Knowing that you love the earth changes you and activates you to defend, protect, and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

A Journey Rooted in Raised By This Place

A holistic experience in ecological awareness, sacred play, and embodied storytelling

Raised By This Place is a living, unfolding process — a journey of reconnection with land, spirit, and self, grounded in creativity and relational learning.

This experience can be offered as a multi-day workshop, seasonal residency, retreat, or professional development program. It is adaptable to different communities and settings, but always delivered as a cohesive whole. The flow of activities builds emotional depth, poetic awareness, and embodied engagement over time.

Each session offers a layer of the experience. Together, they form a spiral — one that deepens presence, belonging, and ecological identity.

Core Components of the Journey

  • Embodied Storytelling: Skywoman Falling

    Participants are invited into the Haudenosaunee creation narrative of Skywoman, shared in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Through music, movement, and improvisation, we explore what it means to fall, to be held, and to plant seeds in a new world.

    Experience includes:

    Embodied role-play of Skywoman story

    Soundscapes drawn from Indigenous musical traditions

    Group reflection on reciprocity, care, and the origins of place

  • Sacred Jars: Collecting Memories

    Inspired by In a Jar by Deborah Marcero, this contemplative practice invites participants to collect and assemble small natural items — stones, petals, feathers — into a personal altar of memory. Each jar holds a story, a feeling, a place, a person.

    Focuses on:

    Sensory memory and emotional expression

    Gratitude and the sacredness of the everyday

    Creating space for reflection and honoring loved ones

  • Terrariums: Miniature Worlds

    Participants build tiny ecosystems with soil, moss, and imagination, learning to observe and tend to life at a small scale. These living jars become metaphors for our shared planet — delicate, complex, and in need of nurturing.

    Guiding questions:

    What makes something feel alive?

    What would it be like to live inside this world?

    How do we care for the places we belong to?

  • Image Theater & Biophilic Questions

    Using techniques from Image Theater, participants create frozen “tableaux” to express their relationship with nature. We also invite playful inquiry: What if trees could talk? What if we were mud, or wind, or jaguars?

    Explores:

    Embodied imagination and symbolic play

    Personal relationships with outdoor spaces

    Dialogue with the more-than-human world

  • Poetry: I Was Raised By This Place

    Through guided sensory prompts and poetic structure, participants name what has raised them — wind, seasons, soil, family, stories. Inspired by children's reflections, this writing ritual becomes a collective remembrance and offering.