Monday, July 23, 2018

Summer 2018 Schedule-

The Pixie Traveling Medicine Show will be offering their gifts to the world at these up & coming events:

The Honey War outside of Olympia, WA   August 3rd -5th
     http://www.antir.sca.org/Upcoming/?Event_ID=4325

Beloved Festival  August 10th- 13th
    https://belovedfestival.com/

Breitenbush Herbal Conference September 6th-9th
        http://www.breitenbushherbalconference.com/

Okanogan Barter Fair  October 18-21
    http://www.okanoganfamilyfaire.net/Default.htm

Monday, May 29, 2017

Summer Tour 2017

Hey Bee People!

The Pixie Traveling Medicine Show is officially on the road for the summer season!

Here's our dates:

SUMMER TOUR

May 25 - 28: LIB

May 29: Santa Cruz

May 30: Oakland

June 2-4: Mattel Arts Festival

June 8-11: Spirit Weavers

August 4 & 5: Many Gods West

August 11 - 14: Beloved




Thursday, January 26, 2017

Spring Tour 2017

Beeloveds!

So much gratitude and appreciation for the generosity flowing from the plants and all of your warm kind hearts. We have enjoyed partying with you on this tour so far, and are now in southern California, where the rains have blessed the land as well!

We are writing to inform you of our up-and-coming events, workshops, and poetry parties. Please spread the word to your friends, and keep nourishing the seeds of hope in this dark time.

Love
Benjamin Pixie and Shannon Rae

EVENTS

February 6th Tuscon, AZ

4H Herb Shop 609 S Mill Ave

Details TBA

Silver City, NM

Albuquerque, NM

Santa Fe, NM

Taos, NM

Flagstaff, AZ


Wintercount Skills Gathering

private residence - contact us for details
private residence - contact us for details 


private residence - contact us for details

Treatment-Free Beekeeping Conference

March 4-5th Laguna Beach, CA
Terra Vita Herbal Symposium

The Acorn Gathering


Collect me from nectar,
you field bee of flattery,
sweetheart of hexagonal,
vexation of swarm.


Honeycomb me; I will
flower you.


Of Honey -- Mary Brown


Past:


Seattle, WA

Olympia, WA

Portland, OR

Eugene, OR

Ashland, OR

Grass Valley, CA

Willits, CA

Occidental, CA

Berkeley, CA

San Luis Obispo, CA

Ojai, CA

Santa Barbara, CA

Topanga, CA

Malibu, CA

Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

Las Vegas, NV

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Tour 2016

Bee loveds- We are delighted to share the magic and medicine of the wilds with you!  The Pixie Travelling Medicine Show & our cohorts the alchemists of Kymiaarts.com are hitting the road!  Find us at any of these locales!  On this tour Benjamin will be sharing poems from his new collection of work- Beewilderment!  As well as magical honeys, infused and untouched, intoxicating ambrosia's delightful potion, revitalizing rejuvenators and delight to feed the heart & spirit!

Jan 27th- Eugene, Oregon Bohemia Panacea Coffee Tea Apothecary

Jan 28th- Ashland, Oregon Jackson Wellspring 
Jan 29th- Chico, CA 
Jan 30th- Grass Valley, CA- Nectar Barn 
Jan 31st- Grass Valley, CA
Feb 2nd- Sebastopol, CA Root Collective 
Feb 3rd- Occidental, CA West County Herb Company 
Feb 4th- Berkeley, CA Twisted Thistle Apothecary
Feb 5th- Santa Barbara, CA

Feb 6th- LA, CA 
Feb 7th- LA, CA Fullerton 
Feb 8th- Las Vegas, NV 
Feb 10th- Sedona, AZ

The Pixie Travelling Medicine Show brings to you celebration of the powerful and wild gifts of the plant world gathered and concentrated by the world's original plant medicine makers and original alchemists- the honeybees. Through the workshop we will learn how to draw from the honey bee and all the wildness she supports as not only our medicine, but also the base of all our medicine-making. We will taste the sweet medicine and magic of herbal infused honeys, honey wine, herbal potions, and bee based tinctures. 

Benjamin will be sharing stories of Bees as stewards of the fecundity of life and examples of alternative styles of civilization that promote diversity. 
Through myth, story and honey-tasting this class will imbue the sweet plant medicines of the bees while exploring the bitterness of our current experiments in civilization. We will discuss the poison and catastrophe of monoculture as exemplified by Colony Collapse Disorder. Through stories of powerful plants, pollinators and humans who remember, we will untangle the webs of death and amnesia to grieve the losses and celebrate the beauties of being alive in these times of great change.

While discussing the history of colonization, and doing the work of decolonization, we will focus on healing the damage to our world, psyches and bodies created by the poison idea of the human separation from the world- static ecosystems and invasive alien species. Through recognizing the medicines the plants have to offer to our ecosystems, bodies, souls, and lineages, this class will take steps to healing the wounds of poison, and xenophobia, and also to celebrate the beauty of diaspora while not forgetting it's casualties.


Donation $10-50$


Contact benjaminpixie@yahoo.com for more info or see facebook page for specific locations and times.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

People and Plants

An interview that Benjamin did for People and Plants-

How do you work with plants in the world? What is your work?


B: My work in the world is to celebrate and revel in the much-tangled interweaving between plants, animals, and humans- a tapestry so complex that all of the lines blur the deeper one looks to form a glorious, chaotic harmony.  I have been talking to plants and trying my best to listen to their chlorphyllic voices since I first heard the singing of the creosote bush when I was 15.  Since then I have strived to listen, more and more every day to the plants I interact with to learn the gifts that they have to offer.  This has sprouted into many kinds of work.  


I have been fed by the wild, more and more every year since starting to listen, and every year I try to do more to feed what feeds me.  Much of my work is with food- doing my best to honor those that give their lives so that I may live, to know them, and all of the beauties and terrors that filled their lives and deaths.  I do this work in the hopes of transforming the death that my hands and hunger create to be the ripe soil where more life may grow.  


In the field of making plant medicine I have apprenticed myself to the most ancient, efficient and incredible makers of plant medicine, those lovely ladies whose wings carry the love of the flowers from one deep rooted to another, those who feed what feeds them so splendidly that they inspired the plants to grow more lovely in fragrance and color to entice their sweet attentions. 


 Basking in the reflection of the alchemy of those who live and die for the transformation of something as so fleeting as the sweet nectars of a mornings desire into the most immortal gold- a food that stays as nutritionally rich as the day it was made for thousands of years.  Working in their shadow and their light has transformed every aspect of my life and the ways I approach plants. 


 Through both their promiscuity ( in working with any plant that offers up its nectar and pollen in abundance) and their faithfulness ( in sticking to just one species of flower for the entirety of each gathering trip) they inspire me to imagine old/new possibilities of potential of human plant interactions.


What is your passion concerning plant medicine? 


B: I see plant medicine as a portal to destroy the division between humans and nature- the door to become an active dancing participant in the world all around us.  An opportunity to remember that we are learned so much about what it means to be human from studying the tracks, footsteps, and wanderings of the great short-tailed shimmerer in the sky.  The digger of roots, gatherer of berries, lord of the forest, catcher of fish, whose sticky paws drip with honey and who dreams the world into being all through the long winter.  Most medicine we use today is plant medicine, whether you  picked it from the soil and processed it your self or bought it from a store that processed it in a factory that extracted one specific property, the plants are living growing in soils and offering up their magical gifts to heal us.  


    Plant medicines are rich, complex  multi faceted gems, who can present the face that is most needed at the moment.  Many of them are shapechangers who can give what is needed most by the asker and the ingester.  This is a richness and depth that most pharmaceuticals cannot begin to approach.  Plant medicines have the power to awaken our ancestral memories of the living, singing, soul and divinity of every tree and deer, every stone and seed.  To be healed by a plant is to indebt  yourself to the plants, to be adopted by the green world: to remember that the plants are our ancestors and to step up to the immensity of the gifts we have been given and our responsibilities to the future.


In what way do you consider yourself a plant person? Share with folks why you love plants and why you work with them.


B: When I find myself in a new place the first thing I do is check out the plants, smell them, taste them, ask them their names and how they like to party.  I often feel more comfortable around plants then I do people.  Why do I love plants?  Because they can grow out of concrete and offer up delicious fruits. 

 They can transform industrial wastelands into wild gardens for pollinators, animals and humans.  I love them because they are magic.  The creation of sugar from sunlight is nothing short of the miracle that most life is based on, and those green beauties who give it, define generosity in a way so much fuller, broader, and wider than English can begin to approach.  This generosity defines freedom for me, in it’s lack of fear, it’s selfless gifting to futures I can’t even imagine with my sophisticated monkey brain.  I believe plant intelligence is interwoven in the fabric of time to be both rooted in the soils of the past and breathing into the airs of the lungs of the future.  I love them for their tenacity- Japanese Knotweed that keeps growing  thru poison, chainsaw and concrete poured over her, for their power to bend and change reality, to give life and to take it away, I love them for their ability to intoxicate, their beauty- the ancient majesty of the thousand year old cedar trees at the grove of the patriarchs.  For me working with plants is transforming myself into human soil where all of these qualities ass well as their delightful bodies may grow.

What is your dream that you are hoping to bring into the world? 


B: Much of the growth of modern western civilization has been reflected on the landscape by a narrowing of diversity- the destruction of forest to create weeded tended fields of a single species, genocidal campaigns on predators to cement man’s domination of the wild.  The way we interact with the world is the way we interact with each other, manifested in the oppression of human diversity- fear of what is different, persecution of diversity in culture, language, religion, appearance, and sexual expression, and the demand to assimilate often with the threat of violence overshadowing.  The way we interact with the world is the way we interact with ourselves- growing into humans who don’t know how to sing, or how to listen, who are afraid of death and thus of life, who fear the dark and all it could conceal, as well as our inner diversity, predators, and multiplicity.


I dream of the seeds that sleep inside of us awakening, like fireweed that slept under the old growth forest for a thousand years waiting for catastrophe/opportunity of the great fire for the chance to thrive and bloom in the sun, to offer sweet nectar in abundance to the future.  Our bodies remember.  The plants remember.  The deer remember.  We have spent much more time as a species remembering our place in the great orchestra of life, dancing in reciprocity, than we have in this state of whitewashed amnesia. I dream of fields full of so many species, dancing together, the 3 sisters, being just the beginning of what plant co operations can be forged if we listen and learn. Dinner plates so full of stories that it takes the entire night for us to tell them and sing our gratitudes and indebtedness. I dream of farming morphing into tending, humans who ask the world what it wants instead of forcing their will. When we can see and taste the gifts of the plants in their fullness, the old wounds of psyche, and flora, and fauna will begin to heal as the dynamic human spirit takes it’s place once again beside the green beings and animal people that give it life, so that the tide may turn against the genocidal hunger seeking to consume complexity and diversity in the name of domination, dollar, and homogeny.