Soul Cultivation Now
The Village
is Alive Again
For ten thousand years, human beings have lived in villages — small enough to know each other, large enough to hold the full range of life: birth and death, grief and celebration, the young and the old, the neophyte and the elder. We have lost this. We are rebuilding it.
The Lineage
The Abalone Village — Ukiah, 1980s
In the 1980s, Scott Sherman and four co-creators — Lisa Bregger, Jeanne Wetzal, Joanne Witte, and Sue Anderson — brought a village into being. They called it The Abalone Village. Centered in Ukiah, California, in the heart of Mendocino County.
They gathered on the solstices and equinoxes. They held potlucks and weekend work parties. They developed practices, shared ceremonies, raised children, tended the land, and wove something real: a community held together not by institution or obligation, but by genuine care and shared ritual.
The Abalone Village ran for seven years. When Scott and Joanne moved north to Eureka, the village did not end — it gave birth to a second one. The impulse carried forward, as it always does when something real has been built.
Soul Cultivation Now is the living continuation of that lineage. The same impulse, extended beyond geography — into the digital commons, where the village can include anyone, anywhere, who hears the call.
The Roles of the Village
Every village needs the full range of human experience. Every role is honored. None is more important than another — only different in its gift.
Neophyte
Explorer — Free
You have just arrived at the edge of the village. You are listening, watching, beginning to feel what this place is. Welcome. There is no test, no performance required. Simply be here.
Gift to the village: Curiosity. Openness. The willingness to begin.
Participant
Pioneer — $30–60/yr
You have decided to walk the path. You show up for gatherings, engage with the teachings, bring your questions and your presence. The village grows stronger because you are in it.
Gift to the village: Commitment. Contribution. The courage to participate.
Wisdom Keeper
Full Cultivator — $120–240/yr
You tend the living knowledge of the village. You go deep, document your journey, share what you are learning. You are part of the living research. Your experience becomes part of what this community knows.
Gift to the village: Depth. Discernment. The responsibility to carry what you know.
Elder / Avatar
Guide Program
You have walked far enough on your own path that you can walk beside others on theirs. Not directing — witnessing. Not leading — accompanying. The Elder is the most needed role in modern culture and the most rarely filled.
Gift to the village: Presence. Patience. The art of witnessing without fixing.
The Heartbeat of the Village
The Ritual Calendar
As the Abalone Village gathered on the solstices and equinoxes, Soul Cultivation Now marks the same turning points — with online gatherings, new teachings, ceremonies, and community calls. The wheel turns. The village gathers.
December 21
Winter Solstice
The longest night. The return of light. Ceremony of gratitude and intention.
March 20
Spring Equinox
Balance. New growth. Planting of seeds — literal and spiritual.
June 21
Summer Solstice
The longest day. Celebration, abundance, the height of energy.
September 22
Autumn Equinox
Harvest. Gratitude. Preparing to release what is no longer needed.
Live gathering schedule in development · Village members notified first
What Village Life Looks Like
Seasonal Gatherings
Online and in-person ceremonies at the solstices and equinoxes. Scott leads. The community gathers. Music, sharing, teachings, ritual.
Potluck Spirit
Work parties, shared projects, co-created content. The village is not a platform you consume — it is something you contribute to.
Living Research
Your experience — documented and shared — becomes part of the village's collective knowledge. You are not just a member. You are a researcher.
Vision Quests & Rites of Passage
The village holds the container for the big transitions. Adolescents coming of age. Adults at crossroads. Elders completing circles. The community witnesses.
Shamanic Practice
Drumming circles, shamanic journeys, breathwork — practices drawn from Scott's 40+ years of training, offered to the village on a regular basis.
The Game of Soul Cultivation
An ongoing living game of growth, tokens, milestones, and recognition. The village is the game board. Your journey is the play.
At the Apex of Transformation
Stories That Remember
The village is not a new idea. It is the oldest human arrangement there is. These stories — fictional and mythic — carry the memory of what we once were and are straining to become again. They lend credence to the vision. They remind us: it has been done. It can be done again.
The Clan of the Cave Bear
Jean Auel
Ayla's journey from neophyte outsider to medicine woman and bridge between worlds. The Clan itself is a living village — elder wisdom, ceremony, the young learning from the old, survival and the sacred woven together. Grounded in real Paleolithic anthropology.
Always Coming Home
Ursula K. Le Guin
A novel structured as an anthropological field guide to a future village culture — the Kesh people. Le Guin imagines what human life could look like after we remember what we forgot. One of the most visionary books ever written about village as civilization.
Ishmael
Daniel Quinn
A gorilla teaches a man that tribal and village life is humanity's natural state — and that the agricultural revolution was not progress but a story we told ourselves. Quinn calls the village way "leaving" civilization. He means returning to what works.
Of Water and the Spirit
Malidoma Somé
Not fiction — but it reads like myth. Malidoma's account of his return to the Dagara village after years in a Jesuit school. His initiation. The living cosmology of a people for whom the village, the ancestors, and the spirit world are one seamless reality.
The Fifth Sacred Thing
Starhawk
A future San Francisco organized as an ecotopian village community — council circles, seasonal ceremony, radical inclusion, the sacred embedded in daily life. A vision of what is possible when a community chooses the village over the machine.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A Potawatomi botanist weaves Indigenous plant knowledge with Western science. The village relationship with the land — gratitude, reciprocity, the grammar of animacy. Every chapter is a teaching on what it means to belong to a place and its people.
Spiritwalker · Medicinemaker · Visionseeker
Hank Wesselman
A paleoecologist and anthropologist begins experiencing spontaneous shamanic journeys into the body of a far-future Hawaiian ancestor — and documents them with scientific rigor. Three volumes of visionary travel that map the inner village: the relationship between ordinary and non-ordinary reality, the role of the shamanic practitioner, and the long arc of human consciousness.
The Bowl of Light
Hank Wesselman with Hale Makua
Wesselman's transmission from Hale Makua — a revered Hawaiian kahuna elder — on the nature of the soul, the aloha spirit, and the ancestral wisdom of indigenous village life. A direct elder-to-elder transmission across cultures. One of the most quietly profound books of our era.
The Village Is Forming Now
The early members shape the culture. The first Elders help set the tone. The Neophytes arriving now will be the Wisdom Keepers of tomorrow. Every village begins with a few people saying yes.