Our Story

Established in 2010, Sacred Mountain Sanctuary provides Sacred spaces where our bond of intimacy with the living Universe can be recognized, renewed and reverenced.  The work of SMS is inherently reciprocal, and integrates the realms of community, commerce, conservation, and education, as an inseparable whole.

Our story began when a remarkable parcel of land in the Appalachian Mountains was discovered in 2009. The land was surrounded by the wild vitality of Pisgah National Forest…abundant, pristine, and bejeweled with pure, flowing springs, rolling pastures, old apple and peach orchards, rich cove forests, and a palpable, numinous vitality that conveyed itself to all who visited. The land felt as if it had been waiting for the Sanctuary of Sacred Mountain to be born.

Through a slow, reverent, and sometimes challenging process of deep listening and durational Presence to the land through the cycles of the seasons, a recognition emerged around where to situate the work of the Sanctuary’s varied realms- community, education, land stewardship, spiritual-scientific observation and research, and other activities that would nurture and preserve a living future for human beings.  It was also evident that a culture of contemplative reverence and reciprocity would extend to and connect all realms of our work. Thus began the difficult but rewarding process of co-creating an initiative for human-Earth communion and Cosmogenesis that was unfailingly regenerative, and also nimble and adaptable enough to withstand the challenging processes and emergent circumstances of a world in transformation.

This called for a special kind of relationship-building, and a reorientation of the perceived divisions between what we readily recognize as Sacred and that which we regard as mundane. At Sacred Mountain Sanctuary, land stewardship, education & wisdom-keeping, contemplative & spiritual practice, homemaking and the fiduciary realm are tended to with an equal measures of reverence and practicality. The relationships between neighbors, teachers, families; the tending of plants, water, rocks, soil; the care for animals, birds, insects, as well as the unseen-but-tangible realms of spirit are given the same quality of Presence.

Cultivating an abiding, durational Presence is an ongoing learning journey. What continues to emerge from this living, learning process is a Sanctuary where the enlivening work of education, ensouling work of community, regenerative work of agriculture, the evolutionary work of commerce, and all associated challenges are held by a numinous, living web of vitality that is perpetually nourished and renewed by our kinship with one another, the natural world, and the cosmos.

In a culture where our capacities for inter-being have been diminished by the perceived separation between human beings and the natural world, we recognize a great need for a renewed quality of Presence, reverence for Place, and willing engagement with Practices that are devoted to a living future for humankind.

May our work of creating Sanctuary be blessed.