Instead of inviting us deeper into relationship—with land, with lineage, with our own lived cosmology—dominant culture tends to flatten spiritual work into personal development, performance, or escape. For animists, mystics, sensitives, and those who simply know in their bones that everything is alive, this disconnect can feel like a kind of soul abrasion, a steady friction between what we’re told to value and what our spirits know to be true.

The Quest Series offers a different way to meet that tension. Rather than bypassing the fractures in our cultural and personal lineages, it turns toward them with honesty, compassion, and skill. This training is not about adopting someone else’s tradition or attempting to replicate the practices of our Ancestors as if they were static relics. Instead, it is about cultivating a living, breathing relationship with the place we inhabit, the communities we’re part of, and the unseen kin who walk with us. It asks us to step back into right relationship—slowly, deliberately, and in reciprocity with the beings who shape our everyday lives.

A core premise of The Quest Series is acknowledging that many of us walk what I call “the broken path.” This doesn’t mean our paths are wrong; it means they’ve been disrupted—by colonization, by forced migrations, by cultural erasure, by religions that separated spirit from land, or by modernity’s demand that we prioritize productivity over meaning. In fact, I’d even say the path isn’t and has never been broken. Rather, our awareness of it has. Instead of pretending those ruptures don’t matter, this work helps us respond to them with integrity. It teaches us how to build something new: something authentic to our place, our calling, and our lived reality, without appropriating from cultures not our own.

This process requires creativity, but it also demands ethics. The Quest Series emphasizes both. Through guided practice, embodied ritual, and ongoing reflection, students learn how to cultivate cosmology in a way that honors lineage without reenacting harm, and that brings forward practices rooted in relationship rather than imagination alone. It is a path that values accountability as much as inspiration.

Community is central to this approach. While spiritual work is often framed as solitary, animism insists that there is no such thing as isolation. Through mentorship, ritual-building, and deep witnessing, participants learn to tend soul—personal soul, ancestral soul, and collective soul. We explore how the health of the individual is bound to the health of the community, human and other-than-human alike. This is not metaphor. It is a living truth that becomes increasingly clear as we engage the work: when one part of the web is tended, the entire field changes.

Experiential learning is at the heart of The Quest Series. Students don’t simply think about animism—we practice it. We listen to land. We engage ritual as a vessel for meaning rather than performance. We learn to navigate shadow, not as something to conquer, but as something to understand and integrate. We build skills for tending the dead, supporting the living, and honoring the thresholds that shape every life. In doing so, we begin to embody a future in which spirituality is not merely personal, but relational, ecological, and rooted in place.

Ultimately, The Quest Series invites participants to remember what many cultures once knew: that we belong to a vast network of kin, seen and unseen; that our spiritual lives are inseparable from the land beneath us; and that tending soul is both a personal practice and a communal responsibility. Through this training, many discover that their spiritual path isn’t broken after all—it’s simply waiting to be reclaimed, reimagined, and re-woven.

The Quest Series is the precursor to The Spirited Path, the longterm intensive that I mentor. The Quest Series begins again in January 2026. Registration is now open.

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S. Kelley Harrell, M. Div.

Kelley Harrell is an animist, author, deathwalker, and death doula held by Tuscarora, Woccon, and Sissipihaw land. For the last 30 years, through Soul Intent Arts she’s helped others ethically build thriving spiritual paths. Her work is Nature-based, and centers soul tending through the Elder Futhark runes, animism, ancestral tending, and deathwork. She hosts the podcast, What in the Wyrd, and also writes The Weekly Rune as a celebration of the Elder Futhark in season. Work with her in the Runes for Change community or in her intensive soul tending training, The Spirited Path.  Full bio.

#beyourcommunity ~ #youareecosystem

elder well, die well, ancestor well

@kelleysoularts