Phantoms, spirits, apparitions, poltergeists, wisps of white vapor, floating sheets with eye holes cut out. Spooky as they may be in popular fiction, there’s certainly more to ghosts than blockbuster films. Whether interpreted metaphorically, felt bodily, or dismissed as mythical while hurrying past a creepy graveyard, ghosts are well understood as ancestors, legacies, and former or lingering presences on the land. They can be meaningful ways of relating to and understanding the past. Who are our ancestors’ ghosts? Who are the ghosts who inhabit the land on which we live?

Food activist and organizer Sam Bliss runs Food Not Cops in Burlington, Vermont. Join us on November 3rd at 6pm ET as he discusses the ways we can acquire and relate to food when it’s not purchased, and how he shares and gifts food within his community, whether it’s homegrown, hunted, wild-harvested.

Zachariah Ben is a sixth-generation farmer and traditional sandpainter based in Shiprock, New Mexico. He is of the “Giant People” born for the “Red Running Into Water” clan. His maternal grandfather’s clan is the “Red House People” and his paternal grandfather is of the “Salt People.” With more than a decade of experience in traditional Navajo agriculture, Zach works with his partner Mary on their farm and business in New Mexico.

What comes to mind when you hear the word compost? The bucket of stinky food scraps near your sink. Single-use plates and utensils that go in a green bin. A big pile, you know, you need to turn. Time, temperature, and transformation. Rich garden soil. Composting is the process of taking bodies and materials (waste), inviting a new kind of life into them (microbes), and turning them into something that can be used again (digestion). This applies to reclaiming what the dominant culture discards as “waste,” yes, though we can easily extend the lessons of composting beyond the physical.Together, we…

In the middle world we now inhabit, surrounded by the monstrous in politics, ecology, and the psyche, how do we face these forces within and around us, without turning away?And perhaps most importantly: can we still find something sacred within these monsters?In this hands-on workshop by poet and storyteller Tom Hirons, and communications designer and collage artist Niels Devisscher, you will be guided into Supernatural and Monstrous territories using two different but complementary media.

Everything we consume carries stories, has origins. Our food, energy, metals, and comforts are pulled from somewhere — and over the past several centuries, those somewheres have multiplied and often stretched well beyond the range that our bodies travel. Everything we consume connects us to other bodies, beings, places and ecosystems, but those connections are often imbalanced, incomplete, and uni-directional. They take more value than they return. They leave more harm than they tend. In this session, we will look closely at extraction: how bodies, lands, and histories are mined for profit, and how we are entangled in these flows.

Throughout this cycle, we will be exploring the concept of Away. We have become blind to the metabolic processes that sustain us, such that what we consume and what we excrete simply comes from and goes to the mythical land of Away – outside of our attention or awareness. Not only does this hidden world allow us to be oblivious to all kinds of irresponsible, unsustainable atrocities, but it leaves us feeling isolated, uninformed, and disconnected from our beautiful, entangled relationships with the wider world. In this first call we will deep dive into all that we discard in our…

Different containers are appropriate for storing, carrying, and collecting different contents. As the contents change, the container might need to change as well. You can store yarn in a loosely woven basket, but you cannot carry water. You can ferment kefir in a glass container, but it requires attention and active care, so that you burp the container before it shatters. Some containers are temporary, and others hold forever. Some carry seeds, others carry ancestors. In this discussion, we will discuss the oft-overlooked importance of the vessels we carry and those that carry us.

We have been taught by the hyper-individual dominant culture to hoard our excess, to save for a rainy day, as our mainstays against the intentionally insecure competitive economy. Many of us are hyper-aware of the inequality all around us, and deciding how, and how much to share can be daunting and paralyzing. As with so much un- and re-learning, it takes practice to be generous. This conversational gathering will help us to explore generosity (amid material abundance and scarcity and mindsets of the same). We hope to also support attendees in identifying how to engage in giving without feeling taken…