Cultivating Kinship in your home-placE
“What we need is here.” – Wendell Berry
Beginning in the heart of Winter and unfolding toward the Spring Equinox, you are invited to join Wildtender's first online seasonal alumni cohort. Over six gatherings, we'll return to the closeness of an intentional circle, reconnect with fellow Wildtender alumni, and renew the relationships, practices, and perspectives awakened through our time in the wild. Together, we'll immerse in, and deepen, our sacred kinship with the more-than-human world, exploring new expressions of our sublime entanglement in the places we each call home.
Following the slow turning of the season, our journey will begin within the embrace of Winter's fertile darkness, honoring our animal yearnings to turn inward, settle into stillness, and attend to inner realms during the dark, cold months. Through Gestalt Awareness, meditation, and somatic explorations, we'll revisit and deepen practices cultivated in Wildtender programs, while examining the habits of mind and perception that shape our knowing of self, one another, and the living world. And we will tend to the hearth of myth and mystery, cultivating porousness to this animate, enchanted, and profoundly relational Earth.
When the days lengthen, summoning the first stirrings of Spring, our gaze will shift outward, exploring what it means to inhabit the places we call home with greater intimacy, and curiosity. Engaged in sensory practices and place-based inquiry we’ll endeavor to learn more deeply about our local landscapes, and become better acquainted with the most immediate relationships that sustain us. Along the way, we'll explore how our direct experiences of the world are enriched by ecological knowledge, ancestral wisdom, and the stories and traditions through which people have come to know and relate to place.
As the year, and our heart-minds, continue to ripen, we'll turn toward the possibilities of deepening participation in the living world. How might our relationships with the more-than-human move beyond appreciation, or an abstract sense of connection, toward reciprocity, stewardship, and devotion? What would it mean to truly belong to the places and beings that surround us? Through invitations into practice and service we’ll uncover individual pathways into more intimate and reciprocal forms of belonging.
As Winter is reborn into Spring, we'll gather at the threshold of a world awakening anew, to attend to our own awakening into deeper belonging and kinship. May the practices and relationships nurtured through our time together open a doorway into ever deeper intimacy with the living Earth, and the innumerable beings with whom we are already kin.
Your Facilitators
Our gatherings will be co-facilitated by longtime Wildtender guide Ariel Johnson and Wildtender co-founder Fletcher Tucker. Ariel brings a rich background in Gestalt Awareness Practice, eco-somatics, ceremonialism, and much more; Fletcher carries more than fifteen years of Gestalt study alongside twenty years of contemplative practices, natural history, and an ongoing exploration of human kinship with the more-than-human world. Together, they'll hold a sacred, warm, wild, and inviting space for inquiry and meaning-making. Throughout the seasons, Ariel and Fletcher will also be joined by guest teachers (TBA), broadening perspectives and practices .
What to Expect
Reconnect and cultivate community with fellow Wildtender alumni, sharing experiences, offering mutual support, and renewing the intimacy of an intentional circle.
Create time and space to attend to what is present in your life through contemplative practices rooted in Gestalt Awareness, somatics, and Zen Buddhism.
Cultivate resilience and deepen awareness, drawing on practices and perspectives that help us meet life's challenges and participate more fully in the world.
Revisit and deepen Wildtender's core practices and perspectives, exploring how they might take root in our daily lives, vocations, and relationships with place.
Learn from guest teachers whose wisdom, experiences, and ways of knowing enrich and expand upon Wildtender's approach to the living world.
Explore pathways into reciprocity and stewardship within your local landscapes and communities, cultivating a more embodied sense of belonging.
Program Schedule
Our online cohort will meet online via Zoom and is open to all past Wildtender participants.
First Session: Awakening the Circle | Sunday, January 10, 2027 | 3pm - 5pm PST
Second Session: The Fertile Dark | Sunday, January 24, 2027 | 3pm - 5pm PST
Guest Speaker Series 1 | TBA
Third Session: Embraced by the Earth | Sunday, February 7, 2027 | 10am - 5pm PST (Self-guided half day immersion)
Guest Speaker Series 2 | TBA
Fourth Session: Roots Quickening | Sunday, February 21, 2027 | 3pm - 5pm PST
Fifth Session: Sublime Entanglement | Sunday, March 7, 2027 | 3pm - 5pm PST
Guest Speaker Series 3 | TBA
Sixth Session: Composting | Spring Equinox | Sunday March 21, 2027 | 3pm - 5pm PST
More about Ariel & Fletcher
Ariel Johnson
Ariel Johnson is an embodiment facilitator specializing in trauma-informed somatic practices. As a guide with Wildtender, Ariel supports participants to meaningfully immerse in the California wild, and to cultivate deeper relationships with the broader web of kinfolk. A practitioner of meditation and mindfulness practices, she is a dedicated student of Gestalt Awareness Practice in the lineage of Christine Price, as well as grief tending with Francis Weller. With extensive training in ballet and modern dance, yoga (E-RYT 500), and Gyrotonic Level 1, she helps students cultivate greater presence and intuition in their connections with self, community, and the earth-body. Ariel is a Wilderness First Responder.
Growing up in Japan, Washington, and California, Ariel inherited from her father a deep love of the natural world through camping and hiking. Now living with her family in Pacific Grove, California, she finds joy in studying natural history, literature, and Japanese tea ceremony.
Fletcher Tucker
Wildtender Co-Founder Fletcher was raised by the foggy redwood ravines and fragrant chaparral bluffs of the Esselen tribal territory now known as Big Sur, California. Fletcher is a lifelong student of natural history, an ancestral skills practitioner, devotee of trail-craft and minimalist backpacking, an experienced teacher of adults and children, and a multidisciplinary artist.
Fletcher’s inner work includes ongoing exploration in Zen and Taoist practices/philosophy; over a decade of study in the Gestalt lineage of Esalen Institute co-founder Dick Price; and engagement with the Earth-reverent, spiritual practices of his own Celtic and Nordic ancestors.
Register
details TBD