Landscape Residency

JustLiving Farm is a generational working farm. Like many family farms we engage the landscape through our values, with an ear to individual morals, community ethics, and landscape theologiess. Our Landscape Residency program is an opportunity for you to explore your vocation, your work, your life in the liminal space of landscape and indigeneity (Indigeneity: the fact of originating or occurring naturally in a particular place.)  JustLiving Farm offers you a one-week opportunity to consider how your life is intimately intertwined with the indigenous: plants, animals, creatures, humans, and earth.  

We welcome graduate students and other folk who want to explore their fit with the landscape.  Who want to step beyond the norm and engage in conversations that wonder and question how land, husbandry, ecology, nature and the cycle of life and death matters to justice, theology, philosophy and society.

How does this work? 

When you arrive, you will be provided room and board for your one-week residency.  All you need to do is get yourself to and from the farm.  (If you are unable to afford travel, the farm offers one travel stipend per year.) 

Each residency is uniquely based on your worldview.  Together with farm staff, you will engage the life of the of Toppenish Creek Valley landscape.  Our goal is to help you engage the immediate landscape of the farm and the local reservation landscape to explore how this land and these ancestors might inform your vocational outlook and forthcoming life experience.

You will have the opportunity to observe and participate in the life of a working farm.  We are here to help you understand, question, and imagine how rural farm practices matter in your life’s work. We will provide you the space to wander and wonder the similarities and contrasts of your home landscape and ours.

Who do you get to work with? We have several experts in various fields including our cows, dirt, wind, water, grass and chickens: 

Creation:  First and foremost teachers of this landscape are the dirt, water, wind, plants, and animals (both wild and domestic)—including, of course, our cows!

Belinda Bell (Master of Social Work and Animal Health Technician) specializes in herd health, Hospice Care, grant writing, funding small non-profits, and developing out-of-school programming.

Rebecca Lee (Master of Social Work, Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker, MSW supervisor), specializes in seasons, rhythm, and how the body, intellect, and spirit naturally engages landscape.

Katherine Bell (Master in Peace and Justice),  specializes in how boundaries and boarder affect people. Historically and currently, Katherine questions the entanglement of systems 

and cultures and how they manipulate and infect our personal lives and the lives of our neighbors.

David Bell (Master in Theology) specializes in the natural and indigenous.  David engages questions of how our identity and existence is intertwined with creation and landscape.     Foremost, David will work with you to begin recognizing your indigeneity and your natural ancestral siblingship.

Some or all of these folk will help you explore your place within the creational landscape and how to imagine that the native world is in natural relationship with you.

Click under Landscape Residency for more specifics and an application.  You can reserve your week today.

JLF Landscape Residency

 

We are told again and again that we have to find answers outside of ourselves. When you JustLive Your Landscape, you uncover deep wisdom of place and true strength of community. You begin trusting yourself, your community, and your ability to tap int the natural wisdom of your landscape.  And you and your community begin to live as the Natural intended.