☀️ Seeding Community Summer Edition
Your guide to rooting deeper, growing truer, and blossoming wider in our PNW community.
In today’s newsletter, we will highlight all the good upcoming gatherings we’ve had on our radar for the summer ahead. We hope you enjoy! 🥳
The other news is that Aloysious and Jordan have decided to take the summer off from writing and tending to the Seeding Community newsletter. See you in fall!
Lastly, we are in a process of sensing into the future of Seeding Community and are not sure if that will look more like a decomposition, an evolution, or a hand-off, so if you are interested in being a part of conversation on what the future of Seeding Community might look like, please respond to this email and let us know. Thanks!
Welcome to this edition of Seeding Community.
Summer Gatherings in Cascadia
🎶 Cascadia Song Rise: Community Song Gathering
July 3rd-6th in Tidewater, OR
Cascadia Song Rise is a gathering of people who love to sing! We will nourish ourselves through collective song, harmony, and connection. Cascadia Song Rise is aimed primarily at sharing music with multiple vocal lines, sung a capella (without instruments) or with instruments in supporting rather than central roles. The music is participatory, not performance-oriented.
🎉 MANifest: A Transformative Gathering of Dude in Nature
July 10th-13th in Chimicum, WA
Come explore your physical, emotional and spiritual edges among cedar and stone. Through heartfelt connections, invigorating challenges and hearty celebration, we’ll co-create an empowering container for personal growth and collective liberation, weaving our unique gifts into a vibrant and lasting community.
🌲 Volunteer with the Green Seattle Partnership
All Summer Long in Seattle, WA
Find opportunities in your neighborhood to tend to the land and connect with others! Volunteering with the Green Seattle Partnership is a great way to give back to your community, get outside, and improve the health of a local park. Everyone can help keep our forested parks healthy and green! No experience necessary.
🌲 Social Forestry Workshop
July 12-13 in Skamokawa, WA
How do we build reciprocity with the places we care for? How do we love the land as an active practice? How do we learn to listen and start speaking the quiet language of place? Slowly. Quietly. Clumsily. And sometimes in a big rush all at once. If you find yourself asking these questions, or steward a place, or simply aspire to, join us and Permaculture Elder Hazel Vaarde July 12-13 for a weekend of Social Forestry, as we practice reading land, tending to the needs of its inhabitants and building an adaptive vision to manage our places ever closer towards ecological health and plenitude.
✊ Resilience, Resistance, Regeneration: Standing Strong in a Time of Stress
July 13th-18th in Tahuya, WA
Are you choosing your response to the chaos of these unprecedented times? Or are you just reacting? How do you want to show up for your future self? This summer, experience an embodied understanding of how to thrive when the going gets tough. Join Sahale for 5 days of immersive learning, play, and warm connection to boost your resilience and rekindle your creativity to take inspired, regenerative action!
🎉 Rising Moon Festival
July 18th-20th in Bellingham, WA
Magical Beings we invite you to bring your authentic self to this weekend festival at Rising Moon Meadows. It is truly an honor to be holding space for our amazing community to explore, play, connect, grow, reflect, and experience whatever magic is about to unfold! With both Family Friendly kid activities and adult workshops, music and food, The Rising Moon Festival is full of amazing offerings for the whole family.
💧 Grief Retreat at Sacred Groves w/ Laurence Cole & Therese Charvet
August 2nd-3rd on Bainbridge Island, WA
These retreats are an opportunity to support each other to feel and express our emotions deeply held in the basket of a supportive community. There are so few places where our grief is welcome, honored, given space. For deep healing, our grief needs to be witnessed and expressed. This creates an alchemical process of transformation so that grief changes from a burden to bear to compassionate, open hearted connection with others.
🎶 Singing Alive
August 8th-11th in Silverton, OR
Singing Alive is an annual, since 2007 (17 years as of 2025), summer gathering devoted to Gaian Folk-song circles. Singing Alive was born of a confluence of the song culture (rainbow, gospel, trad. Americana, Native Amer.) of back-to-the-land healing gatherings native to the Cascadia bio-region (Pacific NW), and the song-medicine of teacher-plant traditions world-wide. It has since grown to encompass a wide variety of singing people(s), including community choirs, devotees of contemporary spiritual figures, yoga (kirtan) communities. and light language enthusiasts.
🙌 The Temple of Belonging Women’s Gathering
August 11th-15th in Colton, OR
The Temple of Belonging Bio-Regional Gathering is a four-night, five-day immersion into local & women-powered culture, where we gather to build and tend to real community and connection here in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a mix of gathering, retreat, and conference—a place where ancient ways meet modern lives in a grounded, living practice of community and belonging.
🌲 ROPJ’s Adult Mountain Quest
August 14th-27th in The Olympic Mountains
As our world grows more complex, confusing and divided, more and more of us find our lives feelingly similarly disjointed. How do we find or hold a strong sense of self, and a sense of meaningfully contributing to our community, in these times of change, strife and opportunity? For generations, around the world, the quest to answer these questions has looked to nature as a source of clarity and inspiration. The mirror of nature holds up for us a powerful, clear reflection about who we are and what we can offer the world. It is a doorway into a more fulfilling, more meaningful path through life.
💧 Grieving Man
August 30th-September 1st in Tehuya, WA
Fellow brothers, fathers, sons, uncles, elders-in-training & the like, with our hearts open and tender, strong and resilient, we humbly and enthusiastically invite you into the birthing of a new and emergent gathering for men called Grieving Man. Grieving Man is a friendship-led, land-based, relational and musical healing space. It is a ritual container that welcomes in the multi-faceted expressions of grief, joy, anger, desire, fear, longing (etc.) — emotions that are so often suppressed and stuck in our bodies — to be honored, expressed and, ultimately, transformed in the sacred witness of other men.
🎉 Imagine Music & Arts Festival
September 4th-7th on Orcas Island, WA
The Imagine Music and Arts Festival on Orcas Island is a vibrant celebration of creativity, where live performance art takes center stage. Artists and performers merge movement, sound, and visual storytelling in immersive, interactive displays that captivate audiences. Imagine’s workshops are designed to inspire creativity, connection, and personal growth. From hands-on art classes and live painting demonstrations to movement workshops like yoga, ecstatic dance, and circus arts, there’s something for every curious mind.
🎉 Barnivale: Fooling, Rewilding, & Esoteric Lunacy
September 4th-7th in Skamokawa, WA
Welcome, Cosmic Wanderers! Prepare to enter the mystical realm of BARNIVÀLE - where the veil between worlds thins and magic seeps through the cracks! Embrace the sacred fool! Clowning workshops, cosmic comedy, and trickster ceremonies to help you break free from mundane reality. Return to the wisdom of our ancestors! Hands-on workshops in foraging, fermentation, earth-building, and regenerative practices. Journey into the mysteries of consciousness! Explore esoteric traditions, mystical practices, and cosmic connections.
🌲 Conscious Growth Convergence 2025
October 2nd-5th in Dexter, OR
The Conscious Growth Convergence is a four-day gathering rooted in community resilience, earth-based wisdom, and cultural change. Set on the ancestral lands of the Kalapuya people, this transformational experience invites you on a journey through the elements — weaving together music, song circles, grief rituals, workshops, permaculture, and community. For 2025, our theme is “Standing Strong Like an Oak,” drawing inspiration from the mighty oak trees that surround this land — symbols of strength, resilience, and ancestral remembrance. As we navigate political upheaval and ecological crisis, we gather to root deeper, grow stronger, and remember what holds us through the storm.
Summer Gatherings Outside of Cascadia
✊ August 10-14 — Re-Storying Justice Jam (in CA)
Come join us for an exploration of justice and healing at the 6th annual Re-Storying Justice Jam! Our in-person gathering in Northern California will bring together activists, advocates, storytellers, practitioners, community members, persons impacted by the criminal legal system and all who feel called to transform it. We will reflect, share stories, and engage in collective visioning to “re-story” our notions of justice on the path to creating broader systemic change. We will co-create, tangle & untangle, challenge & be challenged, support, connect, and dream in ways we can’t even predict.
🌲 August 17-22 — HOME (Healing Our Movement Ecosystem) Jam (in CA)
Since 2013, the HOME Jam has woven together the journeys of hundreds of leaders from across the environmental and climate movements—strengthening a synergistic ecosystem that powers our collective impact. As we face unprecedented challenges in our rapidly changing world, this year’s HOME Jam offers a powerful opportunity to connect, cross-pollinate ideas, and envision the regenerative world we know is possible. We invite you—as a passionate advocate in the climate and environmental justice movement—to step away from your desk, breathe deeply, and realign with your whole self so you can shine even brighter in your work. Let’s embody the healing we wish to see in the world.
🎶 August 21-24 — Mountain Song: Prayers to Meet the Moment (in NM)
Join us for 3-days of singing together in the magical high desert of New Mexico. We will gather in order to fuel ourselves, to connect with one another, and to sing to the pain and hope of these times. Come with your joy, heartbreak, and longing… please come as you are. Sessions will be led by song leaders Arnaé Batson, Aaron Johnson, Shireen Amini, Te Martin, and Yesh Salz. All meals are provided; both camping and indoor housing are available.
💗 August 22-24 — Wheel of Consent Workshop (on Salt Spring Island, BC)
The Wheel of Consent grew out of the lineage of offering consensual touch practices for those seeking an embodied experience of receiving and giving. In these workshop, we aim to provide you with tools and practices to create safe-enough protocols and agreements to negotiate your needs for touch and intimacy with others.
Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.
SEE YOU IN FALL!
In community and with love,
Seeding Community — Aloysious and Jordan