EVENTS

Between the Human Animal and the Animate Earth
Jul
26
to Jul 31

Between the Human Animal and the Animate 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

“Deeply resonant with indigenous ways of knowing, Abram lets us listen in on wordless conversations with ancient boulders, walruses, birds, and roof beams. His profound recognition of intelligences other than our own enables us to enter into reciprocal symbioses that can, in turn, sustain the world. [He] illuminates a way forward in restoring relationship with the earth, led by our vibrant animal bodies to re-inhabit the glittering world.”

– Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

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Sentient Nature in a More-than-Human World; an ethnobotanical retreat with David Abram
Oct
3
to Oct 16

Sentient Nature in a More-than-Human World; an ethnobotanical retreat with David Abram

  • Wasiwaska Ethnobotanical Retreat Center (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

A two-week intensive, held at a coastal ethobotanical garden and research center on an island in southern Brazil, exploring Sentient Nature in a More-than-Human World. This experiential and thoroughly interdisciplinary seminar will engage the sensorial, ethnobotanical, anthropological, ecopsychological, and musical dimensions of awakening to the many-faceted intelligence of the animate Earth.

led by:

David Abram, Cultural Ecologist and Geophilosopher
Ede Frecska, Psychiatrist
Alexandre Tannous, Ethnomusicologist and Sound Therapist
Dale Millard, Naturalist
Luis Eduardo Luna, Anthropologist

for information, and to apply —
https://www.wasiwaska.org/seminar/sentient-nature-in-a-more-than-human-world/

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Falling Awake: The Ecology of Wonder
Jul
28
to Aug 2

Falling Awake: The Ecology of Wonder

A six-day workshop with David Abram at the OUTRAGEOUSLY BEAUTIFUL Hollyhock Retreat Center, on Cortes Island, in British Columbia’s Salish Sea.

At a moment when so many ecological limits are being breached by a civilization largely oblivious to its own embedment within the biosphere, how can we swiftly catalyze a collective recognition of our thorough dependence upon the animate earth? How to open a fresh and unshakeable solidarity between humankind and the other animals, plants, and elemental forces that compose this breathing commonwealth?

more information and registration here: https://hollyhock.ca/programs/5767/falling-awake-the-ecology-of-wonder/

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Geopoetics Symposium
Apr
19
to Apr 23

Geopoetics Symposium

Leading and emerging figures in geopoetics, Indigenous studies, ecophilosophy, environmental arts and place-based education will dialogue, learn from the land, lead seminars, present works, create, collaborate, and cross-pollinate.

Learn More

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