Forest Learning and Healing Center in Barichara

The land you see here is called Totumo and was a community learning center for children from 2015 until it closed in November of 2023. We have purchased the land to create a healing and learning center for the community that carries forward in the same tradition.

My partner Penny invested her personal money to buy Totumo as part of her work to create a legacy for the territory that lasts beyond the end of her life. She is a healer from Colorado who came to Barichara three years ago to start a relationship with me. Prior to that, she was one of the first donors into the Barichara Regeneration Fund in November of 2020.

Now we actively collaborate as the co-founders of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. Throughout the last two years, we have traveled all over North America doing "bioregional activations" while hosting online learning supports for all of the members of the school. Penny is inspired by what we are doing with the new Waldorf school Sueños del Bosque and wants Totumo to become part of the learning exchanges for regenerative education that take place in Barichara.

Here you can see how the cluster of buildings that is Totumo (in the lower center of the photo) is nestled into a beautiful native forest in the countryside near Barichara. Songbirds fill the air with music at all hours of the day. Spectacular cactus and other tropical dry forest plants are on full display. It is such a beautiful place.

We are deep in the process of creating reciprocity agreements as part of a nonprofit that launches soon called Tierra Sagrada Barichara -- whose mission is to bring land into the commons to help regenerate the territory. Totumo will join the commons at some point in the future as part of Penny's legacy work.

What I want to share in this article is that we see Totumo both as a learning center for the children and adults of the community and as a healing center for the grief and trauma of living in a collapsing world. For my part, I am helping weave Totumo into the Regenerative Education Fund as part of a multi-site learning ecosystem for the regeneration of forests and rivers near Barichara. Penny is dreaming into how she can bring her healing practices in cranio-sacral therapy and polarity work for bodily trauma into a new realm of practice in the Northern Andes.

We also see nutrition and food security as vital and urgent in Barichara. There is a lovely open space on the land that will soon begin to take shape as a syntropic agroforestry garden that feeds our family and works with the community around us.

This means we will partner with the diverse activities of Syntropic Agriculture in the territory. Totumo has an industrial kitchen where cooking workshops can be hosted by community members to promote the transformation of native plants into healthy food for our families. In this way, we can regenerate our bodies while regenerating soils and native forest.

Trauma healing. Regenerative education. Ecosystem restoration. Weaving of territorial processes. All of this and more will soon begin to unfold at Totumo. As I write these words it is clear that this is how we can bring all of our gifts to a place that we love so much. If you are seeking healing or want to learn about regeneration at landscape scales, please consider supporting our work. Maybe we will receive you at Totumo someday.

In this time of cascading crises, healing is more important than ever. And now we have one more place on Earth devoted to this sacred work.

Onward, fellow humans.