We Eloped!!
Alia
&
Hayden
How We Met
In July 2018, our paths synchronistically crossed in the wild mountains of Colorado. We were both taking bold steps in our lives and the Vision Quest called to each of us as a meaningful way to embark into a larger conversation with the world. Although we went to claim our authentic individuality, the experience wove our lives together in unexpected ways through falling in love and receiving a shared vision of a more beautiful world. This vision arises from a love of creation and an intention to shape our lives as though this love matters; this vision is a living prayer of humble participation within our planet’s evolutionary process toward a life-sustaining future. And so for the past five years, we have been in grounded service to stewarding this vision through growing the love between us while living in community and stewarding the lands where we have called home. The first iterations of this vision have looked like implementing regenerative farm systems, facilitating community design processes, guiding wilderness connection ceremonies, hosting seasonal gatherings and offering experiential place-based education. Over the past five years, we have cultivated our love through practicing intentional living, leaning into what matters to us, integrating limitations and fear, and supporting each other and other visionaries to have the courage to say an ever-deeper yes to the invitation to sow, cultivate, disseminate, and cross-pollinate seeds of a life-sustaining world.
The Wedding Ceremony
In July 2023, after spending two months apart, we reunited in Colorado and re-visited the land where we first met at the Vision Quest in 2018. Our intentional time apart this spring had only deepened our love and solidified our trust, and so we sensed this time on the land that first wove our lives together would be a deepening of our vows. We first ventured out to our solo sites where we had fasted alone for four days, in order to honor our past selves for having the courage and audacity to follow some invisible force that brought us there almost five years ago. We then walked down from our separate summits to meet one another in the wildflower meadow between our solitary solo sites. There, witnessed by the elementals, ancestors, animals, storm beings, mountains, hawk, coyote, and future ones, we self-facilitated a marriage ceremony to deepen our partnership agreements and mark our transition into sacred union. At the moment we exchanged vows, a hailstorm opened up above us and thunder echoed throughout the valley. Shortly after, as we exchanged rings, the sun broke through a crack in the storm clouds, gracing us with a golden glow of loving affirmation. We decided to enact this commitment ceremony in order to more fully and officially weave our lives together because over the past five years, it has become increasingly clear that through growing a safe, sacred, process-relational force of unifying love, we can together serve our sovereign and interconnected missions more fully here on earth.
Our Living Vision
Since we met in 2018, we have carried a vision that was gifted from the earth and amplified by our shared love for one another and life in all forms. We call this vision The School for Ecocentric Evolution & Design Strategies (SEEDS) but it has many other names and is arising within the minds of hearts of so many of our times. It is a vision of remembering our innate belonging and beginning to participate in life’s process of creative unfolding. This union is called to help grow oases amidst the ecological and spiritual desertification of our times through sowing seeds of a life-affirming world. We see this world arising through the sacred cracks that exist at the intersection of the individual, community, and ecological domains of experience. For the past three years, we have been applying our design principles within community-based settings. We are excited to explore next applications of our ecocentric design principles in both theory (check out our Graduate Fund opportunity) and praxis (check out our Land Fund opportunity). Our guiding vision is to help sprout a globally-networked set of localized educational praxis hubs in various bioregions around the world that are leading the way in designing, implementing, studying, researching, educating, cross-pollinating and articulating the viability of diverse life-affirming ways of being for life now and far into the future.
Wedding Registry
As a celebration of our sacred union, we are inviting support from our sacred web of family, friends, community, and loving acquaintances. If you feel called to support us as we deepen our commitment to the love that sources the vision we carry, please review our registry of love funds and contribute to whatever extent you are able to do so. Thank you for your consideration!
Important Note! After a donation submission the confirmation page may have trouble loading which has lead some to submit a donation a second time. If the conformation page does not load please do not submit your donation again as the donation in all likelyhood was successful. If you would like to confirm you can email us at alia.hayden.love@gmail.com sorry for the inconvience we are trying to get the issue resolved.
Important Note! After a donation submission the confirmation page may have trouble loading which has lead some to submit a donation a second time. If the conformation page does not load please do not submit your donation again as the donation in all likelyhood was successful. If you would like to confirm you can email us at alia.hayden.love@gmail.com sorry for the inconvience we are trying to get the issue resolved.
More About Us
Hayden Shaw
Hayden is an experienced circle-holder and ceremonial guide. He is trained as a nature-based soul guide and permaculturalist. He is self-taught in ontological design processes, philosophy, primal movement, and evolutionary astrology. Hayden integrates these versatile modalities into his work as an evolutionary catalyst, striving to help root visionary ideas into tangible forms in service to the wellbeing of life and consciousness now and into the future. He is currently preparing to pursue a Master’s degree in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College in the UK.
Alia Yarrow Stewart-Silver
Alia tends the fertile intersection of individual healing, cultural development, and ecological stewardship. She weaves together the diverse threads of her background as a licensed therapist, restorative justice and anti-oppression cultural facilitator, permaculturalist, rites-of-passage guide, and poet. Alia has applied this breadth of experience to founding a thriving holistic therapy practice, facilitating group learning and process spaces, guiding earth-based rites-of-passage, implementing regenerative food systems, and imagining hubs of localized regeneration.
Love Poems by Alia Yarrow
These love poems reflect transcendent moments and salient themes that have arisen throughout the course of this unfolding love story. Alia strives to use poetry as a means to honor the transformative power of love over time.
This Changes Everything
We did not go to the mountain to find love, we went to die to our past selves and claim our rightful place on the earth. We went to bury our limited beliefs and settle business with our ancestors. To occupy our bodies as warriors and to strike out toward our True North adulthoods. We went seeking death and rebirth, vision and mystery. In a society that has forgotten how to...
Flux and Reflux
The ebbs and flows of our love keep me spinning and swimming toward some solid ground. In search of this land, I peer both inside myself: deep into the marrow of my bones, the height of my full upright posture, the ever-present beating of my heart. And I peer also into the space between us: the warmth of your hand in mine, the primal force of our interlocked gaze, the dreams we speak...
Cosmic Stars
The light that pours forth here within and between us cannot stay here. It is destined to keep expanding outward beyond this cob-walled house through the cold moist autumn New England full-moon night, past the foggy fields thick with brightly colored trees amidst the dance of their changing form - one last hurrah as they let go of who they’ve been and surrender the leaves of their bodies as an...