DEEP ECOLOGY with Lydia Violet and John Seed Mullumbimby Jan 2-3 2027

The Rainforest Information Centre presents DEEP ECOLOGY with Lydia Violet and John Seed

Tickets are sliding scale from $105-$600 - $150 student or unemployed, $600 well off, or somewhere in between.

25% of the proceeds will be donated to The Rainforest Information Centre

Details:

• Vegetarian meals will be provided, gluten-free and vegan options by request after booking.

• Bring your own tent or campervan or you can stay in your own home if you live nearby or find yourself a nearby b&b

• Vegetarian meals will be provided, gluten-free and vegan options by request after booking. 

FROM JOHN SEED:

Lydia Violet is an Iranian-Armenian-American musician, educator, and facilitator working at the intersection of deep ecology and collective transformation. A longtime student and collaborator of beloved Buddhist scholar and systems thinker Joanna Macy, Lydia has spent over 18 years studying, teaching, and carrying forward The Work That Reconnects. She is the founder and Executive Director of School for the Great Turning, and co-created The Essential Joanna Macy course with Joanna herself. A lifelong musician, folk-soul singer, and multi-instrumentalist, Lydia also brings community singing, ancestral reconnection, and traditional crafts into her work, exploring how we become more capable, connected, and courageous participants in the Great Turning.

Joanna chose Lydia to be her (ie Joanna’s) voice in the forthcoming audiobook of Thinking Like a Mountain - Towards a Council of All Beings. I hadn’t worked with Lydia till last month when I zoomed into workshops in Oregon and California which I cofacilitated with her and Erika Aligno. I felt almost like I was watching Joanna at work. Lydia's first Australian tour, an incredible opportunity.

The ecological crisis is not only a political, economic, or technological problem — it is also a crisis of identity. We have been taught to experience ourselves as separate from the Earth, and from this illusion of separation much destruction follows.

Yet beneath the industrial trance there remains an older memory: that we belong to a living Earth and are expressions of her unfolding story.

In this Experiential Deep Ecology workshop, we move from ecological ideas into lived ecological identity — from despair to empowerment, from alienation into kinship, and, at last, into remembering that we were never  separate from the living world.

Separation loosens.

Wonder enters.

We remember that we belong to an ancient unfolding far larger than ourselves. See accounts from participants in previous workshops.

I have increasingly come to see these ceremonies not as optional additions to environmental activism but as essential foundations for it. Facts and policies matter enormously, of course. Laws must change. Economies must transform. Forests must be defended with urgency.

But if activism is not rooted in belonging, exhaustion follows quickly.

Despair overwhelms.

People burn out.

Ceremony helps replenish what industrial culture erodes.

It restores wonder.

It metabolises grief.

It widens identity.

It transforms loneliness into community.

Most importantly, it helps us fall in love again with the living world.

You were never separate.

Welcome home.

For more information, sally.novak@risingtide.org.au