An Overview of What You'll Find in the BSS Dark Forest
AUGUST 31ST, 2026
Editor's Note: Today we revised the welcome email that goes out automatically to all new members when they sign up. Since we've scrapped our membership program, dropped all the previous keyholder groups, and completely rearranged the desktop 'furniture' as the DFOS team releases new feature sets, we wanted to send this to all current members of our space to help everyone get re-oriented.
The team has announced another big redesign coming in September, along with the release of Yancey Strickler's new book The Dark Forest Era about what happens after the age of social media... so we may send another overview next month!
Welcome to Black Stone Sanctuary, an interfaith dark retreat project in Oregon stewarded by contemplative animists with a goth nesting instinct. We describe what we do as "open source modular monasticism" centered on the concept of darkness-as-healing-force.
Friends of Black Stone Sanctuary (FBSS) is our minority-owned-and-operated religious service entity that caters to animists and polytheists. FBSS welcomes people of all faiths, genders, orientations, and ethnicities.
If you're just joining us and want to learn more about what we do, here are some good places to start:
If you're new to DFOS and the concept of the Dark Forest Era of the internet, you can learn more here:
Our landing page has a navigation bar at the bottom that takes you directly to our chat, calendar, store, and blog (where you can click on a topic of interest to sort by that topic). There's an arrow pointing to our shared desktop.
On our desktop, the BSS Dark Forest space is loosely organized into rooms (folders):
- About Us - welcome, intro, overview, + history. We've just imported our entire Substack archive of posts into DFOS.
- Shrine + Meditation Rooms - meditation videos, liturgy, shrines to the obscure Germanic/Nordic goddesses we venerate, and a tea room.
- Coming soon: spaces for petitions and prayer requests from the community.
- Dark Retreats + Dream Incubation - monthly dark moon mini-retreats and studies of dream incubation (enkoimesis).
- Ambient + Drone Music - Atmospheric music playlists, deep listening, sound healing, temple dance, + archived material from the former Endarkenment music newsletter.
- Mood Boards - documenting the BSS vision in imagery. Made with the Same Energy visual search engine.
- Contemplative Garden - animism, plant intelligence, aromatics, wildcrafting, etc.
- Ancestral Lineage + Genealogy - a personal project by BSS Creative Director Danica Swanson investigating her Swedish and German lineage.
- Eugene + Portland nodes - folders for city-specific announcements, events, etc.
We also use our DFOS space as the HQ for our small-press publishing venture (in collaboration with our sister project Studio Slowcore), and as a space to coordinate toward our big long-term aspiration: seeding a small monastic community using a middle housing approach (tiny homes, cottage clusters, etc.) through a community land trust + limited-equity housing co-op model.
Ultimately, our intention is to establish digital and physical spaces for FBSS that can outlive the early stewards and be passed on into the care of the next generation of contemplatives in minority religions.
We scrapped our original plans for a membership program in favor of simple, straightforward in-house commerce: publications, guidebooks, prayer printables, liturgical materials, and hand-crafted monastery gifts, all of which are being released exclusively through our Dark Forest space.
Our shop currently offers downloadable prayer printables for Nótt, Skadi, and others, including our 'Lower Powers' series (Mordgud, Nidhogg, etc). Our liturgical materials are publicly available and can be purchased by anyone on a pay-what-you-want basis. All sales proceeds support our pro bono outreach, hospitality, and worship services.
Take your time, look around, and make yourself at home. As you might expect for a space catering to contemplatives, it's very quiet and slow-paced.
We have a chat room for introductions. Intros are optional, but for those who opt in they get attached to a little card that can be found through your member profile, so new folks who join in the future can read the room and get a sense of who's here.
There's no schedule and no obligation. Our slow-moving chat rooms are open to all members. Read for awhile, comment on posts or join a conversation when you feel like it, and if you have a question, ask it in our hospitality suite (chat). Or just lurk and read. Lurkers are welcome.
If you decide BSS isn't for you, you can leave anytime without any pressure or side-eye from us.
