Hawk & Hawthorne: Our Origin Story

Hawk & Hawthorne grew out of a symbiotic community that first came together around Buchi Kombucha more than fifteen years ago. Many of our founders lived and worked alongside one another, building a values-driven business on a beautiful piece of land called Herb Mountain Farm. We traveled together, shared meals and music, and found ourselves immersed in a global community of artists, entrepreneurs and visionaries who longed for a more interwoven and meaningful life.

As Buchi grew, it eventually outpaced its idyllic setting. But the deeper dream -- of chosen family, shared stewardship and building something meaningful together -- was only beginning.

Over the past decade, we’ve traveled widely, learning from ecovillages, permaculture communities and conscious retreat centers around the world. Each place offered a piece of the puzzle. Taken together, our vision clarified and eventually rooted itself on an idyllic piece of land in Appalachia just north of Asheville -- a place stewarded for nearly 30 years as Hawk & Ivy by James and Eve Davis. We are grateful to continue that lineage while tending it in our own way.

At the heart of Hawk & Hawthorne is community -- the ongoing practice of relationship. The alchemy of accountability, care and growth through both our light and our shadow. None of this exists without people willing to show up for one another. Big visions are too much to hold alone. We practice this through shared agreements and intentional ways of living together, in service of creating something that feels closer to heaven on earth each year.

Alongside community is regenerative stewardship -- healing our relationship with the land and dedicating our lives and abundance to cultivating beauty, resilience and reciprocity for our human and more-than-human kin. We believe humans can have a net positive impact on the places they call home. Here, that looks like growing gardens, restoring soil and creating space for people to learn and reconnect through permaculture.

Sustaining it all is what Charles Eisenstein calls sacred economics -- what permaculture describes as cultivating a yield. This is how the land and the people here are supported, and how we share our culture with the wider world. We practice this through hospitality, gatherings, weddings, celebrations of love, and thoughtfully produced events that invite people into deeper relationship with place and with one another.

We encountered many inspiring projects that embodied one or two of these principles, but rarely all three. Something always felt incomplete.

So we chose to grow more slowly. To build one ring at a time, expanding outward from our core values rather than chasing scale.

Nearly ten years in, Hawk & Hawthorne stands as a living experiment -- rooted and evolving, guided by the belief that how we live together matters, and that we can do far greater things together than we ever could alone.