Remembering Our Kinship and Eco-Consciousness — An Evening with Dr. Brian Stafford

What does it mean to awaken ecologically? To not just understand nature, but to remember that we are of it?

Dr. Brian Stafford, wilderness guide, eco-therapist, and poetic thinker, joined us at The District House to explore that very question. In conversation with Hannah Jo, and in deep dialogue with our community, Brian invited us into a truth so fundamental it’s often forgotten: we are nature. And the forgetting is not universal—it is cultural.

Western culture, he explained, is unique in its rupture from the natural world. Children are born with an innate ecological consciousness, a felt sense of kinship with the land, the animals, the elements. But this knowing is slowly eroded—by schooling, by economic systems, by family constructs shaped by disconnection and dominance.

In contrast, Indigenous and nature-based cultures never lose this ecological bond. They don’t speak about the Earth. They speak with it. To be in kin with fire, water, plants, and animals is not poetry—it’s lived reality.

Brian reminded us that what many in the West call an “ecological awakening” is, in truth, a response to a culture that has systematically suppressed our relational knowing. Awakening to nature is not a new discovery—it’s a return.

The conversation moved beyond psychedelics as a tool for awakening—though Brian acknowledged their power—and into the wider field of reconnection. Dreams. Grief. Stillness. Time on the land. All of these are portals. All are valid. What matters is how we listen. And whether we’re willing to let go of the illusion of separateness.

Audience members shared their own stories—encounters with nature that shifted their perception, moments of stillness that dissolved boundaries, realizations that came not through words but through the body, the soil, the wind. There was laughter. There were tears. There was a collective sense of something ancient returning to the room.

Brian’s work is a reminder that we don’t need to seek faraway answers—we need to reweave what’s already within and around us.

The Earth is still speaking.

The question is: are we quiet enough to hear it?

💜