About Ansley
I’m Ansley, a guide in bioregional plant wisdom, dreamwork, and wilderness traditions. My work centers on foraging, seasonal study, wilderness journeys, and ceremonial practice as ways of learning to belong to ourselves, each other, and the land. My teaching is grounded in ecology, skill, and story. I believe that the best kind of learning is that which unfolds slowly through attention and lived experience.
I do this work because the wild world steadies us in seasons of grief and guides our hearts to the gifts each one of us offers. Remembering our belonging in nature and to ourselves is how we create stronger, more resilient communities that hold each other and the Earth together.
Hey!
I’m really glad you’re here.
“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
– Mary Oliver
What do I do?
For more than a decade, I’ve taught nature-based education across forests, farms, arboretums, nurseries, national parks, and remote backcountry sites. I co-founded a wilderness school in the Pacific Northwest, where I guided youth and adults in forest school, survival skills, herbalism, foraging apprenticeships, ancestral crafts, council, ceremony, and seasonal retreats.
My offerings include leading women’s circles, backpacking trips, grief ceremonies, dreamwork gatherings, sustainable garden design, craft workshops, and immersive land-based intensives.
My training is shaped by apprenticeships in herbal medicine, plant spirit practice, wilderness rites of passage, council facilitation, and dreamwork through both traditional and contemporary mentors. I hold a B.S. in Environmental Science with a focus on forest ecology and bioregional communities. So it is important to me that I blend practical wilderness living skills with an animistic approach to ecology. What lives in my work today comes from years of tending land, walking trails, holding circles, and learning alongside the people I guide.
Lineage behind book bindings
I am also a voracious reader so a good chunk of my lineage also comes from the books I carried through deserts and forests: field guides, myth-tellers, and writers who treat nature and psyche as one seamless wild. Their words still echo through my work.
A blog post with my favorites is coming soon!
How can we keep in touch?
I post regularly on Instagram about nature @Plantsleyy. You can also read my work on my Substack publications, From Cedar to Psyche or A Forager’s Diary. Feel free to Contact Me about my offerings or to connect.
