Touching the Earth: A Homestead Retreat for Young Adults

Instructor(s): Kirstin Edelglass, Dawn Scott, Clayton Moon Clemetson, Larkspur Morton, and William Edelglass

Program Description:

An invitation to live and learn in a community of vibrant peers, tending gardens and practicing meditation. 

This three-week immersion for young adults (ages 18-25) on a secluded Vermont homestead is an opportunity to cultivate self-awareness and deepen your relationship with others and the living earth. Our small learning community will explore the Buddhist concept of interbeing through the fields of permaculture, ecology, living systems theory, ecopsychology, social justice, and climate studies. Readings on these topics will feed rich discussions, often facilitated by students. 

At times we will co-create rituals inspired by Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, calling on our moral imaginations as we live beside ancestors and future beings. Daily rhythms will include morning silence, mindfulness practice, physical exercise (e.g. work projects, hiking, swimming, yoga), solitude in nature, creative expression (e.g. writing, reciting poetry, singing), council practice, and sharing nourishing meals. We will also learn from and be inspired by local farmers, artists, climate activists, and wildlife biologists – people who can share their experience of composing an original life and engaging in meaningful work during this time of transition toward a life-sustaining society.

A full description of the program can be found here.

About the Instructor(s):
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  Kirstin Edelglass

  Kirstin Edelglass is a wilderness guide, ecological educator, and counselor whose passion for supporting young adults runs deep.  In addition to teaching at Sterling College, Colby College, Marlboro College, and Lesley University’s Audubon Expedition Institute, she has founded a number of programs including the Canoe Expedition for Maine Girls and the Earth Leadership Cohort (for young activists learning to facilitate the Work That Reconnects).  She is cofounder of the New England Council Collective and leads workshops in facilitating listening circles, song leading, and cultivating ecological consciousness.  Kirstin and her husband (with their 9-year-old twin daughters) host WWOOF volunteers year-round on their Marlboro homestead.

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  Dawn Scott

  Dawn Scott sat her first Young Adult retreat in the summer of 2008, and it meant a great deal to her to meet other young people who also valued turning inward, silence, connection, authenticity, and asking the big questions of life.  Since then, she served as the Family Program Coordinator for eight years at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and continues to teach teen retreats through Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (iBme).  She is a graduate of the Insight Meditation Society’s 2017 – 2021 teacher training program, a co-principal teacher of Marin Sangha, and is a core teacher of Spirit Rock’s Liberation, Emptiness, and Awareness Practices (LEAP) Program and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and Insight Meditation's joint program, Exploring the Heart of Freedom.  Dawn has a deep love of long retreat practice, the Buddha's liberative teachings, and working with young people.

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  Larkspur Morton

  Larkspur Morton, Ph.D. is an experiential, holistic, and liberatory educator, mentor, and leader who loves to help create vital learning communities through exploration, play, and reflective practices to catalyze personal growth and transformation.  She is passionate about supporting profound connection with oneself, with other humans, and with nature.  Her work has been overwhelmingly embedded within nature, sleeping on the earth a total of 6+ years, from the tropics in Peru to the boreal forest in Maine.  It is also grounded in systems thinking, diverse cultural perspectives, decolonization, ecological consciousness, and activism.  Contemplative practices have woven through her life, from Zen meditation to many forms of movement and dance.

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  William Edelglass

  William Edelglass is Director of Studies at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.  He also teaches at Smith College, where he is the Director of the Five College Tibetan Studies Program in India, and is adjunct professor at the Central University for Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, India.  His scholarship explores questions in Buddhist studies, environmental humanities, and philosophy.  William has practiced in several different Buddhist traditions and has taught widely in dharma centers, academia, as a wilderness guide, and in several Tibetan academic institutions in India.  William’s most recent book is The Routledge Handbook of Indian Buddhist Philosophy.