Black Stone Sanctuary Dark Forest FAQ v1
MAY 10TH, 2026
Editor's Note/Update: Today (20 May 2026) DFOS opens its doors to the public — a major milestone. If you're just joining us, welcome! You're now a member of one of the pioneer Dark Forest spaces.
We're rearranging the furniture and preparing to launch a membership program, so you're getting an early view of our Dark Forest HQ.
Expect some changes in the coming weeks. If you see something here that interests you but it's still marked invite-only, that might change soon as we make updates to the groups.
Read more about us in our FAQ below. If you have questions we didn't cover here, or if you'd just like to say hello, feel free to drop by our hospitality suite (chat).
We welcome lurkers, however, so take your time to explore our Dark Forest at leisure and don't feel obliged to comment.
What is Black Stone Sanctuary?
Black Stone Sanctuary (BSS) is an interfaith dark retreat project in Oregon (started in 2011) stewarded by contemplative animists with a goth nesting instinct.
What is Friends of Black Stone Sanctuary (FBSS)?
Friends of Black Stone Sanctuary is our global outreach network of members, contributors, and supporters. While we cater to contemplative animists and polytheists, we welcome respectful interest from all walks of life.
Through FBSS (and now through our Dark Forest) we're able to serve allies of multiple faiths and religious practices, both online and IRL.
Where is BSS located IRL?
BSS maintains two nodes of members locally in Oregon — one in Portland, and one in Eugene. In the coming years, we hope to relocate our HQ from Portland to Eugene and seed a small monastic community using a missing-middle housing approach (probably a cottage cluster or tiny home village).
Who's involved?
Danica Swanson serves as Creative Director. Current and former contributors include Trish Deneen, Birka Skogsberg, Michael Grutchfield, Roger Finney, and a few others who prefer not to be named.
What does BSS do?
We sometimes call it "open source modular monasticism" because much of our work can be combined in mix-and-match ways (as building blocks) by those seeking to build a monastic life outside the purview of the available structures. Here's an overview.
Publishing + Curation + Preservation
- Publish guidebooks, liturgical materials, prayer printables, etc.
- Curate and preserve materials such as browsing libraries, special collections, devotionals, and media recs.
- Compile themed playlists of atmospheric ambient + drone music.
- Make videos featuring our prayers and meditations.
Interfaith Hospitality and Outreach
- Host worship services, fellowship gatherings, and monthly dark moon mini-retreats.
- Maintain a members-only IRL library.
Place-Making: The Goth Nesting Instinct + Sustained-Attention Practices
- Create immersive, dimly lit meditative spaces with emphasis on sensory factors like comfort, atmosphere, and subtle feeling tones.
- Make aromatic blends using materials from local PNW conifers such as Douglas Fir and Red Pine.
The FBSS business endeavors — e.g., publishing, paid-tier curation work in our Dark Forest, making commissioned playlists, conifer aromatics — help underwrite the Sanctuary's ongoing religious hospitality and outreach efforts.
Conceptually, our work centers on:
- darkness-as-healing-force
- the goth nesting instinct
- sustained-attention practices
- deep meditative listening + sound-as-nourishment (e.g., vibroacoustic therapy)
- dream incubation
- navigating the imaginal realm (and liminal spaces in general)
Our long-term aspirations include:
- Developing and publishing a "start-your-own-BSS-node" toolkit for organizers interested in replicating, adapting, or extending the BSS model elsewhere.
- Establishing an incremental affordable-housing process model for would-be monastics in minority religions (using the CLT+LEHC model), and publishing our learnings (i.e., doing what we can to make the process much easier for future generations than it's been for us).
We also enjoy doing nothing in particular!
Why does BSS exist?
From our Housing + Worship Space post on DFOS:
Because it is needed.
After a 25-year search we still haven’t found anything else in Oregon — or anywhere else in the States, for that matter — that’s organized in ways that recognize and address our religious needs as contemplative animists and monastics with a polytheistic theology.
We’ve done our best to find what we needed through outreach. We wrote and published essays and blog posts. We hosted monthly dark moon mini-retreats, IRL and online. We started a YouTube channel and a Farcaster channel. We carried on lengthy correspondences and forum discussions with would-be monastics looking for like-minded collaborators. We traveled to Sweden and considered establishing BSS there. We even attended a Christian church out of frustration with paganism!
Believe us, we looked.
At this point it seems our only remaining alternative is to see if we can build what we need ourselves.
What's the goth nesting instinct?
It's the name we've adopted for our vision of building and maintaining slow, dark, quiet, earthy, contemplative, sensory-nourishing places in a world over-indexed on light, speed, stimulation, and ascension.
Doing this in BSS-style means creating dark meditative atmospheres and houses of worship suitable for sustained-attention and monastic practices.
What's DFOS (Dark Forest Operating System)?
A Dark Forest Operating System is a private internet and shared desktop with customizable apps and plug-in capacities. Among other things, it can include group chats, post feeds, browsing rooms, and a treasury... all in one spot.
It's described as infrastructure that facilitates cooperation instead of competition, which we appreciate.
In Seven Years in the Forest, Yancey Strickler writes:
"DFOS makes me excited to be myself online again. It’s not about filling a feed or getting likes. A simpler, more truthful kind of expression. It feels like discovering the internet all over again. [...]
The dark forest isn’t a retreat or a permanent condition. It’s the breeding ground for something new."
If you're the sort of nerd who wants to read about the tech side of this, including the DFOS protocol, you can do that here.
Our Dark Forest has become the new HQ for FBSS. Once we've finished setting up our membership program, our Dark Forest will supplant our Substack.
What is Studio Slowcore?
Studio Slowcore, our sister publishing/curation project that operates Slowcore Press, also has a Dark Forest space with a similar structure and flow. If you like the BSS aesthetic and slow culture, you might enjoy Studio Slowcore too... especially the Public Domain Art Portal (PDAP). Themes include classical living, Germanic mythology, architecture, and interiors.
What's the relationship between Studio Slowcore and Black Stone Sanctuary?
Creatively speaking, Studio Slowcore (SSC) and Black Stone Sanctuary (BSS) are cut from the same cloth. In fact, BSS was born 14 years before the emergence of SSC, so technically SSC operates under the purview of BSS rather than the other way around. Still, we find that SSC insists on being its own entity in practice.
With DFOS we can offer pathways for modular, mix-and-match approaches: members can pick and choose sub-categories to follow according to their level of interest, without signing on for notifications about everything under that particular umbrella.
Members can follow pathways of their own choosing to explore the digital portals and rooms.
How does the BSS Dark Forest space work?
We've opened our Dark Forest to new members, so we're no longer invite-only. Anyone can apply by answering one question at the front door:
How did you find us? DFOS discovery tool? Substack? Metalabel? Word of mouth? Something else?
This question is mostly just a formality to screen out casual drive-bys; it's not an "application" in the standard sense.
There's no admission fee to join our Dark Forest, and no pressure to "engage" once you're in. Lurkers are welcome to just hang out and quietly observe.
Members of our DFOS can always access our gift-feeds free of charge, and connect with us in our hospitality suite (chat). To dig deeper into our hidden treasure troves (browsing libraries), you'll soon be able to purchase keys (access passes) to unlock keyholders-only materials.
Stay tuned, and in the meantime, we hope you enjoy our Dark Forest!
