Songs of Return
27 May – 24 July 2025
Course Structure
An online programme with optional retreat
Dates
Location
The optional retreat will take place at our private, beautiful and wild riverside meadow, located near Newbridge on Dartmoor, in the South West of England. You will find yourself under the stars amongst a diversity of other than humans and with direct access straight onto the sacred moorland landscape.
Full joining instructions will be provided on booking. The approximate location is shown on the map here.
Comfortable, shared tents will be provided, but please bring a sleeping bag. All your food and snacks will be provided by chefs from our camp kitchen
Fees
An Invitation
Our capacity for singing the world alive has been forgotten in most places. But in this singing for the wolves, perhaps something very old and important was being remembered on behalf of us all – an ancient contract of honouring our extended, more-than-human family, a forgotten but sacred duty of tending to the wild.
Some species are returning to denuded landscapes around the world, invited and helped by us, or finding their own way home. In these precarious times, it might be the time for us to slow down and listen for those voices and songs of other than humans, perhaps somehow helping them find their way.
If we apply ourselves creatively and sensitively to the dreaming and listening process, might we even find songs and stories that have been waiting for us? Perhaps, this act of communion might help tip the balance of the world and give ourselves and others a sense of belonging.
There might be a song of whale, of pine marten or marsh frog, in any and all of us whichever place we come from. Might this even be the way to ‘sing ourselves home?
Join us for Songs of Return, an animate, collective, emergent dreaming, creative and ceremonial practice dedicated and offered to our other than human kin.
What to expect
This is a ceremonial practice of three parts.
Part I:. At this first meeting we will gather as an online circle and set our dreaming task to track the threads of the other than human in our lives and to listen for their songs of return.
Part II: Together we will cross the threshold into a different type of listening through ceremony and vigil. This can either be done together residentially in the UK at a beautiful camping place on the banks of the River Dart in South West England, or you can do this in your own place with instruction on how to prepare and gather.
Part III: We will re-gather online to share our experiences, our songs of return and to gift what we have received back to the world.
Is this for you?
This is for anyone who feels the need for a more reciprocal and balanced relationship with the natural world. It marks the beginning of an exploration, for all of us as individuals, and collectively within our circle, into more subtle ways of working with our other than human kin, through ceremony, dreaming and the act of offering back and singing home.
“When we sing to ourselves, we tend to something sacred within us, and when we sing to the Others, it is tending to Creation, and is an act of worship“
(Please note, we use the term song loosely, so that our songs of praise might take any number of forms. It’s simply about the quality of attention we give)
Your Guides
The lead guides of this course are Chris Salisbury, Angharad Wynne, Sam Lee and Rachel Fleming.
Chris Salisbury founded WildWise in 1999 after many years working as an education officer for Devon Wildlife Trust. With a background in the theatre, training in therapy, and a career in environmental education, he uses every creative means at his disposal to encourage people to enjoy and value the natural world. Chris directs the acclaimed Call of the Wild Foundation program for educators-in-training as well as Where the Wild Things Are, a rewilding adventure based at Embercombe in Devon. He is also a professional storyteller (aka ‘Spindle Wayfarer’) and is the co-founder and artistic director for the Westcountry and Oxford Storytelling Festivals. His recent books include Wild Nights Out: The Magic of Exploring the Outdoors at Night (foreword: Chris Packham) and Folk Tales of the Night: Stories for Campfires, Bedtime and Nocturnal Adventures.
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.
Sam Lee is a Mercury Prize nominated folk singer, conservationist, song collector, award winning promoter, broadcaster and activist. He plays a unique role in the British music scene. A highly inventive and original singer, folk song interpreter, passionate conservationist, song collector and successful creator of live events. Alongside his organisation, The Nest Collective, Sam has shaken up the music scene breaking boundaries between folk and contemporary music and the assumed places and ways folksong is appreciated. Sam’s helped develop its ecosystem inviting in a new listenership interrogating what the messages in these old songs hold for us today Read more about Sam here https://samleesong.co.uk/
Rachel Fleming has worked with animist education for many years, designing and delivering educational programmes for Schumacher College, University of Wales Trinity St Davids and Embercombe, with a focus on the meeting place between human, spirit and nature, between ‘ecology’ and ‘spirituality’. She is co-founder and curator of the Contemporary Animism programmes and loves to convene conversations that explore the deepest depths of why we are here, the ways we find belonging to the world and how to be in service to soul. She is committed to scholarship, word magic, creative imagination and the medicine of circles.