Please note: Moon School resumes in May 2024. Registration opens March 26th, at 10am. For more updates, sign up for our newsletter.
May 2024 - May 2025
Join us for a year-long exploration of nature connection as reverence, resilience and cultural transformation. Rooted in joyful celebration and critical reflection, Moon School takes up the questions: How might we practice nature connection to cultivate webs of care for the land and each other? What does an embodied, reciprocal relationship to the more-than-human world look like in an age of extinction and human-driven climate change?
Each Moon School session is crafted to reflect what is emerging on the landscape in the changing seasons. Together we'll build naturalist skills like plant and tree identification and animal tracking, and practice ancestral skills like sensory awareness, fire-making, natural crafts, medicine-making and storytelling, and explore how these land-based practices can invite us into reciprocal relationship with the land we live on. At Moon School we learn in community through games, skills, conversation, song, and timeless exploration of thickets and riverbanks, forests and fields.
Now in its 6th year, Moon School is hosted by instructors Dani Hagel and byron murray. We are nature nerds, artists, writers, folk ecologists and lovers of the Eramosa River valley and the complex web of floral, faunal and fungal relationships that make their homes here. We intend Moon School to be an inclusive, anti-oppressive space, and are attentive to the challenges inherent in exploring interconnection and right relationship as white settlers on stolen land. We are inspired by thinkers and cultural workers Robin Wall Kimmerer, Baptiste Morizot, Ursula K. LeGuin, Sophie Strand, Wendy Makoons Geniusz, Linda Black Elk, Martin Shaw, and many more.
Moon School runs in the late afternoon and early evening, intentionally inhabiting the liminal space between day and dusk (and night in the darkest times of the year), creating a unique opportunity for firelit conversation and sensory awareness. No other program at GOS is like it.
“Moon School was always a highlight of my month and helped me refocus my busy life around what matters most; connection with people and the natural world.” - Past participant
A typical Moon School session might include…
Exploring riverbanks, meadows, trails and forests, engaging with the land through the changing seasons
Using field guides to identify plants, trees and animal track and signs
Focused naturalist study of topics like bird language, botany, geology and their interconnections
Engaging with local plants by tasting teas and preparing wild foods and medicines
Games and sensory awareness activities to get us in our bodies
Fireside discussion of nature-based writing that moves us
Moon School is for those looking for…
An approach to nature connection that values ancestral (re)connection, decolonization, and reciprocal relationship with the other-than-human world
Hands-on, embodied learning in a small group setting
A place to learn about the land through a lens of ecological and social justice
Program price: $960 + HST. If cost is a barrier, please see our Economics for a Changing World page for sliding-scale and mutual aid options.
Fees & Dates At A Glance
The fee for the full year of 12 sessions is $845+hst (~$65+hst per session). Registration after the first session is pro-rated at $65+hst per session for the remainder of the program year. If cost is a barrier, please see our sliding-scale options.
Moon School consists of 12 sessions. We meet one Sunday a month, rain or shine, from 3-7pm.
2024-2025 Program Dates
Sunday May 26, 2024
Sunday Jun 23, 2024
Sunday Jul 21, 2024
Sunday Aug 18, 2024
Sunday Sep 15, 2024
Sunday Oct 20, 2024
Sunday Nov 17, 2024
Sunday Dec 15, 2024
Sunday Jan 12, 2025
Sunday Feb 9, 2025
Sunday Mar 16, 2025
Sunday April 13 2025
Past participants say:
“Moon School got my inner child out and jumping in puddles and chasing cray fish again. I got to wander through the fields with other adults, steeped in awe, looking at flowers and shrubs and pulling apart owl pellets and falling in love with ferns. We got to sit around fires and reach into our ancestry and our dreams for the earth. Moon School is a place I'd been longing for for a long time, but never even knew I could find. Every time I left feeling energized, inspired and refreshed. It was fun, engaging and transformative.”
“Moon School was one of the major highlights of my month all year, but the value it brings goes so much deeper than that. I built skills, gained knowledge and was introduced to new interests every month, and Danielle and byron helped cultivate a new lens for looking at and interacting with the natural world and community around me that I will carry with me forever.”
