Gatherings

Death is one of the few experiences every one of us will encounter, and yet most of us have very few places where we can actually talk about it. We grieve people we've lost. We anticipate the loss of people we love. We experience endings that change us. Sometimes grief is immediate and consuming, and sometimes something that happened years ago suddenly finds its way back into our lives. I've spent a lot of time close to death, both personally and through more than two decades of working with people through trauma, grief, and profound change. One of the things I've learned is that there is no right way to do any of it.

Death & Soup is an invitation to spend an afternoon making room for our experiences of death, dying, grief, and loss. We'll begin with an embodied ceremony, followed by an invitation to share what you're carrying, what emerged, or simply to listen. You might come with a recent loss, an old grief, someone who is dying, an ending you're moving through, or curiosity about your own relationship with mortality.

There are things we long for that are easy to name, and others that live somewhere beneath language. A person. A place. Touch. Belonging. Freedom. Rest. Adventure. A different way of living. Something we've lost, something we've never had, or something we can feel pulling at us without quite knowing what it is. We're often quick to do something with our longing. We pursue it, judge it, dismiss it, try to satisfy it, or convince ourselves we shouldn't want what we want.

The Ache & The Offering is an invitation to spend an afternoon getting curious about the things we ache for without needing to make them happen or make them go away. We'll work with the body, the land, movement, symbolism, and quiet reflection, allowing longing to be something we experience rather than something we need to solve.

There is a particular kind of longing that can live in the absence of a mother. Whether we have lost her to death, distance, circumstance, or the necessary boundaries of our own lives, there can remain a place in us that still reaches toward being gathered in, tended to, and carried. Motherlessness can leave us feeling strangely untethered in the world. We may have spent years being capable, caring for others, or even carrying our own mothers, only to discover that somewhere beneath all of that strength lives a much older desire to put our weight down and be held by something larger than ourselves.

The Motherless Wild is a ceremony for women who know this longing. We will gather on the land with what has been lost, what was never received, what remains unfinished, and what still lives within us. There is room for the mothers we loved and lost, the mothers we needed, the mothers we could not safely remain close to, and the mothers we may never have known. The wild knows something about belonging without asking us to explain where we came from. For an afternoon, we will let ourselves be daughters again and become curious about what it means to be carried by the earth beneath us, the women beside us, and whatever mystery we each understand to be larger than ourselves.

We are wired for connection. We need one another. We want to be seen, chosen, touched, understood, and loved. And sometimes, without realizing it, we begin to organize so much of our experience of love around where it is coming from, who is giving it to us, and whether or not it will stay. But love is much bigger than what happens between two people. There is a capacity for love that lives within each of us, with its own particular shape and expression. The way we love, what we are drawn toward, what moves us, what we find beautiful, what we tend and protect, what awakens our tenderness, desire, devotion, and awe.

Re-centering Love is an invitation to spend an afternoon exploring that inner landscape. Through the body, the natural world, and ceremony, we'll make room for curiosity about our own experience of love and the ways it wants to move through us. We'll also widen our attention to the many places love exists beyond romantic partnership: in friendship, community, the living world, creativity, beauty, grief, and mystery. This isn't about needing other people less or convincing ourselves that we should be enough on our own. It's about remembering that no single person was ever meant to hold the entirety of our experience of love.