In Fruits of Eden, author Patricia Damery takes readers on a thirty-year journey, vividly recounting her citizen activism to protect the world-famous Napa Valley from the ravages of over-development, water plundering, government failures, greed and damaging tourism.

Damery’s articulate and Illustrative voice is a powerful call that interweaves the story of her ranch with her history, reflections, marriage and her husband’s onset of dementia. His Alzheimer’s began at the same time as pressure on the ranch’s sustainability became acute. Conversely, there is also great hope. The author’s relationships with colleagues in action for the valley, her children, her grandchildren and friends all share a deep love for this extraordinary place on the planet.

Over the decades Damery and her husband, Donald Harms, developed a way of life that respected the natural ecology of their land in the Napa Valley. They applied organic and biodynamic methods, left large parts in their natural state, and had a herd of goats that lived next to Patricia’s writing studio. Then climate change coupled with egregious overdevelopment overcame them, threatening to destroy their way of life. Destruction of native oaks caused erosion and groundwater depletion, insecticide use disrupted the balance of animal life, including beneficial insects, population density and tourism brought air pollution and congestion, and finally global warming brought repeated fires, a risk that continues today.

Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation

Farming Soul questions theories and assumptions that date back to the days of Freud, assumptions that separate spirituality from psychology. Patricia Damery finds answers through unconventional teachers and her relationship to the land — answers that are surprisingly intertwined.

During Patricia’s individuation process she experiences the importance of being rooted in a particular place, guided by the tenets of Rudolf Steiner’s Biodynamic® agriculture. Her professional journey to become a Jungian analyst is a path filled with review committees and unorthodox teachers.

Farming Soul offers perspective on the complex dynamic of the therapist/patient bond and a personal account of when to rely on one’s inner authority. This is a book about soul embodied and the essential recognition that spiritual, ecological, and psychological exploration is essential to reconnecting to our deeper selves.

Marked By Fire

A soulful collection of essays that illuminate the inner life.

“This life is the way, the long sought after way to the unfathomable which we call divine.”
—C.G. Jung, The Red Book

When Soul appeared to C.G. Jung and demanded he change his life, he opened himself to the powerful forces of the unconscious. He recorded his inner journey, his conversations with figures that appeared to him in vision and in dream in The Red Book. Although it would be years before The Red Book was published, much of what we now know as Jungian psychology began in those pages, when Jung allowed the irrational to assault him. That was a century ago.

How do those of us who dedicate ourselves to Jung’s psychology respond to Soul’s demands in our own lives? If we believe, with Jung, in “the reality of the psyche,” how does that shape us? The articles in Marked By Fire portray direct experiences of the unconscious; they tell life stories about the fiery process of becoming ourselves.

Contributors to Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way include: Jerome S. Bernstein, Claire Douglas, Gilda Frantz, Jacqueline Gerson, Jean Kirsch, Chie Lee, Karlyn M. Ward, Henry Abramovitch, Sharon Heath, Dennis Patrick Slattery, Robert D. Romanyshyn, Patricia Damery, and Naomi Ruth Lowinsky.

Goatsong

What happens when you lose everything: a mother, your home, your right to live alone? What happens when society calls you undesirable? When best efforts make it worse? Three women and a child, each alone. Nature heals . . . opens hearts . . . Nelda’s small herd of goats and her wisdom, Ester’s willingness to pay attention, Dee’s caring action. These are the gifts from three unlikely women to the child Sophia. To know the saddest song there is, to know the Goatsong of tragedy, is to be reborn.

Snakes

Angela Tyler has spent the greater part of her life in suspension between the world of the small Midwestern farm she grew up on, and her current life in Northern California as the wife of a college professor and mother of three. When her father dies and the family farm is sold, betrayals both small and large are brought to the surface. Angela faces these betrayals and finds new ground to stand on.

Symbolic of transformation, snakes form the bedrock of Angela’s narrative as she examines her relationship to her father, family, the land, and her life. Highly recommended, Snakes is a transformative, engaging, and seductive story about life’s insoluble contradictions.