No one was going to tell me that I belonged. No one was going to tell me that I deserved it and no one was going to confirm to me that it was real, but I sort of had to take the step in on my own.

Hello, hello friends, and welcome to the Medicine Stories podcast,

where we are remembering what it is to be human upon the earth

through interviews with herbalists, storykeepers, ancestral listeners, consciousness

explorers, earth dreamers, and other wise folk.

With the grounding principles that story is medicine,

magic is real, and healing is open-ended and endless. I am Amber Magnolia Hill. This is episode 36 and my guest today is

herbalist Rebecca Altman. I'm really excited to share this interview with you, but I got to say a few things first and one of those is that I didn't plan to be on this little month-long hiatus that just happened and I apologize for the absence of the show.

I know many of you tell me that you just, you know, wait for it and love when it comes out and

it's very much my intention to have it at least every two

weeks as I've talked about many times before but I had an unexpected family emergency to deal with

actually just got through a really heavy week

where my sister and I had to run down to the Baker's Field area to help our severely alcoholic father get out of a problem that he had created.

I've talked about him and his addiction many times on the show and talked about my Bakersfield kin in episode 29 quite a bit.

So yeah back in October he let a handyman who I guess did some work for him I don't know if they

had a previous relationship or if he just knocked on the door one day but he ended up

giving my dad this sob story about how he'd been kicked out by his wife and had nowhere to live and so my dad let him move in because my dad's a really kind and empathetic person.

A lot of people hear the word alcoholic and

immediately associate that with an abuse of personality, but he's not like that at

all. And so, you know, as you might expect over time, this situation just got pretty weird.

And the man was putting up like padlocks and rooms to keep my dad out of rooms in his own house.

So this house, before my dad lived in it, my grandparents lived in it, and before they lived in it,

...