ARWhole as a business is a place that SELLS medicinal and culinary herbs, handcrafted herbal products and miscellaneous health products. The SERVICES offered are Wijara Energy Sessions (combination of consultation and energy-bodywork), Next Step Consultations (about personal herb and health care; diet and nutrition), Mentoring (which could include spiritual questing and life & lifestyle choices) a
nd an assortment of classes including everything from herbs to food to healthcare. ARWhole is the accumulation of my wisdom gained from many sources, first from living close to the earth on a dairy farm in a large family with two very resourceful self-employed parents. Second, through the many years of raising my 3 children into amazing adults, adding 2 son-in-laws and a grandgirl to the family presented challenges that deepened my herbal knowledge. Also through seeking answers to all of so many questions that have come my way through friends, clients and neighbors about their interests in herbal medicine, their hearts and sustainable living practices. ARWhole as a place is my home and it’s where I make “home”, a place of quietness, sharing and acceptance. My canvas is a beautiful 38 acre piece of land that was previously an Amish farm. Being a traditional farm it came with all its fences and fields. Slowly fences are coming down and fields are morphing into a connected unity of plants and spaces. The feeling is to interweave spaces of retreat and solitude with perennial foods, gardens, areas to wild craft and paths with plant identification markers for learning. As I’m trying to find my way back to some wilderness on this piece of land that was so domesticated I’m learning to listen and trust what it is that we are becoming together – the land and I. It’s a deep intimate experience and we continue to grow each other. Where we are now there are many new definements and etchings, on the land and in my heart space. Trees planted, fire rings set, stone circles and gardens, young and old, permanent and morphing. Some areas are claimed and some are left untouched, always changing always growing. Where do we go from here? There’s that place/space in between domestication and wilderness, where we live in the forever flow of life! Too much of either extreme is daunting to the human soul. The land can live without me. I cannot live without the land. I’m trying to find that space/place where I feel the flowing exchange of life that comes from being in “right relations” with the worlds around me. I practice listening to the earth so I can combine our needs and desires in a good balanced way. So in that ARWhole is also a learning center through direct and indirect experiences. A place with diverse experiences that have to do with this great relationship we’re in called life. There are formal and informal classes that always encourage growth and self-reliance so we can take that “next step” in creating our life. It could mean learning through a hands-on class on herbal medicine, learning through emotional heart work or through a hard day’s work outside. A place of learning where I keep things “a little bit on the wild side” and a place to practice the art of “living for the Greater Whole”
As for me I’m sure I started my herbal studies before I was aware of it. Born on a working dairy farm with many siblings and at a time when folks still took care of their own needs (except for the exceptions) I learned to be self-reliant. Doctors were non-existent in my growing up years and I’ve seen little of them in my adult life. With a farming father who also sold Watkins products we had the “back room”, a room full of products that served as the medicine cabinet. Mother had Aloe Vera and False Sea Onion plants that served as my introduction into plant medicine. Being part of a large family on a dairy farm it kind of looked like this for me: gardening, weeding, cooking and baking bread, driving tractor, feeding animals, canning, hiding behind doors to read, weeding, helping with butchering, picking eggs, weeding, sausage making, weeding, jam/jelly and wine making, sewing and embroidering, weeding, 4 – H, weeding, playing in the woods and the stream, harvesting crops, weeding, throwing hay bales, weeding, escaping into my art and books, weeding, weeding…….we also ate a lot of awesome food! Leaving home and wandering off into the mid 70’s when the radical changes of the 50’s & 60’s were starting to make headway into the so called normal world, I picked up my first herb book. “Rodale Herbs” one of the few herb books written at that time. And so began my addiction of book buying. I tumbled into my 20’s and the birth of my first daughter. After choosing a homebirth I proceeded to care for my little love in a way that made sense to the world as I saw it, only to come face to face with the medical world and antibiotics. Frustrated I started to read and searched out herbal health care, in the 1980’s there wasn’t much written about herbal medicine, especially pertaining to babies and children. Then I began the long slow process of observing, listening and caring for the child, trusting that I could know the way. Three and a half years later another wonderful daughter came into being and so did my first herbal study course. Then began the collection of bottles and jars for all the teas, tinctures, oils and plant matter that came to be made and harvested. On again 6 years to the birth of another wonderful, my son, then massage school and then the move back to a rural resident in the middle of an Amish community. Hearing that a woman “who knows stuff” moved into the neighborhood, my Amish neighbors soon started knocking at my door for herbs and information. I proceeded by hanging up my sign for Massage Therapy and my business slowly bloomed. I owe a lot to the Amish community for their encouraging patriotism as it helped me to keep studying. Most if not all of my products grew out of someone’s need and if the product proved the test of time I kept making it. The business quickly grew from one small shelving unit and a massage table to choosing to add an addition onto the house to hold my herb, consulting and massage business. The business grew through a name no one has heard of to now being called Alice’s Rabbit Whole which is very fitting and much more fun! Playing with the “whole” means there is always room to stretch for new ideas and ways to make life work for one and all. A person can’t stay home and raise children forever, at some point they grow up and it’s time to go forward with the rest of one’s life. So now many, many books later, many classes and conferences later, many clients/friends and neighbors later it’s time to bring all this wisdom out of the rabbit hole into the Whole so I that I can continue my journey of relation………..
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And as she sang she wondered if that was not really the essence of life, to serve at the source of power, to do what had to be done, and if the gallows became the logical end of your behavior, to accept it…. but above all else, to participate, to be at the center of life as a participant……
“The Drifters” chapter Gretchen - by James Michener
