Meet the Weed Nuns – Our Ladies of Perpetual High

In the middle of California’s Central Valley, in a modest milky-blue home on one acre of farmland, lives a small group of nuns. They wear habits and abide by a set of vows, but as the door opens, it’s clear that the Sisters of the Valley, as they’re known, aren’t living in a traditional convent. Because as the scent wafts out, it’s unambiguous: It’s the earthy, pungent smell of weed.

We visit five women who live in the home, Sister Kate, 62, Sister Sophia, 49, Sister Quinn and Sister Camilla. Sister Luna is visiting from Mexico at the moment. Sister Kass, 29, lives off the property with her two children and her partner, Brother Rudy, the collective’s crop manager. The Sisters of the Valley home floods with golden beams of sunlight on this sunny day. A cream-colored piano is placed against the wall, with an ashtray attached and a joint in the top. Sister Kate takes it out, lights it and inhales thoughtfully as she sits down for play. “America the Beautiful.” She’s using a piano-learning app filled with Christian songs and national anthems — the two genres of music she dislikes the most. But there’s a bigger motive. “The Christian kids nearby have contests, so if I do a lot of practicing in a month, then I can beat them,”She says it with a raspy smile. “There is some gratification in beating the Christian kids.”

Sisters of the Valley is not a religious group, but a small group of self-described sisters who are interested in spreading spirituality and selling cannabidiol products. “Look, the average age of a new Catholic nun in America is 78,”Sister Kate, the founder of the sect has 22 sisters and eight brother around the world. “Christianity is dying all around us. What are people going to do? They need spirituality in their life; we need it for meaning. We are very spiritual beings walking a physical path, and so for that reason we will find ways to connect. And we are just one example of that.”

The property is peaceful and has many ashtrays. There’s a craft yurt, vegetable beds of kale and spinach, a trailer where Sister Quinn resides, and tall potted cannabis plants, which were cultivated in a shed and planted outside in preparation for the upcoming full-moon harvest. All of these are hemp plants, which they use to extract CBD. However, they also grow marijuana for their personal use. The abbey is the second home on the property and is used for medicinal-making. This area is filled with the lavender salve, which smells heavenly. There are photos of nuns, female religious figures, and joints on the walls. Sister Sophia smiles while she heats up CBD topical oil on the stove before packaging it in jars. It is their product that is referred to as medicine.

Sister Kate was raised in a Catholic family and spent much of her childhood surrounded by nuns. Before Sisters of the Valley was founded, she was a consultant who traveled the world to help clients with opening telecommunications businesses and internet businesses. As a single mother, she had to give up her job, which required her to be away. She had a business degree as an undergraduate and a half-finished MBA. Her experience in working with deregulation businesses led her to the cannabis industry. She relocated to the Central Valley in 2009 to establish a nonprofit cannabis collective, which provided medical marijuana for terminal patients.

Sister Kate claims that she entered nunhood in 2011 after the Obama administration lost a battle to have pizza sauce classified as a food item in school lunches. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, if pizza is a vegetable, then I am a nun,’”She elaborates. She explains. Soon thereafter, as she was planning to attend an Occupy demonstration, her nephew reminded of a nun outfit she had in her closet and suggested that she wear it. “When I protested with the Occupy movement dressed as a nun, people wanted me to organize myself into a religion and I kept saying, ‘No, this is meant to be crazy. This is meant to be a thumb at the establishment, that everything is broken in this country.’”

After years of protesting against budget cuts in California and tuition hikes, as a self-proclaimed nun she was asked the question: What would a new order look like for nuns? “I thought everybody would think I was crazy because I was this single, self-declared sister, but really it sparked a debate about what a New Age order of nuns would look like if they were refounded today in this environment,” says Sister Kate. She was invited to join a gathering of Native American tribes at Tule River Reservation in San Joaquin Valley in August 2013. She met with elder women from the Tule River Reservation in the San Joaquin Valley, where she spoke to them about their ancient knowledge of how plants can be used for medicine. “When I came off of that mountain, I’m like, ‘Damn, I’m going to form my own sisterhood,’”She said.

After 15 months, she created a Weed Nuns facebook page and soon had 5,000 followers. One of those followers landed at her door in 2015 and declared she would work for nothing. “I thought, ‘Huh, if four of us lived together and made medicine together, we could share our Netflix bill and I wouldn’t have to give up cable,’”So Sister Kate said, she set about creating a commune. “We didn’t want to be a religion. A religion forces you to be in the business of begging, and we know we can support ourselves. It had to be something that supported women ownership of businesses, and here we are. As it turns out, we end up looking like an ancient order called the Beguines.”

The Beguines, a now-defunct religious order date back to the Middle Ages. Because of the large number of unmarried women in the area and their desire to be spiritual, all-female groups developed to allow them to live in devotion without being officially affiliated with any religious order. These women lived in community and provided support for their families by caring for the sick or making cloth. They were spiritual and many even went as far as to become mystics. “We are not trying to romanticize the past, but there are things we like about it,” says Sister Kate. “It’s the way that these women worked in harmony with nature that we are trying to emulate.”

Sisters of the Valley have a business plan that requires them to dedicate their lives and work to the cycles of the Moon. They believe this is what their ancient ancestors did. Their harvest ceremony takes place on a full Moon and begins with a reading by the “Book of the Beguines,”A pamphlet by the Enclave. “There’s no such thing as a ‘Book of the Beguines,’”Sister Kate admits. “They were all burned. We make our own readings. We have to imagine what our ancestors would have said, what they would’ve done, and how they would have reacted to local political forces. Our closing prayer is from Season Four of Game of Thrones,”She laughs.

In the afternoon, the Central Valley sun floods the craft Yurt. Sister Kate sits under the skylight and explains the meaning of their vows. The acronym SOLACE stands for Service, Obedience Living Simply, Activism Chastity and Ecology. Service relates to their work making plant-based medicine — cannabis, and more recently, mushrooms. “Obedience is not to any order or person but to organize our lives by the cycles of the moon,” Sister Kate says. Simple living, as she says it with a smile. “means we can’t own a yacht — but you can, and can invite us all to join you.”Fourth is activism. This means holding local officials accountable.

Sister Kate clarifies that Chastity should not be confused with Celibacy. “Some people think that means you can’t do anything intimate, we can’t ever have a relationship, but that’s not true,”Sister Quinn agrees “Our interpretation is that we are privatizing that part of our lives.”Ecology refers to their desire to reduce their environmental footprint. And then, of course, there’s the full nun’s habit; it’s required on the farm, Sister Kate says, and is worn as a meditation to be in touch with their ancient mothers, to protect their hair and skin from medicine-making, and as a sign of respect for the plant that has been disrespected for hundreds of years.

Their message is being spread by thousands of people on Instagram and TikTok. Sister Quinn, the creator of their social-content, is trying to make them easier to find. Ecofeminist and graduate of University of California, Merced in business economics, Sister Quinn believes in sustainable communities and microeconomies. “I know that some things need to be on a bigger level, but I think that people living in small communities and sharing the work — the gardening and living together — I think that that’s a really positive direction that we should be going in society,”Sister Quinn agrees. In regard to the enclaves’ focus on feminism, she says, “it’s more about realizing that women and female entities are more connected with the Earth. We are the healers, portals for life; we create everything. We like to have a certain amount of harmony, a certain amount of balance. Everyone does their part.”

As for how local officials feel about the enclave, it’s taken the Sisters of the Valley years to get in the good graces of the sheriff’s department. The sisters are regulars at city hall and have emphasized building a relationship with local authorities — with good reason, since they have yet to receive a business permit to grow hemp for profit. “They haven’t given me a permit, and I don’t think they ever are going to give me a permit,” says Sister Kate. “We are in our seventh year of operations and to shut us down, I think, they would have to take us before a judge, and I don’t think a judge would shut us down when we have 10 people working on a one-acre farm.”

There are few jobs in the Central Valley, so Sister Kate plans to expand their business and create leadership and work opportunities for women. As a small business having been left rocked by Covid-19, the sect is saving what they can and searching for a farm to be able to manufacture hemp on a larger scale, furthering Sister Kate’s goal of hiring more of her local community and advancing her spiritually charged, cannabis-laced mission. “The idea is that the sisters set up their own business, set up their own commerce, have their own store,”She said. “[They] start out by earning either through wholesale or as an agent, but always plan to be making their own medicine and having their own little territory.… Everything about us is about female empowerment: women owning property, and women making the rules.”