November 29, 2025
While spending time mostly in my room, keeping my face down during recovery from retina surgery, I have been dreaming of an ideal community! Feeling bold and brave and playful, I’m sharing it in its rough and rudimentary form! Feel free to play along and share your comments!
This is an imagining of the Forgiveness walks Center for Walking, Aging Consciously, And Leaving No Trace.
The ForgivenessWalks Center is a dwelling for a group of people who thrive by walking in Nature to live and work there, supporting each other in conscious aging, dying, and body composting, We also support people in creating fulfilling walks, particularly of the Appalachian Trail. It could be also be the Benton MacKaye Trail – one of those Appalachian Mountain trails.
The Center could be an intentional community that focuses on these topics:
- Connecting to a trail with support, intention, and fulfillment
- Aging and completing our lives in connection with Earth and walking,
- Having our bodies return to the Earth as soil in stewardship, celebration, and legacy.
- Governing ourselves and making decisions with the practices of Sociocracy
Retreats and support could be shared among ourselves and with the public, for example:
Coaching and/or sherpa support for people experiencing the Appalachian Trail in a fulfilling way.
Temporary lodging for trail hikers
A final earthly home for retired hikers
Retreats for exploring and sanctifying one’s journey to the beyond
Workshops for planning fulfilling, transformative walks of a trail – or around the block
Retreats for reframing one’s past and choosing a conscious future
Retreats for learning about Terramation
It could be close enough to the trail that it could provide lodging to hikers walking nearby. Most importantly, residents would come as retired hikers to live out their lives. To accomplish this, it would be a multi-age community with some residents providing assisted living care to the elders. The resident elders could live out their lives there, then have their bodies composted, either at a nearby Terramation facility or in a facility operated onsite. After walking to the ends of our physical lives, we would put our bodies back into the Earth and literally Leave No Trace! We could call it the Leave No Trace Center for Appalachian Trail walkers.
What binds us together is the intentionality of connecting With the Appalachian Trail or Benton MacKaye Trail among ourselves and to hikers who come to us for coaching, lodging, and trail support. What binds us together is the idea of conscious and intentional aging of hikers who Leave no Trace with our bodies through terramation,
Our purposes are:
Physical connection with the trail.
Supporting others in their walks.
Supporting ourselves in conscious aging and dying and returning our bodies to the Earth.
In our daily lives we share goodness, honesty, integrity and the desire to leave no trace except the legacy of our spiritual connection to the trail. We develop a conscious focus on recognizing the meanings of our lives create a way to record and foster that. We strive to influence the culture of the Appalachian Trail as one of reverence, connection, and regarding the trail as a transformational path. We share practices for how to foster this connection.
The ForgivenessWalks Center is a co-housing type neighborhood. It could start as a hostel-type place with living units or rooms for residents as well as overnight short-term lodging for about 20 hikers or retreat participants. On the property or nearby is a Terramation facility that is either a business of the community or an independent business.
It might have direct access to one of the long-distance hiking trails, or maybe proximity to a paved rail-trail that’s more accessible to our aging residents. The Buckeye Trail in western Ohio is an example of this type of trail.
Dreaming forward, in 10 years the dwellings, connecting trail, community house, and terramation facility could be built. Twenty or more residents could be working the businesses of the Center as well as caring for our elders. The legacy would be that there’s this Trail-connecting support place. It Helps people create fulfillment with the trail in their active years, a trail connection for living out our lives, and then a natural rcycling of our bodies.
Just imagine if hikers then can look forward to composting their bodies and literally leaving no Trace and even promoting special soil and gardens right along one of the trails. That would be what people say about ForgivenessWalks – here is a new idea that promotes consciously transformational walks of the Appalachian Trail, helps hundreds of hikers really connect and walk their troubles out on the trail and then have a place to live out their hiker lives, continuing to connect and support others as consciously aging hikers.
This gets to be so popular that each of the states along the trail route then creates a ForgivenessWalk style Aging Center for walking Into the beyond, not just on the trail, but into the beyond, leaving no trace.
The world changes because the ForgivenessWalks Center exists. Now, hikers who connect with the Appalachian Trail really see the spiritual impact of their walk. Many more people connect with the trail as a spiritual path and then enjoy their aging years still connected to the trail, the trail community, and to walking. Finally, their bodies can be a physical outcome and nurturing of the actual land and soil of their beloved trail, a lasting legacy and celebration of their purposeful walking lives.
Regina
November, 2025