Gathering 1 – The Gathering

What to bring

Remember to bring your planted seeds (if you have planted them) or your unplanted seeds (if you have received them) or (if you haven’t received them yet) bring a pot full of the earth into which you intend to plant them when they arrive. The work we do during the project we do on behalf of the part of our soul that is like them and the part of their soul that is like us.

Also bring the tales of your experiences with the Story and your work cultivating a place for the Story in your midst.

On the call – the Circle

I’ve been wondering greatly about what I would invite us to engage with on our call tomorrow. But no matter the wonder, no answers presented themselves – and, feeling obliged to offer a meaning-filled endeavour to us all, I began to worry that nothing had yet presented itself to me until, today, it came. Out, planting hazel saplings, I could hear the whispers – whenever we come into a space, we are never alone – we bring many people with us – all unseen, some human, some more than human. I realized that is who I would like us to speak to tomorrow – I’m inviting you to tell the stories of some of the unseen people you bring with you into the Circle so that the rest of us can be introduced to your people.

All of us have a trail of ancestors that leads back – back to the time when all of our ancestors knew themselves to be deeply at home, at home in the way Martín tells us of the Pueblo people of his youth. All of us born in the West lose the thread of that trail at some point: some of us know our lines a few generations back, some of us maybe know nothing at all of the thread. What we share in common is the cultural amnesia, the loss of what it is like to be deeply at home. In the Circle we can speak to some of these human ancestors that we have because of heredity, because of adoption, or because they eldered us when we needed eldering and we have inherited the obligation to remember ourselves as one of theirs.

Being at home requires an exquisite awareness of the place unto which we are born and the live. All of us where born somewhere and some of us may still be living in the place they were born unto – but many of us born in the West find ourselves in a land very different than where we were born, perhaps even speaking a different language than the one we heard growing up or a different dialect. In the Circle we can speak to these lands and these languages: the ones we still have and the ones we’ve lost.

These are the unseen people we bring with us as we come into the Circle tomorrow – some will come unbidden, some invited, but come they will. When it is your turn in the Circle you will be invited to introduce them to the rest of us.

Our time together

Remember (if possible) to sit down in a quiet place (if you are blessed enough to have such a place) to remember us coming to find you about 10 minutes before you open the link to the call.

Tomorrow we will have a sharing Circle. I will open the room at 7pm UK time and we will have up to 2 hours together and then we’ll close the Circle until next time we meet. I can imagine that we might be able have multiple times around the Circle to share, depending on how many are able to call in.

A hundred blessings to those of you had the rare stamina to make it this far and read these words!