Recipes & Rituals for Community Care: Bathing in the Essence of the Garden

About this event

Slow down, breathe, allow your senses to open, listen to the messages from nature. Join us with certified Forest Therapy Guide Lori Klamner to explore how the concept of bathing in the essence of the forest and forest bathing can be integrated right here in our community garden spaces in our very urban landscapes. Together, we’ll take a slow walk with invitations to notice the shapes of leaves, moving our hands to outline the shapes that call to us, and noticing how it feels for our feet to kiss the earth. Then, we’ll find a sit spot and allow our minds to focus on parts of the garden that speak to us. After each section of these invitations, we will have a sharing circle and tea made from foraged and harvesed plants to practice our attention and reflection in our shared learning garden. Your Facilitator: Lori Klamner is a climate activist and bodywork therapist. A native New Yorker, she has found the Urban Forest to be a truly healing and restorative place. She trained to become a Certified Forest Therapist in 2021, and specializes in group walks in urban parks. What does it mean to heal in community? What does it feel like to extend care—to ourselves, ecologies, and our shared earth? This weekly series explores the role of plants in supporting both personal and communal well-being through herbal arts, folk remedies, somatic movement, meditative wildcrafting, and shared ritual. Participants are guided by guest herbalists, healing artists, and wellness practitioners to co-create a toolkit that not only resources individuals in caring for themselves, but stretches our imagination and capacity to care for the collective and our shared earth. Recipes and Rituals for Community Care is rooted in reciprocity with land, ancestral knowledge, and the rhythms of the seasons. Workshops are rain or shine. Accessibility: Our kitchen/classroom space is wheelchair accessible. With prior planning, we can add a few small mats onto the pebbled ground of greenhouse to make a small wheel-chair accessible path. Our learning garden has grass paths, and the entrance is through a gate with a small, raised entrance. Our tables can be lowered/raised, and we have several backless benches or stools. Our kitchen is in regular use, and while we try to cook without peanuts, much of our cookware is shared and we cannot guarantee a nut-free environment. We have a first aid kit, and the closest AED is in another building several yards away. Drinking water is made available in refillable pitchers. When inside the greenhouse and kitchen we will open our double-doors and windows to vent the space and encourage masking and social distancing when in more closed-in spaces. Our closest bathrooms are a building away, about a one-minute walk. A gender neutral bathroom is also available, and this is accessible by key which you can request from staff. We are not a scent-free zone, and because herbalism classes take place here, cannot guarantee that the site will be clear of any essential oil smells. If you have needs not addressed here, please reach out to Mallory Craig at mcraig@thehort.org.