B2B Promotional Text — For hospitality businesses
From the Aroma Bar at Grateful Rain
Following in the footsteps of Grateful Desert, our sister store in Joshua Tree, Astoria’s own Grateful Rain is happy to offer delicious, clean, ethically sourced amenities to our local hospitality businesses.
Artisan made, locally created amenities are a wonderful way to add to your guests’ experience, and encourage repeat visits. Choose from our selection of popular house blends, or come visit the Aroma Bar to collaborate with our essential oil mixologist on your own signature formula.
We work with the cleanest base materials we can find, and over a hundred pure, ethically sourced essential oils, from vetiver to bergamot to black spruce to rose. Our mixologist is an expert in collaborative blending, creating the Aroma Bar at Grateful Desert a decade ago to do just that, and working with thousands of customers to co-create bespoke blends.
Formulas are available as body wash/shampoo, conditioner, lotion and aromatherapy spray. All products are available with a Grateful Rain label with your business name added, or unlabelled and ready for your own branding. You can also choose to work with our in-house designer to create a label design to suit your needs. Enjoy the samples and come see us...Let’s collaborate!
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B2B Promotional Text — For wholesale buyers
At Grateful Apothecaries we create over one hundred single herb tinctures, and nineteen popular grab & go tincture formulas, addressing a wide variety of ailments and symptoms. All our products are cruelty-free, vegetarian and ethically sourced. Our formulas are designed to support and enhance system strength and balance, detailed information on each formula can be found in the accompanying Tincture Guide.
All our tinctures are created by Herbalist and Registered Nurse, Jenny Q, in small batches in the Astoria, Oregon lab. Jenny uses the percolation method for the majority of tinctures, and the maceration method for all viscous tinctures and fresh herbs. All of our tinctures are made with organic, gluten-free cane alcohol, and reverse-osmosis filtered Astoria water.
We are very dedicated to purchasing organically cultivated herbs, using ethically wildcrafted herbs only when cultivated organic isn’t available. Most of our herbs are sourced from Oregon’s Applegate Valley. In some tinctures, Jenny includes orange blossom water, which is very effective in alleviating nausea and helps with digestibility and absorbability.
Jenny is dedicated to creating an authentic educational foundation for her tinctures. She offers free, remote training sessions to the wellness staff at our wholesale partners’ retail outlets, focusing on herbs as part of a whole health/whole person health regimen.
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Proposal for a theatre piece, Soledad, 2019
Soledad is a multidisciplinary live performance work-in-progress, an innovative musical theatre production grown upon the roots of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. My working vision of Soledad is a Jazz Opera built around an eight-piece experimental band interacting with a small cast, visually enriched by two dancers and film projection.
Soledad contextualises Garcia Lorca’s poems by exploring aspects of his life, era, place, and artistic sphere. Dance and film are central vehicles for bringing early 20th century aesthetics to life, helping create flow and contrast between two different time-periods/stories in the piece, and expanding subtle emotions and ideas to a larger visual scale.
I want to illuminate a central tension I read in much of Lorca’s poetic work: his ability to be so articulately in love with life and nature, in friction with an inability to be open about his loves, as a gay man living in 1920’s Spain. I mirror this conflict with a character from one of his poems, Soledad Montoya, who I bring to life as a friend to Federico, in love but never to win him.
Their dynamic evolves in the second story, embodied by two characters living 100 years later. Soledad’s great-granddaughter Elena and Lorca’s spiritual kin, the androgynous River, meet and live together in an American city in 2019. They allow me to explore themes from the poet’s work in a more accessible context, building paths for modern audiences into the historical material, and providing an opportunity for understanding something more about where we are now in realms of identity, freedom of expression and acceptance of the other.
Soledad opens in 1919, the spring after the end of the first world war, and Soledad’s first lines speak to the destruction the war has brought. In 2019 America, war has become so eternal and ubiquitous it’s not even mentioned until later, but then begins to appear in everything. I want to explore how our state of perpetual war affects us, in contrast with European artists’ reactions in the 1920’s. I want to make some intelligible noise about the acceptance of perpetual war and an entrenched war economy, to question our disastrous ideas about the inevitability and legitimacy of war. As a child of war survivors, I have some first hand knowledge of the long impact of state violence, and it’s a theme I’ve examined from my earliest songwriting, through every record I have made. I create this piece in homage to an artist whose own life was cut short by war.
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Description of The Nest, 2022
The Nest is a cob and straw bale one and a half story building I designed and built in Oregon, completed in 2010. It is an example of a low impact, ecologically clean and locally sourced hand built home. The north/west wall is a half circle built of straw bale with cob layers inside and out, the east/south walls are all cob with many repurposed windows and two repurposed glass doors. The roof is metal, the kitchen sink is fed from a spring uphill and drains to a grey-water field, and there is a composting outhouse nearby.
Cob is a durable and dirt cheap material made with clay, sand, straw and water. I brought a truckload of straw bales to the site, some used wood, windows and doors, the roofing material and some electrical and plumbing parts, but most everything else came from the land it sat on, or the surrounding countryside. The Nest was a personal experiment in how ecologically clean a building I could make, using wool insulation, clay plaster and milk paint, sealed clay floors, passive solar design and a lot of thermal mass. I dug a hollow into a red clay hillside, dry stacked a stone foundation, and sculpted the displaced earth into a studio/home.
I had studied natural building techniques since I came across the idea of working with cob. I could not shake the idea of creating a shelter monolithically, with my own hands using this beautiful, forgiving, sculpt-able material. In the end it took many hands, but this was part of the beauty of the project. Many volunteers got to get muddy and learn something valuable, I got to teach and lead a new kind of creative project, and we all shared many days of joyful, sweaty, rewarding work.
The finished Nest was said by several visitors to feel like an embrace. The project was a manifestation of many ideas I was working with around people's reconnection to the earth, the self-determination we have traded away for modern living standards, and how to gain re-empowerment over our own basic needs. The Nest shows the possibility that given a place to do it, people with few resources are able to create not only shelter but health and beauty for themselves and others.
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Proposal for a public art project, The Passage, 2022
The Passage is a pubic art piece and gathering space that invites participation, collaboration, and spontaneous creativity, while supporting ecological regeneration. Sited in a natural amphitheater in a public green space in the Scottish Highlands, The Passage appears to grow out of the earth, with traditional dry-stack stone walls increasing slowly in height towards the structure on either side.
The structure is built of the most elemental local materials available, stone, earth, straw, a minimum amount of wood, recycled if possible, with a low slope living roof. From the back, the structure seems an integral part of a landscape dominated by rolling hills and mossy stone walls. From the front, one can see that the structure forms a shelter and a stage. The space is oval, a stone bench set into the curved back wall.
Several slightly mushroom-shaped objects seem to grow up from the floor, stage right, their tops a few feet across and about waist height. These are created from recycled materials, mostly metals formerly used in oil drilling, gas powered transportation, and other remnants of an extractive energy system that must be reimagined. They have been carefully and beautifully crafted into simple musical instruments, based on steel drum, marimba, harp, flute, chimes, percussion, several instruments built into each piece. They invite musicians and people who do not think themselves musicians to play, experiment, make sound with other people, any time the space is available, for free.
Parallel to the musical / artistic aspect of The Passage is its use as a distribution point for knowledge and resources for ecological regeneration. This aspect is also based on a free-to-all model. The structure is built by craftspeople skill sharing with volunteers, empowering more people to use natural building techniques to create shelter. The dry stack stone walls split in a Y shape as they approach the sides of the structure, creating two enclosed areas accessible through passages from the rear. These areas are open to the sky but sheltered from winds and are a drop-off/pickup point for freely donated organic saplings, vegetable and herb starts, mushroom kits, and any other organic, botanical, agricultural and wilding materials. Expectations of those picking up include planting and caring for these living gifts, and if they do well, returning with a donation in kind. In this way the cycle of gifting continues, expanding local sustainability and the biodiversity and carbon sequestering potential of the area.