“The retreat brings people together, builds community in the forest, gets participants outside and off their screens, and uses nature sustainably to heal and inspire minds and souls,” stated Great Mountain Forest Executive Director Michael Zafros. Retreat registration closes on July 30.
As spring begins, I have a renewed appreciation for our community of growers, teachers, students and supporters of ecological relationships with the Earth.
In the absence of protective and nourishing snow and sustained freezing weather, it seems arbitrary to proceed as if there’s been winter and to accept that we are halfway to spring.
When we view the native plants that surround our gardens and yards as an extension of our cultivated areas, part of the living, pulsating community that shapes our sense of place, we more fully express ourselves as gardeners and stewards of the Earth.
I am not a man of great or constant religious belief, though I wish at times I were. But I do have faith in the proven dogma of the seasons, of sun and rain and warm and cold passing and coming around again and again over long, slow time.