Patricia Damery and her husband, the late architect Donald Harms, fell in love with the land he had found on the western rim of the Napa Valley, a rugged property that they kept primarily wild. They planted grapes and lavender in two small areas, using organic and biodynamic farming methods. Donald designed their home based on his love of Greek proportions, and Patricia created her writing studio so that her pygmy goats could visit her as she worked. This book, in part, is the story of their deepening relationship with one another and to the land. As owners of this beautiful property, they felt a responsibility to preserve rather than disrupt the delicate balance and interconnectedness of the natural world in which they were living.

Patricia gazed on an ancient oak savanna from her kitchen and vegetable garden, teeming with wildlife, nesting birds, and threatened amphibians. When she learned it had been sold to new owners who planned to create a commercial vineyard, winery, and event center, Patricia joined a grass-roots activist movement of Napa County citizens (Napa Vision 2050), little realizing she had entered into an epic war—one that will determine the survival of the very qualities that have attracted developers of vineyards, luxury resorts, and exclusive restaurants.

Over the past 30 years, Patricia has witnessed catastrophic change caused by overdevelopment and compounded by climate disruption. Egregious land-use policies have allowed ongoing deforestation,  decreased water quality and supply, and eliminated wildlife—while creating traffic congestion and smog, increasing the cost of housing, and drastically lowering the quality of life for residents. Fruits of Eden gives voice to citizens who are increasingly unheard by governing officials.

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.