It all started around my family's kitchen table...

At fourteen, I watched my mother get sicker despite receiving medical treatment for a chronic illness. So we went looking for answers ourselves and found them in diet. Within three months of changing what we ate, her condition was in full remission. Three. Months. I have come to think of this early life experience as an initiation that seeded a question that I've since spent my life seeking answers to: 

how does what we eat, and how it's grown, shape the health of people and the planet alike?

​​

I sought out answers by undertaking a Permaculture Design Certificate with Penny Livingston at the Regenerative Design Institute. Permaculture became the lens through which I studied Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London, graduating with First-Class Honours in this interdisciplinary degree program. There, I began to see how disease, agriculture, and ecological and cultural breakdown aren't separate domains; they're nested systems.

Soil health is plant health is human health is planetary health.

​​

During my studies, I also came to appreciate how stories have the power to shape the world and I followed my ambitions to write stories that changed the world. My first job upon graduating was as a storyteller at an ecosystem restoration company. The majority of projects were focussed on agroforestry and my days were filled with creating educational content on regenerative agriculture for people and the planet that reached hundreds of thousands around the world. 

Then, unexpectedly, a friend of mine died. 

And in the strange way death does, it birthed a new life in me. The grief invited me to get radically honest about how far away I was from really living in reciprocity with the earth. So I left storytelling behind, and went to put my hands in the soil, again. This time deepening my scientific understanding and practice under Dr. Elaine Ingham from the Soil Food Web School, Didi Pershouse from the Land and Leadership Initiative, and Paul Morris from Ecosystem Restoration Communities. In tandem, I sought out direct contact with wisdom keepers that have shaped my approach, such as Satish Kumar, Dr. Saskia von Diest, and Kimberly Ann Johnson, as well as engaging deeply with the work of Joanna Macey, Thich Nhat Hahn, Monica Gagliano and Robin Wall Kimmerer. 

​

Embodied Ecology is the groundswell of the past 15-years of becoming. 

Its purpose is to steward and co-create spaces to practice belonging in the web of life, and is the name given to my body of work cultivating biologically rich soils for personal and planetary transformation.

Soil is alive. And this life in our soils is the foundation of existence. Everything I do starts from this biological reality. I've designed and coordinated regenerative agriculture projects across intentional communities in Germany, South Africa, and Egypt, from a 150-hectare biodynamic farm to CSA market garden to farm-to-table retreat centres. My work is as much about designing, building, and getting my hands dirty when it comes to growing good food as it is about stewarding the consciousness shift that is needed to uphold new ways of relating with land. 

​​​

15 years ago, at a kitchen table, I asked how food could heal us.

I'm still answering that question. I live it every day from the ecovillage in South Africa I call home. From the small patch of land that I steward along with Elephant House, a gathering space dedicated to fostering the creative arts and land-based skills. 

I teach and consult wherever I am invited and if anything I've shared resonates, whether you fund this work, grow food, or are simply seeking your own way back into reciprocity with the earth, please reach out.

​

With heart and soil,

Ceri