LATEST & WHAT’S ON
UPCOMING EVENTS
10 Apr - 16 NOV 2026 | Dartmoor, South Devon
WILDWISE FLAGSHIP COURSE – A YEAR LONG FOUNDATION IN OUTDOOR EDUCATION LEADERSHIP
We are living life in a time of tremendous global change. In a post-Covid world, many of us are sensing the shifts both without, and within us, and we feel called to change, and called to act. The current paradigm of the industrial growth model is unsustainable is also not meeting the needs of its citizens living within the system. The formal education system is creaking under the strain of the national curriculum and our children are receiving instruction rather than a true education, within a context of reaching goals and targets that fail to address the body/mind/spirit potential within each child, or the deeper cultural need.
One of the most effective ways to inspire and enrich ourselves, our communities and each other, is to find our way back to engaging wholeheartedly with the natural world, and to seek ways to offer this connection to others. An extraordinary syllabus is available to anyone open to spending time in nature, and our job as environmental/outdoor educators is to cultivate this ‘nature connection’ in helpful and meaningful ways. Therefore, we invite you to become one of the new generation of change-makers through the Call of the Wild programme.
WHY PAUSE? THE RADICAL POLITICS OF STILLNESS
Tuesday 13 January - Tuesday 10 February 2026 | Live Sessions: 18:30-20:00 (UK time) every Tuesday
We live in urgent times. This course, Facilitated by Toni Spencer through Woodbrooke international Quaker learning and research organisation, explores pausing as both spiritual attentiveness and political action. Together, we’ll examine what stops us from stopping, and how stillness might change the way we meet crisis, complexity and each other.
Rooted in Quaker spiritual practice, but drawing on a wider landscape of political, ecological and embodied wisdom, we ask: What keeps us from slowing down? And what becomes possible when we do?
In the midst of climate chaos, cultural division, and relentless speed, the practice of pausing can feel counterintuitive, or even irresponsible. But what if it’s the exact medicine this moment requires? This course offers a space to reimagine pausing not as retreat, but as participatory resistance and the site of infinite possibility. Looking to Quaker History we see this alive and well.
We’ll explore the sociopolitical forces that resist slowing down (capitalism, colonial modernity, trauma and cultural norms rooted in whiteness and patriarchal systems), and ask what becomes possible when we honour stillness as a generative, co-regulatory act.
Session themes will include:
• Pausing as possibility, participation and emergence
• Ecological, racial and gendered factors
• Somatic awareness and trauma informed factors
• Imagining a pause positive politics
• The pause… in practice: How do we live this?
This season I am continuing work with a pedagogy of death, decay and destruction, now developing a deck of cards to support facilitators, consultants, educators, creative practitioners and anyone else who is interested to invite these themes into their strategy, design, visioning, or problem solving. Watch this space and if you'd like to be invited to a Zoom test of the cards or to know when they are available to buy, please contact me here.
A Devon Un/Learning Journey finished in December. It was such a rich journey with a great group of 17 participants and an amazing team and group of contributors. We are now looking at an updated design for this year and looking out for funding ot support the course to run. Again, get in touch if you are keen to know about the course and if you have ideas for funding, including you might want to sponsor a place. I'll be writing more about this soon.
Running alongside this, as ever, I am loving my work as a mentor supporting leaders, educators and artists across sectors who are interested in the strategic, systemic and soul work in meeting the challenges of our times. If you'd like to chat about me coming alongside you in your work or in a life transition, or in supporting your practice, get in touch.
For a little more see my latest newsletters linked below and sign up here if you’d like to receive the next ones!
Latest Newsletters…
CURRENT FOCUS
RECENT EVENTS
LESSONS IN LISTENING: A LAND ART RESIDENCY - 11th - 15th September 2025
A guest space holder offering a session on Pause in Practice: Kissing the Void. Meet the unknown as a source of creative renewal. Rest and emerge in a space for participants to pause and listen beyond the noise of urgency and overwhelm.
ECO-FACILITATION: SKILLS FOR EXPERIENTIAL ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION - 4th September 2025
How do we enable connection with nature from a deep understanding that we too are part of nature? How might we co-facilitate with the places we work in? How does presence and connection in ourselves change how we work with groups? A workshop that introduces creative practices and simple inquiries to help open deeper connections within the natural world.
A Devon Un/Learning Journey – 29 Sep 2024 – 1 Dec 2024
Are you involved in the work of personal or societal transformation? Based in Devon? Interested in the dance between personal, local and systemic global issues? We will be looking back to Devon’s colonial past and its legacy today to inform how we can creatively look forward to uncertain futures…
The Emergence Network: Becoming Monster – 1 Nov 2024
A PEDAGOGY OF DEATH, DECAY & DESTRUCTION: SANCTUARY MAKING
A testing of a deck of cards for practical and oracular possibilities… Looking to the teachers of demise and emergence in the more- than-human world can offer something of a homecoming to our wider being. What might we encounter in hanging out in the company of vultures, maggots, forest fires or detritivores? What flirtations or invocations might arise in re/membering kinship with these ones? This work taps into the wisdom of compost, termites and hurricanes, of elephant feet, beavers and fallen trees.
Lessons in Listening – 12 Sep 2024 – 16 Sep 2024
I am a guest practitioner offering into this Land Art Residency that is guiding “participants through a programme of creative experiences that will attune & develop their abilities to listen to the seen & the unseen with practices inspired by the Land, Sea & Sky.”
Wildwise: Eco-Facilitation: Skills For Experiential Environmental Education – 5 Sep 2024
This 1 day workshop introduces creative practices and simple inquiries to help open deeper connections within the natural world…
Wildwise: Nature Connection in a Complex World – 18 Jul 2024
If we go back far enough, we all have lineages that root us in healthy relationships within nature, this is our birthright as humans. We are one of the billions of species that make up this extraordinary planet. Over the centuries and across continents, different beliefs, power dynamics, societal structures and modern economics have created great imbalances and harm between humans, and to the ecologies we are part of. As we find and facilitate ways to reconnect with nature, how might we keep an awareness of the bigger picture?
Palestine - Peace, Action and Possibility - A Community Gathering – 2 Jul 2024
Do you feel helpless or stuck with how to respond to the crisis in Palestine?
Do you have endless questions? Are you raging inside? Overwhelmed, grief stricken or afraid? Unsure what to do? We all feel this, we can all relate: you are not alone.
poddd: Creative Lab – 28 Mar 2024
Within Modernity, we hide away signs of death, decay and destruction. Within nature, these is constant breakdown in intricate relationships with emergent life, and all the in betweens. Come and explore ideas through creative exercises, collaborative responses and discussion, applying some activities directly to your own context. For change agents, artists, systemic thinkers, facilitators, activists interested in processes and practices of change.
A Council Of All Beings... with a difference – 17 Mar 2024
A Council Of All Beings is a powerful practice developed by Joanna Macy and others to invite the voices of the more-than-human world to speak through us. Rooted in deep ecology, ritual, and collective inquiry, the experience will include time outside, mask making, play and a council ritual.
This Council will focus on listening for insights only from species, elements and patterns in nature that perform the essential tasks of death, decay, collapse, destruction and decomposition.
Letting Life Lead: A Systemic Constellations retreat – 2023
Devon Transformed Festival – September 2023
