Frank Cook (musician)

Frank Cook was a drummer and former member of blues bands Pacific Gas & Electric, Canned Heat and Bluesberry Jam. For a time he was also the manager of Pacific Gas & Electric.

History

Cook considered himself a citizen of the world. He touched a large number of people and instilled in them a deep love of the natural world as well as an empowered sense of self. For the last fifteen years of Cook’s life, his passion for living consciously and simply led him to become a repository for plant knowledge. He studied internationally with herbalists, shamans, vaidyas, green witches, doctors, professors, and medicine men and women around the world who initiated him into many ways of understanding plants as medicine. During that time, Cook led hundreds of workshops on re-skilling, specifically through plant identification and botanical family relations. He facilitated mead circles, taught at schools and in homes, gardens and the woods, spoke at conferences, and played a prominent role at educational gatherings around the world. He was a phenomenal teacher. After hearing Frank share his way of seeing the world, many were inspired to connect with nature in some way – to eat something wild every day, let their food be their medicine, practice simple living, show up on plant walks, make mead and wild ferments, or create their own herbal remedies for the family. Cook taught about the edible plants in yards and woods. He showed people what plants were medicine and gave medicines he had made from them. He awakened a vibrant herbal movement and graced communities with old knowledge of traditional healers, reminding people to appreciate the whole plant and see plants as allies. He encouraged the pursuit of locally abundant analogue plants to replace the endangered, over-harvested species of the world, and to walk the green path. However, Cook did more than just enlighten people about plants. He expanded minds and aroused higher consciousness: through his travel journals, his botany talks, his way of living by donation, and by taking people to their edges, and asking questions like, “What plants will be with us in this planetary culture rising?”, “How will people to show up to help their community transition into these changing times?”, and “How can we best move forward?” He firmly believed that we are in the midst of great changes on the planet and that it is our awareness and daily choices that will determine what quality of a future we have as people of one interconnected world. Cook spoke often of how we were quickly becoming one world. His central questions in this respect were: “What plants will be in our global gardens and stories?” “What will our global healing system look like?” “What are the roles of the human species in the web of life?” Cook was very much engaged in a multitude of projects when he passed, full of visions, work and inspiration. He was known to say, “I am done with end users,” meaning that as we learned this knowledge and way of being he was teaching, it was now our responsibility to pass it on. In later years Cook became a psychiatrist in California.^[1]

References