Foresta Seasonal Academy

cultivating ecological futures

Seasonal Academy invites into online and onsite learning experiences dedicated to ecologies of human and more-than-human vibrancy and restoration of bonding within this world of many worlds.

Committed to supporting persons from diverse walks of life, who wish to strengthen their work or develop an initiative rooted in forest imaginaries, interconnected multispecies thinking, attentiveness and care, responsive to each particular context.

Seeded within embodied culture, thinking-through-making, and collective practice, Seasonal Academy offers you space and process to deepen into the circles of ecological sensitivity and develop long-term strategies for envisioning and realising your work, while taking care of yourself and your world(s).

Learning trails were on pause while Foresta was searching for a place to land and become trees. Now that we are in the process of landing, the trails will be offered as self-paced but guided formats that try to be mostly screen-free and invite you for long walks. The first offering is a self-paced Personal Ecologies trail. For those involved, currently or in the past, there will also be a chance to attend in-person gatherings at Foresta’s physical location in northern Spain.

Seasonal Academy shares the cosmology of Foresta and unfurls within 4 learning trails during 4 seasons. Offered in independent yet interconnected ways, each trail is taking place as a consistent step on the path towards beginning your own initiative or strengthening your existing project — with your-relational-self never excluded from the process. Each trail is approx 7 weeks long and contains a personal online alignment meeting with one of the authors, an introduction and 5 thematic impulses, including embodied practices and thinking-through-making invitations (as a self-paced journey), and a closing meeting with one of the authors.

1. AUTUMN: PERSONAL ECOLOGIES. This trail invites onto a more intimate journey, understanding inner and outer paths we are walking as intricately interwoven, since our selves continue beyond the membranes of our skins. It aims to offer a nourishing soil to support you in growing your forest, whatever this metaphor means for you. Gently touching such subjects as care, discernment, wisdom of the body, finding own anchors, dealing with history, wounding, healing, working with personal mythologies, and other delicacies belonging to inner forests.

2. WINTER: RELATIONAL SPACE. Walking outwards, towards a deeper understanding of interconnectedness, of what and who’s around, towards weaving sustainable relations with friends, partners, clients, the manifold stakeholders, companions and dwellers across species, towards generative capacities for intra-relational becoming, and a larger sense of self as an imperative for the emergence of an ecological mindset. We contemplate a variety of subjects in relation to making kin across species, regenerating bonding among humans, establishing healthy boundaries, and other subjects that invite overcoming distance to the world and restoring resonance.

3. SPRING: CRAFTING FUTURES. Joining forces of spring that hold space for births, in this trail the focus is on the intentions you want to bring into the world or deepen into, while thinking through making. As a journey from the buds to the leaves, this trail offers sessions for envisioning and describing your initiative in imaginative and material terms, thinking through hands-on creative practices as a form of research and raising of generative powers to come to more clarity and pursue your visions.

4. SUMMER: GENTLE STEPS. In the spirit of summer, this trail offers time to expand, make ideas more concrete, and choose the practical steps for realizing your intentions. It holds space for more tangible decisions that concern livelihoods, delving into such subjects as re-thinking value, organising relations, commoning, including multispecies commons and creatures into the structure of your decision-making, and landing your work in the way that feels right for the multiplicities of you.

You can join either the full year or any trail separately if you gravitate towards specific subjects only. During the time of your engagement you will be invited to join an online platform for receiving impulses, interacting with the team and sharing your journey if you wish to do so.

We dedicate these learning experiences to diversity and wellbeing of inner and outer forests: to a regenerative, more sustainable, attentive, and poetic world-making, and to every person seeking a more balanced being and finding an organic place within the web of life. We are first and foremost interested in holding a space, sharing learnings and offering invitations for broadening participants’ experience of themselves and their world, rather than teaching a skill. The intention of the entire year is also to support you with landing your idea/project/initiative into livelihood rooted in the ethics of wellbeing.

Context

In the contemporary entangled world of ecological imperative there are multiple narratives offering perspectives on the status quo and suggesting new pathways to move forward. Some call for activist action, for abolishing post-colonial mindset of domination, capitalism and industrial models of education and work, often with a certain degree of aggression. Others suggest practical how-to’s for personal wellbeing, new educational and work models, or address environmental problems while keeping the rest of the system(s) largely intact. These narratives, in our view, aim for new horizons, but are themselves often based on the old grounds that incentivise polarisation, fragmentation, competition, commodification, often overlooking complexity, other ways of knowing, and the need for balance of the opposites.

Yet there’re other stories, or maybe those are songs. They tell about the interconnectedness of personal and collective changes, multiple intelligences inside and around, love as an ecological process, the importance of creativity in everyday life, the dance between poetry and reason, as well as a more consciously embodied and embedded earthly being. Different people hear and resonate with these chants, striving to grow and nourish futures that are regenerative, poetic, collaborative, and alive. We find ourselves amongst them too, and are co-creating Foresta Seasonal Academy as a learning space for cultivating kindred spirit, and supporting those who want to make change on personal, relational, collective levels.

Multi-layered care, understood as an ecology of personal, relational and environmental ethics not separated from one another, is the soil of our work. The vision of Foresta Seasonal Academy is to raise attentiveness and affection for nature, inner and outer, and cultivate nearness and care. Physical wellbeing cannot be separated from the emotional, mental, social, or environmental. Human wellbeing is inevitably connected to that of the living world. Seasonal Academy offers hybrid practices to integrate this mindset into the everyday life for a long-term commitment.

Seasonal Academy is a learning space for polymaths. You can think of it as a forest school, a wellbeing institute, an art space, a personal development initiative, an awareness dojo, a food-related dive, an entrepreneurship course, a mosaic of practices for an interconnected world. Because life is not divided into departments as a traditional university is. After graduating you will not become an architect or a professional chef. We hope rather you will be more of yourself, and we don’t know what it means, but we do know that it is linked to feeling more at home on this planet, to broadening and deepening your sense of self, your capacities to navigate waters of contemporary world, your attentiveness, wonder and care, and to a clear(er) vision, intention and alignment in your work.

Journeying into naturecultural ecologies, Seasonal Academy aims to respond to the crisis of imagination, to invite participants to engage with questioning attitudes, representations and narratives that are coming from hegemony of placing value, and to find ways of telling stories that feel more true. It offers a framework for learning that involves unlearning and re-imagining, based on qualities, structure and root elements described here below.

Learning experiences at the Seasonal Academy are structured around four trails unfolding through four seasons. Currently all formats are moving to be self-paced sessions guided by recorded impulses, embodied practices, thinking-through-making, and other learning materials. For people with whom we got to know each other held by the online space and found common ground and mutual interest to continue, there will be offerings for onsite get-togethers, taking shape of convivial learning and living practice.

All experiences tend to unfold within a held space outside of productive thinking and instrumental logic, dedicated to the contemporary ecologies we inhabit — personal, relational, cultural, natural; restoring friendship with the physical and the imaginative, symbolic and material, abstract and earthly. Learning sessions, meetings and workshops that are part of the Seasonal Academy are facilitated by the core team of Foresta Collective and the invited contributors.

Roots for the kind of processes we offer are personal and shared inquiries, embodied presence practices, conversations (in live voice, in written form, or through other media), thinking through creative making, apprenticeship from the wild, from the cycles of seasons, and from each other. We weave these elements into one learning journey, with a structure that is flexible to accommodate diversity rather than serve mono-cultured ways of being, that gives space for individual paths as well as collective learning, for making as well as reflecting, for the emergent as well as the planned, for silences as well as impulses in various media.

Inquiry-based

Seasonal Academy is rooted in honest, open, alive, curious, compassionate inquiries. Personal learning begins with own questions, with finding an honest concern, an inquiry offered by one’s life at any particular moment. We attune and choreograph attention in order to hear, sense and find such an inquiry, to open perception to what is going on around us and within us, to notice what (our) world needs or demands, and to choose how do we want to respond. Responding not in terms of serving, or as a duty, but in terms of sensing the call for finding a path that feels true, that is also free to change, evolve, transform, and offer new inquiries. Landing into own experience and perception, we learn more about ourselves, what we resonate with, what feels foreign to us, what needs more attention and care in our lived and perceived worlds. Pursuing an honest inquiry invites us to move from comprehending something or being able to talk about it, towards a kind of understanding that extends and links to the demands of everyday life.

Embodied culture

Embodied culture stands for recognition of human embodied and embedded nature. It's a practice into ways how bodies as subjects of experience rejuvenate our awareness of the world, inner and outer, and enhance abilities to transform it. Embodied Culture links large scale thinking to the immediate reality of everyday life, as a practice where wellbeing is emphasised, transgressing the classical categories and oppositions between theory and practice, thinking and sensing, learning and making. It grows around questions like, how do we embody our environment, our upbringing, education, current structures of power? What if the different symptoms people suffer from are ways in which bodies speak against ways they are being neglected, commodified or exploited? Embodied culture communicates its essence quite literally, by freeing the body, a spacious, creative, intuitive, emotional, intelligent being that we are, by connecting to something ancient, millions years old, we engage with unlearning and releasing colonial attitudes (e.g., objectification, extractivism, oppression) embodied without a choice, that affect our wellbeing, joy, sense of self and reciprocity. Embodied culture also offers an inquiry into a metaphorical, archetypal and poetic layer of human embeddedness into the Earth body.

Thinking through making

We understand arts as ways of perception, cognition and care, as ways to investigate and form intimate relationships with anything we engage with. In a larger context of art and creativity, we contemplate them in a broader sense as forces that change our states of attention. Crafts are also a form of active meditation, a possibility to connect to ancient cultures as well as to personal meaning-making. Seasonal Academy participants engage with thinking-through-making as ways to find own narratives and visions, reflect and shape ideas into forms, supported in their personal inquiry to deepen the intuitive, experiential and holistic understanding of the living world as well as of their own sense of self. This allows for each person to approach the subject in a way that is imaginative and suitable to them, enlarging perception of what art-making or crafting can be, understanding the practice as a vessel that is capable to home ideas and questions, thinking and writing, making and shaping, to become the means for personal and collective reflection. The materials think through us while we make through them, offering ways for finding a form, deepening and expressing own inquiries and stories, contributing to multiplication of voices.

Collective practice

The initiative of Seasonal Academy grows from the interest in collective potential, human and interspecies, as an ethical practice that fosters both uniqueness and solidarity, as means to arrive to new understandings and enable honest encounters removed from artificial hierarchies. Collective practice includes interspecies nearness. Interspecies nearness is fostering encounters for ecological learning and healing, inviting people into an eco-systemic inquiry with the natural world. Collective practice also reflects an emergent demand for new ways to think relationalities between teachers and students as a microcosm that is a living web of relationships. Whether someone joins the academy because they are searching to learn something, or because they were invited to share their work, it’s a living web where different backgrounds, ways of being, thinking, engaging, communicating, sharing knowledge and experiences come together with openness to learn from one another. It’s a web of fluid identities, eye-level communication, and potential partnerships, based on listening, engagement, and courage: poly-creativity through pluri-vocality and multiplication of narratives, where everyone is a teacher and a student. This tradition of collective practice within Foresta is rooted in Woods in the City.

Core Team

People joining these trails come from very diverse walks of life. Seasonal Academy is based on resonances, shared interests and intentions, rather than disciplinary divisions, or other ways to assign fixed identities. We especially encourage applications from cultural change-makers as well as people who are starting or wanting to start something new in their lives, who feel the urge to change things, personally or professionally, to re-catalyse their reflexivity and awareness of the ‘now’ and the ‘possible’.

Seasonal Academy potentially offers a longer-term engagement, where Foresta Collective supports you in landing your intentions. The process is made out of steps, attuned to what is unfolding, it is made in continuous listening and communication. In more concrete terms, the trails aim to support people with tuning-in to and aligning with their personal path, intentions in life and the impact they wish to make, as well as connecting deeper with the physical world. It also aims to offer tools and experiences that will translate into the everyday life after the trails are over. If you are interested in experiencing something not commonly available, we look forward to hearing from you. We know these trails are not for everyone, so if any questions come up, just drop us a line.

Library

Please note, this library is a collection born of decades of our collective readings. It is a collection of references that were valuable in the making of the Seasonal Academy and generally in our ongoing becomings. But it is incomplete. There are unnamed influences that are just as valuable, both human and multispecies: varieties of practices, long walks, conversations, thinking-through-makings, silences, deep listenings at the river or sea shore, embodied explorations, many others, and of course, the Forests.

Animation: Tseh Knigi
Illustration: Carolina Monterrubio, Joanna Consejo, Armando Fonseca, Charlotte Peys
Words: Sabina Enéa Téari