Just Love Forest is not a place most people stumble upon.

It’s a place you are led to.

You didn’t arrive here by accident.

This land carries a blessing that is rare and quietly powerful. Just beyond the noise of modern life, it rests a stone’s throw away Chattooga Town, once one of the most vital Cherokee cultural centers of life, governance, learning, and ceremony. Indigenous peoples lived, prayed, traveled, and made decisions here in deep relationship with springs, forest, and red clay. The land still holds that imprint.

Later, this place was renamed Poetry by Serpentfoot, a local legend as a poet and spiritual provocateur who believed that the forest is the master teacher and that we are all just, “a little part of nature.” Her presence anchored a radical idea here: that spirit does not belong only in temples or texts, but in the body, in the earth, and in daily life lived with conscience. Hear our first conversation with her here.

Today, Just Love Forest carries these lineages forward as something increasingly rare, a 716-acre conservation ashram devoted to protecting nature while offering refuge for people. Especially in the Southeast, places held explicitly for spiritual practice, compassion, and long-term stewardship of the land are few and far between.

This is not a place to consume experiences.
It is a place to be changed.

If you feel drawn here, it may be because something in you recognizes what this land remembers: you are part of it.

We invite you to step into this story, not as a visitor, but as a participant in something living.

The Ancient Appalachians and the Memory of the Sea

The Appalachian Mountains are among the oldest mountain ranges on Earth.

Long before the Himalayas rose, long before the Rockies were formed, these mountains already existed. They have been worn down and reshaped over hundreds of millions of years, softened by time, water, and erosion. What remains is not dramatic height, but great age, a depth that is felt more than seen.

The Appalachians carry a kind of quiet lore. Not the lore of sharp peaks and sudden upheaval, but the lore of endurance. These mountains have witnessed oceans come and go, continents collide and separate, and life emerge, vanish, and return again.

Here at Just Love Forest, that deep history is not abstract.

Along the trails near Basecamp, we regularly find fossilized seashells embedded in stone and soil, clear reminders that this land was once beneath an ancient sea. These shells are not rare museum pieces; they appear casually, unexpectedly, underfoot. A spiral. A ridge. The unmistakable curve of something that once lived in saltwater, now resting in forest clay.

To hold one is to feel time collapse.

The presence of seashell fossils here tells a geological truth: hundreds of millions of years ago, this region lay beneath a warm, shallow ocean. Layers of sediment accumulated on the sea floor, compressing over immense spans of time into limestone and other sedimentary rock. Later, tectonic forces lifted those layers upward, folding them into mountains. What was once ocean became ridge. What once held fish and shell became trail.

This knowledge changes how the land is felt.

When you walk these paths, you are not just moving through forest you are walking on the remnants of an ancient sea. The ground beneath your feet has already lived many lives. It has been water, pressure, darkness, uplift, and erosion before becoming soil again.

Many people describe a feeling of humility when they encounter these fossils. Others feel awe. Some feel a strange comfort. The body seems to recognize something older than memory, a reminder that change is not an interruption of life, but its most consistent pattern.

This is the backdrop for everything else that unfolds here. Before human trails, before ceremony, before names or towns, there was ocean. And before ocean, something older still.

The Appalachians do not announce their power loudly. They speak through time, through stone, and sometimes through a small seashell resting quietly on a forest path.

Iron, Quartz, and the Quiet Physics of a Vortex

When people speak of vortexes, they are rarely speaking about a single force. They are speaking about convergence.

Across the world, places described as energetically powerful tend to share a similar underlying condition: the meeting of ancient stone, mineral density, and moving water. In particular, two elements appear again and again in these landscapes, iron and quartz.

Iron carries weight. It anchors. It draws energy downward into the earth and into the body. Quartz, formed under immense pressure and heat, holds structure and clarity. It stabilizes and organizes. When these two coexist in the ground, especially in land shaped by great age and slow movement, they create a field that many people experience as grounding, coherent, and alive.

This is not mythology alone. Iron-rich soils and quartz-bearing stone interact subtly with electromagnetic conditions, especially in the presence of flowing water. At the same time, these same materials affect the human nervous system through sensation, gravity, and perception. The body responds before the intellect arrives.

At Just Love Forest, both iron and quartz are present in abundance throughout the land.

The red clay beneath the forest floor carries iron in visible abundance, staining stone, soil, and skin after rain. Quartz appears more quietly, threaded through rock, scattered in creek beds, embedded in the ancient Appalachian bedrock. Springs move through this mineral-rich ground continuously, rising, traveling, and returning again.

Together, these elements create not a dramatic surge of energy, but a gathering one.

Rather than lifting awareness outward, the land draws it inward. Breath slows. Muscles soften. Thought loosens its grip. Many people feel heavier in the best sense of the word, more present, more settled, more here. This is the hallmark of a grounding vortex: not stimulation, but coherence.

Just Love Forest is not Sedona. There are no towering red spires announcing power from a distance. The force here is quieter and older. It comes from the slow companionship of iron and quartz, from water moving patiently through stone, from mountains that have already lived through oceans and upheaval and learned how to rest.

If vortexes are places where energy gathers rather than scatters, where the body remembers how to belong to itself, then this land carries that quality deeply, expressed not in spectacle, but in steadiness.

Here, the power does not pull you away from yourself.

It brings you home.

Indigenous Land Acknowledgment

Just Love Forest exists on land that has long been inhabited, cared for, and traveled by Indigenous peoples. This region was home first to Muscogee (Creek) peoples, including the predecessor tribe, the Koasati, and later became part of the Cherokee homeland. These Nations lived in deep relationship with the forests, waters, springs, and trails of this place, developing systems of governance, learning, and spiritual life that long predate European settlement.

We acknowledge that this land carries the memory of Indigenous presence, displacement, and survival, including the impacts of colonial expansion and the forced removal of Cherokee people along the Trail of Tears. We offer this acknowledgment as an act of remembrance and respect, and as a commitment to steward this land with care, humility, and responsibility for future generations.

Koasati: Early Inhabitants of This Region

Before the formation of later political confederacies, the land that is now northwest Georgia was inhabited by Indigenous peoples whose presence reaches back many centuries. Among these were the Koasati, also known historically as Coushatta, a Muskogean-speaking people whose ancestral homelands extended across parts of what are now Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and the broader Southeast.

Over time, Koasati towns became part of what Europeans later referred to as the Muscogee Nation, often called the Creek Confederacy. This confederacy was not a single tribe but a flexible political and cultural alliance of many autonomous towns, linked by language families, kinship, ceremony, and mutual defense. The Koasati retained their distinct language and identity while participating in this larger Muscogee world.

Naming the Koasati here is not a symbolic gesture toward a distant past. It is an acknowledgment that this land was known, inhabited, and cared for long before colonial boundaries and before the political labels imposed by outsiders. Their presence is part of the oldest human story of this place.

The Muscogee Presence

Long before this land carried modern names, it was part of a vast Indigenous world shaped by rivers, forests, and seasons. Among the peoples who lived here were the Muscogee Nation, known to outsiders as the Creek.

The Muscogee Nation did not begin as a single tribe. It emerged over many centuries from earlier cultures that learned how to live well in this landscape - farming fertile valleys, managing forests with fire, and moving along waterways and ridgelines that guided travel. Independent towns governed themselves while remaining bound through ceremony, kinship, and shared responsibility.

Central to Muscogee life was the Green Corn Ceremony, a sacred annual ritual marking the ripening of the corn and the renewal of the people. This ceremony was a time of fasting, forgiveness, purification, and gratitude. Old grievances were released, fires were renewed, and the community began again together. Corn was not merely food, it was life itself, a gift from the earth that bound people to land, season, and one another.

For generations, Muscogee communities lived throughout what is now northwest Georgia. They planted corn, beans, and squash, gathered from the forest, and oriented their lives around water, soil, and ceremony. Springs and rivers were not simply resources, but living presences woven into spiritual and daily life.

As colonial pressure intensified in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this way of life was disrupted. Following war and coerced treaties, Muscogee peoples were forced from much of their homeland and removed westward. Their displacement opened north Georgia to further encroachment, including later Cherokee consolidation in the region.

Though removed, the Muscogee were never erased. Their presence remains embedded in the land -in the fields once planted, in the fire-shaped forests, in the paths that follow water, and in the enduring memory of a people who understood renewal not as progress, but as returning again and again to balance.

Muscogee: Removal and Power Shifts

By the late 1700s and early 1800s, increasing pressure from British, Spanish, and later American expansion destabilized Indigenous life throughout the Southeast. After the American Revolution, the state of Georgia aggressively sought to acquire Indigenous lands for cotton cultivation and settlement.

A series of treaties, often coerced or signed by limited representatives, stripped the Muscogee Nation of much of their territory. The most decisive blow came after the Creek War (1813–1814), which culminated in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. This treaty forced the Muscogee to cede more than 20 million acres of land to the United States, including large portions of central and northern Georgia.

As Muscogee towns were destroyed, displaced, or forcibly relocated westward, a power vacuum emerged across parts of north Georgia. This displacement did not mean the land became empty, but it did open space that was increasingly contested and targeted by settlers and the state.

Cherokee, Chattooga Town, and the Five Springs

Following this period of upheaval, the Cherokee Nation consolidated and expanded settlement into northwest Georgia. By the late 1700s and early 1800s, Cherokee towns, farms, and governing centers were well established across the region. Chattooga Town was located in the area that is now Lyerly, Georgia, placing what is today Just Love Forest within the immediate cultural and geographic landscape of this important Cherokee town.

Chattooga Town was not a marginal settlement. It served as a center of Cherokee community life and, for a brief but critical period in the early 1830s, functioned as a seat of Cherokee governance when other centers became unsafe under increasing pressure from the state of Georgia.

The importance of Chattooga Town is inseparable from the work of Sequoyah, who developed the Cherokee syllabary in this region in the early nineteenth century. The syllabary enabled widespread literacy within a single generation, allowing laws, teachings, and stories to be recorded in the Cherokee language. This achievement strengthened cultural continuity and sovereignty at a moment of escalating external threat.

Cherokee movement through this landscape did not follow fixed roads in the modern sense. Travel was guided by water, terrain, and seasonal knowledge. Springs were essential points of orientation, places for drinking, rest, gathering, and ceremony, and trails often followed spring-to-spring pathways through the forest.

The land now known as Just Love Forest is part of an area, notable for a concentration of five natural springs, aligned in a pattern consistent with historic Cherokee travel logic in the Appalachian foothills. While colonial maps did not record the names of every Indigenous pathway, regional scholarship and oral tradition describe spring-based travel corridors connecting Cherokee towns such as Chattooga with surrounding valleys and ridgelines. The spring network at Just Love Forest sits within this broader corridor of movement that once radiated outward from Chattooga Town.

These were living trails rather than engineered roads. They shifted with use, followed shade and contour, and reflected a relationship with the land based on attentiveness rather than domination. Even today, the forest reveals this older logic: paths curve toward water, clearings appear near springs, and sound carries differently where water emerges from the earth.

Cherokee: The Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears

Despite the cultural integration efforts by Sequoyah and others, Cherokee sovereignty was not respected by the state of Georgia or the federal government. In 1830, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the forced relocation of Indigenous Nations east of the Mississippi River to lands in what is now Oklahoma.

Georgia moved swiftly to assert authority over Cherokee land, nullifying Cherokee laws, seizing gold-rich territory, and distributing Cherokee land to white settlers through the Cherokee Land Lottery. Legal resistance by the Cherokee Nation, including a favorable ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, was ultimately ignored.

Between 1838 and 1839, the Cherokee were forcibly removed from their homelands in what became known as the Trail of Tears. Thousands were rounded up, held in stockades, and marched west along routes that passed through and near present-day northwest Georgia. An estimated 4,000 Cherokee people died from exposure, disease, starvation, and exhaustion during the removal.

A Landscape Marked by Successive Displacement

What is now Chattooga County and the surrounding region bears the imprint of these successive removals. Muscogee peoples were forced out first, followed by the Cherokee a generation later. Each removal was justified through legal language, but enacted through violence, coercion, and profound human suffering.

The land itself did not change hands peacefully. It was stripped from one people, then another, before being opened to settler ownership. Trails that once carried families, trade, and ceremony were repurposed as military routes and removal corridors.

Understanding this sequence matters. The Cherokee did not simply replace the Muscogee; both Nations were caught in the same expanding machinery of colonial displacement. The history of this land is therefore not only one of habitation, but of loss, and of resilience carried forward despite it.

The Civil War and a Fractured Land

The Civil War passed through this region like a deep wound.

Northwest Georgia sat close to major theaters of conflict during the American Civil War, particularly as armies moved through the Appalachian foothills and surrounding valleys. Rail lines, supply routes, and rural farms were drawn into a war that reached far beyond the battlefields themselves.

Though no major battles are recorded directly on this land, the war reshaped daily life here. Farms were stripped for food and forage. Rail corridors were contested and disrupted. Families were divided, sons sent away, and uncertainty settled over communities that had already endured generations of displacement and upheaval.

For many in this region, the Civil War was not experienced as grand strategy or ideology, but as loss of labor, of stability, of life. Enslaved people seized moments of chaos to escape when they could, while others endured continued bondage until emancipation arrived unevenly and incompletely. The war’s end did not restore what had been broken; it marked the beginning of another long period of reconstruction, scarcity, and change.

The land absorbed this chapter as it had absorbed others.

Fields once worked were abandoned or replanted. Rail lines were repaired, rerouted, or left to fade. Forest slowly reclaimed what violence and extraction had disturbed. What remained was not triumph, but endurance.

To acknowledge the Civil War here is to recognize that this land has been shaped not only by ceremony and cultivation, but also by conflict imposed upon it. It has known division as well as belonging. And yet, like the mountains themselves, it endured, holding memory without becoming defined by it.

Rail, Orchard, and the Long Path Through the Land

After removal, the land entered another chapter of human use, one shaped by agriculture, rail, and rural life rather than ceremony and council.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this area was part of an agricultural landscape sustained by small farms, orchards, and local trade. The community then known as Tulip was not a town of grand scale, but it was active and productive. The surrounding land supported crops and livestock, and the climate proved especially favorable for fruit.

Just beyond what is now Just Love Forest, near Kincaid Mountain, stood a well-known peach orchard and a small hotel that served travelers and workers moving through the region. Peaches from this area were valued for their flavor and resilience, and orchards once dotted the hillsides. Even today, remnants of that era remain. Scattered through the forest and along old clearings, a few of those native peach trees have survived, gnarled, feral, and still bearing fruit, quietly persisting long after the structures and commerce that once surrounded them have disappeared.

The railroad was the artery that made this agricultural life possible.

Tracks were laid through the landscape, connecting Tulip and neighboring communities to wider markets and movement. The railroad carried peaches, timber, and goods outward, and brought people, news, and supplies inward. It reshaped how the land was accessed and understood, carving a linear path through hills that had once been navigated only by foot, animal, or wagon.

Over time, the trains stopped running. The rails were pulled up. But the path remained.

Today, the old railroad grade that visitors cross as they arrive at Just Love Forest has become Simms Mountain Trail, part of the Pinhoti Trail. What was once an industrial corridor has been reclaimed as a footpath, carrying hikers rather than freight.

The Pinhoti Trail stretches hundreds of miles, linking forest to forest and ridge to ridge. It runs north through Alabama and Georgia to Springer Mountain, where it connects with the Appalachian Trail, continuing all the way to Maine. To the south, its broader network reaches toward the Gulf Coast, all the way to Key West, tying this quiet forest into one of the longest continuous walking routes in the eastern United States.

Serpentfoot and the Naming of Poetry

In the twentieth century, this land entered a different chapter of human story through the life of a woman who would come to be known as Anne Otwell, later calling herself Serpentfoot.

Anne Otwell was a poet, editor, activist, and provocateur whose life blurred the boundaries between art, spirituality, protest, and daily service. She founded and published Poets Monthly, a small but influential poetry journal that circulated nationally, and she used poetry not as ornament but as a tool for waking people up. Words, for her, were meant to mean something. Names were meant to carry truth.

In the 1970s, Otwell took up residence in the small, quiet community then known as Tulip, Georgia. Tulip had once been a modest rural settlement, named for the yellow poplar trees native to the region, with a post office that operated from the late 1800s into the mid-20th century. By the time Otwell arrived, Tulip was already fading from formal maps and civic attention.

She renamed the town Poetry.

The act was not symbolic alone. She exposed the vision for poets from all over the world to come live and write here together. Otwell believed that language shapes reality, and that naming a place Poetry was a way of calling forth a different relationship between people and land. Poetry, in her view, was not escapism. It was a way of seeing clearly.

Otwell later adopted the name Serpentfoot, a name she described as representing movement, necessity, and life’s refusal to stand still. The serpent, for her, symbolized endurance and transformation; the foot, movement through the world. “A name ought to mean something,” she said. “It ought to mean more than just talk - it ought to mean reality, or making your dreams come true.”

Serpentfoot became a known figure in the region and beyond. She was outspoken, uncompromising, and at times deliberately unsettling. Her protests, including acts of public nudity framed by her belief that the body itself was not indecent, brought arrests, court appearances, and controversy. Yet these actions were not random. They were part of a consistent ethic: when words failed, she believed the body could speak.

At the same time, Serpentfoot lived a life of quiet, practical service. She housed people in need, corresponded with prisoners, fed animals, and devoted her days to writing, reading, and responding to whoever knocked at her door. She rejected conventional religion while articulating a deeply relational worldview rooted in nature, responsibility, and action. She founded a spiritual group called “Our Greater Self Co-op,” that espoused all wisdom and teaching could be found in nature. The picture at the top of this page is of someone naked mud bathing at one of the Greater Self gatherings! Prayer, she believed, had to become movement.

Through all of this, Poetry remained both a literal place and a lived idea that we carry on now through the practices of nature and forest therapy: You are nature.

By renaming Tulip, Serpentfoot anchored the land in a lineage of meaning-making that echoed older truths, that land is not merely owned, but spoken to; that names carry obligations; and that places can be shaped by imagination as much as by commerce or law.

Today, Poetry remains an unincorporated community, its name a quiet inheritance from a woman who insisted that language, land, and conscience were inseparable. The presence of Serpentfoot is part of this land’s layered story, not as myth, but as lived history, reminding those who come here that how we name a place shapes how we treat it.

Bala, Ram Dass, Neem Karoli Baba, and the Emergence of Just Love Forest

After centuries of movement, rupture, and return, the land returned to a quieter phase, one shaped less by extraction or transit and more by listening.

After series of experiences that carried the clear mandate to “get a forest for healing,” Bala arrived not with a plan to build a destination, but with a question: how to live in right relationship with a place that had already lived so many lives. He did not know any of the recent history of this land when he was lead to it. It seemed to be calling people back to remember truths that can only be found in nature once again.

A student of the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, whose teachings emphasized love, service, and the practice of awareness in everyday life, Bala was also deeply influenced by the lineage of Neem Karoli Baba, an Indian Saint known to many simply as Maharaj-ji. This lineage carries a simple but demanding instruction: love everyone, serve everyone, feed everyone and tell the truth.

When Bala encountered this land, it was not experienced as empty or available, but as already speaking. The red clay, the mountain tops, the springs, the old trails, all suggested that the land itself had been preparing to return more closely to its original kind of relationship with humans. One rooted not in ownership, but in stewardship.

Just Love Forest emerged gradually from that listening and surrender.

Rather than becoming a retreat center in the conventional sense, the land is held as an ashram in the truest meaning of the word: a place of refuge, remembering and practice. Not bound to one religion or path, but grounded in shared values of unconditional love, compassion, service, and presence. This, once again, is now a place where spiritual life is not separated from daily life, and where the forest itself is understood as teacher.

Here, practices unfold slowly. Forest therapy, meditation, ceremony, grief tending, silence, song, shared work. No single tradition is elevated above others. What matters is the sincerity of attention and the willingness to show up with humility. The land is not used to produce experiences, but to support relationship with self, with others, and with the all of the living world.

In keeping with this intention, the land has been protected in perpetuity under a conservation easement and stewarded with long-term care in mind. Development is minimal and deliberate. Quiet is honored. The forest is allowed to remain forest. Trails follow the land rather than impose upon it. The goal is not growth for its own sake, but continuity.

In this way, Just Love Forest becomes a meeting point of many lineages.

The ancient Appalachians.
The Muscogee and Cherokee peoples.
The red clay and the springs.
Poetry named into being.
And now, once more, a living practice of love and service.

Nothing here is meant to replace what came before. It is meant to remember and tend it.

To arrive at Just Love Forest is not to escape the world, but to remember how to belong to it. The land has carried many stories. This is simply the one it is telling now. Now you are part of this story, unfolding.

Welcome to our forest family.