Description
June 23-27, 2027
Sacred Gardener Farm
Includes all your meals and camping spot
Additional fee to stay in our shared timberframe house
This is a hands on experiential workshop where you will learn how to create offerings and how to gift them to the unseen spirits and beings that support and take care of us. During this session you will learn the traditional skills of incense making using local plants, as well as how to make pottery offering bowls and beads from local clay. Beads have a long history of use in spiritual ritual long before they were brought into the Christian tradition of the rosary.
An “offering” is a gift of alchemized beauty being offered to unseen spirits in thankfulness. Even when we make offerings to a specific plant or animal or person, it is not the physical form but rather is directed at the spirit behind the plant and growth. I believe this would apply even to the Christian ‘worship’ of Jesus or Muslim Mohammad. Such offerings are not limited to monotheistic gods. We have always made prayers and offering to a multiplicity of Gods and divas, to ancestors, to the land, to plants and animals, to the sun, moon, stars, rain, rivers, lakes or any other special place. We make offerings to any or all the seen and unseen beings cohabitating this beautiful place with us. We make beauty to offer them as spirit food, in gratitude and thankfulness for that which sustains our body and soul. We also make offerings in our times of great need. We call on those old ones, those holies, in hope the ancestors or deities will receive our prayers and intervene on our behalf.
We can use incense and other tools that came from exotic places around the world, for their innate power. But I feel these offerings, while powerful and beautiful in their own right lack integration with our everyday life. When we create something from the land directly, where we already have a relationship with all the beings, the offering will have an integrity and rootedness. In this workshop you will learn how to create and make every aspect of an offering, as our ancestors have for more than ten thousand years, and possibly for hundreds of thousand of years. It’s been discovered recently that other humanoid species also practices ‘religious ritual’. So these practices may go back further in time beyond our species, back for millions of years! Animals like Elephants have their own rituals. There are many spiritual communities that believe it is only daily prayer and thankfulness that keeps the world turning.
With a synergy of skills and knowledge we’ll move through each step of creating incense cones; from the harvesting and processing of local plants and resins, to forming custom blended cones.
The second “skills” part of this course works hand in hand with making the ephemeral smoke offerings; making the offering bowls or dishes to hold the offerings. We will also learn how to make pray rosaries and offering beads from local clay. We will go through each step making the pottery from the harvesting and processing clay, through to the making, drying and firing of our beads and bowls. This workshop brings together herbalism, pottery, traditional skills, history and spiritual practices.
