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