The Earth School

Shae and Taylor met in 2013 when both were amidst deep personal inquiry about their life path and how to live in a way that is regenerative, rather than destructive, to our planet home. Their separate paths led them to come into greater awareness of the environmental crises of our time and how these crises are impacting human, animal, and plant communities. In particular, they were concerned about the impact these realities would have on young people as they looked to the future of our planet.

A shared vision for their community soon took root. Shae joined Taylor as part of Build It Up’s leadership team where they support efforts to restore connection with local food by empowering community members with the skills, tools, seeds, plants, and knowledge needed to grow their own food (https://arcd.org/build-it-up/).

Shae developed children’s workshops at Build It Up events that included young children in the educational food growing journey with their family, and in 2016, Shae and Taylor developed the weekly Sowing Seeds food forest program for youth ages 3-12. This program focused on teaching food growing, primitive skills, emotional literacy, nutrition, entrepreneurship, construction, and garden-to-table culinary skills. They also began hosting Food Forest Fridays at the Mountain Home Food Forest. These events were an inspiration for them, as they experienced the large turnouts for such a small urban lot, that revealed to them just how many in the community shared in this vision. And so the dream of a farm in service to the community was born, where children and people of all ages could come to experience growth, learning, and healing in deep connection with nature.

In 2016, while co-directing the Sowing Seeds program, Shae and Taylor also began working in wilderness therapy, a field in which Shae continues to lead trainings for guides and instructors, and serves as a Program Developer. While working as wilderness therapy guides, Shae and Taylor mentored young people on wilderness expedition skills, fire safety, friction fire, knot-tying, shelter-building, and nature-based skills supportive of emotional regulation, psycho-spiritual wellness, and trauma recovery. This work inspired Shae to pursue her Masters in Counseling, which she completed in May 2022, and also to co-develop the ETSU Nature-Based Therapy Certificate with Dr. Bethany Novotny during her graduate studies.

In 2017, Shae and Taylor became a part of the Southeastern Forest School Association to learn more about how to design new nature-connected educational models for our region and to integrate more of the forest school model into the ongoing Sowing Seeds food forest program. From 2019 to the Spring of 2022, Shae is grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Micky Morton in co-founding and co-directing Seedkeepers Forest School. During this time, Taylor worked as a timber framer to learn the ancient art of timber frame construction, in hopes that, if they were one day able to steward a farm, he would have the ability to build structures on it as needed.

After ten years of searching for avenues to access farmland that could be restored and protected for generations to come, it is the dream of a lifetime for them to have the unexpected opportunity to steward Fauna Forest Farm and to create a space that we hope reveals to young people a vision of thriving earth and community. The Earth School is the flower of a long-held dream— that the separation from nature that our modern-day culture presents will not keep children from coming to find a sense of place and home in nature, which was much more commonly true for generations prior. We envision a cultural reunion between children and the natural world. We envision children growing into adolescence and young adulthood with the skills, knowledge, and inner resources to know how to live upon the earth regeneratively and to have the capacity to meet their needs well with the incredible resources the natural world provides. Equally important, the dream of the Earth School is that young people come to know their inherent belonging in the web of all of life, and that this connection becomes a source of lifelong nurturance: that when they feel lost, they can follow the wild trails they came to know in childhood, and find their way back home.

"The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still. I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, And the leaf is still singing."

-Mary Oliver