MEET SUSUN WEED

SUSUN “I speak for the Wise Woman Tradition,” she said, “which nourishes the wholeness of the unique individual. My aim is to restore herbal medicine to its rightful place as people’s medicine.” Her physical school, the Wise Woman Center — just outside of Woodstock, NY — and her online school - wisewomanschool.com - offer a wide variety of WEED courses designed to help you learn herbal medicine your way. Susun has graduated more than a thousand live-in and live-out shamanic herbal apprentices, including 15 this year. Many elect to be initiated as green witches.

It’`s not often you get to meet a witch. And Susun Weed is no ordinary witch, but a High

Priestess of the Dianic Wicca tradition. She is also a teacher, mentor, author, speaker and most importantly, a Wise Woman.

It was a mild, drizzly day in early November and Susun was supposed to be in Katmandu, but due to the pandemic all of her travel plans had been cancelled.

“Thank you COVID, I am not off to Nepal!” she said. “Or damn you COVID! Whichever it is, hard to say.” This year all of her invitations to speak or teach have been through virtual conferences. The first time I saw her was at an online seminar series in October on psychedelics and sacred medicines. There she recalled her experiences in the ‘60s with psychedelics –– seminal meetings with people like Richard Alpert aka Ram Dass in Westchester, NY –– and spoke about plants and her relationship with them.

Patch Adams, a physician and social activist whose life story was portrayed by Robin Williams in the film that bears his name, wrote the introduction to Susun’s latest book, “Abundantly Well: Seven Medicines. The Complementary Integrated Medicine Revolution.”

“An important thing about Susun,” he wrote, “is that she invites you to a wholeworld utopia where your health may be a political act. If we are to find solutions to all the horrors in the world, they (the solutions) will sprout from Wise Women.”

And for many states, including New York, Connecticut and New Hampshire, the consumption of Cannabis can still be perceived as an act of political defiance. “Cannabis has been demonized,” said Susun. “And it’s only in the past five to 10 years that it’s actually coming into its own as an herbal medicine. Especially for someone at my age, in my mid-70s, there is that overhang –– ‘they’re going to take your house away, they’re going to throw you in jail, they’re going to take your kids away from you’ –– if you have anything to do with Cannabis. And that is certainly disappearing. I am a legal card-carrying Cannabis user in New York State. It’s weird,” she laughed. “Nice weird. To go into a store and say, ‘I’ll have some of that and some of that.’”

Her last name Weed is not an intentional Cannabis branding effort, but does involve a long story of divorce, a mountain, a shared mailbox, and dropping a letter or two for a last name she could claim as her own and get her mail. “Since I am the champion of the weeds, it fit,” she said. “And how wonderful that ‘the weed’ –– Cannabis –– is resuming, along with herbal medicine, its rightful place.”

When we met, Susun suggested a walk into the woods surrounding her home near Woodstock. No, she did not lead me to a gingerbread house, but there was some storytelling and magic. Her first story began with a plant, but it wasn’t Cannabis. “According to Grandmother Twylah Nitsch, who adopted me into the Wolf Clan of the Seneca Nation, First Woman was working in her garden one day and pulled up a plant by mistake,” said Susun. “The plant she pulled up was the Tree of Life, and it created a big hole that she fell through. At that time the Earth was all water. The beings of the water were concerned that First Woman was falling and had no where to land. Turtle, after all others failed, managed to dive deep enough to bring up earth for First Woman (and the rest of us) to settle on. “So we live on Turtle Island,” said Susun. “This sedimentary rock, bluestone, that we stand on, was created by that first ocean. You are walking on ancient, ancient history.”

Mythology and reality continued to converge as we reached a small clearing and stopped. “Here we are at a crossroads,” said Susun, pointing to three different paths ahead of us.

“There’s a lot of magic that happens at a crossroads, both symbolically and literally in our lives. The goddess of the crossroads is Trivia, and Trivia is also another name for Hecate, the goddess of the coming of the dark.” Of the three paths, one was not an option.

“We cannot go straight ahead because that is the fairy path and this land has a place devoted to the fairies, who are the agents of chaos. And so anything that is at ease with chaos can go there, and that exempts human beings. We are not at ease with chaos.”

Of the remaining two paths, one was steep and slippery; the other, to the right, was the flat fairy bypass. She asked me to choose. I chose the fairy bypass, mainly out of concern for her safety. And I wanted her thoughts on Cannabis, the pandemic and what we should do for the future.

“I find that Cannabis wisely used can help us open our eyes and look at ourselves, and look at each other,” said Susun. “I think that’s the big Rx that we’re going to need. I often say Cannabis is a magnifier –– it’s not a changer. If you give Bob Dylan Cannabis he’s not going to become a bum. And if you give a bum Cannabis he’s not going to write incredible music. So whoever you are, Cannabis can magnify that for you. If you don’t like you, well then, now you’re on your own shamanic journey, aren’t you! So how can you widen and strengthen your social connections while isolating? It’s quite the Koan, the Zen riddle. Cannabis can be a wonderful ally, a green ally, in doing that. It’s not a drug. It’s a plant.”

“I find that Cannabis wisely used can help us open our eyes and look at ourselves, and look at each other,” said Susun. “I think that’s the big Rx that we’re going to need.”

Susun’s website offers a free course, “Healthy Immune Systems: Corona Virus Help,” as well as a variety of other offerings. Susun’s YouTube channel “WiseWomanTradition” has over 40k subscribers and 300+ videos; and her latest book, “Abundantly Well: Seven Medicines. The Complementary Integrated Medicine Revolution,” is available on Amazon. WiseWomanSchool.com youtube: WiseWomanTradition