Saturday 31st October, 2-4pm, John Muir Country Park
An invitational call to Earth Council on the Celtic festival of Samhain -marking the beginning of winter.
A collaboration between Sustaining Dunbar and Wendy Robertson Fyfe
Free but booking essential and donations welcome.
We will be meeting in the dunes, between the salt-marsh and the sea at John Muir Country Park (detailed instructions sent on booking).
Please ensure you arrive for a 2pm start, allowing for a 20-30 minute walk to get there. Please dress warmly for colder weather. If you have a portable chair/stool, please bring that with you for sitting comfort or/and a blanket. If heavy rain is forecast then we will postpone.
There was a long, long time when humans sat together in circle, to be with one another in a specific way at such thresholds and particular poignant times to listen and speak from the heart to the heart of the matter with the seen and unseen, heard and unheard worlds. Earth Council is such a way to gather, to take time to listen deeply together from the heart and to speak from the depths to who and what matters in this crisis of human culture and wild nature times. Are you feeling called to bring your listening and speaking heart to invoke and plant different kinds of seeds before this winter?
What are we willing to offer of ourselves, even risk, at this time as we begin to remember, realise and live into Earth being Primary? Earth Council is not about ‘doing’, ‘fixing’ or saving, though maybe ‘something’ emerges previously unconsidered from it, such as from an experience of belonging to something much bigger. As John Muir stated, “When we try to pick anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” This includes us humans.
Earth Council is about being present with ourselves and each other, towards creating space to speak truth from the listening heart in the spontaneous moment without judging, comparing, criticising ourselves or/and one another. We will be including the voices of the intelligent ‘others’, the ‘more-than-human’ world, who are longing to ‘catch our hitching ear’. In this Earth Council we assume that every‘thing’ is in the conversation, is animate, and that we are all participants in an Earth Community beyond as well as including the humans. Hence, we will also be listening to the voices of the birds, wind, water, clouds, deer, grasses, dunes, the tiniest insect, shells and more. We will also be listening for what these wise ones want us to hear through their own Earth expressions and ways of being hitched. We will be remembering the Ancestors and calling the Future Ones.
“Our love was born
outside the walls,
in the wind,
in the night,
in the earth,
and that’s why the clay and the flower,
the mud and the roots
know your name.”
Pablo Neruda