if left solely in the imaginative realm, nothing happens. Change happens when our imagination inspires us to action — action that is uniquely our own — action that uproots us from our complacency and calls us each to use our Divinely imbued skills and abilities to support our world in rising out of violence into peace….

Women and Wilderness: The Vision Quest as a Rite of Passage

By Denise Horton, Ed.M, PhD

As Vision Questers, we are allowed to take with us only what we can carry on our own backs, a metaphor for simplifying our cluttered lives in order to clarify the nagging, troubling questions that can no longer be avoided. They will be starkly etched against a backdrop of hunger, loneliness, and geographic isolation, so that we might turn in our frustration and despair and hear…an invitation….

Pollinator Plant Picks

By Kathy Jentz

When we usually think of pollinator plants, we think of those native perennial workhorses like Black-eyed Susans and Coneflowers. However, there are several other pollinator garden plant choices for our gardens that can help support bees, butterflies, beetles, hummingbirds, and many more beneficial creatures in our region. Here are a few to consider adding to your home landscape….

World Food Day and Poetry’s Work to Alleviate Hunger

By Hiram Larew

Each year since 1979, the world has commemorated World Food Day on October 16 — the day in 1945 when The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) was founded. And, because food, hunger, water, soil, farmers, consumers, weather, and a host of other related topics continue to be so important to us all, the Day’s importance keeps growing. This year, the focus will be on the importance of water as a precious resource — one that affects our ability to cultivate food in many, many ways. The Day also typically spotlights the prevalence of hunger around the world, including in the U.S. Many folks pitch in on that day to redouble efforts to fight hunger. In fact, World Food Day was a key reason that Poetry X Hunger was founded – as one more way to recognize the Day’s significance by bringing a world of poets to the anti-hunger cause….

Creative Interventions: Social Change as Holistic Transformation

By Carol Burbank

Informed action and focused intent are pretty obviously needed for effective activism, right? But the alchemical ingredient that makes social activism transformative is something that aligns itself with our inner purpose and the complexities of a tipping system: holistic understanding. Holistic understanding sees the world as an interconnected system, in which every action pulls at a web of social relationships and beliefs. Many of us understand this connection as multi-leveled and non-linear, requiring both spiritual and cultural sensitivity to navigate. Holistic change combines organic shifts and intentional transformation….

Reviews By Alyce Ortuzar

• Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, by Catherine Coleman Flowers

This book is an exceptionally well written and powerful narrative that tells a remarkable story. The quality of life inequities among poor people throughout the United States that this book reveals, especially the absence of basic sanitation among the rural poor, should be viewed as a major national embarrassment.

• Ecothrifty: Cheaper, Greener Choices for a Happier, Healthier Life, by Deborah Niemann

The enormous amount of useful information in this book manages to encompass every daily aspect of our lives.

ON THE COVER

MASS EXODUS II (AT MIDNIGHT), by Kristen Hayes-Campbell