Spiritual Ecology Study Club
A monthly space for deepening perspectives and practices in the work of reuniting people, the living world and the sacred.

How might we detach from western myths that life is separate from death and invite a more nuanced practice of life-death into our days? In what ways is life compost for future livings? What mythologies have we been taught about the inherent value of dying or living? And how might we turn to the land for lessons in living and dying well?

Embodiment in Precarity

As we move towards more and more precarious futures, how might a practice of embodiment anchor us into the places we hold dear? How does feeling into our animal bodies make room for a depth of presence as the world continues to change—including grief, joy, anger, fear, gratitude—and how might that renewed relationship to feeling allow us to act differently? In moments of deep change and loss, what lessons does the body have to teach us?

Creating Kin

How might we dedicate ourselves to the practice of kin-making in ways that center reciprocity, embodiment, co-flourishing and co-liberation with our human and other-than-human communities? In order to be good kin, what are our responsibilities to the webs of which we are a part?

Rooting into Place

In an increasingly globalized world, what does it mean to be of a place and to commit to the particularities of a specific land? What does being in presence with the bodies and beings that make up our local ecosystem look and feel like? What are the practices of home-making, and what are our responsibilities of being, always, a guest on someone else’s land?

Growing Soft

In a world that often asks for us to harden, to toughen up, how can softness be a revolutionary guide? What lessons does softening have in the face of extractive colonialism or a changing climate? How can we remain soft under duress?

Living Stories

What stories do we carry in our bodies? Whose story are we living inside—be it the destructive mythologies of a nation-state, passed-down stories of ancestral inheritance, or the stories the land carries? How does the practice of storytelling make space for renewed relationship both to place and to each other? And what stories for the future do we want to re-envision or commit to?

Seasons and Cycles

How is the passage of time in ecology a cyclical pattern, and what are the cycles? How do these iterations challenge western, capitalist, heterotemporal ideas of linear time and perpetual growth? What do the cyclical patterns of winter teach us about our mammal bodies and how we move upon the earth?

Weathering Grief

How is grief an expression of love, and an essential practice in navigating change? How might we weather the iterative and nonlinear cycles of grief? How are conventions of who is grievable reflect power systems, and how might grief be an act of resistance?

Resistance and Resilience

How do we build resistance against systems of oppression in a way that sustains, regenerates, and adapts? How is ecological resilience achieved, and how might we mirror these patterns in our own communities? What does resistance look like in an era of post-activism, and through a lens of collective liberation?

Looking Upstream

What do we owe the future? How do we conceive of and relate to the future in both a true and useful way? What is the function of the apocalypse as a narrative structure, and how might we approach it more critically and intentionally? How can we look directly at the systems of power that have produced harm and work to improve them?

Ecosystems of Care

How might we celebrate divergence and disability in our communities, and extend ecosystems of solidarity? How are the politics of “cure” a dangerous ideal? What might disability rights activism teach us about our place in our ecologies, and the ways our communities care for one another?

Creative Wayfinding and Placemaking

How is creativity a liberatory praxis? How might we harness imagination during times of crisis? What radical ways of knowing already exist under our feet, and how might we unearth new modes of navigation of tumultuous terrain?

Food Sovereignty

How is food a means of connection to landscape and culture, and how has the industrialized food system worked to displace people from their land? How is food sovereignty different from food democracy, and what might it look like in different communities? How can we reconnect with our food systems in meaningful ways, and navigate them towards justice?

Fungus, Worms, and Rot

How is decomposition an act of creation? How have western ideas of sterility, purity, and immortality led to disconnection, isolation, and dissociation? What might the inevitability of contamination teach us about living in community, and practices of harm reduction? How is life after death an ecological fact?

Gods, Heroes, and Hierarchy

How might we subvert assumptions of hierarchy, remove our gods from their pedestals, and challenge cultural narratives of success and value? How might the edict "everything is holy" enable a more collective, liberatory spirituality for everyone? What if there are no heroes, no gods, no pedestals? Where does power lie?

Plant Medicine

How have plants and humans co-evolved for millennia? How might our plant relationships teach us about our landscapes and ecological communities, support our bodies in their ecosystems, and provide new perspectives and pathways towards growth and healing?

Land and Memory

How is the landscape a historical archive? What does the land remember, and how might we pay attention? How have our relationships to the landscape been crafted by systems of colonialism, oppression, and dispossession, and how may we re-enter right relationships with the landscape?

Borders, Edges, and Margins

What exists in the margins, the peripheral, the edges and fringes? What if the margin is a centre in and of itself? How is the border a place, and what happens there? What if there is no centre? Join us as we dive into the cracks and make homes in the margins with the works of bell hooks, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, Eduardo Corral, and more.

Queer Ecology

Cisheteropatriarchy has deeply impacted the ways in which we relate to and understand the natural world. Historically, the term "natural" has been used more as a moral and political judgement than an ecological descriptor. Ecologies are also inherently queer, defying expectation, containing plurality and paradox, always changing. Together we will queer our understandings of ecologies, approach them from new and strange angles, and challenge ecological presumptions that we've taken for granted.

Fungal Associates

In this month's study session we will learn from and with fungi, exploring their ecological, social, and metaphorical resonances. We will begin to study mycology, and interrogate the roles fungi have played in social and political movements, and in our own lives. As non-normative, nonbinary, emergent, decentralized, and collectivist beings, fungi provide fertile ground for metaphor and interpretation.

Technology

Join us as we dive into collaborative conversation with our cyborg compatriots, and unearth the cyborgs within ourselves. We will interrogate what may occur as meaning making evolves through technological chatter, we may consider who humans might be to these new mythmakers - ancestors? Collaborators? Carbon-based kin? Cautionary tales? And how may we reconcile ourselves to their multitudes, whilst reckoning with their troubling roots?

Your Animal Body

A great deal of the dominant cultural paradigm depends upon our forgetting of our animal bodies. Academia, the pressures of late-stage capitalism, Cartesian dualism, and other systems separate our minds from our bodies, thus separating our ideas from our ecosystems. This month's study session will be an investigation into reconnection, and the embodied knowledge involved in the intimate conversations of breathing, eating, moving, and shitting.

Ancestry and Futurity

This month, we will explore the inheritances and legacies of intergenerational collaboration, both human and nonhuman. This session will ask us to consider our own lineages, as well as what type of ancestors we are being called to be.

Water

An investigation into that which flows, permutes, transmutes, transforms, and never stops. Alongside discussing and exploring the relationships and interactions of our water system and the realities of the water crisis, we will also explore Taoism, practices of meditation and movement building inspired by the flow of water, and creative collaboration with our aquatic ecosystems.

Food, Foraging, and Farming

Whether or not you’ve grown or foraged for food, our food system is still an intricate, enticing, entrancing ecosystem in which we all get to participate, feeding and being fed on our entire lives and beyond. The lives and deaths of the other-than-human sustain us, and over millennia, we’ve learned different ways to tend to and nurture life, evolving and eating together along the way. It’s a chorus of beautiful interspecies collaborations, and, the more time I spend on the farm, the more I realise how much there is to learn from the agroecologies of our food system, and the plants who participate in it.

Radical Acceptance

This month, our study club is going to be exploring the theme of “radical acceptance”. This is a broad topic that continues some of our discussions of sacred activism, and has the potential to explore some themes of Buddhism, anarchy, deep ecology, and abolition in conversation with some of our previous topics. We'll explore what it means to deny the impulse for opposition, interrogate our own moralizing tendencies of the other-than-human world, and consider the ways in which spiritual knowledge may inform and uphold movements towards collective liberation.

Decolonizing Spiritual Ecology

For February’s Spiritual Ecology Study Club, we’re going to dive into decolonial thought, particularly untangling colonial, cisheteropatriarchal, and supremacist ideals within “spiritual ecology” communities and areas of thought. Among other things, this may include interrogating ecofeminism for occasionally playing into biological essentialism, deconstructing nature-as-saviour mentalities or the human/nature binary, investigating how ideas of “nature” have been created, and by whom, considering the ways in which our own movements and spaces perpetuate oppressive ideologies, and imagining just futures liberated from oppressive paradigms. We’ll get our hands in the dirt and do our best to pull the plant up by the roots, and, maybe, plant something that will grow.

Emergence

As the wheel of the year rolls over in some calendars, the passing of the winter solstice opens the window of longer days and lasting light, and we make resolutions to mark the passing of time. This week we consider the transformation of emergence, and the cathartic unfolding of our own practice.

Listening

This topic will be an investigation into listening with our whole bodies, listening to our own ancestry and lineage, and listening to our other-than-human collaborators in the natural world.

Trees

The trees are our ancient collaborators, our oldest kin, and our most steadfast teachers, and I’ve been enjoying trying to surrender to their wisdom and guidance in shaping our guiding questions for this month’s inquiry. Our first few materials this month are an attempt to pass the microphone to our plant kin, and see things from their point of view. Stephanie Kaza’s Conversations with Trees uses a lens of Buddhism and deep ecology to mindfully and humbly approach trees as complex and enlivened beings. If you’re in the mood for a novel, I also recommend The Overstory, an entanglement of human lives through their relationship to trees and the movement against deforestation in the so-called United States. There’s also some background on the original tree huggers, the Chipko movement in India, where Indigenous women risked their lives to protect forests against commercial deforestation, in honor of their sacred and ancestral relationship to trees. In an episode of For The Wild, Antonia Estela Perez invites us to consider the violent colonialism that has disrupted these ancestral relationships to plants, the intimacies we experience with plants across human-imposed boundaries, and how we may heal our own lineage through a reconciliation with our plant kin. There’s also a guided meditation and forest walk by Kimberly Ruffin, accompanying her essay on her experience as a forest therapy guide and relationship to the church and her communities. The meditation is an invitation to our sensory ways of knowing and interacting with the ecosystem, and I found it to be an incredibly useful practice to accompany our work within theory. I feel that the best way to study trees is to interact with them personally, so I’d encourage you to pass the mic to your own local ecosystem during this practice, and see what they have to say.

Technology

What does it mean and look like to extend belonging and kinship to technology? How does technology synthesize an animism that already existed within the ecological community? How does it disrupt our connection with this community? What are the limits to our conceptions of intimacy and belonging? Do we include technologies in this belonging? How can we reorient ourselves to ecological technologies and ecosomatic ways of knowing and intuiting that were once known to our ancestors, but have been replaced by technology? How might technology be used responsibly to interface with the other-than-human and trouble the human/nature binary and hierarchy? What ought we to consider when attempting such an interface?

Landscapes

What is some of the language we use to formulate our landscapes? What does that language do? Where does the body begin and the landscape end? How does one love a landscape? How does the land love back? What are some of the dominant landscape narratives in the land conservation movement, and who is controlling those narratives? What are our physical and spiritual responsibilities to the landscapes that we live upon? How do we honor those responsibilities? How do we hold relationships with a changing landscape, as the world becomes increasingly interconnected, digitized, and uploaded?

The Spiritual Study Club is a monthly space for collective inquiry, creative practice, meditation, and individual and collaborative learning. Each month, we focus on a different aspect of ecology, spirituality, collective liberation, or other related themes. There are a variety of materials offered every month, including books and academic papers, films, podcasts, and essays. Our facilitator, Zoë, provides materials and guiding questions, but members are encouraged to participate in offering additional lines of inquiry.

Live zoom study sessions take place on the 3rd Thursday of every month. They include guided meditations, selected readings from new and previous materials, large and small group discussions, and prompts for individual creative practice. Zoom recordings are always posted afterwards.

We hope you join us in creating and sustaining this space for collaborative learning.

Monthly live sessions
Recommended readings
Community discussion area

Decolonial thought
Critical ecology
Creative expression
Embodied practice
Queer theory
Collective liberation

Faculties
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