Beginner’s Grove

A Place to Practice Belonging

I'm Diane.

For most of my life, I taught women how to be fierce, independent, and self-contained.

Now I'm practicing something harder.

After decades as a therapist, retreat center founder, and devoted partner to a Zen Buddhist monk I loved for 28 years — I find myself in Missoula, Montana, rebuilding connection from the ground up. Not as an expert. Not as a guru.

As a woman learning how to belong again.

Beginner's Grove is where I document that experiment in real time. The grief that rides along without being rushed. The village being built one reciprocal friendship at a time. The cold plunges, the handpan lessons, the lotus-shaped sourdough, and the honest conversations about what it takes to start over late and mean it.

Not how to transcend the world — but how to stay in it. Not how to go it alone — but how to build a we.

If you're somewhere near me — geographically or in your bones — and you recognize something here...

Pull up a chair. The gate is unlatched.

Read the Blog
A Working Manifesto

If something here feels like recognition, write to me.

I'm especially interested in hearing from people in or near Missoula who are building something similar in their own lives.

diane@beginnersgrove.com

Soft Signals From the Grove
Podcast hosted by Diane Adams Presents: April & Diane

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Watch Here 👉

Meet Diane(The Village Experimenter)

For thirty years, I worked as a trauma therapist and addiction counselor. I believed deeply in self-sufficiency, resilience, and doing the hard inner work.

Then life unraveled my certainties.

Widowhood. Loss. Burnout. Letting go of a retreat center, an identity, and a long love affair with someone who was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I thought I was building independence. What I was really longing for was interdependence.

These days I live in Missoula, Montana — cold plunging in mountain creeks, making lotus-shaped sourdough, playing handpan, cleaning houses, and building village one reciprocal friendship at a time. At 73, I'm less interested in teaching people how to be fierce and more interested in learning how to be woven.

I don't have a ten-step plan.

I have a lantern, a notebook, a stump in the forest, and a willingness to practice in public.

If you're somewhere in your own unraveling — or rebuilding — you're welcome here.

What Is Beginner's Grove?

Beginner's Grove is a quiet corner of the internet for people who are rethinking independence.

It's not a self-help empire. It's not a personal brand. It's not a masterclass in enlightenment.

It's a living experiment in belonging — documented in real time from Missoula, Montana.

Through essays, podcast conversations, and small observations from daily life, I explore what it looks like to build village slowly, practice reciprocity out loud, stay boldly curious in later seasons, and let lightness back in without pretending the hard parts aren't there.

This is not about fixing yourself.

It's about participating.

On Reciprocity

I am no longer interested in one-way giving.

Beginner's Grove is not a platform built on performance or extraction. It's a place to practice mutual presence.

Reciprocity here might look like reading and responding thoughtfully. Sharing something with someone it might steady. Bringing your own stories into the grove. Showing up lightly and often.

We are not building followers here.

We are practicing participation.

The gate is open.