Join us in the House of Dates for the third annual Center for Multi-Religious Studies Lecture. We will be joined by ethnobotanist and cultural worker Layla Feghali as we explore themes of her new book The Land In Our Bones: Plantcestral Herbalism and Healing Cultures from Syria to Sinai, exploring earth-based pathways to ancestral stewardship and belonging in diaspora. We’ll also learn about the Gaza Mutual Aid Network which Layla’ co-founded.

Layla’s work documents cultural herbal and healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world.

Hosted by Starr King Ministry, interviewed by Taya Ma Shere.

This will be a hybrid (in-person & online) book talk taking place in Portland, Oregon (& virtually via Zoom).

Join us for a timely conversation about Layla K. Feghali’s newly released book, The Land in Our Bones. Highlighting lineages of herbal resilience, diasporic stewardship, and unraveling the rippling impacts of colonial violence on our earth and communities, this book about people and traditions of the Levant offers relevant fodder to grapple with the dire times we are in. Join us in a conversation hosted by Iman Labanieh of Baylasan Botanicals, for a brief reading, interview, and a chance to ask your own questions, plus receive a signed book!

Questions inspiring our conversation include:

- What is the relationship between herbal healing practices, land-based stewardship, and global sovereignty movements?

- How can our relationships with land and culture support, inspire, and guide the cultivation of more liberated and dignified worlds?

- What is the role and responsibility of diasporic land-tenders in confronting empire, genocides, and climate collapse in a rapidly deteriorating world?

- How can the earth and our traditions feed our steadfastness, capacity, and skills to support movements on the ground?

As organizers and herbalists with roots in Lebanon & Syria, the ongoing genocide in Gaza has been particularly heavy on our hearts and minds. Many of us have shifted our practices to respond to the needs of this moment including organizing, fundraising, and providing political education. It is our hope that this conversation will provide generative insight into more practical wisdom for action in our local and care-taking communities — for Palestine and beyond.

This is a masked event. Extra masks will be available if needed.

Exact location TBA to ticket holders.

Limited capacity, so get your tickets now!

IMPORTANT: *Please select "allow River Rose to contact me" upon purchase so you receive email updates about the event only, including location updates and more.*

** If you have the means, please consider offering an "additional donation" upon ticket purchase to support the organizers of this event to sustain their community work. **

ABOUT US

LAYLA K. FEGHALI is an ethnobotanist, cultural worker, and author who lives between her ancestral village in Lebanon, and California, where she was born and raised. Feghali’s work is about restoring relationships to earth-based ancestral wisdom as an avenue towards eco-cultural stewardship, collective healing, and liberation. Feghali hosts a line of plantcestral medicine, community education, mutual aid efforts, and other culturally-rooted offerings, with an emphasis on land-based lifeways from the Crossroads (Southwest Asia + North Africa) and its diasporas. Her recent book, The Land in Our Bones, documents cultural herbal and healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world.

IMAN LABANIEH is a farmer, herbalist, cultural worker, and educator based in Portland, OR. Her ancestors are rooted in Damascus and Aleppo, Syria, but she was raised in Southern California before making her way to the Bay Area where she studied Ethnic Studies and Psychology at UC Berkeley. She comes to land-based work because she sees ecological stewardship as our roadmap to liberating our lands and our selves. Iman loves to exchange knowledge about plants, their medicine, and ethnobotany and is currently an educator at Zenger Farm where she teaches earth-based programming to young people. Additionally, Iman tends a small medicinal herb farm called Baylasan Botanicals where she grows an abundance of medicine to distribute to her community.

This book talk will feature Layla in conversation with Maryam Hasnaa.

Join us for a profound conversation that is a vital invitation to re-member our roots, to deepen our relationship with the lands where we live in diaspora, and a beckoning call towards belonging, healing, and freedom through tending the land in your own bones. 

It is open to the public. Register via the link below.

Will you be my Palentine?

Join us for an evening of cultural healing and remembrance.

Since its inception, The Land in Our Bones has been a devotion of stewardship and care for and from my own ancestors and the Levant’s liberatory relationships to land, love, and life. The book’s culmination is both in resistance to our erasure, and the ongoing cultivation of pathways that can fortify sovereign futures. As genocidal assaults on our people continue, please help me birth this offering in a spirit of collective healing, the cultivation of sumud (steadfastness), communal generosity, and ancestral nourishment as we plant seeds of our liberatory futures together and re-member the roots which fortify us to do so.

Reem’s California will be cooking delicious food featured in the book, including a special Gazan dish in connection towards our kindred relatives on the ground. There will be live folk music, a brief book reading, signing, and q+a with some thoughtful words and invitations for this time. We will have an altar to uplift the spirits of our martyrs - please bring symbolic items to contribute in their honor if you feel called, and a special place to plant native seeds of love and vision towards liberated futures together - from our diasporic homes to our ancestral ones.

While all these generous things are being offered without cost and registration is technically free, I invite folks to purchase tickets with as much generosity is possible for you. ALL fees from the tickets will go directly to our mutual aid efforts to provide basic needs to Gazan civilians enduring genocide: relocation costs, prenatal and postnatal care supplies, tents to protect displaced families, and other such daily living needs. There will be items for sale to collect more funds for our relatives in Gaza on the day of the event as well.

If you would like to donate a customized amount that is not included in the fixed registration tickets, please feel free to register for "free" and then repeat the process by clicking "DONATE + TICKETS" and following the link at the bottom that says "no thanks. I just want to make a donation" to make the contribution in whatever amount you would like to.

* Please wear a mask to increase safety and access for as much of our community as possible.

* RSVP to register your spot, as there is limited capacity and this will help us prepare for adequate amounts of food. Can’t wait to see you!

Feghali's upcoming book The Land in Our Bones, documents cultural herbal and healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world. The book features her Plantcestral Re-Membrance methodology as an emergent pathway towards cultural repair within herbalism, while engaging nuanced conversations about identity, loss, and exile, and the critical importance of tending the land and life where we are to restore the fundamental integrity of our communities.

The founder of the Radical Therapist Network, Sage M Stephanou, will be in conversation with Layla drawing on key themes within the book, particularly the links between ecological destruction, displacement, and consequences of colonisation on our capacity to heal. We will be holding particular care and attention to these themes in light of the current genocide in Palestine.

A percentage of the fees will be going to the Gaza Mutual Aid Support Network

No-one will be turned away for lack of funds - please contact the Radical Therapists Network.