the school for inclement weather is a 365-acre refuge and radical observatory set on the banks of an atmospheric river, just above the thermal belt in Kashia Pomo territory in Northern California.

We practice disaster companionship - systems of knowledge and care that emerge from weathering the earth (and each other) in an era of planetary demise. The prayer of our work asks: as the earth mutates, how must we mutate in return? 


Our training residencies, research and craft are guided by fragile attempts to make sanctuary amidst collapse: How do we strengthen our musculature for worship and reverence as reliable arts for inhabiting the earth in the climate emergency? How does recovering and tending to the preciousness of our awareness stimulate our capacity for offering mutual aid? 


By hosting long-term processes of ecological hospice and regeneration through prescribed fire, rotational grazing, and fiber production, the school for inclement weather acts as a demonstration site for land custodianship and memory-keeping for endangered practices.

past offerings

We collaborate with this place as an experiment in reclaiming observatories as sites to study prophetic arts through bearing witness to the earth. Our training residencies serve to fortify our community through pedagogies of prayerful awareness, disaster companionship and land-tending.

This work is sustained through shared wisdom, support, and collaboration. We offer our deep gratitude to The Kashia Pomo Cultural Department, Weaving Earth, Dream Office of Imaginary Friends, BAKINÉ, Fire Forward, Biswell Forestry, Wudang White Horse Academy, The Emergence Network, Fibershed, Kalliopeia Foundation, and the Jay Chiat Foundation for making our work possible.

  • Image of Steal a Way

    Steal A Way

    A year-long fellowship that culminated in two week-long immersive trainings where participants studied and practiced forest care in a fire ecology, fire ignitions, participated in a prescribed burn, learned fire-by-friction, practiced Qi Gong, and participated in ritual storytelling and craft. Dec 2021 and Dec 2022.

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    ATTUNE

    A 9-month program hybridizing in-person and online immersions in collaboration with Weaving Earth where participants were invited on a rite of passage to practice “attention liberation” (adrienne maree brown) to root their activism and ecological care in their attunement to the earth and cosmos. Oct 2023 and June 2024.

  • image from Firecraft

    Firecraft

    A two-part week-long immersion, centered on Wildland Fire and completion of the training standards necessary to be qualified as NWCG Wildland Firefighter Type II paired with Qi Gong intensive for spiritual and physical longevity needed to carry fire. Nov 2023.

  • an image from millcraft

    Millcraft

    A weekend-long camp to study honorable timber harvest, how to safely operate a mobile mill and guided by the questions: If we take a tree, what do we give in return? How do we allow for that cut to be part of a healing modality with the forest: to prepare the future forest to be healthy and cared for? How does that cut become covenant between humans and forest? Sept 2022.

  • Fire Protocols

    A research partnership with the Ethereum Foundation and Summer of Protocols focused on improving coordination of the complex web of relations that make up the prescribed fire environment in Sonoma County.

practices

Fire Affects

Fire Affects is as much about studying fire-use as it is about noticing what happens to us in return. Each burn is only a facet of an ongoing practice of care and maintenance; each fire leaves a mark on the forest, layering upon traces of past fires. Our practice is janitorial, as fire is the best tool we have for cleaning the great mess we find ourselves in. How does fire shape culture? How do we practice care amidst ongoing violence? How does preparing for future climate allow for presence with each changing day? What can we make from within that weather?

Resanctifying Black Matter

A prayer for rebuking and transforming the material legacies of the plantation, a prayer to resanctify a relationship with animals as an act of interspecies hospitality in the wake of black folks being sold as livestock, a prayer to answer sonia sanchez’s question who is gonna take the words/blk/is/beautiful and make more of it than blk/capitalism?

Research as Reverence

The observatory offers an invitation to scientists, cultural workers, and researchers to see their work as inherently porous. As we step beyond the cartesian boundaries of science, we deepen its rigor by embracing the uncertainties and interconnections at the elemental level of research. 

donate

Your contribution is tax-deductible and directly strengthens our programs and research.