The Commonweal Garden
Nestled in a beautiful valley, surrounded by the wild land of the Point Reyes National Seashore, and within listening distance of the murmur of the Pacific Ocean lies the Commonweal Garden. Oak woodlands and soft chaparral form a wild embrace of the cultivated garden within, a natural sanctuary of beauty, abundance and healing.
The Commonweal Garden invites people into a healing and reciprocal relationship with the land. The Garden is on unceded, ancestral territory of the Coast Miwok (Huukuiko), now a part of the Point Reyes National Seashore.
More recently, students of the master biointensive gardener Allen Chadwick, Avis Licht and William Rappaport, gave this Garden its early shape in the late 1970s. Students of theirs then continued to steward this land, and in 2004 the Garden became home of the Regenerative Design Institute, led by Penny Livingston and James Stark, and functioned as a center for education and training in Permaculture Design, as well as the inner work that allows us to go forth and make change. The Garden is now home to Natura, and is being tended and held as a nature-allied center for healing and resilience, dedicated to reconnecting healing and medicine with nature.
Through the years, a deep reverence and understanding of natural systems has guided the hands that have tended and further shaped the Garden. This reverent respect for the wisdom of nature continues to orient the unfolding understanding of the human-Garden relationship.
The Commonweal Garden has held many people on their healing journeys over the years. From young children learning foundations in caring for the Earth to elders integrating the insights from time in retreat with life-threatening illness, people of all ages and from many different backgrounds have found sanctuary, healing, and support here. The beautiful nature invites humans into our most empathetic, interconnected and kind selves, and moves us to be in a tending relationship with the Earth, here and beyond.
The Garden has been tended and shaped and loved by so many over these many years. Her soil has been nourished and replenished, her water thoughtfully managed, and the abundance here shared generously. The Garden has become a beautiful demonstration of a mutually enhancing way of being in relationship with the Earth.
From this place, in relationship with all of life, we pray we may plant seeds that help to shift paradigms and allow for the healing our planet so urgently needs.
The Garden now invites us to listen deeply to the voice of nature, to explore the edges between the wild and the tended, and to cultivate the rich Medicine that comes from letting the healing energies of nature into one’s being. Through cultivating an appreciation of beauty and wonder, of natural rhythms, of medicinal and culinary herbs, nourishing foods, an awake presence and a quiet mind, we reconnect to our essential human nature and our vital, living world. As we listen with all of our senses and remember our place in the natural world, we relearn the language of inter-relatedness. We regain the essential soul-nourishment of honoring the sacred in the natural world. We begin to heal the alienating wounds of separation and ravages of consumerism. We move toward wholeness.
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