The Sacred Gardener School
An Initiatory Path To Become a Person of Earth and Spirit
In the garden lay open the heart of creation, and the seeds of our culture’s future.
In the garden we can find not only food, but a deeply rooted metaphor for almost every aspect of life.
In the garden we find not only peace but a map and guide to cultivate our self, so we may be fit for the ancestors and a benefit to our fellow beings while we are here in body.
The Earth is a garden, we are all meant to be sacred gardeners, but to do this we must become fully human.
Given the name of the school The Sacred Gardener, many people might think at first glance that we’re a school of gardening or if they scratched a little deeper, of herbalism, wildcrafting or homesteading skills. Well, it’s true and it isn’t. While I teach these ancient arts in a very grounded and clear experiential way, as I practise them, they are the least of the offering. Until now it has truly been a ‘mystery school’ in many ways because even what’s really on offer has been veiled. Most of the people who’ve come to the school have done so from a whisper of intuition or by word of mouth. From reading something I’ve written or hearing something in my voice on a podcast that rang true, many people have followed their heart and come only to find what they were really looking for. While their reasons to attend are to learn skills, or to learn a deeper, more connected way, in the end their gratitude pours over for another gift they never expected.
All of that is to say I want to be a little less opaque and make it easier for folks to find me and join Sacred Gardener. So I’m going to peel off the first layer of the mystery, and say what I felt before didn’t need to be said. And that’s that the ’school’ is the cover for an initiatory path. Each session brings you deeper into the fullness of the mystery, step by step. And each period between gives people time to practice, work with and digest the teachings, and to start cutting the ties that bind them.
I’ve worked over many decades towards being able to offer this two year course; learning the most effective and gentle ways to unfold the bundles of knowledge I carry, and how to offer them to the uninitiated and initiated alike. In the time you are here, through teachings and ceremony I will re-connect you with something you’ve forgotten, or maybe never knew existed, in ways so simple yet encompassing you would never imagine. I will help you find what our culture lost long ago, but still blindly rests on. Find what most of us have never known, but what we all know is missing. We will step through a hidden door into the magic of a mythical living world together.
Spiritually and physically, we live in a time of great ignorance. We don’t even know where our food comes from, let alone how this domestic miracle that feeds billions of people many times a day came to be. Without knowledge of ancient history or older cultures and without certain experiences, we grow up having no idea of who we really are or what we could be, or what our cultural and personal purpose is here on Earth. Over the last couple hundred years with the Industrial Age and the accompanying schooling to which we have all been subjected, we have been indoctrinated into the ‘cult of reason’ and have lost touch with the real world, with Nature and what we call ‘intuition’.
While we have gained much with our technologies, to possess them we have sacrificed our connection to the living world and the knowledge that came with that. It’s clear to most folks that we can not go on living in our consumptive ways, and that the connection to our Mother, the Earth, is essential to our well being and our future here on this planet. On this you may agree, but if you have little or no experience in Nature and no good examples of how to act in the face of such power and grace She is difficult to approach, let alone step into sync with and dance in a respectful and relaxed way.
So, while it is instinctual to connect with our mother, learning to connect with nature as an undeveloped or blocked adult takes time and help. And to develop relationships with Her that can sustain both our bodies and spirit takes longer still.
In the first session in the school I start from the start, like a seed. And as we learn skills that are needed with each changing season I’m teaching you how to grow roots down into the Earth and ground your reality, to draw nutrients from below. And we reach up to the top of the highest pines, feel the winds of fate that whistle through her needles, hear the ethereal messages of the bird people and receive Sun’s wisdom and enlightenment. In our time you will learn how to re-connect with these old venerable ones in a ceremonial way. To help sustain you on this sacred road I open bundles of ‘seed’ knowledge, feeding you that from which culture is derived, and from which many co-creative shoots and tendrils, like art, agriculture and healing can grow.
What your time at the SG school might look like
During the flow of our five day sessions, most days we have active ‘productive’ times together picking wild food and herbs, gardening or doing one of a hundred different seasonal homesteading activities. And we have quiet times together outside and in the ceremonial roundhouse where we learn and reflect on our experience and lives. Nighttime is free time to be alone or to gather round the fire and share, to practice skills or sit by the water’s edge in silence and ahhh, floating on a sound boat of spring peepers, traveling with them up through the stars.
In each session we follow the spirit of the day and a mythic rhythm that underlies that session. We spend our time doing the physical and spiritual activities needed to be a true Steward of the land, gardening and wildcrafting. We plant seeds together, and walk through all the steps to collecting them at year’s end, and learning how to become a seed keeper. Learning about fruit and nut trees and how to prune and graft is not just useful but an initiation into knowledge that was so valued by early cultures that it was only held by certain lineages of women that belonged to secret guilds of pre-patriarchal Goddess oriented cultures.
This sacred image of Eve, the snake and the Golden apples of temptation was appropriated by early semitic writers from much older Goddess oriented cultures and used as propaganda to push people away from the old ways, and at the same time give them something familiar to help them accept the new patriarchal war God, Yahweh. Significantly, while the old practices of Earth and feminine worship and beliefs were stamped out by Christianity, it’s likely that every fruit you’ve eaten in your life, unless it was wild, came from a live thousand year old pagan graft. Even now, when with a click you can see how to graft trees on youtube, people still don’t generally know about this well kept secret behind nearly all the fruit and nuts we eat. And fewer still have the skills to do it well, which take years to develop. To bring these spring teachings home in the last fall session you’ll be harvesting and processing fruit born of these miraculous ancient co-creations.
In our activities we are always mindful and working with the wild plants and animals at the right times, receiving physical and spiritual medicine. When we experience and learn ‘traditional skills’ within their living ecology the spirits and ancestors of these Arts have a way to find us and claim us. To be taken by such a spirit is what we all want. If you haven’t felt it, it’s like love, where our work fulfills the longing.
By following these ways we truly walk a path back to Eden. Not to a place of naïvety and innocence as we might imagine (we can’t go back to that if it ever existed), but to a place we belong, where we are woven into a rich tapestry of relationships with the Wild. A place where we willingly, with joy and gratitude bite into the infamous apple, which gives us the knowledge to co-create and work in harmony with the Deities and beings of the land. And for tending to these relations, we bypass the war gods and their expulsion and are gifted with the generosity and fecundity of the Earth. And the gift is even greater than just abundance.
The gift that’s being offered is a hand-made life, and a place outside the madness of the mainstream. By living in harmony with our mother we make a place for ourselves with our happy ancestors. And we make a place in the seed pouch of time, as worthy seed for sowing future sustainable cultures. This beautiful dance with Nature, who heals us and helps us claim back our life, is available to everyone. We are Her children and so, like all mothers, she is watching and waiting for us to come around. And this gift of bounty from co-creation can happen anywhere. Even in a hard wild place like Golden Lake, where we have three frost free months a year to grow, and winters that drop to -40.
Your teacher and guide’s story
It’s noteworthy that I started ritual practices and growing plants the same year, forty three years ago when I was seventeen. They have both become sacred roads, to what I only realized much later was a world our ancestors knew well. A world we all came from and to which we all belong. These arts have been my sacred Camino to freedom and peace of mind. I re-discovered a path and place covered over by a thousand years of conquest and inquisition, and under the pavement of the Industrial Age. A way back to the heart and hearth of reality.
I have worked with medicine people, Elders and those who carry bundles of sacred knowledge from Canada to Guatemala, and been their guests in countless ceremonies, big and small. When I was young on this path, I spent many years alone in the forests of Central Ontario practicing ritual and learning how to live in a traditional First Nations way with the Earth. I learnt everything from how to do ritual, to how to build shelters and keep myself alive, trapping and foraging for wild food and processing it for the long winters.
Later, I began to learn more about gardening and plant medicines. In the next couple of decades I became a practicing ‘folk herbalist’ and started a bioregional herb company, using only abundant herbs that I knew well from the Southern Algonquin region. But I feel I only really became a herbalist/healer later after getting Lyme disease, when my life depended on my physical and spiritual knowledge and competency to heal myself with herbs. Since that period of time over a decade ago I’ve helped hundreds of people heal themselves from hundreds of ailments, with the help of the herbs.
As my practical and historical knowledge has grown I’ve come to the incredibly simple realization that agriculture is a spell, from which culture grows. If we change how we grow we change who we are. We can choose our spell intentionally, as many have in the past to create cultures. Many others have said as much from different cultures and different times, and now we find this is even genetically true. You are what you eat in many ways.
This foundational knowledge of civilization has been used in a spectrum of different ways, from building strong egalitarian cultures of the earth to unsustainable patriarchal cultures reliant on conquest and slavery. The agriculture we know, even the organic methods that grow our food, are based on monocultural methods directly related to Roman colonization. The genius of Roman colonization borrowed from the Great Khans of the East was, the conquered people were not killed off, they were controlled. So, most of our ancestors were essentially slaves being forced to grow the conquerors unfamiliar grain crops, and to kill out everything else that might lessen the harvest. A version of the same thing happened again during what’s known as the “Great potato famine”, which started the great migration to North America from Europe. Every significant crash or development of a civilization, including all the holidays dedicated to these occurrences came from agriculture.
With seeding a new future in mind, I created a forest garden based on indigenous practice in 1996. And I wrote a M.A. thesis on the process, which was rebirthed twenty years later as my first book The Madawaska Forest Garden.
While I have had many great living teachers, I’ve had no guru, so to support and bridge the gaps in my knowledge I’ve become a student of history and culture, specifically of ‘land-use’, agriculture, food, healing, art and religion. And I am also a self employed, tax paying husband and father, so I’ve developed and co-created many sustainable ‘green’ businesses to make ends meet over the decades, and to bring the healing force of the Earth to others in one form or another. From this experience I am now able to help folks who want to work with the Earth, often on their own land, find ways of sustainably co-creating with Her to develop niche type products and services. The economy needs to be part of the ecology, not the other way around. And not completely separate from us as we act, which is founded in the old belief that money is somehow ‘impure’. Whatever this dark root is that’s tied to money, it’s fed by a rich soil of greed and misguided selfishness.
From visions and dreams, and things people have said to me over the years I know the heart of my life work is to be a bridge that can bring people ‘over troubled waters’ to a place of solidity, to a place of deep understanding and empathy for the Earth and the Spirits. To do this I teach about the longer arc of history and take you through ceremonies and exercises that help you dispel your cultural and personal illusions. I help you cut that which binds us to the small part of who we are, and that blinds us from stepping into who we can be.
This is no small task and part of why the school happens over two years. In helping free you from your cultural and personal baggage I am also obligated by spirit to show you a new way to be, moving step by step through that darkness we are trapped by, into ‘the good world’, to a wholesome world, which happens to be the one I live in. Not perfect, but holy.
Sacred Gardener School 2025
The Sacred Gardener School is for those inspired to move into a deeper level of being; to live in a connected, sustainable and soulfully present way with the Earth. The school will foster your growth over time, enabling you to embody the living skills and ceremony needed to engage the larger spirit and ecology of the Earth, so She may bless and redirect our collective and personal path.