Our Intention...
School of the Greenwood supports creative empowerment grounded in deep connection to the more-than-human world. We teach traditional crafts and ancestral skills for meeting needs sustainably, facilitate practices that open creative pathways and encourage intuitive and embodied aliveness.
Our Approach...
Each program is a facilitated journey into the heart of the forest. We work towards this through:
Re-membering self as a part of the landscape…
Awakening to the connections between us and all living beings, our interdependence on one another, and the intelligence of the wild world.
Re-skilling to meet needs in harmony with the landscape…
Learning handcrafts and skills to support life within human communities and the wider ecosystem.
Re-rooting culture in the living Earth…
Opening creative responses and thought pathways to the present experience and developing cultural elements - stories, songs, etc. - that are rooted in the local bioregion and reinforce healthy relationship within it.
Re-storing hidden wholeness…
Opening to personal gifts, passions and dreams and grounding them in care for the wider whole to allow health and wholeness to organically be restored in individuals and the land. We engage in caretaking practices to encourage biodiversity and resilience in our ecosystem.
We take a full-spectrum approach to rewilding, pulling from learnings in the traditional craft, nature connection, ancestral skills, and permaculture movements, understandings of the historical roots of oppression, and a background in and passion for creative arts. Ultimately, our approach springs from the wildness that awakens within us when we spend time in intimate relationship to the land - our instincts, aliveness, empathy, awareness, and creative, adaptive, out-of-the-box responses to our present experience and the world we find ourselves in.
Learning from the past, we make a new way forward together.
Our Vision...
We hold a vision of a world in which humans live rooted into place - immersed in and living in harmony with the more-than-human web of relationship. We see humans meeting their needs sustainably, using regenerative rather than extractive methods, with respect for the wild spirit of all things. We see creative cultural expression (including stories, songs, structures, crafts, communication styles and games) that springs from intimate relationship to one's bioregion and that reinforces wholesome connection within the human community and wider ecosystem. We hold a vision in our hearts of humans thinking and responding to the world around them - full of creative brilliance and presence. We see dynamic, egalitarian communities where all members are valued for their gifts and where everyone has a voice. We hope for human communities as diverse in their approach to life as the bioregions they find themselves in. Creative, alive, joyful, loving, brilliant, aware, and resilient human communities…this is our vision of re-rooting human culture in the living Earth.
The seeds of the future lie waiting in the choices we make today. Join us as we bring
this dream to life!
