A five-day workshop with David Abram at the outrageously beautiful Hollyhock Retreat Center, on Cortes Island, in British Columbia’s Salish Sea:

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.

Program Highlights

• Enter into richer relationship with the more-than-human natural world

• Deepen your sensory and perceptual skills

• Replenish your sense of wonder

• Wildly expand your philosophical toolkit

• Hone your poetic and storytelling skills

• Awaken to the beauty and power of indigenous cosmologies

• Learn fresh ways of attuning to your home-place, enhancing your experience of the local earth wherever you live

• Become a more effective agent of cultural metamorphosis

Please note that this program will entail some walking, and time spent outdoors in somewhat rugged terrain (rocky beach, uneven forest trails).

Daily Schedule

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