Awakening our Earth Body: Folk Magic, Animism & Trolldom

Join us for a weekend of deep, embodied connection with place. Together, we will explore practices rooted in ancestral traditions to support ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth.

Many of us were raised without a sense of cultural grounding or practices for cultivating relationship with place and its spirits. The legacy of colonization still impacts our communities and our bodies. Whether as communities of diaspora, grieving lost ancestral ways, or as first nations people, reclaiming culture from erasure, we gather to explore what it means to be people of place and reciprocity.

Real folk magic has always been about what is actually needed to survive, heal, and thrive. Throughout our time together we will explore and build upon magic rooted in ancient traditions while also welcoming new and emergent impulses that result in practical and relevant spells for the times of crisis we live in now. This is more than just a program about the old ways, this is two days of intense magical exploration, embodiment of the elements, and active sorcery for our world.

In these times, the longing for connection across difference feels urgent, and rooting back into the living earth becomes an even stronger imperative. As beings of the land, the basket that holds our magic is—and always has been—the earth-body, our body: the source of all magical and ceremonial protocols, stories, songs, and dreams.

This invitation is less about scholarship of old cultures; it is about a living practice, as we heed the call of the all too used metaphor, “tend the flames, not worship the ashes.” We will be courting our embodied relationship with the more-than-human-world and walking away clearer in our unique style of listening, sensing and magic making.

In this spirit, we invite you to a weekend of immersive practice with three deeply seasoned practitioners of magic, story, and ceremony. We will steep ourselves in the old lore, stories, and ceremonies in service to place, here on Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok land.

What you will learn:

Traditional generational magic systems

Wisdom encoded in story

How to use perception of yourself and the elements in magic

Embodied Spirit connection

Spadom: divination technique

Magical herbalism

Methods for creating spells for healing, binding and luck

Date & Time

Saturday, Oct. 17th 10-4pm followed by 6-9:30pm Potluck & Ancestor Ritual

Sunday, Oct. 18th 10-4pm

Location

Ohlsen Homestead in Sebastopol, California

(address w/ registration)

Tuition

$275 early bird (by September 11th)

$325 regular price (after September 11th)

$500+ for those with means that wish to support scholarship tickets

THE GUIDES

Erik Ohlsen is a master of regenerative design, an internationally recognized Permaculture teacher, author, farmer, herbalist, storyteller, and practitioner of Nordic folk traditions. He is the author of the award-winning book The Regenerative Landscaper, a 500-page manual for regenerative design and implementation. Since 1999, Erik has founded numerous organizations that regenerate ecosystems including his award-winning design and build firm Permaculture Artisans and The Permaculture Skills Center where thousands of students around the world learn ecological landscaping and regenerative agriculture.

In the early 2000’s, Erik deployed intense magical actions onto the streets of the Global Justice movement. Working with the Reclaiming Collective, he helped organize and implement many magical activist events and rituals across the globe to combat economic imperialism while putting a spotlight on local solutions for food and water sovereignty.

For over 25 years, Erik has worked at the leading edge of earth based spiritual practices. He was a core teacher of The Earth Activist Training’s flagship design program from 2001-2012 where he worked alongside Starhawk, weaving magic, activism, and permaculture into a whole systems view of our worlds. Since 2017, Erik has rekindled the animistic world view of his Nordic Lineage, mentoring under multiple master tradition keepers throughout Nordic lands.

Kari Stettler (she/her) is an initiatory guide, kitchen witch, somatics practitioner, biodynamic gardener-land steward, and Vedic astrologer living on stolen lands of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok people since 2006. Her roots follow the trails of the corded ware culture into what is now Poland to the north and Sicily to the south, across the northern Germanic lands and into Scandinavia. Her most recent ancestors were farmers in Minnesota and eventually migrated to coastal California, where she was born in ‘76 on lands of the Tongva people. Kari is actively deepening her relationship with her Nordic heritage through her studies and practice with Urhall school of Trolldom and Scandinavian Folk Wisdom and her Southern Italian heritage with The Root Circle: Della Medicina.

Kari has been in practice and service at the crossroads of cultural regeneration and repair, physical-emotional-spiritual healing, embodiment, rites of passage and land stewardship over the past 30 years. She hosts spaces within which individuals and groups can: cultivate presence through embodiment, explore their ancestral roots through inquiry, research & ceremony, resolve traumatic imprints that are held in the body, grow capacity for experiencing the full spectrum range of sensations and feelings that life has to offer, foster reciprocal relations with the natural world and dismantle internal conditioned patterns of systemic colonization and white bodied supremacy.

Kari’s work contributes to the movement of peace work and centers around the prayer of co-liberation. She has been designing and guiding long form transformational initiatory passages for adults and youth since 2014, leading these groups in fasting/vigil ceremonies in the wild. Kari is Wilderness First Responder certified. Her passions include dancing, making pottery, medicine making, quality time with soul family, tending forests and immersing in wild waters.

Chaise Levy was born and raised in the homelands of the Tongva people, in Topanga, California, “the place where the mountains meet the sea.” It was there that he first encountered the power of words, story, and the voices of the land.

During his formative years, Chaise devoted himself to the craft of language and performance, spending over a decade in classical Shakespearean theater training, developing a deep ear for the way truth moves through heightened speech. Alongside that classical foundation, he also studied the art of improvisation and ran his own improv troupe, where he learned that the most alive storytelling happens in the body, in the moment, in genuine response to what is present in the room.

Today, Chaise is the Co-Founder and resident storyteller at Animist West County, and works as an English teacher in Sonoma County, where he teaches both Theater and Literature, holding space for students to find their voice through close reading, performance, and personal reflection. His apprenticeship to language and belief in the power of story has been deepened through formal study of oral storytelling with Dr. Martin Shaw at his School of Myth Summer School, personal mentoring with Andreas Kornevall, and work in the lineage of Daniel Deardorff as an assistant at the Mythsinger Legacy Project. As well as three years of study at the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education. This has convinced him that myth offers us a doorway to the dreaming of the more-than-human world.

In addition to this work Chaise is the host of the Hagstone Podcast, which hosts lively conversations about magical living in relationship with the Earth. The Hagstone brings together creators, sorcerer’s, folk magic practitioners, and storytellers to illuminate pathways for living well in these wild times.

Awakening our Earth Body takes place on the stolen lands from the ancestral and current inhabitants of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo tribal nations. These communities, currently represented by but not limited to, The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, who have called this place home for hundreds of generations before European and other mixed race settlers arrived, are the original and current human stewards of these dynamic ecologies. The diverse landscapes of this region which provide an abundance of food, medicine and textiles from which we benefit is an ongoing legacy from generations of their tending. Wherever you are reading this from, we invite you to take a moment, reflect on the Indigenous peoples of the place you call home. How can you learn more about them, their culture, their stories of past and present, and most importantly, what can you do to support local Indigenous led organizations, projects and movements? If you are living in or around the “Bay Area of California”, there is a list on the Allyship page of local Indigenous-led organizations and projects you can consider researching and supporting.