Landwork: handprayers, a seasonal cycle of landscape-as-ceremony
fourth Saturday of each month, 1:30 pm to 5pm

Each month, we will gather in gratitude for the beings around us and to recognize our unique gifts of relationship with them, followed by setting the day's focus and our regular practices:

• ·         May 25th
• ·         June 22th
• ·         July 20th
• ·         August 17th
• ·         September 28th
• ·         October 26th

We invite you to join us as we practice working with other earth-dwellers to cultivate richness, beauty, and vitality at TLC Farm. We will do this by listening and acting on what we hear. Listening to birds and winds, listening as we move and change plants and soil, listening to our inner world as a participant in a particular web of life.

Each month, we will gather in gratitude for the beings around us and to recognize our unique gifts of relationship with them, followed by setting the day's focus and our regular practices. Small groups will find places around the land that will be consistent over the seasons to spend time paying attention to what has changed, physically and in other ways, and what is called for.

These groups will initiate or continue seasonally appropriate projects, in the context of the land’s overall plan, to make these places richer and more diverse for plants, animals, fungi, microbes – and humans. At the end of each session’s work, we will come back together to reflect on our experiences and share thoughts for how to bring these ways into our daily lives, where we live.

These gatherings are appropriate for participants of all ages, capacities, and experience levels. We invite people to come and build a connection with a particular place on the land by tending it over time, but one-time or short-term commitments will be accommodated by pairing you with someone else.

Specific activities may include the following, but are limited only by your inspiration: layering compost and compost tea; digging some roots and propagating others; making comfortable sit spots; singing new songs and old ones; tending pathways; acknowledging sacred space with altars; pruning trees and bushes; pressing prayers into seedballs and scattering them; making evanescent art with berries and feathers; growing “living rooms” made of plants and open areas; mulching; meditating; blessing.

Facilitators Vinnie and brush have been listening to the land both here at TLC Farm and in California for many years, and will offer their knowledge of the site and experience with specific practices to the group.

About Us: Brush and Vinnie locate ourselves as male presenting people of primarily European descent, with white skin privilege, who are committed to answering to the complex inherited stories of being descendants of settlers on stolen land. We have heard the message from indigenous teachers and personal friends (also teachers) that one key is to grow into deep kinship with the land and more-than-human world. We acknowledge that many of the practices and traditions that our ancestors used to tend to these bonds have been lost or fractured. So weappr oach this work from a place of humility as learners. We seek guidance from the land, and from our subconscious ancestral wisdom, and invite you to do the same. We are also inspired by indigenous relationships to place, as we learn from our sister community on this land and from other teachers and friends. We are committed to respecting these traditions by not appropriating them without legitimate permission. We respect these practices and people by not taking them out of the cultures they are embedded in. We do welcome traditional learnings that come through one’s direct lineages.

Participants invited regardless of ability to pay. Donations welcomed. For more information, contact landwork@tryonfarm.org