Description
Querencia Perfume: Wildcrafting Whole-landscape Smudge and Meeting the Spirit of Place
Landscapes speak to us through all our senses: the climate and flow of kinetic landforms; the breathing of winds and voices of fauna; the glow and awe of floral and mineral expanse. The sweet and compelling wafts that guide our impulses and imagination. Of all these impressions of place, scent is the sense that most powerfully associates memory; giving us transport not only back to location, but to our own past selves. Aromatics exercise our imaginal connective tissue, giving us access to distant places of power and to our human family tree. Querencia is a love of place, a relationship with beloved homeland that supports our cognition, intuition and well-being. Our knowing and affinity for landscapes aligns us with the logics and intelligences of place, and opens us to receive gifts of interdependent strength. This is a lecture about travel and discovery, about the personality of places and the aromatic plants that embody them. We will discuss ethical wildcrafting in regard of landscape spirits and the use of aromatics in ceremony to bolster access to limbic system space and time travel.
Biography Day is an Emergence Medic and Radical Perfumer from the wetlands and forests of the Upper Midwest. She attended Antioch College, where she earned her bachelors degree in Sustainable Systems and discovered the deep joy of meeting new places. Traveling with synaesthesia introduced her to the power of aromatherapy; which in turn lead to over a decade of study and practice in aromatic herbalism; which lured her into alembic lab alchemy; which released her out to the landscapes of her homelands to wildcraft edible, aromatic and medicinal plants; which inspired her to train and work in wilderness and urban emergency medicine; where she discovered the completely practical applications of laying on of hands; which revitalized her commitment to modern ceremonial work. She has spent much of the past few years exploring the wildernesses of the mountainous West, forested Northwest and desert Southwest. and writing about what she has seen and smelled.
