Author presents “Exploring a Sense of Place” at Moon News Wednesday

Karen Harwell, co-author of the Exploring a Sense of Place guidebook, will be at Moon News in Half Moon Bay on Wednesday, March 7, 2007 at 7pm. Karen will give a talk on how you can incorporate Sense of Place ideals into your own life, and begin a process of discovery and reconnection with the natural world where you live. The Exploring a Sense of Place guidebook is designed to help people with this process. It contains inspiration and all the practical tools needed to design, develop, organize and produce an Exploring a Sense of Place program for any bioregion.

The guidebook was a natural outgrowth of the Exploring a Sense of Place program. The first program started in 2001 in Palo Alto, California, and was designed to help people reconnect with the local San Francisquito Creek watershed. Now in its fifth year, The Exploring a Sense of Place program provides a series of readings, walks, and encounters in nature designed to build a ³rootedness in place² and to help people reconnect to nature at the soul level. It seeks to help us establish new patterns in our lives and experience a shift in our perceptions. Through regular immersion in nature over a period of time, and guided by the stories and experience of dedicated naturalists and elders, people find themselves opening up to the true spirit of the place where they live. This increasing awareness of kinship with nature, which underpins our human structures, can inspire us to make better decisions about how to live sustainably within the Earth community.

"We’ve all heard people say they love nature," say authors Harwell and Reynolds. "Yet we often forget what great skill humanity has in constructing a world that insulates us from actually having to experience nature. Many of us now believe that if we are to be a successful species in the long run, we need to change our ways and partner with nature. Exploring a Sense of Place was written to help us start the process of becoming native to our place."

Karen Harwell spent her early years living in the beauty and majesty of the Colorado Rockies. She received her Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Colorado. She has done graduate study in philosophy, cosmology and consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, completed a six-week Earth Literacy program at Genesis Farm in New Jersey, and was certified in the study of permaculture at Occidental Arts and Ecology in California. She currently lives in Palo Alto, California, where she has made her home into a model of sustainability and where she engages the neighborhood children in the Dana Meadows Organic Garden.

Joanna Reynolds grew up in what is now called Silicon Valley, but which used to be called "The Valley of Heart’s Delight" for its fertile land and acres of fruit orchards. She spent many years working in education, developing curriculums and facilitating courses and programs designed to inspire participation in the conscious evolution of culture. As a co-director of the Exploring a Sense of Place program, Joanna spent many years helping to hone the curriculum, contributing from her extensive experience and love of the natural world.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Exploring a Sense of Place: How to create your own local program for reconnecting with Nature

By Karen Harwell and Joanna Reynolds

96 pages, illustrated, 8.5x12 spiral bound

©2006, Exploring a Sense of Place

ISBN 0-9786851-0-5