A PLACE OF PRACTICE & INQUIRY
About Dark Hollow
A small farmstead, a living landscape, and a place to ask better questions.
THE PLACE
The land sets the terms.
Dark Hollow is a 13-acre home-scale farmstead in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, in the hills above the Susquehanna River.
The land is steep, wooded, uneven, and not especially interested in behaving like a conventional farm. That has become part of the point.
Rather than clearing the woods and flattening the questions, the work begins with what is already here: forest, slopes, water, native plants, wildlife, and the limits of the place itself. Sheep move beneath trees. Medicinal plants grow under a standing canopy. Native foods become crops. Bees connect the farm to a landscape much larger than its boundaries.
Dark Hollow is a home before it is anything else. The farm grows out of daily life rather than sitting apart from it.
HOW THE PATH GOT HERE
Biodynamics, Anthroposophy & the living world
Biodynamics and Anthroposophy are important roots of Dark Hollow. They offer a way of looking at agriculture, nature, and human life that asks for more than efficient production. The farm is approached as a living whole, and the human being as a participant within nature rather than an observer standing outside it.
That path also passes through Waldorf education, Goethean observation, natural philosophy, permaculture, agroforestry, craft, and ordinary practical experience. None of these needs to be a doorway that closes behind a person. They are different ways of paying attention.
Rudolf Steiner’s agricultural lectures of 1924 gave biodynamics its starting point. A century later, the useful question is not simply what Steiner said. It is what can be practiced, observed, understood, questioned, and carried forward on an actual piece of land.
Leave a Trace grows from the same inquiry. Human beings will leave traces in the living world. The question is what kind: whether our presence diminishes a place, merely passes through it, or can sometimes increase its life, diversity, memory, and possibility.
The ideas matter. So does what happens when they meet the ground.
THE PEOPLE TENDING THE PLACE
A shared life, approached from different directions.
Dark Hollow is the home and work of Allen and Kerry Clements. Their paths into the farm are different, but meet around a shared interest in what happens when land, art, education, craft, food, animals, and ideas are allowed to belong to the same life.
Allen Clements
Allen’s work at Dark Hollow centers on biodynamics, agroforestry, perennial agriculture, woodland medicinals, native foods and spices, land management, and the questions underneath those practices.
He is a filmmaker, writer, farmer, educator, and public speaker. His background in documentary filmmaking and creative work brings observation and storytelling into the life of the farm, alongside an interest in natural philosophy, technology, culture, and what it means to be human in a living world.
Allen speaks with conference audiences, podcast listeners, community groups, and students about biodynamics, regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, human participation in nature, and the ideas growing out of Dark Hollow.
Kerry Clements
Kerry’s work brings art, education, fiber, and animal care into the farm. A Waldorf educator with a background in fine art, she tends the Icelandic sheep and works with the wool they produce.
Her part of Dark Hollow lives especially close to the relationship between usefulness and beauty: animals cared for well, fiber carried from fleece toward finished object, handwork, teaching, and the ways everyday life can remain connected to making.
Not a model. A practice.
Dark Hollow is not an institute, a commercial demonstration farm, or a place claiming to have solved the problem of how people should live with nature.
It is one small place where ideas can be practiced long enough to have consequences. Things can grow. Things can fail. The land can answer back.
The work is to keep paying attention.