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About
“Earthkeepers makes me think of... wild creativity and song, deep connection with land and ancestry, skillful and profound teachings, and rituals that are held in a container that is co-created with beauty and community. I deeply trust the keepers of this school.”
Te Martin
Mission
Earthkeeper Wisdom School revives living culture through Earth-reverent, soul-nourishing ritual & ceremony in these three ways:
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With hearts of devotion, we catch and co-create original ritual forms that nourish our souls and re-harmonize our communities with the greater web of life.
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We apprentice those called to be sacred space holders and ritual weavers for these times.
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We support community leaders and movement-spaces to craft libertory rituals that inspire social change and facilitate collective healing.
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“Ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation.”
Francis Weller
What is ritual and ceremony - and what distinguishes them?
Though these terms can be used interchangeably or according to lineage custom, they can also be differentiated as follows:
Ritual is a technology of creating change and is born out of need.
Ceremony is a formalized acknowledgement or furthering of what is—a transmission or “feeding” of what is sacred.
Find out more about our approach to ritual and ceremony at:
Why is the revival of ritual and ceremony so essential in these times?
Since time immemorial, our ancestors have relied on ritual for creating and sustaining living culture. As the engine for cultural creation, ritual performs many functions including: (1) Catalyzing transformation and healing, (2) Attuning to and Aligning with the greater web of life, (3) Dreaming healed futures into being, (4) Weaving bonds of soulful belonging 5) Anchoring our most beautiful story of who we choose to be.
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Values our community is rooted in:
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Animism: We affirm the sacredness and personhood of all living beings, elementals, ancestors, and celestial bodies. Furthermore, we believe that all rituals of enduring potency are in service to this greater web of kinship. With devotion and humility, we invite the animate world to dream ritual through us by listening intuitively, spending solitary time on the land, and engaging in deep imagination and dream work.
Earth Reverence: Love and devotion to Life is the heart of our community. Earth reverence inspires our commitment to bring our soulful gifts forward on behalf of all beings thriving.
Earth Stewardship: We dream of a ceremonial way of living that is deeply woven into place and which grows in intimacy over time. This is the mission of Slate Creek Sanctuary, a land-based project that we’ve begun in the heart of Missouri. Slate Creek Sanctuary sustainably stewards an ecologically-rich habitat in the Ozark foothills and hosts ceremonial gatherings, retreats, and land restoration projects.
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“All healing offers a suture to the torn fabric of belonging.” —Francis Weller
Extending love, belonging, and kindness is core to the culture of our community. We grow our love-muscles through heart-felt listening and by leaning-in across differences to understand each other's experiences.
Additionally, we are committed to practicing curiosity around conflict by welcoming it as a messenger of growth through practices of intentional conflict tending. Rather than calling out, we call one another into greater depth of connection and understanding by respectfully sharing our experience. While doing our best to act with sensitivity and awareness, we expect to make mistakes and practice compassion with one another when we do.
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Through internal work as individuals and structural work as an organization, we are committed to seeking to understand and heal the diverse manifestations of supremacy and to practicing radical welcome.
To this end, we:
Practice oppression awareness, including challenging white supremacy culture, sexism, heterosexism, and gender normativity.
Seek a decolonized ritual praxis, and engage in active, ongoing dialogue as we discern what is cultural misappropriation versus consensual sharing.
Engage in racial caucusing when supportive to challenging oppression and avoiding harm.
Practice sliding scale economics to make our offerings accessible whenever possible.
Actively celebrate and honor the gift of difference in race, class, gender, sexual orientation, physical abilities and life experience.
Practice the art of village mind by learning to lead in ways that combat isolation, affirm belonging and uplift the whole.
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We honor the many venerable lineages that have grown us, including: Sobonfu Somé, Francis Weller, Joanna Macy, Bradford Keeney, Sherri Mitchell, Martin Prechtel, Liz Rog, Lisa Littlebird, Laurence Cole, Barbara McAfee, The Last Mask Center, Animas Valley, and Inpower Institute.
Yet, the teachings and ceremonies of Earthkeeper Wisdom School are more emergent than of lineage.
An exception is our practice of ecstatic grief ritual which is directly inspired by the Dagara tradition as introduced to the West by Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé. To honor this lineage, we have from our inception tithed to Wisdom Spring (see details below).
As we grow our community, we are asking how we can make reparations a core part of our culture and what anti-racist practice looks like for the long haul. Imperfectly, humbly, and with love, we join together in this giant undertaking of reparations and repair. Let’s call each other in deeper.
Our current steps include tithing to the following organizations whose missions make our hearts sing:
Wisdom Spring: A charity started by Sobonfu Somé to bring water to communities of need including but not limited to those of the Dagara tribe.
Mama Scraps: Whose mission is to (1) aid in the healing of black, brown, and indigenous folx by honoring ancestral and indigenous wisdom, (2) plant seeds of wellness for future generations, and (3) strengthen spiritual connections.
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“The fundamental power of ceremony is that of storytelling. Ceremony harnesses all the creativity we can muster towards enacting our most meaningful, healing, truth-revealing story of who we are in relationship to ALL. Through ceremony, we reclaim our power as meaning-makers and culture creators who define for ourselves what is Sacred. What we do in ceremony redefines who we know ourselves to be and ripples out into everything we do.”
Carolyn Griffeth
Founder of Earthkeeper Wisdom School
Carolyn Griffeth
Founder, Ceremonialist, Soul Guide
In the center of my soul there is a feeling of being bound to something. This mysterious “something” reminds me that my life is not my own. There is something I came here to serve and contribute and the fulfillment of this mission means everything to me.
This “something” has become increasingly clear in the last decade of my life. As a young woman, I dropped out of medical school and spent the next twenty-plus years deeply entrenched in social change work on several fronts. Around 42, I entered a time of spiritual expansion in which I was visited by a series of dreams and visions that awakened me to a further calling. In one such dream:
I climb onto a high roof and from this place, I see within the photos of my phone the ceremonies that I came to birth. The potency of these ceremonies hits me like lightening! A delicious and terrible agony overtakes me and can only be relieved by wailing and shouting repeatedly, “I will do this!”
The vision of Earthkeeper Wisdom School came to me similarly. I was sitting in my yard sincerely praying to be shown my unique medicine for the world, when I saw a cycle of ceremony…
Sobonfu Somé, ritualist of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, also came into my life as a core teacher during this season. Of the soul’s journey, she wrote, “It is like looking for a path and suddenly the path takes you. The path takes you; you don’t take the path.”
I have been taken by the path of serving the life of the soul through mentoring, dream tending, and catching and co-creating rituals and ceremonies that serve the revival of soul-honoring culture.
Besides being a ritualist, I serve as a mentor, soul guide and dream worker. In this capacity I offer deeply attuned listening, intuitive guidance, grief work, nature based soul work, emotional clearing, practices of deep imagination, ceremony and most of all, faith, prayer and wisdom.
If the above draws you in, or you are seeking support with ceremonial co-creation for you or your community, I warmly welcome you to:
Contact me at carolyngriffeth@gmail.com
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The teachings of EKWS flow from my mystical journey, my life in the trenches of social change activism, and my devotion to the web of life. Additionally, I have been blessed to learn directly from these and other remarkable teachers:
Joanna Macy, founder of the Work that Reconnects and an elder/mentor to me.
Sobonfu Somé, ritualist of the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso
Hilary and Brad Keeney, teachers of the ancient art of ecstatic engineering
Rebeccah Bennett, founder of Inpower Institute and Spirit Rising—a womenist community where I serve as a spiritual minister.
Bill Plotkin, Animas Valley and Purpose Guides Institute - schools of nature-based soul guiding in support of the journey of soul initiation
Francis Weller, soul activist and grief ritualist
Sherri Mitchell, Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset, Indigenous activist of the Penobscot Nation and founder of Healing Turtle Island
“There is a web of connection, life, and light. This web is how we stay connected to earth and other worlds. Connecting to the web feels like being so bound to something.”
–Sobonfu Somé
Lyndsey Scott
Song Leader, Priestess
Song welcomes us to Life, now. It teaches me to Hold each moment as prayer, whatever the task at hand. It gives me a way to praise this question, this being, this ache, This. Leading community singing woke me up to my priestess soul! I love to honor our thresholds, bring beauty to our gatherings, tend the grief in our bones, liberate the pleasure in our bodies ~ all woven in Song, all in service of this great big Coming Home. When I lead us in song, I pray this full transmission comes through to nourish us as we claim and wake into our divine birthright, Freedom, and into our full bandwidth of praise, pleasure, play, and power.
Leading song with Earth Keepers lights me up ~ seeding a repertoire of "sonic ritual vocabulary" for us to draw on as we deepen into community, laying a bed of tones and beats for us to freestyle our prayers into, anchoring the field of ceremony as we experiment in co-creation. Our singing is laced with laughter, reverence, presence, & permission. Our singing Remembers us into Village.
My start in art school jostled loose the Weird; my decade as a community artist in St. Louis, MO trained me as a Weaver; my recent adventure as a small-town yoga studio founder honed me as a "just folks" embodiment-based Sacred Space Holder. My love of loooong journey bike-abouts throughout the Heartland teaches me earthspeed Kinship. My prayer for the abolition of the prison industrial complex requires my commitment to ending internalized and systemic racism, and necessitates the tender work of apprenticing to personal and collective Grief.
Find out more about my work at:
Website: www.lyndseyscott.earth
Prayer for abolition: Over/Under
Instagram: @lila.gaia
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Deepest love and gratitude for my song teachers and mentors, Liz Rog, Lisa Littlebird, Laurence Cole, and Barbara McAfee, who model the path of singing as heart-opening, and to Holistic Resistance, modeling Song and intimacy as tools for ending white supremacy.
“Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.”
–Anne Lamott
Tamira Cousett
Collaborative Partner, Ancestral Medium
Tamira is an ancestral medium and ritual facilitator specializing in supporting folks with remembering the authentic pathways of ancestral connections. Her practices are rooted in ecosystems of Love and Black liberation theologies and informed by her initiations into Afro-Brazilian earth-honoring traditions and West African Ifa Òrìṣà tradition. She enjoys co-weaving communal containers of curiosity, connection, homecoming, and life-affirming rituals with folks and their ancestral ecosystems of care.
Find out more about Tamira’s offerings at:
Website: www.tamiracousett.com
Instagram: @tamiracousett
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