The Persephone
Project

 

The Persephone Project investigates the devastating impact of human-centric narratives of time on the Earth’s ecosystems and explores strategies for healing the damage.

 

Song: “Good Friend” written by Jan Harmon, learned from the singing of Libana on their CD Fire Within. Soloist: Hillary Sunberg. Narrator: Andrea Most.

With Persephone as our standard-bearer and the Old Farmer’s Almanac as a source of inspiration, we collect and re-imagine stories, rituals and practices rooted in the rhythms of the Earth.

In doing so, we aim to restore balance to the land that sustains us, and the communities that call it home. 

Enter into the story…

The Persephone Project began with a quest for a research structure that would enable us to delve into challenging topics while re-imagining our relationship to the living Earth.

 

Using permaculture principles and an embodied, land-based approach, we spent two years devising a method that joins scholarly exploration with creative collaboration, humans with the more-than-human world.

In a different era, we would have described our findings in a journal article. But we wanted to find another way to marry form and content, to capture the complexity of the dynamic, collaborative, multi-sensory exploration that is the Persephone Project.

This website tells the story of what we discovered. By clicking on the buttons at the bottom of each page, you can journey alongside us and witness how our method unfolded seed by seed, season by season.  If you wish to return to particular aspects of the story, the menu at the top of each page functions like a typical website, allowing the user to jump easily across pages and locate specific information.

Throughout the site, you will find links to more information about our collaborators, our team, the places we visited and the books we read. They form a parallel conversation which deepens and complicates the story.

We welcome you into this conversation and look forward to your responses.  Please reach out to us via the JOURNEY WITH US button at the top of each page.


“I begin to sing of Demeter… And her daughter [Persephone] too…”

Hymn to Demeter, lines 1-2