Sep 26-28, 2008
New ways of imagining and knowing, new possibilities for the future are unexpectedly emerging during these very dark times. We are asked to face the grief and sorrow of what western civilization has become; we are asked to step away from what acts against the natural world and against life; we are asked to act on behalf of ‘all our relations.’ These requests that we change our minds and lives meticulously also portend great beauty for us. Exactly when our global circumstances are so difficult, we are blessed with luminous dreams, visions, stories, startling alliances, interventions of fate, surprising synchronicities.
The soul work calling to us is inevitably rigorous, fierce, demanding, inspiring, surprising, and beautiful. Dreams, animals, the elementals, the spirits, and perhaps the Divine, are insisting that we change our lives and assumptions.
One way Spirit speaks to each of us is through the individual stories that are asking us to live them. Each of them is a universe — unique and complex. Our stories can reveal the work that we are being called to, by spirit, on behalf of the future beings. Our task is to step into the stories that we have been given to live, to become vision, to become the transformation the future demands.
We will use writing, dream telling, story telling, examination of our lives, council, meditation, prayer, and divination to discover the stories that are coming to us. From the beginning of time such means, as well as alliances with animals, plants, and communications from spirit have guided communities, warning of dangers, articulating the paths of healing and peacemaking, revealing the true nature of the universe. We will identify, as best we can, the stories and paths that are calling to us. We will examine our own lives; we will offer ourselves to the future.
These questions will focus our investigations: How do we step away from human centeredness and become earth centered? Who are we being asked to become? How shall we live? What alliances with the natural world are we each, individually, being asked to make? What is our relation to the future beings whose ancestors we are?
Click if you would like to read an article we published in our newspaper The Center Post.
Deena Metzger is a compassionate healer, passionate woman, political activist, spinner of myths, spiritual explorer, novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, lecturer, educator, and psychotherapist. She is concerned with the ecological relationships between nature, psyche, politics, spirit, and imagination. Her most recent books are From Grief into Vision: A Council; Entering The Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing, and Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn. She has written many other books including Tree, Writing For Your Life, and Intimate Nature: Women’s Bond with Animals. Her retreats are powerful and deeply moving, as is Deena herself. We wouldn‘t offer this program if we didn’t believe that Deena, and all who are summoned by this call, can make it happen.