Saturday October 12th
2 to 6 pm
Lagunitas-Forest Knolls, CA
A ritual of offer our grief to nourish the earth.
Everyone experiences loss in large and small ways. We aren’t meant to hold it alone and so we come together as a village to hold the grief together. Like a wolf, grief is wild and it can lead us into unknown territory which has its own timeline. It is courageous to reintroduce grief into our inner ecosystem and such an act restores the flow of rivers of joy.
We will have space to explore grief in a safe container amidst a redwood grove. The time will begin with a twenty minute uphill hike to the grove. Entering a ritual space, we will offer our tears held in a container of story, song and witness.
Contribution: $20-40 (no one turned away for lack of funds)
Loss is not an enemy. Loss is an invitation to welcome back to the table of conscious awareness the places that have been abandoned or neglected. It is the voices of those shadowed exiled places, be they those of our inner wounding or those voices outside us, human or more-than-human, that carry the medicine we need to “jump up and live again,” in the words of Martin Prechtel.
The journey to awaken and live a life driven not by unconscious convention, but deeply rooted in authenticity requires metamorphosis. Grief is the food that the caterpillar feeds on as she makes her transformation.
But soul-making is not the work of creating a beautiful immortal butterfly, flying apart and proud. Soul-making is a conscious journey toward death. The journey of becoming an individuated soul is to be cooked into good food for those who come after. It is to become a good ancestor making fertile soil. I surrender to the whispers pulling me away from an easy answer into the depths of mystery that will eventually transmute my body into good compost.
Just for today, let it be enough
to soothe this animal body.
Let’s take a walk
down to the creek in the deep forest.
Feel the softness of the soil.
Let the fragrance perfume you.
A child sits by the water.
Anoint her with the oils of the fir.
Don’t abandon her to her fears.
Speak to her in the language of eagle.
Speak to her in the language of fern.
Speak to her in the language of the thousand-year-old redwood,
so she knows who she is.
Listen, the forest is speaking
to all the frightened animals in its care.
I am one with the porcupine,
whose prickly quills are quieted in the here and now.
I am the one who loves the quills.
I hold the hand of the child.
We walk together to the well.