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What the Senses Tell: A Plant Medicine Perspective
February 23 at 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Free
RSVP in Advance
The Peale’s exhibition on The Future of Here: A Glimpse of a River Culture to Come is an invitation to extend our senses into the landscape around us and the other futures it may promise, to turn our attention from the commotion of city streets to the vibrant yet unseen riverscape at our feet. By imagining what the many things we leave behind could one day become when our fossil-fueled civilization has faded away, the exhibition dreams of a more symbiotic and hopeful time to come for our watershed and planet.
This workshop event with artist & herbalist Alyssa Dennis will provide participants an opportunity to connect the exhibition experience with the medicinal gifts of the land in an embodied way, giving participants a chance to collectively share what they are experiencing as we strive to meet our herbal allies in the city in a more intentional way. Senses like taste do more than simply make our food taste better. The flavor of familiar plants can reveal an herb’s affinities, energetics, and medicinal actions, deepening our understanding of how plant medicine works and helping to divest from a one-size-fits-all modern healthcare paradigm.
As part of The Future of Here program, What the Senses Tell may awaken your dynamic sensory system to how the land is speaking to you, and such forgotten practices of creative alchemy. Participants in this workshop will be able to taste, touch and smell at least one plant corresponding to each of the 5 flavors (bitter, pungent/acrid, sour, sweet, salty) which correspond to seasonal cycles of the land and how that is mirrored in our own bodies.
Alyssa Dennis is the creator of Eclipta Herbal and steward of a small herbal sanctuary on the unceded land of the Piscataway people in Baltimore City where she conducts an immersive herbal CSA program, the Herbal Compass. As an herbal holistic health practitioner, plant medicine educator, and interdisciplinary artist, Alyssa’s goal is to empower her community to reconnect, re-wild and remember the regenerative wisdom of the diverse web of life to reclaim our lives from an ever-growing disassociation from nature. Alyssa aids her clients in taking stock of their personal ecosystem to begin to uncover the root causes of their health challenges. Alyssa has a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Tulane University, and she completed her advanced plant medicine training at Arbor Vitae School of Traditional Herbalism in New York. She is also part of the practitioner team at Chesapeake Mental Health Collaborative, a member of the Ecological Design Collective, and Co-Coordinator for the Baltimore chapter of Herbalists Without Borders.
This event is co-sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Institute of Planetary Health.
