The Close of Our 2024 Retreat Season + Winter Break 2025

This just occurred, my dog RoZie sniffing out a pristine specimen of Aminita Muscaria. Great finds like this make our hearts leap, causing mini feelings of amazement, and are usually followed with a text to Tony, my mycology buddy a couple posts down. What a gorgeous Fall and outstanding October retreat month we just enjoyed, with our Fall Noble Silence Meditation Retreat (NMSR), Ceremonial Overnight weekend and private visits for established clients, not quite making it to the blog to record several huge victories. Speaking of wins, couple our own with those of our beloved Detroit Tigers, who made an amazing late-season playoff run to be October Ready for the first time in a decade. We were blessed to balance our work with play and took in the best game at Comerica Park in over ten years, the Tigs beating the Cleveland Guardians 3-0 in Game 3 of the best-of-five American League Division Series. Safe to say that we made it all the way around the bases last month, with many a yarn to weave and good story to tell. I woke up one morning and had the thought that my writer’s hands were holding a royal flush, maybe two, one for each hand, tight to my chest, but with our own retreat season and Winter Break looming, we’ll be playing those creative cards soon.

Watch for upcoming, off-season stories on being struck by lightning during the October Silent Retreat, what we see in the stars above during our Dark Sky Events, my friend Tinker — a real, live poet, writer and Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe Elder — as well as an article on our town’s own Libery Hyde Bailey, Jr., the Son of South Haven and talented horticulturist who inspired a new land ethic for God’s Holy Earth. But before we’re laying low like farmers during the Winter serene season, there’s still a few opportunities to come out this Fall, with our new Zen Walk , a workshop for experienced meditators to deepen their established practice, and our final Ceremonial Way of the Contrary, in which we take all the fear, stress, grief, abuse, heartache, and loss of the material world and turn it all around in a beautiful, Ceremonial, spiritual purification sort of way. We’re also making good on the evolution of our Holiday Aho-Ho-Ho down, with a Silent Night/Holy Night and a Winter Solstice/Advent Event in the works inspired by the Christianity and writings of poet Reiner Maria Rilke, with Tony cooking up a wild feast.

While RoZ and I have enjoyed the crunch of a month spent living amongst a sea of leaves, the magic and healings that occur here feel like a stark, calm contrast to all those endlessly annoying political texts and the insanity around America’s election occurring this week. We’re happily extending the ten-year anniversary of living on our land that occurred October 31st with a special Saturday, November 9th Celebration of Michigan Farmers, of whom we are a part, at friend and fellow farmer Julian Lauzzana’s Earthen Heart, right up the road. We’re not big collaborators, as our land is Sacred Ground, and for ten years we’ve been on our own as moss grows fat on a rolling stone (sung to the tune), having beaten back all the folks who wanted us to host their music festivals.

All that said, we caught an outstanding act at Julian’s this summer, a performance by the powerful West African singer/musician/storyteller Zondo. We wanted to invite that dude down for a celebration show, and so, only ten days later and 1.4 miles around the corner at 6431 107th ave, South Haven, home of the old Macintosh Winery, you can come out and enjoy the potluck, art, agricultural conversations, and Zondo’s 5pm show. Check out www.earthenheart.com, watch for our love letters from the road, more information on our Holiday Happenings, and our 2025 schedule up through summer soon.

Our Upcoming Fall Noble Silence Meditation Retreat Weekend

This article was originally an anthology of all the Noble Silence Meditation Retreat (NMSR) Weekends we’ve hosted and posted on post. Originally published in September of 2022, since then we’ve run and recorded one a season, adding to the overviews below with the Fall of 2023 NMSR, a few moths prior the Summer ‘23 NMSR, and the Winter ‘23 NMSR, when our Barred Owl mascot made a rare, non-nocturnal appearance. Interesting the chosen visuals were these beautiful black and white moths, moths being symbols of spiritual transformation, rebirth and reminders of life’s temporary nature. Jesus sited moths in his teaching to eschew short-term wealth on earth ‘“where moth and decay destroy” and instead turn one’s attention inward toward attaining spiritual wisdom.

In light of ongoing spiritual development, this retreat continues gaining momentum, growing into our leading transformational offering. Since its Summer of 2020 founding, reports from attendees have consistently been off the charts, in establishing and elevating people’s personal meditation practices, as well as providing emotional well-being, per the Spring NSMR of June 2022. In between is a short record of hope, health, and ongoing healing, from the warm reports of our Winter Count 2022 NMSR, back to the Fall Harvest of 2021, the great Sioux gathering that can occur during the summer months, as it did in late July at our Summer NSMR 2021, back to the 2021 Winter NSMR, and full circle to The Fall NSMR of 2020, when we first gained traction with dedicated retreaters coming together to support one another in sitting and days spent in noble silence.

Since that first strange pandemic summer, the outer world’s ever-quaking chaos only seems to increase, while here, our feeling of safety and calmness deepens with every retreat. There’s a bit of information and a few standout testimonials that we hope will answer some of the recent questions regarding “what the silence even does(?)” as well as the power of our practices and current offerings. With a few seats left in our upcoming Fall ‘24 NMSR, we hope you’ll consider coming out and joining our growing tribe of tranquil peacemakers now or in the year 2025.

Our Fall Foraging Workshop with Anthony Michael Blowers `

There’s Anthony as always leading the backwoods charge, here on the path that I’m fond of saying really leads somewhere, per John Muir, who wrote that “the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” Said path is also the one that winds through our back ten acres of Northern Deciduous Forest, otherwise known as The Eastern Masssasauga Trail, named after Michigan’s only poisonous rattlesnake. And while our Wolverine state’s elusive swamp rattler never appeared, The Golden Pholiota, the storied Birch Polypore, and my personal fav, Slime Mold, all made their presence known. Preferring to keep his talks and walks intimate, Tony kept our crew to a lucky dozen, ranging in age from nine to sixty-nine.

Although a Fantastic Fungi coloring book and even a vintage, 1000-piece mushroom puzzle were on hand to make sure the youngest, Cameron, stayed engaged and entertained, there was no need. This nine-year old’s knowledge and enthusiasm ended up impressing and energizing us all, giving us some hope for the planet! I joke that Tony puts the fun back into fungus finding, and his gatherings are always a lively mix of storytelling and wild discoveries. We started by touching on some of the mysterious mushroom basics, fungi being neither plant nor animal, made of mostly water and fiber like plants, are reproductive organs like fruits, but evolutionarily speaking, have interesting correlations to Homo Sapiens on the tree of life. The hunted, visible, fruiting body of the organism that shoot up in exotic arrays of reds, yellows, blues, purples and greens are the reproductive part of the natural entity. But these attractive, colorful outgrowths are mere glimpses of their vast existence, most of the living organism remaining unseen, thriving underground, or inside the bark and wood of trees, existing as part of a vast mycelia network that lies just below the earth’s surface.

While a hot, seasonally dry early autumn turned our stretch of front lawn into a silvery savanna, lack of rainfall and a sweltering September afternoon couldn’t thwart our mission to forage. It wasn’t long before we crossed paths with “a mushroom interesting in the extreme.” Fomitopis Betulina also known as the Birch Polypore (BP), a common bracket fungus, was harvested for centuries for its vast medicinal aspects, holding anti-bacterial, anti-parasitic, anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. It was also formed into band-aids for wounds. Unearthed with the first discovered Iceman Ötzi, BPs were also sought after for their ascetic or ornamental value, a Birch Polypore found mounted to Ötzi’s leather thong. Three of the mushrooms were found in his pouch along with Fomes Fomentarius, a mushroom that, when boiled and properly pounded out, forms a leather-like material called Amadou, that’s then used to make hats, wallets, and other garments. BP’s velvety edge were even used as a strop to sharpen razors, hence its name Razor Strop Fungus.

Cameron’s sprightly, trail-attuned eyes caught the bright yellow caps of Pholiota Aurivella, commonly known as the Golden Phollota. While described by Anthony as having a “nutty taste”, it’s been reported that the this mushroom’s flavor resembles "marshmallows without the sugar.” That set the stage for a sighting and discussion of beloved, bright yellow Slime Mold. Not a mushroom but rather a protist in its own scientific category, Fuligo Septica, also called Dog Vomit or Scrambled Egg Slime Mold, are energetic blobs that can move up to a foot a day, changing form like a shape-shifter. Amoeba-like with no cellular walls, there’s even a pulsating area of the organism, as if it had a heartbeat. Put into terrariums, these intelligent molds can crawl through a labyrinth, and were bizarrely used to remodel the Tokyo subway system. In Mexico, they’re gathered by moonlight and fried up in pans. Buenos.

Receiving some encouraging follow-up notes from Anthony, he pointed out the ramps on our property take forever to develop, going from seed to bulb in four to five years, a very lengthy multiplying process. That considered, we’ll be working at developing our edible plant offerings — ramps, mushrooms, slime mold (bromas - joking!) — but seriously building a thriving food forest here at The Higher Haven. Fostering ramp patches, plugging logs, these are just a few of the ways we can apply the wisdom of the forest wilderness, enriching our land as well as future retreats. Plugging Mycelium corks and inoculating logs makes for the start of an incredible cultivation plan, a collaboration with the power of nature, a way to harness its primal, unpredictable force.

At the end of the day, it was another great forest foray, another chapter in our ongoing discovery of an underground network of interconnected organisms revealing a wild new story about our planet’s ability to heal itself. The innate intelligence of these networks —the result of billions of years of evolution —has much to teach us. And spending the afternoon with Tony, our team of nature walkers took it all in. According to my mushroom coloring book, this ‘third kingdom” of fungi and mushrooms is a realm of mystery on whose secrets the future of life on earth may depend. At a time when solutions to our planets most pressing challenges seem as elusive as ever, the ground beneath our retreat center holds some very promising answers.