Recipes & Rituals for Community Care: Incense making for Día de los Muertos
Schedule
Wed Oct 29 2025 at 05:30 pm to 06:30 pm
UTC-04:00Location
The Greenhouse and Education Center at Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park | New York, NY
About this Event
Join us in making our own incense using cempoalxóchitl (Aztec Marigold), a flower used in Mexico during Día de Muertos (Day of the Day).
Create your incense to use during meditation, for aromatherapy, as an altar offering, and in a smoke cleansing. Together, we'll learn the process of making incense, an excellent way of preserving plants and flowers to be used year round. Learn from herbalist Diana about this special plant, and how we may use cempoalxóchitl after its time on the altar so nothing goes to waste.
Participants will create their own incense sticks and cones and participate in a tea meditation of cempoalxóchitl.
Your Facilitator: Diana Arellano
Diana is a clinical herbalist in training born and raised in the southside of Chicago with roots in Durango, Mexico now based in Brooklyn, NY. For the past 12 years, herbal medicine has played a key role in Diana’s healing journey and she has been working closely with plants, teachers, and curanderas to continue deepening her knowledge of plants. She loves to teach single herb workshops to highlight the extensive magic and medicine that any herb holds. During her herbal workshops, Diana empowers participants to use their intuition and senses to guide their own relationship with plants. Through establishing a reciprocal relationship with plants, we’re reminded of the connection and aliveness in ourselves and in plant beings.
Join us for Recipes and Rituals for Collective Care every Wednesday!
What does it mean to heal in community? What does it feel like when we extend care to ourselves and the collective? How do plants and our local ecologies care for us? How can we care for the plants and local ecologies in return?
Weave in rituals and recipes into your own self-care and community care practices through weekly explorations in herbal arts, somatic movement in the greenhouse and garden, folk remedies, and other wild-crafts and meditative activities that foster a deeper connection to plants to care for the body, mental health, and the people you move with.
Each week, be guided by a guest herbalist, healing artist, or wellness practitioner who will help you create your own toolkit and apothecary for self and communal care.
This is a free drop-in program. Come to every class to build on your skill or come to one or two that you are available for. Explore your relationship to food and agriculture and the ways our food systems can connect us more deeply to our local ecosystems and communities.
Workshops are rain or shine.
Accessibility: Our kitchen/classroom space is wheelchair accessible. With prior planning, we can add a few small mats onto the pebbled ground of greenhouse to make a small wheel-chair accessible path. Our learning garden has grass paths, and the entrance is through a gate with a small, raised entrance. Our tables can be lowered/raised, and we have several backless benches or stools. Our kitchen is in regular use, and while we try to cook without peanuts, much of our cookware is shared and we cannot guarantee a nut-free environment. We have a first aid kit, and the closest AED is in another building several yards away. Drinking water is made available in refillable pitchers.
When inside the greenhouse and kitchen we will open our double-doors and windows to vent the space and encourage masking and social distancing when in more closed-in spaces.
Our closest bathrooms are a building away, about a one-minute walk. A gender neutral bathroom is also available, and this is accessible by key which you can request from staff. We are not a scent-free zone, and because herbalism classes take place here, cannot guarantee that the site will be clear of any essential oil smells. If you have needs not addressed here, please reach out to Mallory Craig at [email protected].
Where is it happening?
The Greenhouse and Education Center at Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park, 679 Riverside Dr, New York, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00
