4 Month Immersion Program
Delve deeply into ancestral skills, cultivate a caretaker relationship with the land, build community skills and activate your own wild awareness.
the 2024 program runs May 23rd-Sept 25th
You will live in a community of human and non-human kin in a wild village in the woods. You will learn new skills that will enrich and inform your daily life; that may look like sewing up some bark tanned leather shoes or adding a new wild food to your meal. We personalize our instruction to cater to your passions and innate gifts. If you find yourself on fire about a certain craft or skill, we will empower you to nurture it. Welcoming these skills back into our lives in a big way is a vital part of stepping into being a caretaker of the earth.
As animals, humans are designed to participate in nature by meeting our needs through these skills. The land relies on us to do so. Using your mind, your senses, and the feelings in your body, you will discover how to let the land speak through you. As the land shows you how to be in right relationship with her, you will naturally start to retrain your senses and feel more wild in your body. You will start feeling the forest instead of only seeing it. The animals soften into your presence and you soften into theirs. When you can channel this ability, it changes how you harvest the birch bark for baskets, what you do with the hide scraps from hide tanning, and where you plant the oak trees for future generations. If you tune in deep enough, the wild animals might even start offering themselves to you as your next meal. You will become aligned with the land in a deep way. It’s a profound relationship that all of our early ancestors had with the land they were born from.
As land stewards, we will not only focus on tending the physical land, but also nurturing each others inner landscapes and innate gifts. By learning more authentic ways of communicating, celebrating our accomplishments and break-throughs together, and practicing giving and receiving feedback, we can help one another uncover more of who we are. You will use disagreements as opportunities to learn about each other’s needs. Committing to experiencing joys and challenges together creates a deeply rooted trust, which is a true treasure in our modern world, but you must be willing to wade into the sometimes mucky waters.
Developing competency & relationship to each of these skills activates a connection that your body has been longing to remember. This land, these skills, and the community will awaken you to the power of who you’ve always been. It is your birthright to reclaim this for yourself, to live as a fully alive and wild human; full of love and deep connection to the natural world.
List of Physical Skills covered:
Land stewardship techniques; including permaculture, nurtureculture, agroforestry and ancient indigenous wild tending technologies from across the world
Wild Awareness Skills
Shelter Building
Buckskin, bark tanning, fur-on pelts, fishskin leather, organ tanning and other ancient tanning techniques
Community Skills
Making Clothing & Sewing techniques
Traditional felting techniques and felted clothing
Water procurement, purification, storage and utilization
Wild fibers, primitive spinning tools & weaving on handmade looms
Bark containers
Primitive Pottery
Knife and tool skills/safety
Basketry; made of wild gathered materials like roots, cedar bark and cattails
Kayaking & Canoeing
Friction fire Methods; bow drill, hand drill, pump drill and others.
Fire making/tending skills and coal carrying
Primitive Cooking with rocks, baskets, clay and other natural materials.
Wild edibles; harvesting, processing and cooking from the land & sea
Medicinal Plants
Rawhide crafts and braiding techniques
Animal processing of roadkill, deer, goat, ducks, fish, porcupine and more.
Bone tool making
Camping/tarp skills and knot tying
Coal Burning spoons & bowls.
Natural glues and “epoxy” recipes
Mat weaving with cattail or grasses
Camouflage, tactical awareness, concealment, and stealth skills
Tracking and animal behavior
Naturalist Studies
Bird Language
list of internal skills covered:
Community living
Ancestral skills as the language humans speak with the earth
Conflict resolution; ancient and modern techniques
Play as a sacred way to work through difficult relationship dynamics
Working with medicine creatures of the land
Leaning on plants to help us heal
Emotions as messengers
Going into our inner bear cave
Gratitude
Decolonization as the path forward
Finding your voice through song and communication skills
Ancestral healing
Giving and receiving feedback to become our brightest selves
Self care practices as central to our thriving
Reconnecting to body; developing intuition, body wisdom and reading the body
We teach most of these workshops ourselves, but value bringing in various guest instructors to share their wealth of knowledge and unique perspectives, including the Penobscot as they are the original and active stewards of this land.
Living Setup:
Sleeping: For the first part of the program you will be living in the sleeping setup you bring with you. You can build a shelter at your camp during the shelter building session if you choose or sleep in your tent during the whole program if you would rather focus your energy on other skills. There is also earth lodge people can take turns sleeping in.
Kitchen Setup: You will cook over the fire pit or with rocket stoves. All the kitchenware is provided and you will work towards making your own bowls and utensils to use throughout the program. There is drinking water and sink setup gravity fed by spring water.
Bathroom/Shower Setup: There is a simple composting toilet and tick checking station. For bathing, you can choose between two different streams. There is even a waterfall five minutes upstream if you want a high-powered shower on a hot summer day and the ocean is less than a mile away for a midday dip.
Food: We provide the majority of food. We have some gardens of cultivate foods on the land, get a weekly organic CSA share from a local farm and buy bulk organic staples from the coop along with other food items. You will be scavenging road kill, fishing, hunting small game, or killing organically raised ducks and goats for meat; meat is generally offered 2x/week. There are wild foods throughout the land as well. Please plan financially for extra food as you may want to buy things like personal snacks, extra meat, dairy, etc. All participants take turns cooking meals for the group in cooking teams of two during class days.
Monthly, Daily and Weekly Rhythm:
The first three months we progress through the foundation skills following the sacred order– awareness, shelter, water, fire, food. We move through each one until you feel a deep-rooted reverence and competence for what it means to live with the earth. The last month of the program is more of an independent study where we help you go deeper into the skills that you are most excited about and do a final survival trip to feel your deepening connection to the earth.
The following is to give you an idea of the different components and general rhythm of what your day to day will look like for the first three months. It is lose framework that we use to make sure your time living here is a good balance between intensive learning, play, deeply sinking into landscape and free time.
Your Sit Spot: This is your sacred learning place that we encourage you to visit almost every day through out your 4 month experience. Here you will practice different awareness techniques, meditations, giving offerings, care-take, and sitting quietly observing what is happening around you. This place becomes a portal for you to learn how to be in relationship with the land on many levels.
Morning&Afternoon instruction blocks: We have workshops every morning 4-5 days a week, that sometimes extends into the afternoon. These are a mix of hands on skills and educational lectures.
Inner landscape skills: Once a week we explore skills of our inner landscapes. These sessions are developed through grounded frameworks, storytelling, and activities/exercises/games; all informed by the landscape you will be living with. See internal skills listed above for the themes we will be exploring.
Land Tending Time: Sporadically throughout the program we partake in various land stewardship techniques, work in the gardens or tend to wild food patches on the land.
Rest Day: Rest days are for taking care of personal needs, timeless wandering, canoeing out to the islands to catch fish and explore or working on projects that you’re excited about.
Sample Day
7am:Wake up & spend half hour doing a sit spot.
8am: Communal Breakfast
9:00am–12:00pm: Tracking in leaf litter.
12:00pm-3pm Communal Lunch, rest time or a short canoe out to catch fish for dinner.
3pm-5pm: Hanging out together, weaving a birch plaited baskets or folding pine bark baskets.
6pm: Communal Dinner.
7pm: fire stalk awareness game
Cost & Financial Aid:
The cost of the Program is a sliding scale of $4,200-$7,500. We will not turn folks away if they cannot afford within the sliding scale.
We want this program to be available to anyone who feels called to be part of this experience. We ask you honestly evaluate whether or not you can afford it, and to stretch financially to do so (keeping in mind we need financial compensation to run the best version of this program). There are scholarships available to those who need it. If you want to donate to the scholarship program to help someone else attend, please contact us!
Want to Sign up for the Program?
If you have questions regarding the program, please email us. Once you’re sure you want to apply, fill out the application below. Please be thorough so we get a better glimpse of who you are, what you care about and why you want to do this program. Once you send your application and pay the application fee, we will send an email letting you know if you have been accepted or not. We will then set up a phone call so we can share about how to prepare for the program and answer any remaining questions you may have.
Application Fee (if you are not accepted we will give you a full refund. If you are accepted, the 50$ goes towards your tuition and is non refundable).
Application (PDF format)
Application (word document)
