Building Culture & Community Resilience
​We are at a powerful juncture in time on our planet. A time of great paradoxes. Of concurrent realities. Of polarization. Of uncertainty. And, of opportunity.
Our species stands at the intersection between forgetting and remembering many of the critical teachings around how to live beautifully and harmoniously on our planet. So much is disappearing, new forms are appearing, and things feel like they are changing so fast that it is hard to understand the direction we are heading. People are increasingly dividing and polarizing and losing skills for communicating about the most important issues of our time. It seems at times like our species is giving up on itself, and people are giving up on each other.
And yet...This is also a time of remembering. A time of healing.
While many of our social and economic systems seem to be breaking down, new pathways forward are emerging. Many of us are synching back up with the natural rhythms of the earth and re-membering ourselves to the wisdom of where we come from. For every expression of division and disconnection, another path of healing opens - pathways which point us back to the earth and to each other​.
"The only way to get it together is together"
-R. Zalman Schachter Shalomi z"l
Upcoming Events
Aug 2025 - Feb 2026
Join facilitators Daniel Schindelman Schoen and Tali Weinberg for a 7-month immersion exploring Jewish lineage and tradition. For those who feel far from their Jewish identity but long for deeper connection, SHOOV offers an inclusive, liberatory exploration of Jewish time, rituals, stories, songs, and cosmology. It is an invitation to claim and create an alive and deeply personal relationship to Jewish ancestral traditions.
For the past 20 years, I have been involved in an exploration of what is means to re-instate healthy culture in a time increasingly characterized by its absence. I have studied its building blocks and constitutents amidst a movement of visionaries and dreamers and artists in an endless pursuit to bring more resilience and beauty and connection to the world.
The Building blocks of Healthy Culture ​
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-Healthy cultures are Intergenerational: they honour the wisdom and gifts people bring forth at different stages in their lives. When people in different stages of life weave and share with one another, culture flourishes. Elders voices are needed so that perspectives, values, stories, language, and traditional knowledge can be shared forward. And the young ones' voices are needed to share the new visions that want to be born into the world. All life stages are equally important.
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-Belonging ourselves on this planet is both a human and ecological need. The earth needs us to belong ourselves to where we live so that we assume responsibility for our home ecosystems, watersheds, and the human and non-human relations that we share with. Learning to 'belong ourselves' to a place, the way countless generations who have come before us have done, is a vital part of preserving local knowledge and a critical dimension of caring for place for the future generations.
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​-The role of rites of passage, ritual, and ceremony in communal life brings meaning, direction, and orientation to what is important. They connect us to the unseen realms. They help us remember our place in both the outside and inside worlds. A culture without these elements loses track of what it is beholden to and in turn loses track of what it is in service towards. These rites and ceremonies tether us to something bigger and sacred.
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Photo by Julia Maryanska
-Healthy systems are based on the principles of interconnection and interdependence. We are not meant to go through life alone! Our accomplishments need celebrating, our grief needs holding, and our transformations need witnessing. Being woven into a larger tapestry of relationships is a requisite our aliveness and sense of belonging.
-Honouring the history of the lands where we live: most, if not all of us, reside on territories that were stolen from their original inhabitants. Part of the social chaos and environmental destruction we face in our communities is a consequence of the many acts of genocide and theft that took place, and continue to take place, where we live. A reimagining of healthy culture necessitates that we consider what we can do to support local landback movements, and what acts of reparations and solidarity we can commit our resources towards.
