Waymarkers History

The seeds for Waymarkers began in 2004 with a group of Seattle Pacific University students Mary DeJong led on a vocational discernment retreat to Iona, Scotland. The Sacred Isle offered its ancient self, inviting the sojourners into the archetypal stages of pilgrimage, where we would ultimately find ourselves more at home with our unique and integrated place within this planet.  This journey, and subsequent others to Iona and within the Pacific Northwest, inspired projects, writing, and teaching aimed to support the pilgrim moving through this life towards a deep sense of belonging.

Waymarkers’ offerings are provided as a modern vade mecum, a soul text of writings and reflections that would challenge the pilgrim, the traveler, and any Earth-walker to make their way home, inviting a profound posture of perception; a noticing of the natural world—akin to the exilic waymarkers in Old Testament scripture— that would lead one back to a sense of belonging to themselves, the Sacred, and our planet Earth.

Waymarkers became an LLC in 2010; out of this emerging context Mary DeJong has facilitated and guided numerous pilgrimages to Iona, Scotland and convened reflective Rewilding Retreats locally within her native Pacific Northwest home-scape. Waymarkers has become the way by which Mary continues her retreat work, and it has also become the on-line presence for her writing that will encourage and inspire a renewed sense of the sacred within ourselves, the natural world, and the cosmos.

Inspired by Creation Spirituality, Spiritual Ecology, and eco-mythology, Mary stands on the great and wise shoulders of ecotheologians, Christian and Celtic mystics, ecopychologists, and scholarly thinkers such as Thomas Berry, Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Matthew Fox, Sallie McFague, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sallie McFague, Bill Plotkin, David Abram, Martin Shaw, Sharon Blackie, and John Philip Newell (among others), Waymarkers' hope is to offer way-markers and guide others toward a holistic and harmonious inter-connected life with the more-than-human world through restorative rewilding rituals and pilgrimage practices that recover a way of seeing the sacred in the soil, the stars, and even in our neighborhood streets.