Animate Earth
Annual Confluence 2023
This Animate Earth
Hosted by Rachel Fleming with speakers
Sharon Blackie, David Abram, Pat McCabe, Colin Campbell, Stephan Harding & Angharad Wynne
Course Structure & Fees
A Recording
Structure
2.5 hours of recordings
Fees
£15
An Invitation
To a More Than Human World
Remember a world that is alive and ensouled, an animate earth where everything has place, purpose and meaning and all life is sacred.
This is a recording of our Contemporary Animism 2023 confluence marking the launch of the Animate Earth Collective. We were delighted to be joined by Animate Earth’s advisory circle to mark the launch of our new platform.
Weaving together myth, magic, ceremony and science as we explored the questions: What would a new vision of animism mean for us as individuals and for our contemporary communities and cultures? What would it take to recover the soul, the aliveness, the intelligence, the mystery of the natural world and to live in service to it, how do we move towards a thriving life for all, what can we glean from the old stories to find the new, how do we embrace uncertainty and navigate our way to communion and connection?
Friends & Guest Speakers
This event is hosted by Rachel Fleming and Colin Campbell with guest speakers Manda Scott, Rupert Sheldrake, David Abram and Helena Norberg-Hodge.
Pat McCabe
Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining) is a Diné (Navajo) mother, grandmother, activist, artist, writer, ceremonial leader, and international speaker. She is a voice for global peace, and her paintings are created as tools for individual, earth and global healing. She draws upon the Indigenous sciences of Thriving Life to reframe questions about sustainability and balance, and she is devoted to supporting the next generations, Women’s Nation and Men’s Nation, in being functional members of the “Hoop of Life” and upholding the honour of being human.
Manda Scott
Manda Scott is a novelist, smallholder, shamanic teacher and – soon – podcaster. Her Boudica: Dreaming books both grew out of and informed her shamanic dreaming practice and were the start of a fifteen year journey of teaching small groups. Now, as we near the biggest crisis in our evolutionary history, she is focussing more on how to bring the birthright of shamanic dreaming to wider groups of people and combine it with the explosion in cognitive neuroscience that is teaching us how to shape the structures of our minds. Her belief is that we can make the next evolutionary step consciously, but that we will need to know how to ask for help of the Heart Mind of the Universe – and that we need to get to grips with this as a matter of urgency. Yesterday would be good. Today will do. Tomorrow might be too late.
David Abram
Dr. David Abram, cultural ecologist and philosopher gone wild, is the award-winning author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Described as “daring” and “truly original” by Science, as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, David’s work has helped catalyze the emergence of several new disciplines, including the burgeoning field of ecopsychology. Named by both the Utne Reader and Resurgence as one of a hundred visionaries transforming contemporary culture, David is co-founder of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), an organisation exploring the manner in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform our relation with the rest of the animate earth. He lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.
Stephan Harding
Since childhood Stephan has had a deep fascination with the natural world, and his scientific cast of mind lead him to do a degree in Zoology at the University of Durham and then a doctorate on the behavioural ecology of the muntjac deer at Oxford University. After completing his first degree he returned to Venezuela where he was a field assistant for the Smithsonian Institute, studying mammalian diversity in the rainforest and in the lowland plains. Stephan was appointed Visiting Professor in Wildlife Management at the National University in Costa Rica, where he lived for two years before becoming a founder member of Schumacher College in 1990. Stephan is author of Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. Green Books, and editor of Grow Small, Think Beautiful. Floris Books. He is also the writer and presenter of the documentary film Animate Earth, produced by Angel TV.
Colin Campbell
Colin works with the wisdom traditions of South Africa, specifically those that are based on our relationships with the ancestors and spirits of nature. He looks at where these ancient indigenous practices collide and coalesce with the knowledge and belief systems of the west.
He now works around the world as a diviner, teacher and public speaker, developing forms through which to bring this knowledge to the modern world.
Angharad Wynne
Angharad teaches from the old Brythonic tradition of the British Isles, the spirit ways of the ancestors of this land, and how we can recover and remember them to help us restore balance in ourselves and with the world around us.
Rachel Fleming
Rachel has worked with animist education for many years, designing and delivering educational programmes for Schumacher College, University of Wales Trinity St Davids, Lampeter and Embercombe, with a focus on the meeting point between ecology and ‘spirituality’.