Sitting at the Feet of the Glacier: Land-Based Practices, Meditation, and Grief Work

In an economy predicated on capitalizing our attention, what if we apprenticed ourselves to ecological forces whose temporality refuses capture? How might sitting at the feet of a glacier, as our elder, liberate our presence?

Enter this five-day apprenticeship with the glacier as a teacher, following the glacier’s quality of time as a grammar for re-patterning our minds, bodies, attention, care, and labor as students of the earth. 

Drawing on land-based practices created by the facilitators and their collaborative work in Southeast Alaska’s Glacier Bay, each day will begin with storytelling from the lands we study — to cultivate a collective ethos and, in the words of Martin Shaw, “attend to a world in constant disclosure.” Guided by the earth as scripture, these transmissions will orient our practices as they are translated into embodied prompts to empower our capacity to love and protect the sacred amid ecological and social crisis. 

Practices will include: 

• Daily meditation: sitting in stillness to take on the posture and soul of the glacier. 
• Daily movement: slow movement and wanders on the land to embody the pace of the glacier. 
• Grief + praise work: How does the glacier’s rapid melting call upon our grief and worship?
• Reading the landscape through pattern recognition to pay attention to the birds, tides, bees, plants, and stones at Esalen, and ask, “What do we learn about the earth’s nervous system, and what does it teach us about our own?” 
• Writing and intimate council shares: As glaciers face extinction, what stories are at risk of extinction through the endemic nature of you? What stories do these practices call forward to be shared? How does writing and speaking them in council affirm and protect your own life as something the earth desperately needs right now? 

On our fourth day together, participants will be invited to a half-day of silence on the land, culminating in story-sharing around the fire and soaking. Prepare to be thrilled by, and thrill the earth, with your glacial pace.