Sacred spaces connect us to the earth's healing energy. Imagine getting home after a long day and tuning into a bird's call or a flash of color that draws you into the garden. The sweet fragrance and exquisite patterns begin to soothe you. Relax and breathe. Notice the play of sun and shade. The soft, harmonious sound of water playing in the fountain re-tunes your jangled nerves. You may align yourself with the four directions or walk a meander or a labyrinth as a meditation. Your mind settles gently into the peace within.
Our personal journey of discovery will begin with a journey through the labyrinth, music to open you, and exercises to stimulate your imagination. We'll ask the spirits to help us find the spirit in ourselves and our land. We'll experience archetypal spaces and learn to find and enhance them at home.
Ancient eastern, western, and native traditions will offer suggestions for integration into our garden. We'll explore the role of plants and forms to create beautiful personal, transcendent places, expanding our horizons, and providing us with a framework and tools to develop our own sacred space.
Mary Dewart is a landscape designer who has designed and built garden spaces for 15 years and taught numerous horticulture and design classes for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. She helps gardeners expand their connection with nature, the earth, their gardens, and themselves. A lifelong gardener, naturalist, and adventurer, she's also an environmental activist and a preserver of historic landscapes. For over 20 years, Maria von Brincken has been designing and creating horticultural experiences featuring compositions of color, form, texture, and bloom sequences. She weaves client values and dreams into a tapestry employing the practical and the aesthetic into a garden that evokes our better selves. Trained as a fine artist, color theorist, and graphic designer, she uses French Intensive organic gardening practices in the ornamental garden. Prue Berry co-directed Rowe Camp and Conference Center for 17 years, is a guitarist, singer, therapist, mother, and an ace workshop leader. She specializes in the creation of Sacred Spaces in her design work. Mary, Maria and Prue are all graduates of the Radcliffe Seminars Graduate Program in Landscape Design, where Maria also lectures, and Maria and Mary create and present landscape symposia. Marty Cain, an artist, teacher, dowser and geomancer, was taught to dowse by her Lithuanian grandfather. She has experienced, researched and documented hundreds of ancient, sacred sites in England and Europe and teaches dowsing as a way to touch that part of you which generates creative ideas. Her own artistic work focuses on creative place making, the integration of art and geomancy and she knows what makes specific places sacred, which enables her to recreate that experience for others. She has created over 100 labyrinths and her goal is to create, and enable others to create, new sacred sites that heal the Earth and all who enter them. Her enthusiasm is contagious.