Go Listen to the Mountain: Propagating the Sacred from 'Holler to Hilltop

Abstract

Go Listen to the Mountain is a journey intended to enliven in people dormant sacred landscape relationships that are critical for successful ecological stewardship. Located in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains, it proposes a seven-stage walking trail that uses its varied topographical conditions to cultivate and distribute diverse communities of regionally significant plants. The sites are also choreographed to provide a cyclical energetic experience designed to iteratively weave new sacred human-landscape relationships by people’s movement through the seven stages, as well as their participation in a three-part ritual at each: the cultivation, preparation, and consumption of that specific plant community. As people and plants go forth beyond the trail, they seed the world with the meanings and relationships generated upon it.