Hello Dear Friends. We hope you are surrounded with support as you weather this storm. If there is anything we at Terra Cultura can do to help you feel more supported, I hope you will reach out. We know this is a very challenging time for many of you, and we are here for you.
If you’re like us, then you’ve been thinking of ways to be of use during these troubled times. To address the immediate needs of our time and place, Terra Cultura is:
1.) Transitioning our weekly workshops and events to a digital forum,
2.) Generating instructional videos for an educational resource library on our website with home, farm, garden, and eco-arts project ideas, and
3.) Collaborating with local mutual aid networks to provide food, medicine, resources, and care to the most vulnerable members of our community.
We will also be taking this time to continue planting our crops and to make progress on farm infrastructure projects, looking forward to a time when we can share in the beauty and bounty together once again.
Since Terra Cultura exists to strengthen community resilience, this pandemic demonstrates the necessity of our mission. Community, care, collaboration, creative innovation, and mutual aid have always been central values to our organization. At Terra Cultura we are re-exploring the interconnectedness of our ecological and social systems—the ways that partnering with the land for our sustenance is interwoven with nurturing the culture of local communities. This crisis has highlighted the ripple effects of our personal choices, and our interconnectedness. If this virus is indeed an environmental issue, then the pandemic also exposes the myth that environmental and social systems are separate. Terra Cultura’s vision of strengthening the resilience and self-determination of local communities is more relevant than ever. If any good is to come of this, perhaps it will be a collective revelation that, as a society, we will no longer tolerate the brokenness of our current systems. In the wake of this, we look forward to working beside you to re-imagine and build a better world, of compassion, inclusion, equity, and integrity.
In the meantime, we’ll be sheltering-in-place and physical-distancing on the farm, sending out our hearts and solidarity to you, full of wishes for health and support through difficult times, and hope for brighter days ahead.
Comments
5 responses to “Hope as we Shelter from the Storm…”
Thank you loves — you are all so strong! So comforting to read this message 🙂 Sending strength & appreciation to the whole Terra Cultura family and community!
Stay safe and well. We are alive and well in Washington. Maybe when we can finally take the 5th wheel somewhere we can come and visit. Love to all the family.
Beautiful, Rachel. We in San Diego are doing pretty much the same to live productively during this apocalyptic time! I’ve been teaching my students through Skype, Zoom and FaceTime. It’s amazing how quickly we have adapted, but my kids miss reading on Woody and Cooper. I hope you are receiving as much live theatre on social media as I. Go to my FB age and watch/listen to G. Scott Lacy’s 50th birthday solo cabaret; it’s a fundraiser for Lambs Theatre. Gorgeous songs will make you happy. Continue to stay safe and remember I adore everything you are❤️
What a bright, positive message! “Ripple effects of our personal choices” is something i need to meditate on. It really makes me stop and think.
Thanks for your encouraging and inspiring words. Be well. Stay healthy.
“And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.
And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.
And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.” Kitty O’Meara