Remembering Earth

It’s a good thing, taking time away from posting about life, to do the living of it. Just dropping in to say things are good here. Listening, building, learning, growing. Tending this thread of remembering, dreaming and digesting changes, excited for the next turning when the time is right.

We are excited to announce that we gained our nonprofit status a few months ago, which we hope will bring new possibilities of accessibility to our work. In tandem with this, we are each individually pursuing training in clinical mental health counseling and expressive arts therapy which supports us in bringing a trauma-informed lens to our ceremonial and eco-psychology work. It will also support us in making our work more available to others by being able to take insurance and Medicaid.

Part of this calling has been the recognition that there is no “us and them”, no counterculture actually separate from the “mainstream,” no liberation if everyone isn’t included. So many people come to our work already deep on their path of earth reconnection and we love that. And, we hope to be a bridge and a resource for folks longing for that nameless something who might not know quite where to look just yet.

So for now, we hope you’re having a beautiful end of summer as we turn toward harvest season and the coming of autumn. 🍂

“I’m not sure how or when I began my apprenticeship with sorrow. I do know that it was my gateway back into the breathing and animate world. It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life. . . .

There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.”

― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

At this time of accelerating crises, we are urged to tune our ears to a slower tempo, listening for our gifts and the beauty we came to give. By doing so, we begin to decompose the story of progress and speed, opening to the yet-unseen possibilities of a regenerative future. Each of us contains a particular seed and our work now is uncovering and planting it in our immediate communities and bioregions.
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Animism to us is the practice of being in communication with and listening to sentient life forms through various ways of knowing (thinking, feeling, imagination, and our senses). With this in mind, we decided to do a day long program April 27th, Courting the Wild Ones: Animism as Survival.

We will have a conversation about why animism is essential as a tool for our survival and wellness and we will do so with the more than human wild ones :)

This is part of a project, the Land Literacy Project, put on by our dear friend Jackie . There are many amazing folks coming out to Celo, NC to teach on different subjects so check it out! && we highly recommend coming to visit this gorgeous place that we are honored to call home.

Msg us if you want to come and we will send you the dets ♥️

We’re so excited for this collaboration between RE guide and ._thunder and , and we’re getting close to being full, with four or five spot left, so if you’ve been considering, reach out to us and let’s chat.

We’ve still got some scholarship funds available (BIPOC prioritized) and also have three pricing tiers and payment plans available!

🌿 We just wrapped up the final session of Alchemizing Grief and Sorrow, an eight week program led by Jacob and Madison. It was a profound journey filled with potent introspection, powerful transformations, and meaningful ceremony.

We are grateful for the opportunity to facilitate this grief tending experience rooted in animist practice in person. It not only nourished our souls but we pray holds the potential to ripple through our communities, shaping alternative futures grounded in love, listening, and liberation.

One thousand thank yous to everyone who made this journey possible. To the participants willing to say yes to grief and its initiating force, thank you. To flowing waters of big ivy creek, the fire who kept us warm, the sky for your sunshine and clouds that kept us grounded and reminded of beauty, thank you. And thank you to the human and other wild ones, seen and unseen that guided our way with love and wisdom.

From the depths of grief, inexpressible beauty emerged, forever changing us and those in this group.

We are excited to do this again next winter. 🌹

WNC friends, we’re hosting a dreamwork workshop at the Celo Community Center this Sunday from 3-5 pm. This is an opportunity to come experience the way we weave inner and outer worlds, and make space for the way dreams are always a surprise. If you’re interested in attending or want to learn more, reach out to us! And if you know you want to attend, please RSVP 🌿🌳🪶

It’s a weird thing. Inhabiting the progress narrative. The ideas still spinning around in my heard planted from before birth. All the things to become, to purchase, to achieve. And then another foot that seemingly stretches across a vast canyon and lands on shores that feel more like reality. The way it was never going to be, or how it never has been for most of the earth.

The foot on this side of the canyon knows something that the foot in progress land doesn’t want to see. And so my days exist in leaping back and forth, relishing in the existential facts of the moment and doing the work that was always here to do anyway. Facing my mortality, considering what really matters, trying to love and rest and enjoy. And then I leap back, homework and taxes and the way “we don’t actually know” so best not gaze that way too long.

But more and more, I long to be in conversation with others who are looking. Not to be morose, but to be connected to reality, to be making choices and plans from feet rooted in the earth.

Written by RE guide

We are thrilled to announce a second year of Wild Mirrors in the To***co Root Mountains in Southwest Montana! This retreat combines dreamwork and wilderness exploration with expressive arts, movement, rhythm, and poetry. It’s an opportunity to explore art making as an ecological process and lean into conversation with the unconscious in some really fun and powerful ways.

We’ve got early bird pricing going through March 15th, so reach out with any questions or visit our website to learn more and apply!

Remembering Earth We guide youth and adults on camping retreats, dreamwork, mentoring, rites of passage, vision fasts, and online courses for personal and cultural transformation. Our programs are rooted in meaning, belonging, nature and healing.

Doubt. I wake with doubt. Why do I have to find my way back to my heart as if it’s the first time, every morning? What is all this effort really achieving? Flat, gray, a rainy winter morning with the requirements of the machine howling across the shores of my mind.

Each day, the choice must be made. Somehow I have to walk the new labyrinth, a different maze than yesterday, all over again. To find my way back to the center, through the cynicism, touching the numbness, trying not to linger too long in the despair. Can’t I just be happy? Why this heaviness? Is it possible to just be only happy if I am really looking?

I call it picking the lock. Alchemical psychology calls it heating the material. How do I turn my inner lead into gold when I just want to stay in bed? The promise of the labyrinth is a thread leading to the center. I try to take that promise seriously.

Zen has a phrase, “the great doubt,” that is considered a good sign. It means you’re looking, it means you’re awake. Because it really is unthinkable, the great freedom. The great doubt arises on the path, it is believed, as something to fully encounter and honor, to truly inhabit for a breath or a year or a decade, and then to keep going. To keep choosing life on life’s terms, as fully as possible. And to empty out eventually, through that doubt, into the wonder of aliveness.

The old saying goes “Great doubt, great awakening. Small doubt, small awakening. No doubt, no awakening.” I’m not sure if it’s true, but on a day like today, seems to be as good a thread as any to pick up and see where it goes.

Written by RE guide

We are so grateful that Alchemizing Grief and Sorrow is almost full. We are honored to hold this space and be in the journey of grief with you, for we know it is not something we ought to do alone. Thank you so much for enabling us to do this work in person. It feels so exciting to have access to your embodied presence and with a creek, forest, and an old wise willow tree to sit with. Especially after running this online for the last three years!

It is also incredible that people are willing to feel their grief and see the worth in doing so, thank you for saying yes.

If you would like to join us, please register on our website soon for it will likely be full by tomorrow ❤

Whew! The holiday season is over! For us at Remembering Earth, we notice how each November and December the cold shakes awake so many memories of childhood that we thought we had “dealt with”. The grief swells and even though those traumas aren't happening in this moment my body feels like it is happening in real time. Maybe some of those feelings are lingering for you too and we thought it would be nice to post a practice that we like to do. This practice helps us shift between grief and gratitude.

We will be doing practices such as this in Alchemizing Grief and Sorrow in WNC, we still have a few spots! Please reach out if you have questions. You can register on our website.

Gratitude Practice:

Go to a wild or semi-wild place. Find a threshold like a stick or creek and cross over. After you step across the threshold, look for a being or place that catches your eye. Ask if you can speak with them. Then proceed to praise them in the most eloquent speech you can muster. Allow your words to dance with your romantic self, speaking to this one about what you notice. Continue to pour praise onto this one in all the ways you can. When you feel complete, allow yourself to be found by another and speak praise to them. Continue to wander giving praise to the world around you. When you feel complete journal about what came alive in you and how you feel now. Before leaving, cross back over the threshold.