DESCRIPTION

This weekend retreat offers an opportunity to come together in community in these times of rapid change and deep uncertainty to cultivate creativity, courage, connection, and resilience, and renew our commitments to care for ourselves, each other, and the Earth. Structured around deep ecologist Joanna Macy's spiral framework of The Work That Reconnects, and drawing from the work of Michael Meade, Sobonfu Somé, and Francis Weller, we will engage the transformative power of experiential group process, council practice, earth-honoring ritual, poetry, and song to ground our hearts in gratitude, honor our sorrows, seek new inspiration, and bring forth our unique gifts for a world in crisis. We will spend time with the land seeking to restore a sense of deep belonging with our more-than-human community by offering gifts of grief and gratitude to the Earth.

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Our teachers will offer classes on the traditional arts of spinning, weaving, and awakening fire from friction to remember and reclaim some of the ways of our ancestors. We will work with myth and story to awaken our imagination, cultivate resilience, and search for golden threads of inspiration that can guide us through the dark during these troubled times. Our grief for the world is a clear sign that we are fully alive and connected to the web of life. By honoring and metabolizing our sorrow, fear, and outrage in community we can transform the energy of these valuable emotions into good fuel for the journey ahead. As we share our hearts and hands in creative re-engagement we invite the possibility of opening to new ways of seeing the challenges we face as a species and weaving a tapestry of healing, strength, and renewal from all that is unraveling in our world.

LOCATION

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This retreat is being held at Loving Earth Sanctuary, an intentional community and land-based living project, centered around radical simplicity and committed to non-violently resisting the exploitative, consumption-driven systems upon which modern society subsists. Nestled in the beautiful Santa Lucia Mountains approximately 40 miles north of Paso Robles, CA, the focus of this community lies in cultivating personal growth, healing our relationship with the planet, engaging in voluntary simplicity, and actively working toward an electricity- and-fossil-fuel-free lifestyle.

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OTHER DETAILS

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This is an off-grid camping retreat. Participants are required to bring their own camping gear. Thoughtfully prepared, seasonally focused breakfasts and dinners made from food grown on the land, and/or locally sourced, will be provided. Click here for a detailed list of items to bring.

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*We will be working with sustainably sourced Churro wool from a sheepherder who herds Churro sheep on Black Mesa with the Diné (Navajo) people. Working with this precious yarn honors this heritage breed of sheep and the history of this ancient practice, helping to support the Diné people of the Black Mesa area financially so that they will be able to remain on their ancestral lands and continue to practice their traditional ways. 

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**We will also be working with the last few yards of a hand-spun, plant-dyed golden yarn gifted by Trebbe Johnson, founder of Radical Joy for Hard Times, an organization focused on making beauty in wounded places on Earth as a way to give back to those places that have had so much taken from them. We will weave this yarn together with our sacred Churro wool to create a community tapestry of beauty, strength, and renewal. ​​​​​