Belonging to Place: A Practice of Wild Spirituality

Victoria Loorz, author of Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred, will offer opportunities to develop or deepen your spiritual practices of intimacy with nature. Practices of deep listening, wandering, mirroring, full bodied emotion, poetry, dreamwork and conversation with particular places and beings become portals to re-member ourselves back into intimate, sacred relationship with the rest of the living world. Spiritual leaders are desperately needed to accompany those in our communities who are experiencing disconnection, despair, and disillusion related to Earth's groanings. Through this daylong workshop, participants will be encouraged to seek beneath the urgent practical lifestyle adjustments necessary for a new way of relating to the natural world, into an intimacy, a relationship of lover and beloved, a deep belonging to your land, your place as sacred.

About ChIME

ChIME was founded by Rev. Jacob Watson, D.Min. and incorporated as a non-profit educational organization in 2002. Jacob graduated from Matthew Fox’s University of Creation Spirituality and was ordained by the California-based Chaplaincy Institute for the Arts (ChI). With the help of a number of colleagues and artists, including Abbess Patricia Ellen, ChIME developed its two-year curriculum. The first ten ChIME enrollees began their studies in Portland in 2002. From 2004 to 2011, with the help of Rev. Joel Grossman, ChIME also offered weekly classes in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Today we serve 20-40 students annually. Our Core Faculty consists of a host of local, regional, and national presenters and includes our Abbess Emirita, Patricia Ellen, and Arts Minister, Cathy Grigsby, both of whom have been with ChIME since its beginning.