falling awake
  • Private Cabin Oceanfront – CAD $4,120.00
  • Single w/ensuite Oceanfront – CAD $3,120.00
  • Single w/ensuite – CAD $2,920.00
  • Single w/shared bathroom – CAD $2,495.00
  • Couple w/ensuite Oceanfront – CAD $4,825.00
  • Couple w/ensuite – CAD $4,430.00
  • Couple w/shared bathroom – CAD $4,035.00
  • Twin w/ensuite oceanfront – CAD $2,415.00
  • Twin w/ensuite – CAD $2,215.00
  • Twin w/shared bathroom – CAD $2,015.00
  • Three-share w/shared bathroom – CAD $1,810.00
  • Women Dorm – CAD $1,565.00
  • Male Dorm – CAD $1,565.00
  • Mixed Dorm – CAD $1,565.00
  • Tent Site Single – CAD $1,540.00
  • Tent Site Couple – CAD $2,830.00
  • Commuter – CAD $1,365.00
  • (All prices include CAD $1,240.00 base amount)

Date & Time Details:
Starts with dinner on July 28
Ends with lunch on August 2

View your program schedule here

Location: Cortes Island

Tuition: $750 CAD

Campus Rates: Campus rates include accommodations, meals, Hollyhock activities, use of hot tubs and campus facilities (does not include tuition). Click here for details.

Scholarships: Program experiences are enriched by having a multitude of voices and experiences that reflect global plurality. Our scholarship program is one of our key strategies to expand program access to underrepresented and marginalized communities.

A limited number of scholarships are available per program with awards ranging from partial to full tuition. We encourage applicants from those whose identities intersect with, but are not limited to: Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, 2SLGBTQIA+, people with disabilities, newcomers, youth, and elders.

Please apply for a scholarship within your program registration form. We ask for a 5% refundable deposit to apply. Contact us directly if you are unable to pay this deposit.

Email us about program

Falling Awake: The Ecology of Wonder

With David Abram

July 28 - August 2, 2023

How can we open a fresh and unshakeable solidarity  between humankind 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 geopolitical cataclysms – all ensure that our species is tumbling toward a sea change of immense proportions. Exploring practices useful for grounding and thriving in weird 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 awareness settle deep into our muscles and bones, and how can it come most powerfully to expression in our lives?

“David is an excellent presenter – knowledgeable, soulful, poetic and passionate. I am profoundly grateful for this experience.” – Martha Sorensen, 2019

Join us for a program vivid with personal discovery and collective exploration – a gathering rich with storytelling, magic, 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 bears and the crickets) in the emergence of that reality.

“The garden colours, raven calls, salt water cleanse, sanctuary embrace and warmth of the human heart and spirit sit with me still, still, still.” – Program Participant, 2019

This program supports you to:

  • Deepen your sensory and perceptual skills
  • Enter into richer relationship with the more-than-human natural world
  • 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
  • Wildly expand your philosophical toolkit
  • Hone your poetic and storytelling skills
  • Replenish your sense of wonder
  • Become a more effective agent of cultural metamorphosis

Please note that this program will entail some walking, and time spent outdoors.

Schedule

View your program schedule here.

Terms & Conditions

You may find our terms & conditions here.

Presenter

David Abram
David Abram, PhD is a cultural ecologist and geophilosopher who teaches widely on several continents. He is the multiple award-winning author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Hailed as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring”…
Learn more about David Abram