For thousands of years, autumnal holidays such as Samhain, Hallowe’en, and Vetrnætr have served as ceremonial foundations — connecting pre-modern peoples to landscape, ancestors, and ritual time. Many cultures believe “the veil thins” during this time, letting enchantment flood back into our world. The time is rife with opportunities to renew sacred relationships with the Earth, ourselves, and beings seen and unseen.
As the deciduous trees draw inward to direct energy into their roots, we too may feel drawn to our deeper inner worlds. The Big Sur wilderness — Esselen Tribal territory — is a fertile habitat for mind and spirit, and a potent domain for ritual to support transformation during this liminal season. Approaching the landscape as our teacher and guide, we will engage with the natural world in an embodied ecological context and explore the mythological and psycho-spiritual dimensions of land connectedness.
Drawing from their own European earth-based kinship traditions while holding a larger frame of pancultural land relationship, facilitators Fletcher Tucker and Micha Merrick will offer daily encounters with the medicinal, ecological, and ritual dimensions of plants found across the Northern Hemisphere. Diverse practices, including sound journeywork and guided meditations, will aid us in cultivating enhanced awareness, interconnectedness, and ceremonial reverence. Rooted in the Gestalt tradition of Esalen, we will build a container of safety and heart-centered community to connect meaningfully with ourselves and one another. Over five days of presence, play, and practice on the land, we will depart from modernity's anthropocentric paradigm and descend into the ancient, potent, animate world of kinship and enchantment.
Important notes: This retreat will include one full day of immersion in the Big Sur wilderness, with a hike up to three miles. Please be aware that the hiking terrain can be steep, rugged, and sometimes strenuous. There may be prolonged sun exposure. Participants must be able to hike and carry what they need for the day: two liters of water, a pack lunch provided by Esalen, and sun protection. Other workshop sessions will be mostly situated outdoors on the Esalen property.
Registration
This program is run by the Esalen Institute, all registration is handled by Esalen. Register here.
Meet your guides
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.
Fletcher is a NOLS certified Wilderness First Responder.
Micha Merrick
Micha grew up in a family of healers and earth-based celebration. She knew the medicinal wild plants of her forest and meadow from an early age. learning to meditate in wild spaces and revere the larger circles and cycles to which we belong. For the past seven years she's lived off-grid in Big Sur, in a magical mountainside yurt-cabin, living with the land, tending her hillside herb garden, stoking her woodstove, attending births, and offering embodied herbal practices at Esalen. Micha uses sound vibration, vocal enchantment and the beauty of aromatic herbs and flowers to open portals of reverence and healing. She experiences life through authentic relationship with her surroundings.
Micha received direct mentorship in earth-based animism from Thai Buddhist women's healers, Bali Hindu-Tirtan Midwives, Lahu Tribe Shamanic midwives, and New England Wise-Women birthkeepers. She's dedicated to studying herbal embodyment, birth and healing practices from her own Celtic, Nordic and North American ancestral lineages. She walks a red road, learning how to respect this continent directly from diverse original people. She loves to co-create circles of presence through sound, herbs, intention and belonging to the earth.