Spiritual journeys in tending the living earth, permaculture, and nature-inspired arts
All of us are on a journey. Perhaps it is a physical journey, traveling to distant shores or a new home. Perhaps it is an emotional journey, a journey of the heart and of healing. Perhaps it is a journey …
As my blog readers are aware, a year ago, I returned back to my beloved Appalachian mountains in Western Pennsylvania after living in other parts of the country for most of my adult life. Now let me be clear–this is …
As I walk through my neighborhood in this quiet Pennsylvania town, I am struck by the contrast. On one hand, many of my neighbor’s lawns are monocropped with grass–one after another, green expanses stretch on and on. Dandelions are quickly …
At the end of the semester in my quaint college town, a spring ritual of sorts takes place. (I know, I know. Spring rituals in college towns are rarely a good thing!) It is a holiday dedicated to the gods …
My last beekeeping post told a tale of my two bee colonies destroyed by colony collapse disorder. I had hoped to have better news to share about my beekeeping endeavors this year. And things started well enough: a friend removed …
When I spent two weeks living in an ecovillage last summer, I proudly talked to friends and family about the fact that I hadn’t flushed a toilet in two weeks. This led to a wide assortment of responses, including “gross, …
I had the most amazing thing happen to me about a month ago, and it involved the direct (palliative) healing of an active strip mine site. I was heading to teach an herbalism course at a friend’s business about 15 …
Today’s post continues my long series in land healing (see earlier posts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6), and given the heaviness of the last few weeks of posts, today, I wanted to delve into how to do this …
As I’ve mentioned throughout this series, the energetic land healing work that you do is largely based on the situation at hand–what is occurring, what has occurred, or what will occur. Sometimes, you are aware in advance that the land …
Sometimes, the hidden, the unacknowledged hurts are the worst kind. These are the kind that you bury, deep within yourself, or that society pretends never happened. We hear stories of these every day–massive cover-ups of the truth of crimes being …
Today marks the Spring Equinox, Alban Eiler, a time of new beginnings, of the balance between light and darkness, between summer and winter, and between hope and despair. Given the energy of today and the challenges before us, I’d like …
For the last month or more , we’ve been exploring the nature of land healing and we will continue that journey over the next few posts. I’ve been doing this work intuitively for a very long time, and its taking …
The last time I wrote about bees on my blog, I wrote about the loss of my hives from Colony Collapse Disorder back in October. The loss of both of the colonies of bees caused a great deal of sadness …
In my post last week, I discussed the different ways that we might heal the land including physical land healing, healing human-land connections, and various forms of energetic healing. Today, I want to delve deeply into the aspects of energetic …
As we are all so fully aware, our lands are increasingly under duress in ways unprecedented in recent human memory. At least here in the USA, the systematic pillaging of every resource these lands have to offer continues unabated. And …
The druid tradition–along with many others–is full of stories about sacred waters. From the Chalice Well in Glastonbury to the invocation of the “Salmon who Dwells Within The Sacred Pool,” we’ve got our water going on. Imbolc (which happened earlier …
This is the last post (for a while) in my series on wildtending. In the last month, we’ve explored the philosophy of wildtending as a sacred action, explored the refugia garden principle, I shared my own refugia garden preparation and …
In my last two posts, I shared the philosophy of wildtending–the idea that we can nurture and regenerate the lands around us as a spiritual practice. In this post, I wanted to share the start of a new garden–a refugia …
Over the course of the last six months, I’ve been discussing in various ways philosophies and insights about helping to directly and physically heal our lands as a spiritual practice, weaving in principles of druidry, permaculture, organic farming, herbalism, and …
Calling all land regenerators, earth walkers, and friends of the weeds! You can help heal our lands, today, with the resources you have and the love you have to give. What if, instead of doing less harm or less bad, …
I had a long conversation with an older close relative of mine over the holidays. He had overheard my sister, brother-in-law, and I talking about herbalism, permaculture, cultural shifts. This conversation was framed in the context of the recent Paris …