Love story

In anticipation of our upcoming in-person retreat ‘Living a Purpose Filled Life: Meeting Death Alive,’ we are sharing a personal story from Madison about how she and Jacob fell in love and came together to form the beginnings of what has become Remembering Earth.

Jake and I have always supported each other being with the mystery of life and uncovering our gifts for the earth community, we just didn’t know it. We met in 2011 in Flagstaff, Arizona. We were young and passionate college students who were both finding our way in social and environmental justice groups.

I first spoke to Jacob in a sustainability class very briefly. Our consistent smiles and the butterflies in my stomach highlighted our chemistry and we fell into friendship. Our first years consisted of incredibly supportive conversations as we learned more about the potentials for social and ecological collapse and searched for our places and our gifts. We found solace in encouraging one another through romantic escapades, break ups, times abroad, and in finding who we were. We danced too, laughing amidst the seriousness. After we graduated, Jake went on to fight the fires of climate change and save lives as a firefighter and I went on to be professional community organizer in academia to empower people to find their way to contribute to justice.

Eventually, I went to graduate school looking for pathways to navigate the heartbreak and challenges of living in Industrial Growth Culture while taking part in social change. In my first semester, I met John Lynch, a soul guide and professor at Northern Arizona University, and with his guidance I dove deeply into the field of eco-depth psychology. When Jake and I had our regular get together, I told him all about it. Two years passed before he was in the same graduate program, Sustainable Communities, with the same mentor and an emphasis towards eco-depth psychology. We were the only two with that focus in our cohorts.

Looking back, that was a time where further ingredients of soul, dreams, and guiding, nature reconnection alchemized the possibility between us. It wasn’t long into his own journey with those depths and soul before I was in love with him. We were enchanted, like we had found a key, some piece of a puzzle we both didn’t know we needed and had been creating together for some time.

Our first kiss was seven years into our relationship on a road trip to go to an eco-psychology conference with ecological luminaries Joanna Macy and Bill Plotkin. We continued to feed something magical and profound between us without fully realizing it.

Six months after our first kiss, we were guiding groups of 18-20 year olds through what we had experienced. We camped with them and sent them to talk with watersheds and to write love letters to sunsets. We encouraged them to connect to their resilience with desert landscapes, and to burn what no longer served them. We cultivated belonging in circles where they would share their deepest truths, struggles and longings. Our students said things about our courses that enlivened our hearts and nourished the belief that we were on to something. I felt like we were meant to do this - whatever this was - and perhaps together.

Over the course of years, we went on do more of our own healing and soul work. We each went on vision fasts where we encountered deeper understandings of why we were called to this work. We worked with soul guide mentors and did programs with guides at Animas Valley Institute who mirrored our experiences back to us, helped us heal and integrate visions for our lives. We traveled and learned from other land-based cultures, did solo multi-night trips where we wandered in wild places, and learned in our own journeys to court and work with our dreams. We fell more and more in love with life and one another.

After 9 years of growing and healing and learning, we heard the call for the next step. We decided to create Remembering Earth (RE) in 2020 knowing we would continue listening, learning, and unfolding. We are now two years into RE and our souls, dreams, visions, encounters, experiences on the land, and trainings continue to shape who we are and what we offer. A year in, we grew to a team of four with an unaltered knowing something far bigger than us, far more transformative and mysterious is being birthed through the four of us.

Jake and I continue to see these threads in our relationship as vital to what we bring to others. Threads of who we are, what we have to offer, what we love, and how we want to live. This September we weave together these threads that we have always found potent.  We do this with questions that destructive culture doesn’t promote us to ask but that have saved and fed our own lives and our relationship. We have been asking one another these questions all along and they have deepened our understanding of our place and offered us purpose in the storms of these times. In a four-day three night retreat, Living a Soulful Life: Meeting Death Alive, we will ask:

• Who am I?

• What do I love?

• What are my gifts for the earth community?

• Perhaps most significant in our personal journeys and transformation: Knowing I will die, how do I live?

We will ask these questions to life’s biggest teachers - death, life in all of their forms, ancestors, dreams, and the night. We hope you will consider joining us in the mystery that keeps unfolding. If you’re interested in signing up or learning more or have questions, we’d love to hear from you. You can learn more about the retreat here.

Thanks for reading and supporting our work. We are deeply grateful to be connected to you.