Our Offerings
Rites and Responsibilities offers a wide range of community, land-based, and online offerings, all oriented toward the long, slow work of cultural repair, healing, and regeneration. These offerings include, but are not limited to:
Beyond our established offerings, the Rites & Responsibilities team is committed to supporting individuals, groups, and organizations through customized offerings suited to the emergent needs of each community and individual we work with.
If you are interested in working with Rites and Responsibilities to customize an offering, please reach out.
The 9-Month Course
The Rites and Responsibilities 9-month course offers an online communal inquiry and initiatory journey for those committed to generating meaningful passages in their lives, families, and communities. While this has previously been offered as a white caucus space to facilitate dialogue and repair within settler lineages, we are listening for what best serves the community in this next cycle of offerings, and may offer this as a cross-cultural, multi-racial course.
Designed for educators, therapists, guides, healers, organizers, mentors, parents, youth and community leaders, and anyone ready to roll up their sleeves and co-create rites of passage for their community, this curated, online series is based on Rites and Responsibilities: A Guide to Growing Up [Link to: The Guide site page] and learned best practices in the field of rites of passage.
Over nine months, in a slow-and-steady arc, we will build a community of mutual care, support, and accountability as we bring meaningful, culturally-responsible rites of passage ever more deeply into our lives, families, and communities. As we study, share, reflect, practice, grieve, organize, and celebrate, we will create space for our points of connection and shared experience as well as honoring the intersectional differences between us. Participants will receive individualized support for the specific contexts they are working in and/or work in caucus spaces to deepen their practice.
“This course has changed my life. I no longer move from a place of urgency, instead I center my relationships with my human and more than human kin and move from a place of deep listening, embodiment, and heart centered action.” – RR
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Participants will:
Connect with others working to bring forth meaningful processes and practices for growth into their communities
Explore the resurgence of rites of passage today, and how these efforts fit in with decolonization and other global change movements
Explore human development from neurological, psychological, cultural and ecological perspectives
Reflect on the impacts of sexuality and consciousness-shifting substances in their own initiatory journey, and the roles they play in rites of passage more broadly
Explore the role of identity development in rites of passage, including: dynamics of power, privilege, oppression, and difference; the ways these manifest in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ability, class, citizenship, and more; and how this impacts our work and those we serve
Investigate the causes, consequences, and complexities of cultural appropriation, and co-create ancestrally-rooted, culturally respectful alternatives
Build capacity to design and/or lead healthy passages, for themselves or others in their community
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This course is for you if:
You are committed to healing, justice, and healthy passages for yourself and your community
You value learning in community
You yearn for authentic, meaningful, emergent culture
You see a connection between individual and cultural healing, wellness, and transformation
You are able to show up with care, grace, and self-awareness in community
You are committed to ongoing learning and inquiry regardless of how much work and learning you have done already
This course is not for you if:
You are committed to specific outcomes and deliverables on a set timeline
You’re not interested in the connection between rites of passage and social justice
You aren’t willing to make space for others who use different language than you do
You don’t have time and space in your life to devote to the ongoing study aspects of this course
You are looking for fixed answers to the questions we are engaging
There are two structures for this 13 Moons Journey:
A 13 Moons Journey
The Rites & Responsibilities 13 Moons Journey offers a year-long cycle of learning and exploration held by natural rhythms, seasonal shifts, and support from a core Rites & Responsibilities guide of your choice.
It’s a simple, organic, and emergent process: we’ll work together to identify a clear theme for the journey, articulate intentions, and customize a basic map for a one-year (13-moon) cycle of learning and exploration. This includes identifying general areas of focus. This focus may be a body of work you’ve been dreaming of bringing into the world, or could be an area of inner exploration that needs some containment and support. Next, we’ll identify some specific tasks and practices to be engaged according to the natural rhythms of the day, moon, and seasonal shifts. This might be specific earth intimacy practices, for example, or creative projects that will be part of the arc of your time.
Once we’ve set out a map together, you’ll be invited to give yourself over to the process, tracking what emerges as it relates to the intentions you’ve called forth. We’ve experienced powerful learning, growth, and transformation by the end of the year’s cycle.
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The 13 Moons Apprenticeship offers a work-trade option for the journey: apprentices serve as a research and/or communications support in exchange for support and guidance during the year-long process. Typically, this trade is on a 5-to-1 hour basis, meaning that Apprentices devote 5-10 hours per month to supporting Rites and Responsibilities research and communications in exchange for 1-2 sessions a month throughout the 13 moons. Generally, apprentices are provided with 3-4 projects they might contribute to depending on skills and interest areas, and select 1-2 that most resonate with them.
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The 13 Moons Accompaniment offers this year-long journey on a sliding scale basis:
One coaching session per moon: $1600-3000.
Two coaching sessions per moon: $2600-5075.
Both bundles include two preparation calls, one integration call, text/email support for the duration of the 13 moons cycle, and the sharing of materials to support your 13 Moons Design Process.
As with all of our work, if cost or payment schedule is inaccessible, please reach out with a proposal for what would feel accessible, and let’s work together to see what’s possible.
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After years of searching for the kind of soul-based healing that she needed in the wake of childhood sexual abuse, Marisa Withey Byrne came to a conclusion: she was going to need to create her own pathway for healing, with the tools she'd gained through ceremony and rites of passage. 13 Moons was born, as Marisa created a process for her own learning and healing, and transformed her suffering into a curriculum for holistic sexual health.
Watching Marisa's process, Darcy was inspired. As she too set about articulating and developing her own body of work--Cultural Habitat Restoration--she went on her own very different 13 moons journey, which she called an "embodied exploration of boundaries and flow."
Along their journeys, both women watched as others became curious about their process, and wanted to embark upon their own 13 Moons journey. The two women began offering their story and framework for others, and immediately saw how the principles and processes could translate as a simple template for healing, learning, and self-initiation that could serve others on their own creative edge, without a clear guide to follow, as they bring together bodies of work, find paths for healing, and offer their gifts to others.
Methow Valley Offerings
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
To stand like slow-growing trees…
If we will make our seasons welcome here,
Asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
The lives our lives prepare will live
Here....
—Wendell Berry, “Work Song Part 2: A Vision”
While distance-based learning supports cultural repair in vital ways, Cultural Habitat Restoration [link to: organizing philosophy page] is ultimately place-based work, rooted in particular lands, waterways, and communities. Working in our home ecosystems, we meet the land in embodied practice, and learn what’s possible when we work together, in place, to foster emergent, relational, local potential.
At Rites & Responsibilities, we are cultivating the intentions of Cultural Habitat Restoration in the traditional homelands of the mətxʷú people, in the Methow Valley of North Central Washington. We see this as long-term, multigenerational work, done in slow relationship between individuals, communities, and organizations. Our intention is to support community systems to make it easy for any and all in the Methow Valley to access:
Spaces to mark and support change at multiple levels - personal, social, and cultural;
Multi-cultural, cross-class, intergenerational spaces for truth-telling, healing and repair;
Accessible, interfaith ritual spaces designed to help us process and be with the complexities, stressors, and griefs of our times;
Coordinated public spaces in which seasonal cycles (in our lives and in the world) can be explored, honored, and marked.
Resources to support sufficient livelihood for community practitioners, healers, artists, culture workers, and visionaries to offer their gifts toward healing in our community and beyond.
Working in our home ecosystems, we meet the land in embodied practice, and learn what’s possible when we work together, in place, to foster emergent, relational, local potential.
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Since 2018, in partnership with the Methow Valley Public School Funding Alliance, we’ve brought elements of Rites & Responsibilities into local classrooms and coordinated field trips to local Indigenous Cultural Revitalization projects.
Since 2022, we’ve offered an annual land-based ceremony, including a 4-day/4-night solo, for people in the Methow Valley community (along with some beloveds who have traveled here to participate).
Additionally, we’ve convened a variety of one-time and ongoing circles for dialogue, ritual practice, and mutual support. Along the way, we've been learning what forms of cultural support and repair foster accessibility and participation in meaningful and relevant ways in a small-town community. We continue to listen for what best serves our community now, as well as what serves our long-term vision of restoring right relations (between people and people, and people and place) and preparing this valley for generations to come.
For more information about our offerings, upcoming events, or opportunities to collaborate, please check out the Nourishing Futures events page, follow up on Instagram, or join our mailing list. And you’re always welcome to reach out to us directly! -
“The Methow Community Ceremony, rooted in Rites & Responsibilities, was one of the most meaningful ceremonies of my life. It was both an affirmation of who I am and a life-changing experience. To be supported, encouraged, and challenged by such skilled practitioners and guides as Darcy and Scott, was remarkable. Through the practices of council, listening and speaking from the heart, rituals of letting go, and solo time on land. they helped me to see myself more clearly and the gifts that I can offer my community. Remembering who I am in this interconnected web of creation is a gift indeed!”
— David Lafever
“Darcy’s lessons, professional expertise and educational background have greatly benefited both myself and my students throughout our 15 years of collaboration. Darcy has facilitated over 20 interactive workshops, field trips, panels and discussions with both my Junior High and High Schools students. In her wise and thoughtful approach, Darcy challenges students to step out of their comfort zones to discuss intricate topics such as cultural appropriation, racial and ethnic diversity, pertinent social justice issues, and the difficult history of how colonization affects Native American tribes and settler communities. Darcy has not only shown me how to improve my own teaching practice, but has also modeled how to be a conscientious member of society.”
— Dani Golden
