Mud Magic Natural Building ♦ Art ♦ Spirit
Come join us for a long weekend in the beautiful Cazadero Hills, playing with mud and unleashing your creativity while learning the skills of building with natural materials. We’ll be building with cob: clay, sand and straw, to create an oven in the age-old pattern in use since Neolithic times, and we’ll bring our dreams and myths to life with sculpture and mosaics. Each day will begin and end with ritual, and we’ll have time to relax, listen to nature, talk to the redwoods, and meet the cows, sheep, goats, ducks, chickens, and livestock guardian dogs on Starhawk’s ranch. Everyone will have an opportunity to make a small project to take home.
COURSE CONTENT
- Cob: Learn the ancient art of build with sand, clay, and starw. Using local, clay rich soil learn to mix cob for building walls, benches, or ovens.
- Earthen Oven: Gets your hands durty building a earthen cob oven. From the ground up learn how to build a wood fired eathen oven.
- Sculpting Beauty: Practice sculpting forms of magic and beauty. Learn to mold cob into graceful forms and give everything you build an artistic flare.
- Mosaics: Let your inner artist out to play. Using small pieces of stone, glass, and ceramic learn the traditional craft of mosaic making.
- Ritual: Each day will begin and end with a ritual to greet and honor the sacred, connect with ancestors, and listen to the land.
- Relax: Beyond building and crafting you will be fed delicious meals and have time to relax and commune with the deep woods, flitting songbirds and the friendly animals on the ranch.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Course Information
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- Location: Golden Rabbit Ranch, Cazadero, California
- Start: with Diner@6pm May 24
- End: 3pm May 27th
- Lodging: Camping on site
- Meals: 3 meals a day. Meats will be ethically sourced & we will provide for vegan, vegetarian, & gluten-free diets. We will do our best to accommodate other dietary needs
- Location: Golden Rabbit Ranch, Cazadero, California
Typical Daily Schedule
8:00-9:30am —Breakfast
10-12:30 pm—Morning session
12:30-2:30 pm—lunch
3:00-6:00 pm—Afternoon session
6:00-7:30 pm—Break
7:30-9:00 pm—Dinner
PAYMENT
- We offer sliding scale tuition and payment plans to make our courses as accessible as possible
- Abundant Tuition: $500
- Standard Tuition: $450
- Resilient Tuition: $400
- Work Trade: details below
- All amounts are in US dollars
Course Size
Due to the hands on nature of this course and the personalized focus of this course, space is limited. Only 20 spaces available for this course. Once the course is filled additional students will be put on a wait list.
SCHOLARSHIPS & DISCOUNTS
Group discounts and Diversity Scholarships available? Yes!
See below for details
QUESTIONS?
We are here for you. Reach us at: support@earthactivisttraining.org
MEET YOUR TEACHERS
Starhawk (she/her) is the co-founder and executive director of Earth Activist Training. One of the foremost voices in Earth-based spirituality, Starhawk is an author, activist, and permaculture teacher and designer. Her 12 books include such beloved reads as The Spiral Dance, The Earth Path, and The Fifth Sacred Thing. Starhawk drew from 30 years of living collectively to write The Empowerment Manual, which is the basis for her social permaculture course, Empowering Collaborative Groups.
Starhawk has been recognized by the Permaculture Institute of North America (PINA) as a leading figure in permaculture and has been awarded dual diplomas for excellence in education and permaculture site design.
Best known as an articulate voice in the revival of Earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion, Starhawk is the co-founder of the Reclaiming movement, an activist branch of the modern Pagan religion. In partnership with Donna Read, Starhawk is the co-founder of Belili Productions film company, whose most well-known project was a trio of popular films on the Goddess religion.
Starhawk’s work in progressive activism has spanned generations and geographies. As a global justice and peace activist, Starhawk co-founded RANT: Root Activists’ Network of Trainers, and has taught non-violent direct action across North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East. She has been on the front lines of anti-nuclear actions at Diablo Canyon, Livermore Weapons Lab, Vandenberg Air Force Base, and the Nevada Test Site. She has been a witness for peace in conflict zones across the world, including Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Palestine and Israel.
As a teacher of magical activism and permaculture education, Starhawk’s life work takes her across the globe. She currently lives part-time in San Francisco in a collective house with her partner and friends, and part-time in a little hut in the woods in Cazadero, California, where she practices permaculture in her extensive gardens and writes. Her website is http://starhawk.org.
Delyla Wilson, engaged Grr-Parent and resilience visionary, began her journey into resilient living as an environmental, social justice, and animal rights activist. Her path includes farmstead learning and living, community street medicine, disaster preparedness, permaculture, and decades of animal management experience with a special focus on all things dogs. Delyla acquired an Earth Activism Training Permaculture Design Certificate; developed and directed the Skills for a New Millennium Tour (a three-year traveling resilience education tour), and earned a Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies focused on Resilience Education for Disaster Preparedness.
Delyla’s energy is focused on resilience education both as a teacher and life-long student. Delyla seeks to weave resilience into every system throughout the web. Delyla currently is developing lines of homestead working dogs and keeps cows, goats, chickens, and sheep for land management, soil building, carbon sequestering, and dinner.
Victoria Scott is a Canadian-born visual artist. She has a lifelong studio practice with divination and experimentation to visualize the unseen as material sculpture and digital environments.
She has exhibited in galleries, and museums throughout North America and Europe, including the Centro Nacional de las Artes (Mexico City), Galleri Enkehuset (Stockholm), and the San Jose Museum of Art (California) and has been an artist in residence at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), an Oculus Launch Pad Fellow (Meta/Facebook) and a Science, Technology & Society resident at the Delfina Foundation (London).
Victoria completed her MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For over a decade she taught experimental digital media arts practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, California College of the Arts, and the San Francisco Art Institute.