“All important ideas,” as poet Mary Oliver once put it, “must include the trees, the mountains, and the rivers.” In this eco-spiritual retreat, we will attend to our relationship and conversation with the more-than-human world. Over the course of the day, we will dialogue with the four classical elements (water, fire, earth, air) as they express them selves in the evocative landscape of the Driftless area of southwest Wisconsin, and through our own bodies. Through teaching based on Daniel Cooperrider’s award winning book, Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You: A Field Guide to the Bible (Pilgrim Press, 2022), embodied movement and ritual, and short field trips to sacred sites, we will adventure with and back to the earth as a way of becoming more fully awake and alive to the task of helping the world understand and celebrate itself, seeking flourishing and fullness of expression.

Presenter: Daniel Cooperrider is a writer, teacher, and pastor in the United Church of Christ. A fly-fisher and forager, Cooperrider lives with his spouse and their young one on the edge of the Driftless Area in Madison, WI, an ancestral Ho-Chunk land.