Land & Sky

Observing the land and sky, wherever you live, is a readily available, non-appropriative, restorative practice that can help anyone who wants to repair and work towards right relationship with the land within which they reside. This type of practice can be healing and nourishing at a personal level, and it can also be a supportive, supplemental practice to more overtly political forms of decolonial, anti-capitalist social movement work.

While making your own observations, and building your own relationship with land, does not substitute for learning whose land you are on and taking the time to connect with and support the struggles of local Indigenous peoples for sovereignty, land back and a dignified life, it does highlight an important aspect of social change: that alongside “doing” we work on changing our way of “being”, including how we conceptualize and relate to the world around us. Observation practices are at the root of all sustainable, life affirming traditional cultures, and observation itself is immediately available to all of us, wherever we are. 

Building Relations with Land & Sky course is an offering that supports this transformation in “being” through a humble but transformative daily practice: managing a journal for the goings-on of your surrounding landscape and the celestial events overhead, as the rhythms of land and sky work together. Participants will receive guidance around:

• Defining the scope of one's local bioregion

• Prioritizing raw perception, flexible analysis, and moving from science to storytelling

• Examples of what the presenter typically includes in her log, such as behaviors of plants, animals, fungi, the water cycle, and weather phenomena

• A few profiles of easy species & weather indicators to consider tracking, with resource recommendations for learning how to identify more

• Astronomy 101 for understanding the Moon's gravitational influence, the stars' relationship to the seasons, and more things to see in the night sky (all accounting for the problem of light pollution)

~✵~

Comrades Education (formerly White Awake & based in the U.S.) has outlined community guidelines and expectations for this learning community in our Course Structure, Agreements & Ground Rules document for the program.