Hearthwood Sanctuary grew out of years of work at the meeting place of grief, song, ritual, art, and the living world. Over time, these strands began asking to belong to one another. What had lived through separate gatherings, collaborations, creative projects, and experiments in community slowly revealed itself as one larger body of work.
Founded by ahlay blakely, Hearthwood is a home for grief literacy, art in service to the living world, and the cultivation of cultural practices that help us meet a time of polycrisis. It exists to hold and grow collaborative work with grief practitioners, artists, facilitators, elders, and other companions, while creating room for new forms to emerge.
Hearthwood operates under an established church structure, with grief literacy as its ministry. At the center is a question: How do we build our individual and collective capacity to grieve ecological crisis, loneliness and fragmentation, inherited and collective trauma, and the immense changes of our time, while remaining in relationship with one another and the living world?
For now, Hearthwood is nomadic and place responsive. It lives wherever the work is happening through rituals, retreats, residencies, art, collaborations, and gatherings. There is no single building or permanent home yet. Hearthwood is currently a container for the work itself.
Over time, it is growing through three interconnected branches: grief, art in service to the living world, and eventually, a place to gather.
Goals
01
grief
Offerings include two to five day grief rituals and weeklong grief and psychodrama retreats, centered on building our individual and collective capacity to grieve in a time of polycrisis.
Hearthwood also offers specific gatherings for people of European descent to grieve and metabolize the inheritance and ongoing impacts of white supremacy, exploring ancestry, responsibility, repair, and what we choose to carry forward.
Different gatherings may weave together psychodrama, nature connection, song, movement, creative practice, and other forms that help grief move, speak, and transform.
A future aspiration within this branch is to create weeklong grief residencies for young adults, cofacilitated by ahlay, BJ STAR, and other collaborators. These residencies are not currently running. Hearthwood is actively seeking the funding needed to make the first residencies possible, with the hope of beginning in 2028. Donate.
02
art in service to the living world
Hearthwood is growing a commons to gather, uplift, and amplify artists already creating in service to the Rights of Nature and multispecies liberation, while inspiring more artists to explore what their own creative practice might offer.
Across many places and traditions, artists are already asking what role our species can play through our particular capacities for art, song, story, ritual, imagination, law, and culture, and what these human gifts might offer in service to the flourishing of the more than human world.
Art can carry ecological realities into the body and imagination. A scientific finding can become a story. A legal movement can become a song. Through music, poetry, theatre, image, sound, and collective participation, art can help us feel, grieve, remember, sing, and participate more deeply in our relationship with the living world and the movement for the Rights of Nature.
03
a place to gather
Sometime after 2028, the longer dream is for Hearthwood to begin putting down roots in a physical place.
The vision is for an ordinary, welcoming communal threshold that gradually opens into a deeper cultural life. A place where food, art, song, story, grief, young people, elders, creativity, ritual, and relationship with the living world can coexist. A place where people can participate as lightly or deeply as they choose, and where forms of communal life that have become increasingly difficult to find can take root again.
That dream is still ripening and will require significant funding, partnership, and shared stewardship.
For now, Hearthwood is wherever the work is happening.