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 …
Refugia Gardening Guide
Living in Harmony
Land Healing and Physical Healing for the Earth: A Druid’s Garden Guide
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 …
Living with Climate Change
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 of Damaged Places: Exploring Empathy and Compassion
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 …
Love Letter to the Mountains
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 …
Herbalism and Magical Herbalism: A Druid’s Garden Guide
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 …
Land Healing – New Book Announcement!
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 …
The New Paradigm for the Future: What do we do next?
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 …
The Future is Here: An Emerging Paradigm of Hope
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 …
Looking in the Face of Death at Samhain
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 …
Soul of the Soil: Soil Honoring and Dirt Worship
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 …
Soil Building Techniques and Cultivating Healthy Soil: Hugelkultur, Biochar, Composting, Mulching, Lasagna Gardening, and More!
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 …
Straddling the Edge: Deepening and Seeking a Way Forward
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 …
Straddling the Edge at the Fall Equinox
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 …
Secrets in the Soil: Understanding the Soil Web of Life
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 …
Resiliency in the Age of Climate Change for the Homestead and Home Garden
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 …
Growing Dyes and Dye Gardens: A Walk Through a Temperate Dye Garden
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 …
An Animist Primer for the English Language
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 …
Interwoven Ritual into Everyday Life
When people think of “rituals” particularly in pagan traditions, I think there’s often this idea of scripts, robes, and a lot of formality and preparation. These rituals are rooted in history: a good deal of neopaganism (including druidry and wicca) …
Intuitive Herbal Sun Teas for Summer Solstice Healing
Walking through a sacred garden or a wild place always brings such joy; working with the herbs, drawing their wisdom, and seeing which herbs reach out for healing and health. Today, in honor of the upcoming Summer Solstice, I will …
Reskilling, Rebuilding Community, and Exploring Folk Traditions at the John. C. Campbell Folk School
When we think about the building blocks of a new human society, a human society that doesn’t destroy the planetary biosphere, that nurtures and supports human beings and communities, that fosters our creativity and innovation—I think it starts in fostering …