#Living earth knoxville tn professional

Eventually, she took on the role of director of Narrow Ridge, making a fraction of the income she made as a medical professional in Nashville. Over the next few years, she would craft a plan to extract herself from the comforts and consumerism of her cookie-cutter suburban existence to pursue a life “boiled down to the essentials” in a rural landscape, bringing her husband, Jason Von Mizener, along for the ride.

Two months after her mountaintop experience, Wood-Von Mizener signed a lease in one of the land trusts managed by Narrow Ridge. There’s truth in both, and you can’t get that from any sacred text, it’s something you have to experience.” You have the opportunity to feel both your smallness and your significance.

You think you are going on the mountain alone, you realize you are not alone, at all. I had a real sense that the squirrels, the birds, the groundhog that approached my campsite, were very aware of me. The sheltering trees, the low mountains, it’s nurturing. There’s a nesting feeling, whether you are in the valley or in the trees on the mountain. Something in my DNA was connected to this type of place. “Even though I grew up in Hendersonville, my family for generations had been Appalachian. “I fell in love with the mountains,” Wood-Von Mizener says. Alone in the woods, hollow with hunger, Wood-Von Mizener derived meaning from the metaphors she saw in the landscape and wildlife, experiencing an unfolding of peaceful insights, and the growing certainty that she belonged there, right there, in the lush woods on the edge of Hogskin Valley. At the root of Narrow Ridge is Nickle’s effort to lead people to forge a profound personal connection with the natural world, to develop a love for the earth that inspires land conservation and sustainable lifestyles. She did find “good people” in the quiet, deliberate Nickle, a Methodist minister now in his 70s, who imparts a message of environmental unity and social tolerance. Because my phone’s dead and I’m in the middle of nowhere,” Wood-Von Mizener says. I came out here and I thought, Oh my gosh, I hope these are good people. “Bill sent me a copy of handwritten directions. In her suburban house in Hermitage, Wood-Von Mizener read and was inspired by Stephen Foster’s The Book of the Vision Quest, in which Foster describes a “mystical, practical, and intensely personal journey of self-knowledge.” She found Narrow Ridge through a Google search (Tennessee + vision quest.) Tennessee has an underground counterculture streak though interest in Narrow Ridge has ebbed and flowed over the years, with financial woes nearly tanking the retreat in the early 2000s, a recent wave of devotees has breathed new life into the community. whose members call themselves Radical Faeries and locally, The Ridge, Rollo Sullivan’s “third-world paradise” of fainting goats and houses built with reclaimed trash in the woods of South Knoxville. There’s The Farm, a former hippy commune in Middle Tennessee Short Mountain Sanctuary, the LGBTQ collective near Smithville, Tenn. Yet, Narrow Ridge is one of several alternative communities that carved out a space in the inexpensive, secluded land of rural Tennessee. Guided by Narrow Ridge founder Bill Nickle, the solo-fast participants engage in wilderness survival training, three days and three nights of fasting and solitude, and a sweat lodge ceremony.ĭeep in the backwoods of the politically conservative state of Tennessee, this eco-minded spiritual retreat, started in the 1970s with a 40-acre parcel of former farmland, may be an anomaly in some ways. This solo fast on the mountain is part of an eight-day nature immersion experience, one of the flagship programs at Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center, a 120-acre spiritual retreat that controls conservation easements on nearly 500 acres near the small town of Washburn, Tenn. My biggest fear was that I’d come to the end of the three days with no transformation, no change.”

But I was ready for the clarity I was seeking. There was fear of being alone, and fasting is not easy for me. It was summer, very humid, and very green. For three days and three nights, Wood-Von Mizener wandered alone in the mountaintop wilderness, eating nothing and drinking little. I n 2005 Mitzi Wood-Von Mizener, a psychologist in her late 30s with a home and practice in the suburbs of Nashville, hiked up Log Mountain in rural Grainger County on a vision quest.