Women’s Rewilding Weekend

A Rewilding Retreat for Women: Reconnect and Remember

Nourish yourself with a long weekend retreat full of reconnection and rejuvenation by engaging your hands and heart.

Rewilding for women is a supportive, collective opportunity to learn ancient, archetypal skills, commune with your sisters, and fortify your connections with yourself and the generative, Earth.  

Rewilding is about integration, not about going back in time. It’s about making space for the ancient, undomesticated part of ourselves to come forward, even in the modern world.

As women, we have a deep physiological and spiritual connection with creation. Rewilding is a way to nurture and animate that innate connection. No matter our backgrounds, all of us have female ancestors who lived with the rhythms of Earth’s patterns and cycles. Indeed, women’s relationships with plants, animals and spirits have been foundational to human culture for millennia. This rewilding retreat offers an opportunity to revitalize those connections and to reclaim the power and grace of your womanhood.

We’ll co-create a supportive, inclusive environment.

This class is open to all women, including trans and femmes.

In this rewilding retreat, we focus on cultivating a safe, inclusive, supportive, relaxed and fun learning environment, in which students with beginning to intermediate skill levels can thrive. While we will be doing hands-on projects, this is not an outcome-oriented class; you won’t be pressured to work more quickly than is comfortable for you. The women’s rewilding weekend is about liberating our minds and hearts to express themselves creatively, not about measurable accomplishments.

Learning together with our hands and hearts.

During this special weekend, we will learn and practice some of the essential, beautiful skills and rituals that have woven us together for millennia. We’ll gather around an altar and a fire to share stories, rituals, and prayers. Together, we’ll explore traditional crafts, self-care, wild foraging, medicine making, and more. 

With the loving guidance of wise women from diverse backgrounds, we’ll learn to nurture the feminine strength within each of us that has sustained our ancestors and that springs directly from the Earth. As we practice ancient skills and explore timeless ideas, we will connect with each other and with the nature of womanhood, throughout the ages and across all walks of life.

What is rewilding?

Rewilding is a term that was first used in wildlife conservation. In that context, it refers to the restoration of land to a wild, uncultivated state, including the reintroduction of native plant and animal species. Human rewilding is a process of restoring our inner landscape and lifestyle to a more primal and natural state. In this case, we are welcoming home our instincts and innate connection with the natural world. Rewilding is a process of reawakening the essential nature that lives within each of us.

Through rewilding, we connect with our truest selves and our roots in the living world.

As a result, we’re able to access a much-needed inner compass to help navigate our busy, modern lives. Even though we all have a deep well of creativity, healing, and wisdom within us, many of us have forgotten how to get in touch with it. Rewilding is a path toward remembering.

Why is rewilding for women important?

We believe that empowered, grounded, earth-centered women are an essential part of a healthy world. But it can be hard to embody these qualities with the pressures of daily life, especially if we feel isolated or alone! In the face of rampant ecological and social upheaval, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or powerless. In these modern times, we organize our lives on our phones, communicate via the Internet, and live in a culture so very estranged from each other and the Earth. Yet, the power and wisdom of the wild world continues to speak to us, and through us.

Rewilding is a way to listen to that untamed voice. Through this process, we can reclaim the innate strength to show up with integrity in our own lives, our communities, and the wider world.

Now more than ever, it is vital for us to come together to reconnect and to remember what it means to be human and female, in order to nurture a thriving future.

What to Expect in This Weekend Rewilding Retreat:

Over the course of four days, we will gather for morning and afternoon sessions with a wonderful group of wise women. There will be time for discussion, reflection, ceremony, exploration, hands on learning, and space for dropping in with ourselves, the land, and each other.

We will create a container together during this time that allows for depth and integration. Within this there will be moments for learning new skills, for coming together as a group, for one-on-one connections with sisters, and for quiet contemplation with ourselves and one of our greatest teachers, the living Earth.

Please note: this weekend of rewilding for women involves spiritual practices such as prayer and ritual, but it is not a religious class. Animism, or the belief that there is Spirit/aliveness in all things, was the first “religion” of humanity everywhere. Let us rewild our own spirits by working with the powerful, wild energies of the Earth. 

Throughout the rewilding retreat, we will collectively tend an altar. There, we’ll honor goddesses from various traditions, the animistic elementals, as well as the essential female archetypes of maiden, mother, matriarch and crone. Specifically, our altar-tending will include making offerings, prayers, and other rituals based on the backgrounds and training of our instructors. The women who lead these ritual practices will be speaking and teaching from their own cultural identities and acting from a place of honoring, with permission and respect. 

All are welcome, regardless of your personal beliefs and practices

Students are invited to participate as they feel moved, and nobody will be pressured to do anything that doesn’t feel right to them. 

Most class sessions will include a hands-on project or craft, along with an in-depth discussion of its personal and cultural significance. Part of the magic of rewilding is the weaving together of our physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual bodies. For this reason, we’ll be working on projects that embody and explore essential aspects of our womanhood.

Skills and subjects we will explore, in a relaxed atmosphere that honors both ambition and repose

• Basketry
• Reconnecting with our wild women within
• Traditional broom making
• Honoring the stages of women’s lives through seasons, cycles
• Wildcrafting and plant medicine
• Wild foods cookery
• Earth-centered self-care 
• Altar building & tending
• Breath-work

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Instructors

Nancy Basket

Nancy Basket (she/her) takes her name from the work she does and from her Cherokee grandmother long ago, Margaret Basket. She came South in 1989 to gather pine needles and learn Cherokee stories to teach her 6 children.  Nancy loves being an Artist in Education working in public schools sharing her culture, stories and art ...

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Kearsley Tate Schweller

Kearsley (she/her) is the bioregional Chef, folk herbalist, & artist cooking up local flavors in Kearsley’s Kitchen. She shares her seasonally inspired meals and musings in the form of pop-up dinners, private catering, wildcrafted herbal elixirs, & seasonal cookbooks that detail her favorite recipes, herbal remedies, and rituals for connecting with each season. In 2018 ...

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Emileigh Zola Renee

Emileigh Zola Renee (she/her) is descended from a line of strong Appalachian women who were homesteaders and healers and lived their lives in accordance with the land. Emileigh walks her path in this life as a mother, teacher, herbalist, broom-maker, and seeker of truth. She is the creatrix behind Rhythm and Ritual Craft. One of ...

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Mary Morgaine Squire

Mary Morgaine Squire, aka Mary Plantwalker, was born a tender and documentarian. She naturally tends to the beings within any space she is in with the utmost attention and care. As the matriarch of Herb Mountain Farm, Mary creates sanctuary for plants, birds, humans and many other creatures through earth stewardship. Documenting the life unfolding ...

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Stephanie Hein

Stephanie (she/her) is a Plant Extrovert, No-Till Farmer, Herbalist, Mother, and Daughter. She owns Wise Earth Way, a small batch botanical company where she takes great joy in growing nearly 90% of all the plant medicines in her formulas.  She believes that the earth is wise and the way to tend to her is with ...

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