Falling Awake: The Ecology of Wonder

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 climatic changes now underway ensure that civilization will experience dramatic transformations in the near term future, indeed that humanity is about to undergo a sea change of immense proportions. How can we help such metamorphoses unfold in a manner beneficial not just to human elites, but to the greatest possible range of species, ecosystems, and cultures?

A dawning recognition of the primacy of place, an awareness of wildness unfolding wherever we turn our attention, a fresh humility in relation to other earthborn beings (whether salmon or cedars or storm clouds), and a radically transformed sense of the sacred — all these are struggling to be born at this moment in the world’s unfolding. How can this transformed awareness settle deep into our muscles and bones, and how can it come most powerfully to expression in our lives?

Join us for a program vivid with personal experience and collective exploration — a gathering rich with solitude, storytelling, and heartfelt conversation. Together, we’ll pool our discoveries toward engendering 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.

This program supports you to:

• Expand your perceptual and sensory skills
• Enter into richer relationship/rapport with the more-than-human natural world
• Learn new ways of tuning to your home-place, deepening your experience of the local earth
• Wildly expand your philosophical toolkit
• Awaken to the beauty and power of indigenous cosmologies
• Expand and intensify your sense of wonder
• Hone your poetic and storytelling skills
• Become a more effective agent of cultural metamorphosis