CARE FARMING

forest bathing, trail-making, ceremonies, basket-weaving and, if the conditions are right, cool-burning. The activities are carried out with hand tools and informed by the needs of the land that Hazel has spent two decades observing. The goal is that the students leave with an expanded sense of connection with the woodlands, each other and themselves.

Through cooperating together we can regenerate our forests and rewild ourselves and the land, growing hope as ecosystems recover while empires crumble.”

integrates deep ecology, the ethics of First-Nation cultures, small-is-beautiful bioregionalism, and ‘mythic memory’ to advocate the repair of the planet and forests, while rewilding our own damaged psyches.”

integrating humans back into the land

Together we listen to the earth, we understand where we belong, and we find our way home again.”

Supportiveness, or service to others, is one of the four cardinal virtues described by Lao-tzu. When you extend yourself in a spirit of giving, helping, or loving, you act as God acts. Imagine shifting your attention off of yourself and asking the universal mind: How may I serve? When you do so, the message you are sending is: I’m not thinking about myself and what I can or can’t have. Your attention is on making someone else feel better.

Anytime you’re supportive of others, you automatically remove ego from the picture. And with no ego, you go from edging God out to being more like God. Practice giving and serving without expectation of reward (or even a thank-you)—let your reward be spiritual fulfillment. This is what Kahlil Gibran meant when he wrote in The Prophet: “There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.”

The greatest joy comes from giving and serving. That’s much better than the discomfort and distress of focusing exclusively on yourself and what’s in it for you. When you make the shift to supporting others in your life, without expecting anything in return, you’ll think less about what you want and find comfort and joy in the act of giving and serving. This giving, loving, serving person is the real you.

What Laurence Cole calls "an ecology of care"

Wild Peace Sanctuary is located on a beautiful, tranquil property just five miles inland from the Pacific Ocean on the Central Oregon Coast. The land here is teeming with wildlife as well as being home to our adorable herd of equines. Book one of our therapeutic services services, schedule a tour of our regenerative land projects and learn about rewilding, or simply visit with the rescued and rehomed equines that we care for and feel their healing energy that will keep filling your heart and lifting your spirits long after you have left.

For the vast majority of our species’ development, we have held sacred our relationship with all life, with the seen and unseen worlds through certain practices of presence, deep listening, honouring, reciprocity and through cultivating forms of communication and divinatory practices as a ‘language’ we might share with creation. Here in the West, over the past 500 years in particular, we’ve been moving away from these deeply human practices that have sustained us for at least 70,000 years. This self imposed separation from our deep knowing and sense of belonging within the web of life has left us aching and empty and our home planet in dire straits. And yet, it takes so little to rekindle the relationship, to re-member ways of being and interacting with the seen and unseen world that are deeply woven into our humanity. FEATHER, FIRE, STONE AND BONE calls together a community for a year and a day of practices, ceremony, learning from teachers from across the globe, discussion, sharing and deep relating with our animate, soulful world. This journey we make together asks for a commitment to bed in practices, to go deep into a new, old way of knowing and connecting with life.

How may I serve others so that they may have what I desire? The answer to this seemingly contradictory question holds the key to authentic inner peace. Many callers to my radio show are struggling with fears, worries, and concerns that stem, as they see it, from unfulfilled desires. I usually suggest that they try wanting something more for others than they want it for themselves. The love required to do this turns their focus away from the constant turmoil of the ego and instead opens real possibilities for living their highest and most joyful purpose.

ith all things. We develop an embodied spirituality that restores our full humanity by remembering our sacred relationship to the land.

Our domestication/attachment to harmful people - Shiloh. Shanti imprinting.

At Wild Peace Sanctuary we host workshops, gatherings, and retreats focused on reconnecting with the living spirit of the land, and reclaiming our own inner wild spirit. Through earth-centered practices drawn from the fields of ecotherapy, sylvotherapy, nature-based ritual, we can deepen our sense of connection with life, with one another, and with our own wild soul. We belong to the Earth so true healing comes from remembering our place within the interconnected web of life. with life, with one another, and with our own soul.

I’ve been looking into the root system of plants, and my mind is blown, their root system holds their neural network, it is where their brain is and it is highly intelligent, holding neurons exactly like those in our brain, using the same neural chemicals that our brain does and stores memory.

Plants possess a highly developed, conscious root brain that works much as ours does to analyse incoming data and generate sophisticated responses and while humans and many other animals have a specific organ, the brain, which houses their neuronal tree, plants use the soil as the home for their neural net, our neural network is limited by the size of our skull, but in plants the root system can grow wider and deeper.

Plants consciously form social communities that are tightly coupled together. And similarly to bacteria, plants show just the same sorts of complex and sophisticated behaviours that humans do, from language, to sentience, to intelligence, to the creation of communities, to cooperation in groups, to complex adaptation to their environment, to protection of offspring, to species memory that is consciously handed down through the generations of plants.

Older plants intelligently send out volatiles to younger plants that contain within them information about chemical responses to predation, teaching them what they know so they may survive and thrive. Older plants consciously store the information or wisdom they learn about different predators as a kind of cultural learning that is then passed on to younger generations. Old growth plants are repositories of the acquired learning of the species. Cultural learning and transmission is, in reality, common throughout the Gaian system.

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for

a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to

let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Mary Oliver