Greetings from Duluth Minnesota

What are you finding this fall in nature? Are you outdoors much? Are you in the sunlight when it is nice weather? This newsletter comes to you from a sunny day in Duluth, northeastern Minnesota. Great for camping, the area is currently having some warm days this fall. The leaves are just starting to change color and I’m looking forward to photographing the drive north of here along Lake Superior.
 
These past two weeks I traveled in Wyoming, South Dakota and Minnesota. The stars are bright, the towns are quiet and people are friendly. And the wind blows, a lot. For over two weeks Minnesota has shared some amazing sacred sites, and activities done by groups to access the divine such as pow wow, puja to a cow and, finally, a sweat lodge. The sacred sites include a Catholic shrine, petroglyphs, and battle memorials. There’s so much more, and so much I didn’t photograph out of respect, but here are a few pictures in the slideshow below.
 
The other part of this trip has been to feel out where to open a practice. In addition to talking with various health care practitioners, I've visited some towns' chambers of commerce,  and people I’ve met are guiding me from place to place, helping me meet more people. In Rochester, Minnesota, I was able to talk with quite a few locals involved in health care, and even those not. There, it seemed everyone, even the owner of the town’s Ethiopian restaurant, was able to direct me to potential places to rent space to practice.
 
Along the way I’m meeting many people who care about organic food and herbalism which helps me feel like I could live in a place dominated by farms boasting GMO corn strains at the end of the field rows. In southern Minnesota, among the corn, I visited the forest and dug for twenty-five year old American ginseng with the man who planted the seeds.
 
Bottom line, there’s so much potential and need for Oriental medicine in the mid-west. There’s amazing natural beauty and there are some places with better economies than others. You are probably asking: can I give you any idea where I’m going to move to? My answer is that this is an evolution. I’m here to feel it all out. I don’t expect clarity for some time yet.

--Tanuja