Every year, the Ranch relies on volunteers to clean cabins, do major repair and upkeep projects, and anything else needed to prepare for guests. Please consider joining us for a week of work, fun, and fellowship!

Register for this session here!

Bring your current project, favorite equipment, and adventuresome spirit to Ring Lake Ranch for a week exploring the fiber arts together. We will enjoy late spring wildflowers, community conversation about faith and fur, and all The Ranch has to offer as we set up our work- and conversation-spaces throughout the wilderness.

There will be opportunities to teach and learn with one another according to whatever we bring: crochet, felting, weaving, knitting, spinning with spindles and wheels, and preparing wool. Show and Tell will play an important role in our time together. We’ll forage for dyestuffs and see what colors we can create! Field trips to Wyoming Wool Works in Dubois, Pingora Yarn in Lander, and a happy herd of Shetland sheep in Crowheart are options in the daytime.

Amy Mears will convene the group and provide a whimsical collection of discussion topics from her haphazard life’s experiences. When not pastoring a collection of unusually odd Baptists in Nashville, teaching preaching for seminaries and divinity schools in the Midwest and South, or learning how to parent people in their early 20’s, she spends time kayaking and hiking, spinning and knitting, and doing chemistry experiments in natural dyeing to no ill effect, so far.

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How do we develop our voices and not simply become echoes to all the noise that surrounds us? What does it mean to proclaim as an agent for change, hope, and possibility, whether it be on public platforms or through interpersonal dialogue? Walking through the lives and proclaiming of Sojourner Truth, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Fannie Lou Hamer, we will talk about what it means to develop our voices and think through strategies for speaking beyond the echo.

This workshop will have both a seminar and practicum element as we work through our own sense of voice while learning from some examples that have come before us. The Rev. Chelsea Brooke Yarborough holds a Ph.D. in Homiletics and Liturgics from Vanderbilt University. She is an ordained minister, a poet, an Enneagram enthusiast, and a lover of leadership development.

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The town of Dubois, WY and the area surrounding Ring Lake Ranch have a rich history that spans centuries and involves a variety of peoples and traditions. This session, co-sponsored by the Dubois Museum, will examine the history of both European settlers of Dubois and the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes. Steve Banks will discuss the history of the early fur traders in the area and Dubois Museum staff will offer presentations on the basic history of the town of Dubois and look specifically at the work of tie hacks that brought railroads to the region.

John Washakie, great-grandson of Chief Washakie, the Eastern Shoshone leader who negotiated the Wind River Reservation boundaries with the U.S. government, will talk about the history of the reservation. Gail Ridgely will discuss the Sand Creek Massacre which was partially responsible for the relocation of the Northern Arapaho tribe to the Wind River Reservation from Eastern Colorado. Millie Friday will talk about her work retrieving the remains of Arapaho children who died at the Carlisle Indian School, a federally-run boarding school for Native American children in Pennsylvania, in the late 19th century. We will also offer day trips to view the remains of flumes, dams, and cabins built by the tie hacks, and sheep traps built by the Sheepeater people, the ancestors of the Shoshone tribe.

This session is full but please contact Amanda Verheul

at amanda@ringlake.org to be added to the waitlist

What if we walked our way into faith, as a pilgrimage? What if where we walked with our feet was as important as what we believed in our heads in shaping our spiritual journey? In centuries prior to the Reformation millions of people made pilgrimages to sites they considered holy, such as Jerusalem, Rome, Trondheim, and Santiago de Compostela. Today pilgrimages are being revived. 225,000 pilgrims travel each year to Santiago de Compostela. Wes Granberg-Michaelson has experienced that pilgrimage; he’s also been with 1 million Christians gathering in Nigeria, and pilgrims going to the Sancturario de Chimayo in New Mexico.

The sessions will explore what it means for all of us to see faith as a pilgrimage. What must we leave behind when we are beckoned unto unknown paths? Wesley Granberg-Michaelson served as General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America for 17 years, from 1994-2011. Earlier he was Legislative Assistant for U.S. Senator Mark O. Hatfield and Director of Church and Society for the World Council of Churches. He currently serves as Chair of the Board for Sojourners. He’s the author of seven books, most recently Future Faith: Ten Challenges Re-shaping Christianity in the 21st Century and the forthcoming Without Oars: Casting Off into a Life of Pilgrimage.

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When anyone asked jazz trumpeter Clark Terry how he made jazz, he’d respond – “Simple – you imitate, assimilate, then innovate.” So it all begins, and so we began – shared attention, communication in listening, and imitation – not just music-making, but all the improvisations of our emergent humanity. This seminar’s playful practice of improvisational song, wordless storytelling, and shared experience-and-reflection noticing and wondering will point us toward rediscovery of ourselves as persons-in-community, shared conscious mind, the image of God that Gregory of Nyssa insists belongs to all of us together in our one humanity.

The Rev. Donald Schell served as a chaplain at the Episcopal Church at Yale, as vicar of a small town congregation in Idaho, and as co-founderof St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. Since leaving full-time parish ministry in 2007 he has served as founding director of Music that Makes Community, an ecumenical and international project to recover and renew oral tradition practices of congregational song. He continues his study of transformative human interaction and communion in daily aikido practice, as a cello student, as a chorister, and as occasional director of inter-generational scripture improvisations.

Paul Vasile is a freelance church musician, consultant, and composer committed to building, renewing, and re-shaping faith communities through music and liturgy. As the Executive Director of Music that Makes Community, Paul is passionate about modeling and sharing leadership practices that sustain the musical and spiritual life of faith communities through the practice of paperless (oral/aural tradition) singing. Additionally, he serves as Director of Music at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, where he directs the Seminary Choir, collaborates with faculty and student worship leaders, and serves as a resource to the wider faith community.

This session is full but please contact Amanda Verheul

at amanda@ringlake.org to be added to the waitlist

The way that Americans engage words has gone through a revolution in the last decade. In this week, for anyone who cares about and work with words, we’ll explore the spiritual practices and practical issues of writing, from shaping ideas and stories to platform development and publishing. Diana and Roger have worked together since 2005, first as writer-and-editor, and then as author-and-agent. They will share from their experience of creating books together, the challenges along the way, and what they have learned about reading and writing in a changing culture of words.

Diana Butler Bass is an author, speaker, and independent scholar specializing in American religion and culture. Her books include the bestselling books Grateful, Grounded, Christianity After Religion, and A People’s History of Christianity. Diana regularly consults with religious organizations, leads conferences for religious leaders, and teaches and preaches in a variety of venues.

Roger Freet works as a literary agent with Foundry Literary and Media Agency. Before joining Foundry, Roger worked as an Executive Editor at HarperOne, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, where he published bestselling authors James Martin, Paul Stanley, Bart Ehrman, Adam Hamilton, Diana Butler Bass, Stephen Prothero, Bruce Cockburn, and Stephen Meyer.

This session is full but please contact Amanda Verheul

at amanda@ringlake.org to be added to the waitlist

Exploding the myths that wisdom is an esoteric gift or spiritual commodity, Diana and Marianne will explore the ways that wisdom guides through all stages of our life, how it can be nurtured and practiced, and what difference it makes in a post-truth culture to individuals and communities.

Diana Butler Bass is an author, speaker, and independent scholar specializing in American religion and culture. Her books include the bestselling books Grateful, Grounded, Christianity After Religion, and A People’s History of Christianity. Diana regularly consults with religious organizations, leads conferences for religious leaders, and teaches and preaches in a variety of venues.

Marianne Borg is a retired Episcopal priest and the widow of Marcus Borg. She is the Founding Chair of the Marcus J. Borg Foundation. She and Marcus have been part of the Ring Lake Ranch experience for many years, which was a transformative environment and community for them both.

This session is full but please contact Amanda Verheul

at amanda@ringlake.org to be added to the waitlist

Humans are a herd species for whom membership means life. Belonging is sacred. This week we will explore the sacred as human belonging in the great web of existence and the Ring Lake horses, a fellow herd species, will be our guides. We will ask horses to mediate a relationship with a belonging that is understood as the deeply embodied remembering of our participatory membership in an infinitely relational universe, an idea captured by the Hindu and Buddhist images of Indra’s Net.

Through this remembering, engaging with horses as a spiritual practice contributes to an understanding of our greater wholeness/holiness with nature, the universe, and God. The week will be limited to fifteen riding participants with prerequisites of unsupervised comfort on and around horses and the ability to mount up without the aid of a mounting block or human assistance. Guests not interested in riding are welcome to register and participate in other activities and evening sessions.

DeWitt Daggett has been a wrangler at Ring Lake since 2015. His previous lives include geologist, audio book producer and publisher, and farrier. DeWitt recently completed an MTS at Iliff School of Theology.

This session is full but please contact Amanda Verheul

at amanda@ringlake.org to be added to the waitlist