We each have multiple sides to our existence — different ways we’ve reflected throughout our lives, and the fractals of our existence in this current moment. When we launched otherWise, we came up with 16 archetypes of people who might find value in our community, or 16 different attempts to articulate some of the many forms people find they’ve come to inhabit in modernity. These archetypes are like mirrors held at different angles, showing different parts of us from different perspectives, how we show up in different contexts. We all contain multiple archetypes, some described here, and maybe others we’ve yet to put to words. In this session, we’ll go through the archetypes that we feel make up the fractal accumulation of our existence. Read more

In **Chainsawing for Forest Citizens**, we will cover fundamentals of chainsawing, including proper technique, safety, and honorable harvesting. We will be cutting logs for later application as substrate for shiitake inoculation. In the spring, we invite you to join us again to use these winter wood provisions to set up a mushroom yard in another workshop. This four-hour workshop will be a winter solstice adaptation of [Pine Hill Voices’ Chainsawing for Greenhorns Course](https://www.pinehillvoices.love/woodlands). We will be focusing primarily on learning and practicing chainsaw fundamentals, with a slight focus on applying these skills in a way that sets us up to create a mushroom yard in the spring. We invite you to take this course simply to learn safe chainsawing and to practice honorable harvest, to spend a beautiful time honoring the shortest day of the year in nature with one of the few options for season-appropriate land work, or as… Read more

Through an offering of weekly prompts and suggested practices leading up to the darkest day of the year, we will take the time to explore the darkness – literally and metaphorically. What may we find when we move with intention into the dark? What may be revealed to us – both from dark places within us and from the dark spaces we choose to explore fearlessly – when we sit in darkness from a place of peace? Join us in this goodGrief offering as we practice holding and expanding space for Grief in the Dark. Read more

Revillaging is about putting the theory of how to be-long into practice, in our places. We take what we learn from traveling (literal travel, and metaphorical travel through literature and discussions), and learn how to adapt these lessons to our unique circumstances in place. A village is how we humans and non-humans live together. The scope and range of a group of people is determined by availability of energetic input. In revillaging, we consider the essential needs of our communities and lost skills needed to meet them with a grounded, realistic view of our entanglement with the Earth and in the midst of a wounded planet, and fractured culture. Read more

Using wood that we provisioned earlier in the winter in our chainsawing workshop, we will begin to prepare for spring food production by inoculating our logs with shiitake mushroom mycelium. Developing a strong relationship with our fungal kin is a key practice in forming diverse, resilient community food networks because they are so quick, easy and passive to grow. Understanding general fungal biology and cultivation is also a great skill to develop for a variety of applications from recycling/composting various forms of organic excess, rehabilitating polluted landscapes, creating biomaterials such as certain forms of synthetic leather or insulation, art, medicine and more. This workshop also invites us to notice the many different time-scales that various forms of life are operating on. In just a few days a dormant log can suddenly be exploding with visible fertility. Watching your mushrooms colonize and then fruit allows you to bear witness to an… Read more

In this workshop, we will come together for a weekend to learn a creative approach to framing a small bespoke wooden structure that will allow us to piece together salvaged windows into a workable greenhouse. Discarded and cracked windows that can no longer serve as working windows in a house due to problems with insulation or even just aesthetics can find new life sheltering our seeds. We will discuss sourcing windows, cleaning them up, and putting them together. Read more