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Tool Hunting
June 28, 2008by Jeffrey Pierce
The work never ends - even when you're on your honeymoon.
On our last day of children, Bri and I went to our favorite herb store, a place fittingly named, The Herb Store, located in Lincoln City, Oregon. Bri is hand-making a wide range of herbal products (from salves and soaps, to teas and oils) and I needed a handful of aromatic resins for use in shamanic healing sessions, the offline classes I'm teaching, and a line of hand-ground and crafted incense that I'm making. So we needed herbs and The Herb Store is one of our favorite stores of any type. Period.
The crafting is all part of that "step out in faith and serve the spiritual community" thing we're doing. I'll be sharing more details in the near future, but right now there's simply a lot of front end work to be done. So we swung by The Herb Store and then headed up The Nestucca River for wood for crafting tools.
River drift wood piled high by many years worth of winter flooding and spring thaws.
The product lines we're putting together are the same that we use in our own ritual and spiritual work. I've been working this direction for some time and have been collecting wood for use in making wands, staves, ritual bowls, and the like for over a year. Each piece has been carefully cataloged and I can tell whether it came from the heart of the California Redwoods, the Nestucca River, the Olympic National Marine Sanctuary, or if it was sent to me by one of my friends, such as Hawthorne who sent me a collection of amazing woods from Central Europe.
Jeffrey evaluates a piece of drift wood for its potential as a wand.
I've built a rapport with the spirits that inhabit every place where I gather the materials from and thanks are given for everything I take. All of the tools are crafted, blessed, and energetically charged using the techniques I was taught to do during my shamanic training. Bri takes similar care with the products she crafts, putting a great deal of love and energy into everything she makes. It's good stuff. You have my word on that.The other thing is, we're not looking to get rich, we're simply trying to make ends meet while serving the spiritual community. We're consciously pricing everything (including our holistic healing sessions - in addition to me being a shaman, Bri is a Reiki practitioner) well below the prices we're finding for similar services - some of them at less than half what everyone else is charging. It's hard to assign a price tag to something like healing or spiritual counseling, but we're following our hearts and trying to keep prices as low as possible so that anyone that seeks out one of our products or services will find that it's well within their price range. At various points in time, both Bri and I were well-below the poverty line, and we're very sensitive to keeping what we offer within the financial reach of those who would seek them.
After all, we do truly see you as our magickal family. You do your best to take care of your family. It's really as simple as that.