Wonderments is a lushly illustrated book that enchants and empowers as it equips, featuring inspiration, assessment tools and exciting insights for a more effective life practice or purpose... and for a vitally awakened and deeply satisfying life! As the subtitle explains, it was written for all you visionaries sensualists, culture-shifters and healers of every kind.
"The enchanted healer is one who has gone to that other world, been changed... and committed himself or herself to the all life... to heal all things, to bring them into right relationship with all others. I hope the reader enjoys this journey into the enchantment of the healer as much as I have."
-Matthew Wood, Herbalist
Wonderments is for anyone seeking a vital re-enchantment, a more full experience of life, and a greater effectiveness in fulfilling one's dream, one's purpose, one's calling. Such enchantment is essential to our efficacy, enjoyments and satisfaction - not in the sense of being "bewitched" or "beguiled," but enraptured, enlivened and aroused, the opening of our sensate beings, conscious minds and caring hearts to those intense potentials existing at the edges of our tested knowledge and the far frontiers of our respective fields and interests. Enchantment is a natural state induced by the encounters with the mysterium occurring in the wilder parts of the mind, at the far frontiers of what is conventionally imagined, and there at the sun-dappled edge of the unmapped forest.
Much of this material appeared first in the the book The Enchanted Healer, and then was reworked and expanded with several new chapters and a number of additional illustrations. The intention is for it to reach beyond the plant healer community to the larger audience for information and inspiration about subjects like awakeness and expanding our awareness, enhancing the five physical senses, ecstatic sexuality, places of power and the healing quest, the lore and ethos of Gaia the living Earth, creating your own inner sanctum and cabinets of curiosity, identifying your plant and animal allies, the roles of healers and seers, and so much more!
From the Introduction:
"Our enchantment and wonder, roles and purposes, efficacy and satisfaction require that we be both Seekers & Practitioners. We need to daily practice skills and tasks, the honing of the senses, the exercising of curiosity and critical thinking, the deliberate plumbing of meaning and patterns, the application of ideas and the testing of knowledge. Developing, improving, and applying. Parents practicing parenting and poets practicing poetry, healers practicing the ways of healing, teachers of teaching, artisans practicing the ways and means of creating, lovers practicing love. At the same time, we must never cease being Seekers - explorers, questers, students - seeking new experiences, fresh ideas, indicative discoveries, greater understanding, and more and more powerful ways of applying our practices to actualize our intentions and goals, our gifting and service, effectiveness and optimization, realization and fulfillment. While it certainly feels good, enchantment is not only a search, enjoyment and reward, but a peak condition enabling, influencing, and enchanting our thoughts and actions. As explorers of the far depths and full breadth of reality, we and our personalized missions benefit from the increased awakeness and awareness, embodiment and presence, self-knowledge and spiritual/magical sense of place and purpose that wonder helps make possible. Wonderments is encouragement to do what many may call impossible: fully inhabiting and passionately co-creating the diverse manifestations of a fairytale-quality life."
