About
My name is David Allred
I am a certified Forest Therapy guide, pastor, and poet who has spent more than three decades helping communities slow down and rediscover what brings them alive. My work blends contemplative practice, creativity, and the healing wisdom of creation.
Civic ritual is the art of shaping moments that help individuals and communities remember who they are and imagine who they might become. I learned this practice not in a single classroom, but across decades of leading people through life’s most tender thresholds—weddings, funerals, baptisms, vigils, community blessings, and Sunday gatherings at High Places Community Church, where I’ve served for more than 30 years. Those years taught me how story, scripture, poetry, and shared silence can open a room, soften fear, and invite deeper imagination. That same sensibility now animates my work with Oak Ridge Periodic Tables, and guides my relationships with newer national partners like the National Issues Forums Institute, the New Pluralists, and many others who are busy intersecting where civic life, art, and spiritual presence meet in meaningful ways.
Civic ritual, at its best, becomes a living space where people encounter belonging, healing, and possibility. It happens best locally, but can be found in national networks and spaces of shared collective belonging—even when the specific work we do might differ.
Today, this thread carries through every part of my work—whether guiding forest-based contemplative practices through Deep Calls to Deep, tending the relational ecosystems of Oak Ridge, or equipping leaders in resiliency networks to hold steady in uncertain times.
Civic ritual helps communities honor their histories, navigate complexity, and strengthen the webs of connection that support resilience. In a fractured world, these practices offer a transformative counter-force: weaving people back into relationship with one another, with their inner lives, and with the places they call home. It is both ancient and new, grounded and imaginative—and it continues to be the heart of my vocational calling.
I founded Deep Calls to Deep because I believe healing begins with listening—listening to ourselves, to one another, and to the living world that holds us beneath its one shared sky.
My own soul gets unsettled at times and I find I need calm and connection to the Earth and the stars in order to return to balance. I guide walks because I have found them to be restorative-- and because in community, I often find kindred souls with the same passions for healing our world and making connections.
My work draws from forest therapy, the wisdom of ecology, the arts, and years of civic engagement work. Together, these shape a practice that invites individuals and communities to slow down, breathe differently, and reconnect with the deeper currents that sustain meaningful life.
When I guide a walk, my hope is simple: that people feel invited into presence. Through gentle sensory invitations, poetic reflection, and shared stillness, participants learn to attune themselves to the quiet rhythms of creation. Over time, these encounters become a form of civic ritual—a way of remembering that we belong to one another, and that the health of a community is tied to its capacity for wonder, tenderness, and shared attention.
Deep Calls to Deep also includes occasional astronomy walks, where standing under the night sky reminds us that we are a single community held within a larger story. These moments, simple as they are, invite humility, connection, and the courage to see one another with renewed compassion.
