Spiritual journeys in tending the living earth, permaculture, and nature-inspired arts
As I’ve shared before, I have personally gotten so much depth and connection from working directly with the earth for healing food, and medicine, and meeting my needs. More than just knowing or being out in nature, using nature to …
My last Druid Garden guide covered physical land healing, tied to regeneration, rewilding, permaculture, wildtending, and refugia gardening. These are the practices that allow us to connect with the land deeply with our hands in the soil and love in …
As a part-time member of the Goose flock, I walk in the back of the line of geese we make our way to swim in the creek. I say hello to the berry bushes and hazelnuts that are ripening, playing …
What can we do to support nature in this age that is meaningful and important? One of the primary ways that I’ve been thinking about this is in terms of creating refuges for life, or “refugia.” I’ve shared some of …
As we have been exploring on this blog, living in the Age of the Anthropocene means living in a time when human activity is radically reshaping the world. Exponentially increasing human demands for resources are leaving many other lives on …
It is not easy to live in the Age of the Anthropocene–the increasingly difficult challenges of everyday life, the unweaving social fabric and community bonds, and of course, the 6th mass extinction and ongoing climate change. Despite the media parading …
Land healing encompasses a wide range of activities: from physical replanting, rewilding, and regenerative approaches directly on the land to metaphysical blessings, healings, and palliative care. As I’ve just launched the Land Healer’s Network and am releasing the Land Healing …
I see you, beautiful, layered ridges of the Appalachian mountains: your peaks against the blue winter sky, the mist arises from the snow while the Imbolc sun comes out to warm you just enough. Below that, your frozen bones await …
Plants and mushrooms have been healing humans since long before recorded human history. Evidence of this abounds from healing plants and mushrooms found on preserved corpses and pre-historical burial grounds (such evidence of herbal use in Shanidar cave from 60,000 …
Today I’m very excited to announce the upcoming release of my new book: Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Approaches for Healing the Earth. The book is now available for preorder and will be released on March 28, 2024 from …
As we’ve been exploring in my post last week–a new paradigm is rising, a paradigm being enacted in backyards, home kitchens, community gardens, clubs, mushroom clubs, herbalism schools, ecovillages, pigment foragers, and thousands of other places. This is a new …
A paradigm is a set of patterns: of thoughts, actions, beliefs, and practices, under which people operate. We all were born into the paradigms of our current age: where money, colonization, domination, and the myth of progress are embedded into …
As I write this, we have our last day before a freeze–the day before death comes to our landscape. On my landscape, in temperate Western Pennsylvania (USDA Zone 6), we’ve had almost no frosts to speak of–the summer has seemed …
There is something magical about putting your hands in the soil. The cool, damp feeling, the smell of earthy loam, the crumbling of the loam between your fingers. Touching soil, the building block of life, grounds you in a way …
Recently I had some local homesteaders visit who wanted to see our homestead and the various systems we’ve been building. At one point, I uprooted a dandelion that was growing in a bed and the whole root just came right …
My post from last week generated an incredible amount of discussion from people from all walks of life. So rather than continue to talk about soil (which is now scheduled for next week), I wanted to take another week to …
The Fall equinox is traditionally regarded as a time of reaping the harvest and also a time of balance between the dark half and the light half of the year. As is customary this time of year, I’ve been reflecting …
Soil is one of the most sacred things on the planet–the soil is the foundation of all life on earth. The soil, including the living organisms in the soil, provides the basic conditions for plants to be abundant, to resist …
I’ve been homesteading for about 12 years now, first in Michigan at a 3-acre homestead, and now with my partner here in Western Pennsylvania on five beautiful acres where we practice land healing, forest regeneration, permaculture, bioregional animsim, tend our …
I think it is easy to forget in this day and age that so many of our traditional art forms are directly rooted in the living earth, and reconnecting with those ancient forms can bring us closer to nature. This …
The longer that I’ve really embraced animism, not only as a life philosophy but as an active spiritual path, the more I realized that to be an animist is to radically turn your world upside down on every level. Being …