Please Note: The 2025 Winter Rewilding Retreat will be the final Rewilding Retreat for the foreseeable future. After seven wonderful years, and in alignment with the themes of Jubilee and mythic cycles of rest and recovery, I’ve chosen to let this program lie fallow for a time. This pause honors the natural rhythm of renewal and opens space for new possibilities to emerge.
Rewilding Retreat: Recovering the Wisdom Within the Wild
Quarterly day-long retreats at the Whidbey Institute (Whidbey Island, WA)
Learn and practice seasonal rhythms & rituals for Sacred Guidance through the natural world to grow an earthen and elemental guidance
How are your spiritual practices evolving in response to climate change? How does your faith thrive amidst environmental crises like forest fires? How do you transform the wild edges of your life into a source of profound creativity rather than chaos? How do your prayers address the deep ecological grief we feel?
To explore these questions, we invite you to reconnect with the Sacred Wild through a transformative day-long retreat. This experience is designed to help you remember and rewild your sense of the Sacred, bridging the gap between yourself and the natural world.
Our retreat offers a unique opportunity to:
Reconnect with the Sacred Wild: Through seasonal prayers, practices, rites, and rituals, immerse yourself in the spiritual essence of nature.
Address Modern Disconnection: Western society often fosters a sense of separation from the natural world, leading to spiritual emptiness. By rediscovering our bond with the wild, we rejuvenate both our internal and external senses of wildness.
Engage in the Rewilding Wheel: Inspired by Celtic spirituality and indigenous wisdom, this sacred wheel circuit will guide you in cultivating seasonal practices that foster a conscious and inspired relationship with the Earth, the elements, and the divine.
Join ecotheologian and wild-soul guide Mary DeJong at the Whidbey Institute's Storyhouse, nestled in a serene forest setting far from urban distractions. Here, you will deepen your sense of rootedness and belonging through practices that honor the cycles of nature.
Leave the retreat with grounded insights and practical rhythms that integrate seasonal changes and elemental connections into your daily life, helping you recover a sense of self and sacredness in the soil of your everyday existence.
Following a community learning circle in the morning, a hearty and wholesome lunch will be served on site that will nourish you for a time of personal rewilding within the Chinook woods. Listen deeply to the numinous natural world within the Listening Circle, a sacred circle of stones set deep within a grove of hemlocks, cedar and fir. Engage in the ancient labyrinth-walking practice as a way to discern your place within the wild web of life. Spend time listening and learning from those with roots, wings, or fur and fold those messages deeper into your soul while you take a personal moment to breath in the peaceful air within the woodland sanctuary. Meditation materials along with wild-crafting supplies will be provided to enhance this process of remembering and reconnecting with the precious and wild more-than-human world.
Rewilding Retreats are offered quarterly, each exploring the entire round of the Rewilding Wheel™ while going deeper into seasonal practices that connect to the corresponding cardinal direction and element. The Rewilding Retreat will invite daily, monthly, and seasonal practices that will embed you in an interconnected, sacred relationship with your bioregion. Each quarterly Rewilding Retreat will focus on the sacred themes and practices that correspond to that particular seasonal quadrant, offering new rituals and practices that will deepen one’s presence within the wild world of creation.
What's Included
A one day retreat experience within The Whidbey Institute's Story House and the surrounding wild landscape (begins at 9:00am and ends at 5:00pm)
Thoughtfully prepared and seasonally focused vegetarian breakfast, lunch, snacks, and herbal teas/coffee
Expert teaching and soulful group facilitation
Invitation to engage with meaningful rituals and nature-based spiritual practices
Guided nature walk
Introduction to and support during a forested labyrinth walk
Wild-crafting materials
Supported nature solo time
Access to a 100 acre trail system in a legacy forest
What's Not
Lodging
Travel expenses
Please Bring
Personal writing materials (journal, paper, pen/pencil) and backpack
Warm comfortable layers, weather proof outdoor wear, and sturdy water resistant footwear
Personal water bottle
Flashlight and fully charged cell phone
Emergency whistle
Fold up camping chair
A seeker's desire and the posture of seeing the stranger as a sacred guide!
“Rewilding is restoring whole relationships.”
What people are saying about their Rewilding Retreat experience:
“Mary led us through a profound journey to awaken our souls and find our place in the more-than-human world. I am astounded by what I learned this weekend and I expect the aftershocks will continue for a long time.” ~A.K.
“So beautifully skilled in holding the most tender souls and fragile moments with grace, wisdom and understanding. I had the privilege of doing a pilgrimage to Iona, Scotland with this lady last summer. I can't recommend a retreat with her enough- you'll wish you had more days than one.” ~D.C.
“Welcome to my sacred clearing.
Welcome to my thinnest place.
Where God and Breath and Earth converge
and grace us with this Holy Space.
Where we are nature, advocating;
sometimes pleading on our knees
that the wisdom of the birds return.
I am not the Lorax, but I still must speak for the trees.
Speak to the earth and let it touch you.
Pick up the feather, the shell, the stone.
The original scripture is in there speaking;
drink it in deeply, make it your home.
One leaf, one twig, one lizard, one bird;
talk to it with respect.
Honor its place as equal with yours,
care in handling; avoid neglect.
Where is your Geography of Hope?
What landscape of your soul
ignites in you the urgency to stand up
Beside, before, with and as the whole?
Everything we can see is the Incarnation
pulled forth from our loving God’s center.
The emergence of life before and around us
is pleading for us to enter.
You must make the time, you must listen in
Your compass [inside] knows true North.
Like the cry of the hawk, the howl of the wind,
your divine DNA must burst forth!
For in all of creation, for I and for thou,
for Fox Woman Dreaming and kin.
The value of being is always enough
for all to be welcome. Enter in.
So, welcome to my Nemeton.
I am done trying to breathe on my own.
Join me and the earth, the cool water and stars;
its symbiotic, its respectful, its home.”
Photography by April Huizenga April Huizenga Photography and Mary DeJong