Our Story

How Wildbrook Canopy Came to Be

Long before Wildbrook Canopy had a name, we were already being called into the wild.

When our children were little, Trish began taking them into the woods and wild places around our home in Connecticut almost every day. She watched their imaginations come alive there. The forest became a place for wandering, making, storytelling, discovery, and play.

It was also the beginning of a different relationship with the natural world. We were learning to notice. To pay attention. To become curious about the life of a place.

We began to long for a life that felt more connected to that world.

In 2015, we found a piece of land in southern Vermont, a hillside between two ridges with a brook running through it.

We began coming whenever we could, camping, playing in the brook, wandering the woods, and slowly beginning to know this place.

Eventually, we built our home and began creating the life we'd imagined.

But the more rooted we became, the more something else seemed to be asking for our attention.

We kept being called out into the forest.

The forest became more than a backdrop to our home. It became somewhere we returned to again and again, to wander, play, read, write, think, imagine, and simply be.

And our own paths were changing, too.

Trish's lifelong curiosity about what lies beneath the surface led her work in theatre and storytelling into the forest, first through Forest Theatre and then through Essence.

Alan's path took him into his own exploration of purpose, initiation, ritual, and vision. Through men's work, vision quests, and wilderness ritual, he began to experience the forest as a place of encounter.

The paths were different. But they kept leading us back here.

And somewhere along the way, something shifted.

What had begun as a longing for a more connected way of living became a deeper question about our relationship with the living world itself.

We began to experience the forest not simply as a place we go, but as a world in its own right, alive with mystery, beauty, intelligence, and wonder. A world that is other than us, and yet the world from which we come.

And we began to sense that something in the outer wild was meeting something in the wild within.

That there are parts of ourselves we cannot fully know apart from our relationship with the living world.

Wildbrook Canopy grew from that realization.

It grew from this place, from the paths we've each walked, and from a relationship with the wild that continues to unfold.

What becomes possible when we step outside the world we've made and into the world that made us?

~ Alan & Trish