from the pages :: FOLK

Sunlight Meditations

"As my relationship with these amazing plants deepens, I realize that they are imbued with the energies of the places where they grow. When we use them as medicine we are connecting to these environmental forces in order to bring our bodies back into balance. The sun—fire, light, yang—is one of the most important energies in herbal medicine, and along with the more cooling Yin herbs, I am thankful that the plants offer these to us in so many healing forms: to uplift and bring joy, to energize, to warm, to cleanse and to renew." - Ryan Blosser, Trevor Piersol & Dr. Ted Butchart

Sweet as Honey

"Our first hive had a place at our wedding reception. It was marked off by caution tape so that errant children wouldn’t get too close, but the bees buzzed freely through the flower beds in my parents’ garden as our guests mingled and sprawled in the grass with their potluck fare. Back then, we had no idea that bees would end up playing a central role in our lives and in our relationship." – Camille Storch  

Four & Twenty Blackbirds: a pie-making community

"I stopped by Four & Twenty Blackbirds. I tried the pies I’d seen first-hand, amazed at the Black Bottom Oat—a sweet brown sugar custard topped with chewy oats and a melt-y chocolate bottom—then the light caramel sweetness of the Salted Caramel Apple with the spiced apples and the flaky, flaky, butter-y, pie crust with lattice top. Fast-forward two years, a bread-baking apprenticeship in British Columbia behind me and suddenly I’m living in Brooklyn. My hobby of photographing my baked things has become my daily work and I’m working in Manhattan." - Demetria Provatas

Hosting a Red Tent Retreat

"Girls should feel positively, blatantly cared for. They should be supported openly by every member of the family, especially when they are moving through this rite-of-passage and becoming young women. Nothing about a young woman’s experience should be considered shameful, and offering her a safe and nurturing environment to learn about menstruation and talk about the changes in her body, mind and emotions is the best way to help our daughters enter into womanhood." – Holly Bellebuono

Blue Man

"Tucked in between a bakery-cafe and a shop selling tour packages on the main street of Ubud, Bali is a small and worn shop set back from the road, with plant dyed fabrics and handmade batiks flapping in the breeze on makeshift drying racks out the front. We kick off our shoes outside the door and step up into the shop, and call out hello. From behind an indigo batik curtain pops the very smiley and excited face of our friend Nofel. His wife Erna is laying on a mat on the tiled floor beside her baby son Kabir who is napping by the fan. It is very hot and humid. We all grin and greet each other." – Em Falconbridge & Nicole Lawrence

My Life at Fosen Folk School

"There is a place, a place where we dig in the soil, sail in handmade wooden boats, dance in a ring, weave, and carve, and hike, and sing." – Lily Bell

 

Bruce

"I’ll watch him and think how careful people are these days. We’re wary of too much sun and of ticks, chemicals on our skin and in our food that go running off into the streams, and all of the other all-too-real stressors of the times. I watch a man who has had his hands submerged in gasoline and oil for most of his eighty years. A guy who, along with a wide variety of wild caught fish, deer, turkey and the like, eats largely from cans and boxes and whatever is convenient and easy for him. He‘s heard of all the dangers from watching his share of the nightly news, but he mostly shrugs it off and chalks it up to the ridiculousness of government and the futility of trying to fight the man." – Steve Soule (with photos by Meredith Winn)