Preparing To Die

Rev. Sara Jolena Wolcott, M.Div, directs the eco-theology initiative Sequoia Samanvaya. Prior to fully engaging in ministry, she worked in over nine countries as a climate change social science researcher, which showed her that the multi-crises is fundamentally a spiritual and cultural challenge. Whilst pursuing her life-long call to ministry via Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, she learned the importance of re-originating the story of climate change into the Doctrine of Discovery/colonization (and the European witch hunts); this became her foundational online course, the ReMembering Course, and led her to start Sequoia Samanvaya after graduating from the Seminary in 2017. For the last nine years, she has served leaders called forth by Earth in these precarious times at the intersections of climate change, spirituality, decolonization, time, origin stories, storycrafting, and legacy.   This includes developing tools, theologies, and rituals around circular/spiraling time as key to eco-spirituality.  As an ecotheologian, she has been teaching, preaching, writing, and advising organizations as varied as Land Justice Futures, Family Office associations, and literary initiatives such as the Dark Mountain Project.  She holds an MA in Science, Society and Development from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in England and a BA in Anthropology with a focus in arts and religion from Haverford College, PA. Raised in a Quaker community (and with a herd of horses) in California, she now lives in the Hudson Valley with her partner alongside the Mahicanattuck, the River that Runs Both Ways, aka, the Hudson River.