Listening to Our Earth

This workshop is about how to internalize the wisdom of Braiding Sweetgrass. We will look at how to become naturalized to Turtle Island – examining colonialism, reciprocity, honorable harvest and kinship relationships with all living beings. Worship sharing and experiential exercises for integrating holistic ways of being part of Earth.

Workshop Description

This is not a “book group” – We will throughout our week together explore themes in the book in order to understand how we can move out of western dominator paradigms of taking and colonizing land into a paradigm that has been held by indigenous people for time in memorial of living in reciprocity and relationship with the land.   It is certainly not possible to solve climate change unless we make this paradigm shift.  

Thus we will be looking at how to personally internalize and integrate the wisdom that Robin Wall Kimmerer so generously shared with US residents in Braiding Sweetgrass.

We will use worship sharing format, as well as experiential exercises to explore these themes:

• Reciprocity with Earth
• Gratitude
• Settler/Colonialism
• Watershed & trees
• Storytelling
• Naming “things”
• Honorable harvest
• Respecting native knowledge

Please be willing to journey from the heart, leave behind intellectualizing and do reflective self examination.

Leader Experience

I have led over 16 workshops at FGC over the decades. I also am a trained AVP and Joanna Macy workshop facilitator and lead various workshops in my community. (and have led groups on this book – see above.) I love the process of bringing spirituality, worship sharing and learning together in a week long workshop! I see FGC workshops as the hub of our Gathering experience, a place to create community within community. I was recently told that people who met in my workshops still have deep and meaningful long term relationships with each other -as I do with many of them. Hurray.