What Happens Here

Skill Building, Land Stewarding, and Climate Resilience

Blooming Echo is a demonstration of how to bring a degraded piece of land back to health and potential. Through reintroduction of fire, brush clearing, selective thinning of the forest, water retention techniques like check dams, food forests, mushroom cultivation and remediation, we regenerate the land while letting the land regenerate our culture.

Through natural earth building techniques, we adapt to a changing climate with climate resilient infrastructure— adobe/cobb earth structures, tree houses, ponds and agroforesty.


Farming, Feasting and Seasonal Rituals

What is more fundamental to human existence than food?  

People and seeds have evolved together.  Agricultural humans have relied on seed bundles passed on for generations, and these seeds were considered sacred gifts from the ancestors and the wild land they came from.

Seed diversity is ever more important with changing climate, and for seeds to remain vital and responsive they need to be grown every year, adjusting to changes in temperature, moisture and soil of each season.  

Every year at Blooming Echo we are plant rare heirloom seeds, focusing on beautiful corn, beans and squash varieties.  These seeds are capable of feeding entire villages and are able to respond to a changing climate season after season.  

Hand in hand with seeds is culture, the rituals and songs, the feasting and seasonal celebrations that hold the seeds sacred, and ensure the tending not only of the seeds, but the earth, air and water that seeds, and humans need to live.

Art, Beauty and Music

What really makes life worth living?
What endures throughout time?
Art, beauty and music.
These are cornerstone values here at Blooming Echo.
Blooming Echo can be thought of as an “earth arts” school. 

Imagine if Meow Wolf was actually planted in the ground — or if an ember of Burningman was caught in a mossy horn and tended to by a quiet spring, it might look like what’s emerging at Blooming Echo. 

What Has Happened So Far…

Years 1-2 (2022-23) : Artwork and Infrastructure Buildout

  • Irrigation and fencing set up for farming + 30,000 gallons of water storage

  • Kids swings, trampoline, ninja obstacle course and swurfing swing set up

  • Cob-earth Pizza Oven Project

  • Shipping Container Art Project

  • Milled wood onsite to create a covered outdoor kitchen, deck and more

  • Installed a 30’ beautiful and cozy dome with an expansive deck

  • Composting toilets, hot shower, drinking water

Year 3: Iktomi’s Cradle (2024)

Iktomi’s Cradle was Blooming Echo’s 2024 EcoCultural Experiment. March-November of 2024 a committed group of people, about 30-35 adults and 15-20 kids of all ages came together every six weeks for a weekend together.  These weekends we practiced “villaging”.  Olders got a place to Elder, babies were held by Aunties and Uncles, kids were roaming the fields and forests in multi-age packs, running free, playing games, helped out by amazing twenty-something “nature mentors”.  

We danced and shook it out together, cooked good food for each other, prayed and sang in the sweat lodge, held earth-based seasonal planting rituals, built altars for our ancestors, tended to our spring.  Laughter and music, drumming and treehouse building all happened.  The teens undertook a year-long initiation and learned to tend to the fire.  We told stories and laughed.  We planted and harvested corn.  It was good for the kids.

In many ways, it was quite simple, friends getting together to be simple, natural humans.  And yet, a committed group of people, returning to each other seven times throughout the year to hold an arc of time together with intention, ritual, art and land tending is all too rare these days.  

Iktomi’s Cradle was our first small and beautiful step in recreating healthy coherent culture, for all generations, here, now.  And we did it!  ….and it was glorious, and it was worth it.

What’s next…

Year 4: Nebula (2025)

If Iktomi’s Cradle was a single cradle, Nebula is a nursery.  

A seed was planted, watered and tended. The seed took and now we are sprouting a field: Nebula at Blooming Echo is the next layer of our dynamic, multidimensional, village experiment inside the polyphonic, multivalent prayer that Blooming Echo is.

Nebula is a year-long choose-your-own-adventure by creating one/many and/or coming to as many events as you can of others. 

Nebula invites you to host one of your own creative weekends, days or events, in dynamic relationship with Blooming Echo, as well as attend some or all of the myriad of offerings sprouting from the community field.

This is culture creation, and culture creation takes participation and will!

In outer space, Nebula are “distinct luminescent parts of interstellar medium, often star-forming regions”.  Nebula are bright and glowing, spacious yet dynamic; a galactic womb for stars, stars that live and die and create planets.

Nebula invites you to shine your offering.

March-November 2025 contains 36 weekends…

So far Nebula’s calendar is already lit up with:

  • Monthly Sweat Lodge and Potluck with Chayo and Tecpa

  • March 21st Equinox Fire Ritual, forest tending and burn piles

  • April 25-27th Beltane: Spring Fertility Rite and Ritual Corn Planting Family Weekend Festival

  • April TBD Tending Sacred Fire Workshop with Spencer.  

  • Date TBD Kitchen Love and Family dance camp martial arts for kids, led by Laina and Even and family (right guys?!)

  • June 19-21 Summer Solstice San Pedro Journey 

  • October 17-18 Harvest Festival and Ancestor Ritual Family Campout

  • [Dates] Wormhole: Spencer and youth

  • TBD Treehouse work day with Goat

  • TBD Group Mushroom journey in the Dome

The web for Nebula is cast wide— you can invite who you want to your happening, you can forward this email to those who are interested. 

This will be what we make it.

Your offering could be a workshop you have been wanting to put on, or a personal vision quest you ask others to support you in; it could be a work day for a project you want to bring to life, an art installation, a needed physical structure like a wood shed, a cool bushcraft fort for the kids, or an experience you invite people into.  Throw a party, a sound bath, a skills gathering, a weekend of dance and bodywork, a grief ritual, a seasonal prayer offering, a book club, a mothers group, ETC!

“Stop crying for milk, and Become the Breast!” - Martin Prechtel

Ideas of what we would Love to participate in/co-create:

  • Mighty Mushroom Magic:  Come be in service to the health of the mycelial network!  A weekend of drilling plugs in the forest by day (kids love to drill and pound and cover with beeswax—super fun), and dancing to the magic of mushrooms by night (optional).  Blooming Echo is an amazing mycelial jungle—so many varieties grow here, and so many more can.  Let’s “plant” Oyster, Reshi etc and enjoy mushroom magic.

  • Clear the Brush from Our Minds and Set it on Fire—clearing brush from the forest and burning brush piles is one of the most satisfying, fun and invigorating work of forest tending.  To natives of this land tending the forest was simply tending their home.  Years of differed maintenance and centuries of extractive forest practices, have led to wildfire prone areas and unhealthy forests.  We believe that tending to the woods with our own hands is one of the best, and most underrated spiritual practices for people of the wooded Wes

  • Altars to Death and Thrones for Decay—Making compost is a high art form, like making a big birthday cake for the earth, a way to show our gratitude to the ground that feeds us, by feeding the ground.  There is nothing more life affirming than making compost piles, big offerings to the forces of Death and Decay.  Compost shit and waste and make it into rich soil that grows food.  This is spiritual alchemy embodied.  Also, healthy soil sequesters carbon.  Compost is magic.

  • Metal and Food—Get Elemental!  Make your own silver or copper bracelet while delicious food simmers on the stove—all spirits willing we will catch a wild hog to roast while we hammer out some beautiful hand made adornments over the fire.

Other ideas for what you can host for Nebula:

  • Fruit and Nut Tree planting

  • Natural dye weekend

  • Sisterhood and self care woman’s camping weekend

  • Reskilling events

  • Weaving basket backpacks (please someone!!!)

  • Chi Qing and Cold plunges, a day

  • Circling, intimacy and relational practices day

  • Seasonal Storytelling Evenings—Myths by the Fire 

  • Kids games and skills weekend

  • Puppet art

  • May the Forest be with you, a day of service to the woods

  • Song circles

  • Medicine journeys

  • Family camping and art

  • IFS and tapping

  • Light - Dark Workshop

  • Queer Sanctuary nature day

  • Dance

  • Life Transition Rituals

Nebula is a chance to shine your gift into creation as an offering to what you Love. Let’s make some beautiful constellations on planet earth.

So — if you’re interested, RSVP with your idea here.  We will help dial it in and find the right dates together.