Dwelling

10/16/2022

Transition is upon us :) After four years of rich, relationship-centered learning, dwelling is changing shape in a big way.

In this long season of transition, dwelling itself is moving through a transformation. It’s time for us to bring our practice of dwelling home, to center our time and energy and creativity among our roots, where we are and among our guides. For us (Graham and Rose) at this time, this means honing our teaching and practices, and for now the best way for us to do this is in our first homes, and

We treasure the intersections of our communities with dwelling and we hope you do too. While this space won’t be held the way it was before, that doesn’t mean the richness of our relationships will disappear. Our community lives on!

We are so grateful for this community and the space dwelling has held for our relationships over the past four years, the windows it has opened into our medicine, and our relationship with healing and the ways it has supported us in healing together. Thank you.

Thank you for sharing in the medicine with us.

Graham + Rose

09/22/2022

Want to come to a mycelial themed ROUND TABLE discussion, centering our fungi kin?

You’re invited! October 2 from 9am-10am Pacific Time.

Send an email with the subject “mushroom round table” to invitation@dwellingschool.org to get on the list to receive the Zoom link. Make sure to include your name in the email!

This event will not be recorded.

Hope to “see” you there!

07/02/2022

Wanna get fungi with us?

Let's get rich like humus with the fungi basics, including the stories they tell about interconnection, how to approach in-the-wild identification, and ways to engage with mushrooms as food and medicine. For too long, competition and scarcity have shaped the discourse of ecology, obscuring our myriad connections with one another and the wider world. Let’s reweave together with the fungi as our guide.

Rose leads you through three rich sessions (details on our website).

This course culminates in a live, online mycelial-themed Round Table via Zoom,* so you will have an opportunity to share your own mycelial connections with other participants, ask Rose any questions you have, and gather in earth medicine community.

I hope you’ll join me in widening this medicine web, mushroom-style!

Link, as always, in bio.

06/17/2022

everything is a transformer.

“What is it that allows us to feel pain for our world? And what do we discover as we move through it? What awaits us there ‘on the other side of despair’? To all these questions there is one answer: it is interconnectedness with life and all other beings. It is the living web out of which our individual separate existences have arisen, and in which we are interwoven. Our lives extend beyond our skins, in radical interdependence with the rest of the world.

Every system, be it a cell, a tree, a mind, is like a transformer, changing the very stuff that flows through it… For it is by interaction that life forms are sustained.”

– Joanna Macy –
from Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age

It’s a nourishing perspective as we sink into *infinite compositions* —

It’s about change, exploring change, navigating change in the living world, choosing change with connection and support. The online course is here for you and me and whoever else wants to join us now.

06/02/2022

hello, medicine.

you. yes, you!

we have an announcement tomorrow…so if you want to. choose to. desire to…stay apprised.

rose

03/21/2022

Of kith & kin.

As I step into the lengthening days and witness the blossoming of so many ephemeral beauties in the dappled light before the leaves grow large above, I find myself in awe of this world to which I belong. I feel a sense of kinship, deep nourishment, of rest in belonging to the whole thrumming of earth. What miracle is each flowering plant?

Yet/and this connection does not come without grief. When I step into the heart of the forest, I also feel the tenuousness of so many precious lives, the impending extinction of myriad relatives that is the legacy of colonization, extractive capitalism and disconnection from ourselves as members of this wild community.

What would it mean to create home space in a way that thrives as part of this wild community and recognizes this earth as both shared self & home?

I am so grateful for {dwelling} as a space both where we gather to experience ourselves and the earth as medicine - and one where we acknowledge the wider contexts that need healing - creating space to initiate and practice reciprocity.

I wonder what this blooming Bloodroot has to say. This Spring, let’s listen together.

02/12/2022

c r a v i n g ::: c o n n e c t i o n

sometimes, when I imagine I can distill this murky life, I wonder…

does it all come down to the spaces between us, which turn out to be space & not space…nothing less than what connects us in this web of life…the boundaries of self and earth present & dissolving

How do w (re)find our role in this network? How do we return to experiencing the abundance and belonging that IS truer than the scarcity that holds us captive at the surface?

These and other healing questions are at the heart of our community here. We are so eager to share more offerings with you like…

🌱Community round tables (coming soon)

&

🌸{invitation 2022} our 15 week *deep* immersion in the medicine of plants, stones & self (embodiment practice) begins March 18th. If you want to nourish yourself & grow your powerful medicine with support and community, this may be the offering for you. Applications due March 1.

The plants initiated and they continue to remind us that rooting in place will bring us back to a healing economy. Thanks, Golden Currant, for bringing beauty to my day and for hosting MANY caterpillars to feed the birds and nourish the whole web of life.

p.s. I’m deeply indebted to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay “The Serviceberry” for inspiring this dialogue

01/24/2022

01/18/2022

The different between repetition and ritual is intention.

I was reminded of this watching a friend washing dishes. She turned up the music, put on her gloves and started dancing!

Sometimes if I slow down and create moments of pleasure, I can transform tedious everyday activities to rituals.

Not every potentially tedious task transmutes into a meditation, particularly if the work is hemmed in by extractive capitalist pressure, as it so often is…and yet, in claiming moments of sublime pleasure in the ordinary processes of living, in slowing down, perhaps our joy can work towards the dissolution of oppression alongside our anger and grief.

The process of making these hoshigaki, dried persimmon treats, requires daily massage. That seems like a lot to do, sometimes, alongside life’s other work! However now that they are dried and the natural fruit sugars have dusted them with the signature crystalline coating, I find Im missing the rhythm of daily squeezes.

Well, I guess I can turn up the Bruce Springsteen and do a few dishes before diving into more {invitation 2022} curriculum tending!

p.s.
is another of my teachers in presence (see, Pleasure Activism).

12/31/2021

m o o n ::: m e d i c i n e

A lunar cycle practice for the new year is coming to all our treasured newsletter recipients. {dwelling school.org/newsletter to initiate this communication}

One of my consistent allies in easing disconnection and anxiety is the moon. Vibrant from the urban to rural places, the moon is like a tether to universal and cyclical time wherever you are on earth.

Our next few newsletters are little bursts of medicine - earth connection practices, guided embodiment with and plant connections and medicine-making with me

While you can only truly experience {invitation} by participating in it, this newsletter series is a glimpse into the world of our earth medicine fundamentals as we deep dive with plants, stones, aromatics and ourselves.

invitation 2022 begins intimately online March 18th. Small. Connected. Medicine.

12/30/2021

::: k e e p s a k e s ::: f u t u r e s c a p e s :::

feeling so RICH in connection w. these amazing medicine beings and grateful to for holding space for this year.

it's thanks to these folks and our extended community that even as we reflect on 2021 we also unfold into a new shape: we continue to grow as a community in earth practice, and we've got some collaborative vision spiraling into 2022 for...

+ free, community round table medicine conversations curated by wise dwelling community members

+ the initiation of our online journal, led by invitation participants

+ {invitation 2022} a new constellation of humans gathering for 15 weeks of plant, stone + embodied medicine practice

+ in person wild connection + medicine-making offerings from in Los Angeles

+ the unfolding of our next layer of learning, {awakening} with my fav medicine facilitator .

invitation applications are open now through March 1!!!

p.s. this photo is a keepsake from the final gathering of invitation 2021: what some might call a sacred space (thanks for the language inspiration). Our gatherings didn’t start this way, but grew as our relationships grew, and as we engaged in the process of being together. each person is present here with their particular permissions and boundaries and that in itself feels worth celebrating.

p.p.s. we know that not every vision will come alive, but that what we place our attention to grows (you might get yourself a copy of emergent strategy by adrienne maree brown for some new year reading, one of our inspirations + foundational texts).

12/20/2021

a p p l i c a t i o n s ::: o p e n ::: invitation 2022

the full moon rises into the shortest night. we hope you are treasuring the darkness on this solstice-eve.

and. perhaps you’ve been yearning for a community to hold space for your own healing inquiries, to cultivate health with the plant and stone beings as allies and your embodied self - the universe that is you - as your wise, resourceful guide.

applications for invitation 2022, our fundamentals in earth medicine course, open tonight. this year’s invitation reunites our three core modalities: plants, stones and embodiment for a deeply foundational 15 week dive into earth medicine practice.
combining live online classes one day each week with recorded offerings and earth connection practices, invitation is your door to over 160 hours of integrative learning.

March 18 - June 30

live online gatherings Thursdays | recorded learning released Fridays

we have specifically created the invitation curricula to bring us together within and beyond the virtual medium into grounded connection with earth and community.

invitations to spend time with the wild world wherever you are, medicine-making projects, and a creative medicine box filled with plant, stone, and embodied healing allies accompany our online media to bring tangible resource to this experience.

this is truly a unique offering. if you think invitation might be more perfect with you, we probably think so too. send us a line.

rose + graham