Spring: May 7-11, 2025
This first session is introductory and foundational for moving into the other sessions. We come together in the burgeoning spring when the first green flush comes out on the land, and when the Earth provides us with a bounty of nurturing and cleansing plants. Which is exactly what our body needs at this time of year after the long winter.
In this session I will take you back into ‘the Garden’, foraging for abundant spring edibles and medicine.You will learn experientially what to forage in the spring; how to start plants; and different forms of gardening including wildculturing. Wildculturing is the original Paleolithic form of agriculture that worked in harmony with the Earth. The original ‘Garden of Eden’.
I will also teach you how to graft, using three different methods. This little known practice, from which almost every fruit you’ve ever eaten was a co-creation of Goddess culture. This art was hidden and protected for centuries if not millennia by select families in sacred guilds. In the time of conquest that followed, the appropriated knowledge spread through Asia and Mongolia, North Africa and eventually Europe. It still forms the backbone of the industrial fruit industry.
These two arts, wildculturing and grafting are the foundational cornerstones of modern culture around the world. A people’s culture is an extension of the way they work with the land to generate food and the other materials needed to live. All of the cornerstones of culture were originally given to us as divine gifts. Those old ones we call gods gave these things to us like we would give food to the runt of the litter. These gifts were given to us in pity, so we humans could survive because we are not as physically strong as the other animals. They were given to us humans so that we could live well, not so we could spend our surplus on war, conquering other people and taking over the Planet.
Many of our backward cultural ideas and misappropriation of these gifts can be directly sourced to the Bible. Specifically, to our story of ‘the expulsion’ from the Garden of Eden. In our time together this first week we will take this myth apart in such a way as to dismantle its patriarchal spell.
In this session you will be introduced to not just the Earth and the ecological communities but the spiritual community as well, that holds us and the rest of this physical reality up. In terms of spiritual teachings you might ask, how can you speak about the unseen world with a common understanding if there hasn’t been any groundwork laid down beforehand? How can you have ritual or ceremony and travel somewhere as a group when everyone’s not in the same boat? Everyone in the school will be starting from a different place, both in their ecological knowledge and their own spiritual beliefs. So, as I do with the Earth citizens that surround us here on the land, so I do with the Spiritual community. In a ceremonial way the ‘big story’ will be revealed to you.
Which includes the creation of this world and our whole human story from 300 000 years ago to now.
And how we lost our way from the sacred path.
A history that has been lost under the stories of colonization, hidden in myth, but not completely forgotten. My vision is not something new, or invented but is as old and solid as the bedrock we are all standing on. It’s the story from which our religious and shamanic traditions have grown. As when I introduce you to the plants and animals, and you start to get a sense of the physical ecology, by introducing you to the Gods and Deities you will begin to get a sense of the ancestral spiritual ecology that we are all swimming in.
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