For hundreds of thousands of years, plants have been humanity’s greatest allies, shaping culture in material and spiritual ways. Across the Northern Hemisphere, a shared cohort of plants has profoundly influenced human existence, providing sustenance, medicine, textiles, and more. Honored as wise relatives, they carry mythic and spiritual significance across diverse cultures, forming a thread of kinship connecting our ancestors across continents and histories. Though modernity has painfully estranged us from the expansive web of relationality that our ancestors shared with the more-than-human-world, we can reclaim our “inalienable belonging to the earth community,” in the words of Joanna Macy. Meeting our botanical kin with curiosity and intention is a gesture toward restoring this enchanted ecological paradigm.
Join us to meaningfully engage with the lore and lives of pan-culturally significant plants — such as oak, nettle, mint, mugwort, elder, and rose — attuning to their presence in Big Sur’s wildlands while cultivating our botanical and cultural literacy. Through hands-on collaboration and an approach of reciprocity instead of extraction, we will craft herbal medicines, natural pigments, fibers, and tools in a manner that benefits the land and plants. Ceremony will invite us to discover these plants’ archetypal dimensions, revealing their roles as teachers and healers. As guests on Esselen tribal land, we will root our explorations in respect and reverence, honoring the relational worldviews of all our land-connected ancestors. Guest faculty Ariel Johnson will offer somatic practices to help guide us into embodied kinship — grounding us in gravity, sensory awareness, and open-hearted presence with our floral relatives.
Through these efforts, we remember our belonging, and we are remembered in return. The plants know us, after all, and welcome us back into our ancient traditions of botanical kinship.
Important Notes:
This retreat will include one full-day immersion as well as two half-day hiking excursions in the Big Sur wilderness, involving hikes up to 3 miles each. Please be aware that the hiking terrain can be steep, rugged, and sometimes strenuous, including prolonged sun exposure. Participants must be able to hike and carry what they need for the day: 2 liters of water, pack lunch provided by Esalen, and sun protection. Other workshop sessions will be mostly situated outdoors on the Esalen property.
Registration
Registration for the workshop is being handled by the Esalen Institute.
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.
Ariel Johnson
Ariel grew up in Japan, Washington and California where her father instilled in her a deep love and awe of the natural world through camping and hiking.
Currently living in Monterey, CA with her family, Ariel has served her community for over twelve years offering various movement, breathwork and meditation practices. Her personal studies and passions include natural history, literature, Gestalt practice, grief and ancestor work, and Japanese tea ceremony. Ariel continues to nourish her relationship with land, place, and the greater web of kinfolk through her work with Wildtender.
Ariel is certified in Wilderness First Responder.