Between the Human Animal & 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.

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).

Testimonials

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

“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

Daily Schedule

A detailed schedule will be emailed to you about 30 days prior to your program. Click here to view a sample program schedule.