Feather, Fire, Stone and Bone
Conversations With an Animate World
Year-long online programme starting 9 December 2025
With Angharad Wynne & special guests
César Rodríguez-Garavi, Fiona Shaw, Manda Scott, Carolyn Hillyer, Andy Letcher and Bríd Walsh.
Online Course Structure & Fees
Structure: December 2025 – November 2026
Teaching sessions
Time: Tuesdays 6:30pm-8:30pm (UK time)
Dates:
Session 1: 9 December
Session 2: 6 January
Session 3: 3 February
Session 4: 10 March
Session 5: 7 April
Session 6: 5 May
Session 7: 2 June
Session 8: 14 July
Session 9: 11 August
Session 10: 8 September
Session 11: 6 October
Session 12: 17 November
All teaching sessions are recorded so you can catch up if you miss any, but you are
encouraged to attend as many as possible to enjoy the discussion and interactive
teaching space.
12 monthly sharing circles
Time: 7pm – 8.30pm (UK time)
Dates: Dates decided with the group
These are sessions for sharing insights, responses and questions. You will also have continuous access to the discussion platform on Animate Earth to share and discuss your thoughts, ideas and resources, creating for yourselves an animate-loving community through the arc of the year and beyond. Sharing circles are not recorded.
Fees: Online Programme £685
If you are not able to attend for financial reasons we offer a limited number of places at a lower-cost price for those people who are committed to this work and would otherwise not be able to attend. These places are by application only, please fill in the application form.
An Invitation
Old Ways of Knowing
to Sustain us Today
An initiatory journey of a year and a day, developing practice and reclaiming kinship with all beings to live soulfully and magically in our animate world. We’ll explore indigenous ways of relating, reconnect with our wild and intuitive nature and embrace the unseen.
A year-and-a-day long exploration of what it means to live soulfully and magically in an Animate World. In this online, introductory-level course, we’ll journey together around the sun, for 366 dawns and dusks and thirteen moons, delving into the old knowing of our lands, reconnecting with our wild and intuitive nature and embracing the unseen things that make our souls sing. The aim is to radically change how we relate to the world, to each other and to ourselves in order that we may root in the earth, connect with all creation, listen deeply and offer our light and our gifts to generatively create our future.
Over twelve monthly meets, held by Angharad and a powerful gathering of guests, practitioners and tradition bearers, we will open to conversations with creation and explore ways of living soulfully in modern times.
“Just want to say how grateful I am for the wisdom, love and strength I’m receiving from the FFSB programme. I’m working gently and uncovering deep depths.” ~ Jules
What You can Expect From The Programme
- Monthly online teaching session (each is recorded), which includes conversation and discussion with guest tutors.
- Monthly online circle session for discussion, to share experiences and reflections on practice to build community and to dream together.
- Monthly practices that build throughout the programme: deep listening, connecting to intuition, creating simple ceremony, vigil, exploration of interbeing, magical making, ancestor connection, the work of creating, maintaining and relating to sacred spaces, divining, dreaming/journeying and connecting with the mythic landscape. These will support our exploration of what it is to be human and deeply connected to the web of life.
- An exploration of big questions: Why are we here? What is my purpose? How can I be with all that is happening in our world? How can I make a difference?
- A sharing of wisdom drawn from lore found in ancient texts, poetry and stories drawn from the animate traditions of this land and those of our guest teachers.
- An enquiry into the cultural norms we have adopted – how and why we believe what we do, and a reclaiming of a deeper knowing.
- A shift in your experience of being human in an animate world.
- A transformation of your relationship with your locality and the seen and unseen realms.
- Community and deep connection among a circle of people who are on a similarly soul-led, animist journey.
“I am loving this course and how it is deepening my communion with the Holy Wild. I do not remember how I stumbled upon Animate Earth Collective but it has been a source of inspiration and enrichment since the first offering I attended.” ~ Natalie
No previous experience is required, just a yearning to delve deeper into soulful connection with all life and living magically.
Photos contributed by previous participants:
River Griffin, Ruth Minchin. Elizabeth Graves and Dave Warren.
Monthly Discussion Topics
9 December: A new, old way of knowing
6 January: Lore – myth and medicine
3 February: Listening to the land
10 March: Ancestors – you are made from the love of millions
7 April: What’s in a Dream? Exploring trance states
5 May: Magic of the everyday – small ceremonies, shrines and ritual objects
2 June: Hollow bone: synchronicity, magic and connection
14 July: Divination
11 August: This old work in today’s world
8 September: Tides and times
6 October: The journey of life – rites of passage
17 November: At the threshold – honouring this moment
Your Guides
Angharad Wynne leads this year long online course.
Angharad Wynne
Angharad has spent much of her life following her feet along pathways back through the portals of ancient myth, folklore, song and poetry of Britain. Today, she draws together the fragments of our tradition to help guide and sustain a living spiritual practice, connected to this land and her creatures. She shares her contemporary animate practice through retreats, storytelling gatherings, ceremony, talks, writings and pilgrimages. These are conceived as radical acts of re-membering our soulful, deep humanity and re-weaving ourselves back into fully engaged participation within the web of life.
She is a professional storyteller and ‘Cyfarwydd’ who has worked on story projectsfrom Britain to India, Portugal to the US. She is the founder of Dreaming the Land and Dadeni Spirit School, and co-founder of The Animate Earth Collective. A ceremonialist, a published poet and writer and co-author of Wise Women with Sharon Blackie, published by Virago.
dreamingtheland.com
insta: @dreamingtheland
César Rodríguez-Garavito
César Rodríguez-Garavito is an Earth rights scholar, field lawyer, and founding director of the MOTH (More-Than-Human Life) Program at NYU School of Law. He is a Professor of Law and Director of the Earth Rights Research & Action (TERRA) Clinic at NYU. César’s work has advanced new ideas and legal actions worldwide on issues such as climate justice, Indigenous rights, and what he proposes to call “more-than-human rights” (rights of nature). His contributions to Earth rights have been recognized with a More-Than-Human Fellowship by the London Design Museum and a spot in the UN Museum’s Top 10 Culture for Impact 2024 List.
Manda Scott
Manda Scott is an award-winning novelist, host of the international chart-topping Accidental Gods podcast and co-creator of the Thrutopia Masterclass.
Best known for the Boudica: Dreaming series, her previous novels have been short-listed for the Orange Prize, the Edgar, Wilbur Smith and Saltire Awards and won the McIllvanney Prize.
Her latest novel ANY HUMAN POWER is a ‘seismic’ Mytho-Political thriller which lays out a Thrutopian road map to a flourishing future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
Welding the power of intergenerational connection to combat the sting of death and the vicious vengeance of a dying establishment, it opens the doors to a new way of being.
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.
Fiona Shaw
Fiona Shaw is a Medicine woman, a Midwife, a Grief Walker and Fire Keeper.
Having initially trained as a nurse, in 1993 the ‘craft’ of birthing found her. Initially becoming a ‘lay midwife’, Fiona went on to train and then practice for over ten years as an independent midwife, accompanying many women through birth and the childbearing year. In 1997 she was initiated as a Medicine woman in the Red Path tradition and, since then, has created communities of ceremony in the UK, Germany, Portugal and Israel. Her work takes many forms, but in some way, all the threads are concerned with the ‘soul’, healing and supporting and enabling people to be more present and connected in their lives.
Carolyn Hillyer
Carolyn Hillyer is a renowned artist, musician, writer, drum maker and workshop teacher of thirty years standing, who lives and works on an ancient farmstead amid the wild hills of Dartmoor, southwest England. She sings of ancient spirit and hidden memory, and has released over twenty music albums (solo projects and collaborations). She writes about ancestral roots and the deep experience of women in their weaving of courageous life paths; her books include Weavers’ Oracle, Her Bone Bundle, Book Of Hag, Wild Litany and Sacred House. She paints life-size images of archetypal and mythological women which are exhibited as large shrine installations.
Andy Letcher
After a brief spell studying physics and astronomy, Andy Letcher completed a degree in Ecology at Sheffield University, then a doctorate in Ecology at Oxford. It was as an eco-activist in the 1990s that he was invited to do a second PhD in the Study of Religion at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. He is especially interested in the tangled and sometimes tortuous relationship between science and spirituality, and in so-called dark green religion. He has written papers on: the distribution of mammals across continents; fairies; mysticism; and psychedelic spirituality. He is the author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom.
Bríd Walsh
Bríd Walsh grew up in rural Ireland, in West Cork in the South Western part of Ireland. She was immersed in traditions of language, culture and deep connections to land and environment – listening to the rhythms of the land. She is the third generation in her family to carry close communication with land and trees.
Bríd has worked to remove blockages to the flow of energy in land, property and also when working with individuals – on their personal journey. Her connections have supported the removal of trauma from landscapes and also using this supportive dialogue with nature forms part of decision making when it comes to next steps for properties/land.