Duane Marcus is an organic farmer. permaculture practitioner, teacher, herbalist and maker of rattles. He grows vegetables, fruit, herbs, mushrooms, worms and microorganisms at The Funny Farm, a 3-acre suburban permaculture demonstration project in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Duane teaches workshops on organic gardening, medicine making and sustainable living. He speaks to groups about the importance of healthy soils in creating and maintaining a viable and sustainable food system.

Duane’s posts: Searching for spirit in the garden, Gathering stars and giving thanks

The thread Lindsay McLaughlin has followed since the mid ’70s winds in many loops, but always weaves around spirit and community. Trailing from it are varied vocations: editing and writing for Sojourners Magazine and other publications, Montessori educator, staff for Friends of Silence (a non-profit organization of spiritual seekers and contemplatives). She has been a dance artist with a handful of modern and liturgical dance companies. A wife, mother, and grandmother, she has always delighted in creating, with her beloved husband Billy, a family within community.

Now she revels in living at Rolling Ridge Study Retreat, an intergenerational community living on and with 1400 acres of forest and streams on a small mountain foothill of the Blue Ridge in West Virginia. She looks out the window of her home office and sees the wild and tangled woodlands, which call to her daily. She leads retreats that explore the thresholds of wilderness, soul, and story; she writes; she still dances.

Lindsay’s posts: Learning to listen, Mist ecology, Holding complexity in community, Overlook the evidence, How silence will save the world, Learning to walk in the dark

Phila Hoopes is a freelance copywriter, poet and blogger, a student of creation spirituality and permaculture, and a spiritual edgewalker, seeking the common threads of conscious encounter with the transcendent/immanent Divine across religious traditions.. She lives in Maryland and is working on her first book.

Phila’s posts: The divinity of the speck

Artemis Vandelay is an idea brought to life, a shadow given substance, a photo snapped while still developing, the still shot in motion, the answer to the question before you ask it. Art is a poet who seeks to closely examine the small details of life through written form expressed on page. Until the simple becomes complex and the massive undertaking of existences enormity makes itself to be minuet in scope.

 “I’m Art Vandelay. An architect of words.”

Art’s posts: Giving tree

Megan Carlson is a teacher, a soon-to-be student in a PhD program for English and Education, a wife, and a mother of two dogs. She enjoys spending time outdoors either reading, writing, eating, or all of the above. Her music taste toggles between Kendrick Lamar and The Piano Guys, and she has an impressive collection of citrus scented candles.

Megan’s posts: