Hearth of the Wild Mystery School is a transformative, wild, liberating, and life-changing nine-month journey toward spiritual awakening and communion with the whole of Life.​

​

In this nine-month journey of deep transformation and spiritual unfoldment structured around the rhythms of the year observed in ancient Gaelic and other Celtic cultures, students explore the enlivening and liberative mythic landscapes of poetry, ancient folktale, ritual, visionary practice, magic, mystical theology, healing, and relational alchemy in partnership with the spirits of plants and animals, as well as the deep waters of true contemplation. Students will be directly (re-)introduced to a cosmos that is profoundly alive and infinitely diverse, as well as unitive. They will be given the opportunity to fully reclaim their own birthright of ancient ancestral inheritance and their natural place in the great family of being.

​

Between four fully taught retreats (two in-person and two hybrid), held at each of the four ancient Gaelic fire festivals, students of the Hearth will have carefully curated, powerful, creative spiritual work to do on their own, as well as two-hour monthly communal Hearth Gatherings with the teacher on Zoom, where he will offer further instruction, answer questions, lead practices, and facilitate deep communal sharing.

Hearth of the Wild is as much a poem, a wave-glint of twilight luminosity, a transmission of wind through a grove of aspens as it is a school of formal learning. It is a vessel to facilitate deep, effectual transformation, a space of liminality, of living connectivity, and a ‘sanctuary’ or ‘protective circle’ (Gàidhlig, caim) for seekers after depth, beauty, meaning, and relational wholeness in a world of increasing alienation, superficiality, and cultural orphanhood. It is one way (certainly not the way) of coming home to our own full humanness, our own ancestral roots, our roots in the Land and in the vast unseen. It is a living, contemporary incarnation of an ancient hearthside, which glows in this world and the Otherworld, whose light illumines both the internal and external wilds.

​

This school of ancestral lifeways, of animistic witness, alchemy, and practical mysticism, this sacred gathering beyond the verge, has grown organically like a wild seedling from the living rain, sun, breath, and song of a life lived in deep commitment to a sacral vocation known in ancient Gaelic culture as ‘poet-seership’ (Gàidhlig, filidheachd)—a life on and with the living Land; a life of embodied scholarship; of poetry and sacred artistry; of teaching and guiding others along the unseen pathways; a life lived in three worlds; a life of sustained commitment to the spiritual freedom, wholeness, and conscious connection of all; a life of deep relationship with many beings, both seen and unseen, human and other-than-human alike. It was birthed and is taught by Brendan Ellis Williams (An t-Athair Urramach Brèanainn Èilis Mac Uilleim).

​

What can I expect in this journey? you might ask. Expect ancient song and story, potent ritual, and poetic utterance that changes worlds; expect to meet gods, ghosts, myths, and magic; expect to enter deep communion with the living Land, Sea, and Sky, and with many of our non-human sisters and brothers; expect mantic speech, dream-journey, shamanistic incubation, vision, and alchemy; expect light; expect shadow; expect powerful new perceptions; expect ancient ancestors, wild spirits, and folktales that haunt our thresholds; expect beauty and depth unnameable; expect the subversive power of virtue and nobility; expect the unwinding of tightly knotted conditions, the burning away of trenchant obstacles and obscurations; expect radical freedom from the dominator agendas that have cut us off from our own ancient roots, and from our own deepest nature. Expect to discover that you already have all that you’ll ever need, here and now. Expect upending, turning of mind, reconciliation, rewilding, and reunion. Expect confounding silence, pure, deep breath, unbounded spaciousness, and ineffable wisdom.

​

Your place around the sacred fire awaits.