+PRISMATIC PIONEER PODCAST +

August 21, 2017 ~ prismaticpioneer ~ Leave a comment

Well its been a few weeks to figure this out, but i’m just over the moon and this new platform and finally i’ve put together the very first episode of the Prismatic Pioneer podcast!!

My first guest is Samantha Zangrilli, of Turkey Tail Farms set in the hills of Yankee Hill, CA! Sammy is an amazing charismatic and enthusiastic woman who has been changing the face of the local scene around Chico, CA for many years through slow + sustainable food and with the love of hard work and dedication she has been able to put together a rad little mobile music festival that happens on bicycle through the streets + parks of Chico as well!!

Samantha is a California born, flower farmer, shepherdess, fowltres and butcher.

Raised in Amador County CA, Samantha sought travel. After some time in Ghana and Hawaii graduated from Chico State with a degree in Environmental Politics. Samantha committed her life to the love of bikes and environmental awareness. She took to a life of cycling and cooperative living at the GRUB Farm Cooperative. During her time at the GRUB cooperative she founded the Chico Bicycle Music Festival. The Bicycle Music Festival is an all day, traveling, bicycle powered, free event. A day of bike-powered music, people powered energy and grass-roots fun. The Chico Bicycle Music Festival just celebrated its 8th year.

Also during her time at GRUB she met her now husband of six years, Cheetah,and moved to the oak savanna foothills. At Turkeytail Farm she has expanded the scope of products as well as marketing platforms. Her and her husband operate a pork, lamb, chicken, mushroom, flower subscription program, serving their local community.

TURKEY TAIL FARM

Is rooted in a passion for quality food and love of the natural world. We produce Grass-Fed Lamb, Pasture-Raised Chicken, Pork, Duck Eggs,Oyster Mushrooms, Cut Flowers and Culinary Herbs on 40 acres of oak savanna, brushland, and pasture in Yankee Hill, California. Seated between the immense wilderness of the Plumas National Forest and the great bread-basket of the Sacramento Valley, we manage our land for both the production of food and expansion of wildlife habitat. When we arrived in 2008 the property had been overgrazed by cattle for many, many years. The pastures were depleted, and the hillsides rutted from cattle traversing the muddy slopes. We began grazing and running poultry and working with Natural Resource Conservation Service and developed a conservation plan to improve wildlife habitat through intensive grazing and browsing. Our farm employs observation of nature and regenerative agriculture to bring you the finest food available.

I truly hope you enjoy listening to this first episode, i enjoyed this entire process and cant wait to have my second episode live! Ha!

practice the practice

January 26, 2017January 26, 2017 ~ prismaticpioneer ~ Leave a comment

I had the distinct pleasure of sitting in a group meditation that was created recently in our immediate community with a number of beautiful and very inspiring human beings, some of which I know very well, and some I have recently just met.

The evening left me with the feeling of wanting to be doing WAY more, knowing I am fully capable, and reminding me that nothing will happen without the practice of practice.

Even just sitting down to breathe properly has to be an initiated experience for me these days.

When life hands you a daily dose of anxiety/stress and your breath is so often caught up in your chest, the act of putting your hand to your belly and directing your breath downward is what it takes place instead of an autonomic spiral…..it is what has to happen for it to make it anywhere in my body these days. A practice to put my hand there and not continue the shallow chest breath, the recipe of what life has been serving up lately.

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But when you have fallen so far out of a habit, returning to it can be difficult and awkward/ having to down multiple cups of caffeinated tea so you can sit quietly and meditate with your friends around you is laughable, but I tell you thats what it takes sometimes for me to calm down…..

I am practicing what it is to practice once more. My days in this past week have been filled with very foundational and fundamental routines in my diet, which has me reflecting on the ways in which our diet and routines are so linked to the way in which we feel throughout our day, highs and lows, and balance within the emotional realm.

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There was a point when I was living in California, that I was really thriving in my body, working on a farm and studying herbs that helped to heal and nourish pieces of my body and spirit. I left that experience with a deep sense of knowing remembering that feeling deep within my spirit, it has carried with me all these years of living quite a different life.

So revisiting this, is actually just a remembering and an awakening of deep seeded knowledge and practice from a life that was not so long ago. Woman! It feels good! It makes me wonder how I ever found myself on the other side of this practice in the first place.

Tonight I begin another weaving intensive with my own teacher that has taught me so much in the way of relationship to pattern and structure and fun within this space, and I couldnt be more excited to show up for myself in the realm of learning and placing myself in the ground to sprout and blossom once more.

I am practicing the practice of showing up for me and supporting myself in these hectic crazy sometimes terrifying times, in all the ways I can, and it makes me feel calm and collected.

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A moment of vulnerability

April 21, 2016April 22, 2016 ~ prismaticpioneer ~ Leave a comment

Now lets just say I wasn’t fooling myself when deciding to do a cleanse, especially a cleanse of this magnitude. I knew I was going to be hungry, I knew I was going to be emotional, I knew I was going to feel challenged in pulling away from my daily americano.

The thing i didn’t account for, is the rest of my absolutely insanely wonderfully full life. Nothing in the world stops when you are on a cleanse, they keep plugging right along. And lets just be real here, I am nearing the ripe old age of 30, and my life is PACKED to the brim of many things that I am doing or learning to manage, or encountering new things on the daily that I get to be challenged with and learn….anyone who knows me knows I am working simultaneously on at least 5 projects. All these ‘adulting’ projects are taking more problem solving abilities and patience than ever before.

So on Monday I walked away from my espresso / egg a day habit and went to green juice and salad my brain wasn’t really excited about me deciding to take away my comfort zone, the beautiful plate of caffeine and animal protien that I had been feeding myself in moments of stress and uncertainty.

I started with the intention to look at myself this week a little bit more intensely before I was to pair with our cleanse group that my friend and colleague Nicole DeVaney and myself are hosting in the next week.

What I have been handed is the truth peeps, cleansing is no joke!

Nicole and I had plans to formulate our cleanse packages and daily care routines the following day, so I was feeling confident that I could withstand 24 hours with juice/ water and a salad and be completely fine. When I completely underestimated my day of mental activity ( I’m a Gemini by the way, so any amount of stumble to my mental acuity and I tend to ball up in the fetal postition) I knew I was in for a rough one. I have always said it, my americano helps me think straight. It will never be possible for me not to wake up thinking, but to organize and act on those thoughts is a whole other scenario….usually requiring my 16 oz. of pure espresso heaven. So going to run a bazilllion errands before noon on no coffee was, lets just say, painful! Caffiene withdrawl is a real thing….have you ever tried it? I have, but things like this are easy to forget when you’ve gone a while without doing that… by the end of the day I had cried twice, was COMPLETELY exhausted and was a little weary of the next day, even though I knew I would be meeting with Nicole to finally get square on our healthy cleansing routine!

The next day felt fresh, no caffeine headche, and I was on the go again, but somehow even with renewed optimism on my side I managed to sustain a head injury on the job site while getting into my car (nice to look where your head is going….smack) headaches, upon headaches! 4 o’clock couldnt come soon enough.

Upon arrival to the Iron and Salt studio I knew I was in good hands, Nicole made me a glorious colostrum milkshake and handed me my amino acids ( part of our cleanse kit) and kindly some wintercrest for the goosebump on my head and it was like night/day.

It was at that point that all of this cleanse started to come into perspective, and where I became truly aware of how necessary our formulation for support during this cleanse time will be during our collective release. So many individuals make the attempt to cleanse on their own and go about their days much like I had spent the last 36 hours. And boy let me tell you, that just isn’t gonna fly! Not for busy, driven people with lots on their plate everyday. And I realized the idea of collective accountability and support is key too! Even just having Nicole hear about my hard day and symptoms and offering a hand made a world of difference with my own anxiety. No herbal concotion of my own making could really touch the support of a friend.

And so I guess I’m posting this today because I find myself really excited and proud of what we have put together here! Our efforts in ritually cleansing our bodies has become sharply formulated and well thought out. I have gone the rest of the week feeling supremely different and really feeeling back on top of my life thanks to the key pieces of our cleanse. And it hasnt really even started yet! I am happy to be the test monkey of own own design though, I recieved such insight into why I have studied herbs and healing modalities in the first place (I am an artist mostly, but man is it good to know about herbal medicine and what the natural world does to support the body, heart and mind!)

Our cleanse begins on the 30th of this month, with a 2 hour class on everything you’ll need and want to know going on at Iron and Salt studio Wednesday the 27th! There are limited spaces this round, but still a few openings! Wont you come cleanse with us, it feels WAY good to be supported during this time! click on this link and read through a bit more to see if it might be a good fit RELEASE CLEANSE If you cant make it for this round, dont worry 🙂 we will be recording the class and will make it available online, along with your kit so you can order it on your own time as well. If you have time, and intention to release and let go of patterns that dont serve you and your health and well being anymore, consider joining in this time! We have partnered with some truly great local companies to help in making this release the smoothest ever! Vive Juicery and Real Foods Market have been great in giving us some great deals for everything you will need!

I share all of this with you in a true moment and feeling of honesty, transparency and vulnerability. I always try and show my best face to the world at large, but really you have just gotta lay it out there sometimes and tell it like it is! I am including pictures of my transformation over the past 5 years from good and bad times. I used to use photo booth on my computer to take a daily ‘check in’ photo and they have proved to be a really interesting look into my overall wellness-emotional and physical. If nothing

Best of health to you today and everyday xo

the idea of a beginning

March 29, 2016March 29, 2016 ~ prismaticpioneer ~ Leave a comment

The way to begin anything can happen on a multitude of different emotional wavelengths. It can be stirred by excitement, and the desire to create a brand new path. It can come from a place of sorrow or resolution, a way to repair what has once felt broken. It can also be stemmed from a point of necessity. A needing to change or implement a new way of doing things. A beginning, it is just that. A start. It can be fresh, or it can be something we have done a hundred times.

i think the thing is, it must be done. Beginnings are where we were all created from. They are the point of origin from where our lives began, and thus they hold a special place in our memory and in our hearts. We all remember first kisses, first loves, first cars, the beginnings and points in which our lives make a turn, or jump into unfamiliar territory.

This blog, this first post, this place that I am finally finding myself, is a beginning that has actually been a long time coming in the way of my heart feeling a need to create, and express myself in a consolidated forum. A wanting and desire to collect my thoughts and my trials and errors in life into a written and photographic compilation of intent and love.

I have for the most part been writing all of my life, and looking at words as a form of expression. There was this thing I jumped into in high school ( which I reflect on now, and consider it to be a unique adolescent moment), it was a primitive blog culture. Back in the early 2000’s my high school scene of Fargo, North Dakota, had discovered the idea of blogging on a popular site at the time, Xanga. It would be one thing to think that maybe a few kids from my school were using it, but man, I think about it in its entirety and it really created a vast network of expression that not only included my high school, but ALL of the Fargo/Moorhead area!! It was a moment of reflection for each of us, a gushing of the days events , a tell all of what was being downloaded on Napster, what boy may or may not hold a special place in my heart because HE was listening to the Postal Service too! We were all connected behind the safety of our computers at home, or in the library computers at school…. and there was a certain air of confidence around the idea that we could say what we wanted, it was OUR page, and we could all comment and talk, without instant messenger or text, it was a way to POUR all the greasy teenage dirtbag feelings into one venue. A public forum at that, but it still felt uniquely private….as if only the people I wanted to be reading, were there consuming my innermost feelings.

WHAT BRAVERY!! I mean now, it is almost laughable that I felt that way. Give way to Facebook, and Instagram and it seems like I have been sharing myself on a cyber kinetic visual level for over half of my life. Welcome to the new cyber age, where no one actually has to run into each other anymore to know exactly what we are all up to.

I have thought to myself for quite sometime about how liberating having a blog actually was for my teenage years, and right before I like LITERALLY forgot about Xanga for the next 7 years I went ahead and PRINTED my blog off….every page, every song, every heartbroken poem, has travelled with me in master copy for over 15 years….( I pat myself of the back on the regular for this one). And let me tell you, its hilarious. Everything I wrote, everything I FELT was so intense and over the top, but I mean, what 14-16 year old isn’t feeling the world INTENSELY?!

Flash forward to today, and I’m proud to say I will begin anew. Over my years away from online published reflection, I have gone out into the woods and I have LIVED! Boy have I lived, I have experienced much more than I ever thought possible, and still it doesn’t even seem like I’ve made a dent in what I’d like to find myself involved in and exploring. I have been passionate about learning skills and studying culture and how it applies to folk art.

This blog, my current vision, is under the idea that my life is to be lived in FULL COLOR, prismatically. A space of awareness in that way that all colors in the spectrum bring about white light, pure love and radiance in my heart with everything that I am creatively connected to. My hope is that I can find myself sharing my life as a movement of color and space. The integration of things that I have learned in the way of skill, and the exploration of those skills from a place of color.

This will be a place to house projects, thoughts, feelings….with the intention of connection with word and image.

I will leave you with some photos of the most current macrame piece that I have done, photographed by my incredibly lovely friend Vanessa, who is also exploring a colorful world in the way of learning to sew with me.

Thanks for witnessing this beginning, I couldn’t be more excited to start.