To everyone who’s found their way here,

My first Zen teacher used to say, “No beginning, no end.” And here I am, inviting you into a beginning.

Anonymous Forest has lived in my imagination for years—before I knew it was a brand, before I tended land.

Like many of us, my life took a radical turn during COVID. I had been a committed Zen practitioner, assuming I would follow the path I’d seen before me: therapist to teacher. But then, my community collapsed. The places where I had once practiced closed their doors.

So I turned to the forest. To hidden old-growth groves. I wandered off trail and practiced something I didn’t yet understand.

Lying on the earth, I dissolved into the root structures below. I breathed from root to canopy. I swayed with the movement of the branches. My nervous system began to stretch into something vaster—a field of immense complexity and care.

And the trees told me stories. Stories of how they care for the sick and struggling. Stories of staying connected through fire, drought, storm. Stories of what it means to be community.

Practicing in those cathedrals of wonder, I began to dream. To dream of stewarding a forest. Of creating a sanctuary for wild practice. A contemplative forest.

And maybe, it wasn’t my dream at all. Maybe it was the forest dreaming through me. Who are we to say what moves through us?

One request came clear: Remember.

I asked, “Remember what?” 

 The forest replied, “Only you can remember. You are human. We are forest. We have not forgotten who we are. But you have.”

That’s when a vow opened in my heart: to spend my life tending a forest. Tending to what is forgotten in me. 

Before the land had a name, Skyhorse Sanctuary began to fill my dreams. And over the years, it unfolded, as imagined things do. I found myself living among redwoods, tucked along the wild coast of Northern California.

I wandered the land and found places of practice — hollowed-out old growth stumps to hold my rage. Cliffs to cast off parts of myself I could no longer carry. Ancient cedars of  ancestral memory.

And I began to feel the weight. The weight of the long now.

How do I do something I cannot do alone?

How do I live this vow: to create the legal, economic, and social conditions for intergenerational forest stewardship?

There are real needs: Funds to pay arborists. To support permaculturists. To build the structures that allow people to return to the land.

And deeper needs still:

What are the social rituals, the shared practices of rupture and repair, that allow a community to endure around a shared goal for centuries?

I don’t have answers. Only commitment.