Between the Body and the Breathing Earth: April 24-29, in Tuscany, Italy.

Can we replenish our capacity for joy, while renewing our solidarity with the living land? It’s hardly a simple question, for our world is rapidly becoming more dangerous. Once-hopeful democracies slide toward dictatorship, wars spread (and their attendant cruelties metastasize), the climate veers toward catastrophe. Humankind seems ever more distracted, hypnotized by our digital screens even as our fellow species tumble into extinction. At such a difficult moment in the world’s unfolding, how shall we nourish a soulful commitment to what matters?

In the course of our timed together, we’ll explore the wild ecology of perception, stirring our animal senses awake. We’ll enter into felt relation with other beings – with creatures, plants, and the elemental, earthly surroundings. Weaving contemplative encounters with nature along with rich conversation, entwining bodily gesture and movement with the arts of poetry and storytelling, the retreat will empower each of us to bring our expressive lives into a fresh and ever-evolving alignment with the more-than-human Earth. 

How can we open a fresh and unshakeable solidarity between ourselves and the other animals, plants, and elemental forces that compose this breathing biosphere?

The deepening contortions of climate change – intensifying droughts, monster floods, flaring wildfires and heart-wrenching geopolitical cataclysms – all ensure that our species is tumbling toward a sea change of immense proportions. Experimenting with ideas and practices useful for grounding and thriving in dangerous times, we’ll ponder how our lives might be of genuine service to the more-than-human earth.

A dawning recognition of the power and primacy of place, an awareness of wildness unfolding wherever we turn our attention, a new humility in relation to other earthborn entities – whether salmon or cedars or storm clouds – and a radically transformed sense of the sacred: all these are struggling to be born at this teetering moment on our whirling dervish of a world. How can this altered, animistic awareness settle deep into our muscles and bones, and how can it come most powerfully to expression in our lives?

Join us for this 5-day immersive program, vivid with personal discovery and collective exploration – a gathering rich with storytelling, intellectual adventure, creaturely dynamism and heartfelt conversation. Together, we’ll pool our findings toward a new experience of the enveloping earth as an exuberant, improvisational, and sentient reality – and of ourselves as full-bodied participants (along with the humpback whales and the thrumming crickets) in the ongoing emergence of that reality.