In this fifth session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax gathers the community around Wendell Berry’s poem “The Person Born to Farming” — reading it aloud, line by line, drawing participants into its imagery of soil as divine drug, of entering death yearly and coming back rejoicing. The poem becomes a lens for the day’s planting, and a doorway into the concept of sympoiesis — the understanding that nothing arises alone, that an oak tree doesn’t just come from an acorn, but from the sun, water, earth, mycelium, and air making something together. Roshi walks the community through a photographic history of Upaya’s canyon from 1920 to the present — bare bean fields, denuded slopes, and the slow return of ponderosas, pollinator meadows, and wildlife — living proof that staying the course transforms a place. For Roshi, rewilding the land and rewilding ourselves are the same practice: “We can not only rewild ourselves, but we rewild the places that we live in. It is the spirit of our practice to do exactly that.”

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