Caring About the Earth Is Not the Same as Belonging to It
Most nature-minded people stop at caring. Rewilding the Soul goes further.
Where Caring Ends, and Belonging Begins
The gap between caring about the Earth and belonging to it is not a gap of feeling.
You already feel deeply. You grieve the losses of the natural world in ways you cannot always explain. You carry a sorrow that does not resolve when you close the screen, a restlessness that sleep does not fix, a sense that something essential is missing from how you move through your days.
Most spiritual practice addresses the feelings. Very little addresses the root.
The root, as I have come to understand it after 5 Camino de Santiago pilgrimages on France’s ancient Le Puy route, is not an emotional problem. It is a contact problem. We have been taught to think about nature rather than belong to it. To appreciate the Earth rather than know specific beings within it. To manage ecological grief rather than let it become the beginning of a genuine relationship.
That gap is what Rewilding the Soul was built for.
What I Kept Witnessing at NYU
I am a Chaplain at New York University.
Every week, I sit with people who are carrying something they cannot name, are exhausted, and are searching. Graduate students, faculty, staff—educated, intentional people who care about the world and still feel strangely separate from it. They have tried the apps, the therapy, the retreats. They come to me not looking for information. They have plenty of information.
They are looking for contact.
What I keep witnessing is not a knowledge deficit. It was a severance. Our culture has been telling a single story for centuries: that humans are separate from nature, that the Earth is raw material, that belonging must be earned rather than received as the birthright of every living creature. That story lives in the body long after the mind has rejected it. Information does not reach it. Relationship does.
No amount of reading about ecospirituality replaces standing beside a specific tree in a specific season and learning its name.
Why I Built This Program
I did not build the Rewilding the Soul Ecospirituality Certificate because I had it figured out.
I built it because I had walked 5 Camino de Santiago de Compostela pilgrimages, earned a PhD in Educational Research, been ordained as a Wild Guide, and still spent years caring about the Earth without genuinely belonging to it. The practice that finally reached the root was not dramatic. It was slow, specific, embodied, and relational. It required showing up to the same tree in the Luxembourg Gardens across many seasons until the relationship became real.
Why there and why then? It was, in part, because I needed to try something else, as none of the other achievements I accomplished had answered some of my questions or helped me feel connected.
That is not something a course teaches. It is something that a year of practice builds.
Rewilding the Soul is a year-long EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary. It begins March 18, 2026. It was designed for people who have tried the available approaches and still feel the gap.
What the Year Actually Holds
Four seasonal modules, aligned with the turning of the Earth itself.
In the first module, you develop a daily earth-based practice rooted in your specific place. You learn to read your local land—its plants, birds, water, weather—until your bioregion becomes your teacher rather than your backdrop. The sitting spot, the wandering, the Earth journal: these are not exercises. They are the beginning of relationship.
In the second, you move inward with the winter. You explore your own earth story — the grief you carry, the losses that have not been witnessed, the slow gestation of something new beneath the dormant surface. This is not therapy. It is a supported, communal container for the ecological grief many of us have been carrying alone.
In the third, you engage the spiritual traditions that have always known we belong to the Earth. Indigenous, mystical, ecological, cross-cultural, all approached with reverence, without appropriation, with serious attention to what they actually require of us.
In the fourth, you discern your particular calling. You design and offer Earth-based practices. You leave with an Earth Service Mission that names what you are for, and a cohort of people to hold you accountable to it.
Who This Is For
This is not a religious program. This is not a scholarly program. This is also not an environmental conservationist program.
It is for the lifelong churchgoer who feels that something holy is in the river, too. It is for the secular ecologist moved to tears by old-growth forests who has never had a language for that. It is for the burned-out therapist, the exhausted activist, the chaplain who left institutional religion and never stopped longing for something real.
It is for the person who always comes back to life in the garden, on the trail, or standing in the rain.
It is for the seeker who has tried many things and still feels something essential is missing.
You do not need credentials. You do not need certainty. You need only a willingness to show up, to practice, and to be changed.
You Were Not Meant to Carry This Alone
The grief, the search, the longing: most of us have been doing all of it in isolation, while everyone around us performs certainty and composure.
This program offers what has become genuinely rare: a community built around shared practice. Small council circles. Earth companions. A cohort of people willing to be changed by the same seasons, the same grief, the same belonging, and ultimately through the same kinship with the natural world.
The first cohort begins on March 18, 2026. The program meets weekly in 90-minute live online sessions, designed for working adults with full lives and for people who know something essential is still missing.
We begin at the edge of spring.
Registration is open now. If this calls to something in you, I would love to have you with us.
Register for the Rewilding the Soul Ecospirituality Certificate here.
Questions? Hit reply. Comment below. Ping me directly. I read everything and write back.
~ Jeffrey
Walk With Me
If my post resonated, then these may, too.
Pack Light, Walk Present: The Contemplative Camino Packing Guide — Everything I know about preparing body and soul for pilgrimage. Complete packing list, 6-week training plan, contemplative preparation guidance, and a printable checklist. Available on my website (free for annual subscribers). Every purchase includes a complimentary live Packing & Planning Audit, one pilgrim to another. Either Get the Guide or become an Annual Subscriber and get it for free!
September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat — Seven days on France’s ancient Le Puy path of the Camino de Santiago. Only 4 participants with only 1 space remaining. Private rooms directly on the route where pilgrims have walked for a thousand years. Silence as practice, not punishment. Details Here.
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