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…

The dominant global agriculture is the largest threat to the world’s forests. What would it look like for agriculture to treat our forests differently? What would it mean to be a forest farmer? Chris and Kat Parker have been answering this question for decades. They run [The Forest Farmacy](https://www.theforestfarmacy.com/) in western North Carolina, where they grow food while protecting their forest and teach others how to do the same. Chris will join us for our upcoming otherGardens gathering to share about his experience in mycology, botany, agriculture, permaculture, and ecology, and his 30 years of mushroom cultivation, wild harvesting, and…

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…

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.

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…

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…

For the past 25 years, Victoria Ferguson has dedicated her work to uncovering and interpreting first-person accounts and archaeological evidence about the daily lives of the Yesáh (Eastern Siouan) peoples during and prior to early European colonization. She has shared her findings through written work and presentations at institutions such as Virginia Tech, Washington and Lee University, Sweet Briar College, and James Madison University, as well as at numerous archaeological conferences. Victoria has also organized lectures on a wide range of topics, including dietary health, textile craftsmanship, Indigenous matriarchy, enslaved communities of color in Virginia, soil health, and environmental justice.…

In a time of deepening polarization and institutional distrust, we find ourselves in what Naomi Klein names the Mirror World, a landscape of distortions where genuine grievances, misinformation, and identity politics blur together. This has given rise to “diagonalism,” where people from across the political spectrum converge around shared suspicion of institutions, sometimes in generative ways and sometimes in ways that feed conspiratorial, extractive, or anti-democratic energies. Beyond Diagonalism invites us into a deeper discernment: how do we honor multiple knowledge systems without falling into epistemic relativism, and how do we differentiate between healthy skepticism and narratives that deepen fear,…

Our algorithmic mirrors are everywhere. Surveillance capitalism meticulously tracks our behavior to create virtual replicas of us. We create our own digital doppelgängers as well, every time we post something online. We’re surrounded by bots, trolls, and alter egos posting otherwise unspeakable beliefs under the protection of anonymity every time we enter the digital universe. Every time we go online, we enter a hall of mirrors, an endlessly refractive simulation of reality, and our reflections change based on the digital surfaces we look into. What should we make of all these algorithmic reflections of reality?