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Event Listing

Rewilding Retreat
Please see the registration page for pricing options.
  • – Program Price

Date & Time Details: A one day retreat experience within The Whidbey Institute's Story House and the surrounding wild landscape. Program begins at 9:00am and ends at 5:00pm.

Address: 6449 Old Pietila Rd, Clinton, WA 98236, USA

Contact: [email protected]

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Rewilding Retreat: Recovering the Wisdom Within the Wild

With Mary DeJong

June 24, 2023

Learn and practice seasonal rhythms & rituals for Sacred Guidance through the natural world to grow an earthen and elemental guidance.

How are your spiritual practices changing in the face of climate change? How does your faith flourish as our forests burn? How do you engage the wild edges of your life, not as a place of chaos, but as a place of profound creativity? How do our prayers hold the ecological grief that howls within our hearts? A response to these probing inquiries demands a return to a whole-relationship with creation and re-membering, or rewilding, ourselves to a profound sense of the Sacred within and with-out the wild and wonder-filled world.

Come rewild your wonder at a day long retreat designed to reconnect and remember yourself to the Sacred Wild through seasonal prayers, practices, rites and rituals. The Western world has valued separation and alienation from the more than human world, which has resulted in sterile and depleted soul-lives. As we decrease the external wildness, we decrease our internal wildness as well. One could argue that there is no greater spiritual project in today’s world than the reclamation of the wild. By bringing ourselves back into relationship with the sacramental nature within the more than human world, we remember how to conceive of ourselves within a cooperative, a member within the blessed assembly of Creation!

Respond to this call to seek the sacred within the text of the natural world and recover your feral faith on Whidbey Island with ecotheologian, writer, and wild-soul guide Mary DeJong at the Whidbey Institute’s Storyhouse, a nurturing cabin surrounded by legacy forest and the whispers of wild life half a world away from the urban hustle and bustle.

Here you will expand your sense of rootedness and belonging to a place through the practice of the Rewilding Wheel, a sacred wheel circuit, influenced by Celtic spirituality and indigenous wisdom traditions. and designed to cultivate seasonal practices and disciplines that nurture a conscious and inspired relationship with the earth, the elements, and the divine. You will come away with grounded theory and routine, regular, and repeated rhythms and rituals that honor and connect with Earth’s seasons and elements as a way to recover your sense of self and the sacred in the very real soil of your daily existence!

What’s Included

  • A one day retreat experience within The Whidbey Institute’s Story House and the surrounding wild landscape (begins at 9:00am and ends at 5:00pm)

  • Expert teaching and soulful group facilitation

  • Invitation to engage with meaningful rituals and nature-based spiritual practices

  • Rewilding Wheel Workbook

  • Guided nature walk

  • Introduction to and support during a forested labyrinth walk

  • Thoughtfully prepared and seasonally focused vegetarian mid-day meal, snacks, and herbal teas

  • Wild-crafting materials

  • Supported nature solo time

  • Access to a 100 acre trail system in a legacy forest

Faculty

Mary DeJong
Influenced by the lives of Celtic saints, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey and the emerging field of ecopyschology, Mary facilitates retreats and pilgrimages in the Pacific Northwest and in Iona, Scotland, that strengthen the unique and mystical interconnection of participants, the sacred, and the natural world. She has studied and practiced within the Celtic Christian spiritual tradition, her own maternal line heritage, for over twenty years, receiving mentoring and vocational guidance from Vivienne Hull, co-founder of the Chinook Learning center and the Whidbey Institute and the director of the Iona Retreat Programs. Mary is also a graduate scholar of the School of Celtic…
Learn more about Mary DeJong

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