Gather

Harvesting Quiet Voices
Session 1 Reflection

listening to the time of year

The gardens can’t hold communities in the woods if winds are above 23mph. It’s October, month of harvest, Halloween, Samhain, the shift into the thick of Autumn. The weather calls us to take stock, to gather what the land offers, and to retreat inwards: inside, indoors, together. Listening to the clock and wisdom of the seasons, we moved this session a week later than planned to keep our people safe and respect the storm. This meant that the first weeks focus 'SUMMER’ shifted to ‘AUTUMN’ instead. With these gathers, each session focuses on one season, and so it felt almost coordinated by our first space holder, the land and environmnet itself, to begin where the year descends and where we found ourselves: Autumn.

It is a kind of perseverance to continue gathering outdoors in October, staying in relationship with the elements that shape us, and as much as it feels like a challenge to be at whim to the weather, its worth noticing this too is a way to relate with the elements that shape up. With this being a community offering and participation, as with all funded projects, is considered paramount, deciding to stick with the invitation and keep the sessions going despite fears of storms and ferocious winds, established a sense of solidarity between lead and assistant facilitators, community members, and the tended outdoor space we find ourselves.

Both initiatory sessions for the first expressions of the Nature of Community have began with a storm. *Read about Hawbush Herbalism Hail here.

GATHERING

We arrived in circle gently in the bowl of the community wellbeing garden. Sketchbooks we’re given, blank fields for drawings, notes, fragments. A guided meditation invited us to feel our inner autumn: what is full, what is heavy, what is ready to fall, but most of all, tune into the space and ourselves within the space.

With softened bodies and widened sight, we moved into the wellbeing garden and woodland for a Sit Spot practice, guided by prompt sheets that asked us to notice. This wasn’t action-oriented work. It was attentiveness.

We returned to the circle to share what we heard, sensed, or met; small noticing’s in form or sense, tone, a scent, a tilt of stem, (awe returns easily when invited) - harvesting quiet voices from the more-than-human community.

If I were to write these again, I would change ‘it’ to ‘who’ to instigate deeper relationships within the space.

Together we planted garlic and broad beans, leaving something of ourselves in the soil, whilst providing cover crops for the soil. a promise of future nourishment for the community, and a deepening of knowledge of the food we can grow for ourselves.

Around the table we crafted copper electroculture wands from sticks and twigs of the garden with stones and crystals.

Though there is some differences in opinion on the plausibility of electro-culture, the act of creating something that has the potential to support growth in the garden feels magick. There is an inner child in all of us that wants to make believe; to bend and coil and play with our hands.

This gesture of co-tending is an act of creation, and provides something to hold, supporting conversation through collective action.

SIT SPOT

The Fig
(The Bell Jar - Silvia Plath)

During my Sit Spot I met with Fig: lantern-shaped, like an onion or light bulb.

I thought of Sylvia Plath’s fig-tree passage in The Bell Jar: each fig a possible life; wait too long and the figs wrinkle and drop. That image sat beside the small Fig. What asks to be chosen? What is ready to be released? What must be allowed to fall and feed the ground?

In sharing this story with the group, I learned of the unseen companion: the fig wasp. A life-long reciprocity, the wasp enters the fig’s narrow doorway to pollinate the hidden flowers; often it loses its wings, sometimes its life. In return, the fig shelters the next generation of wasps. Ancient synchrony, reciprocity and necessary relationship. Dependence here isn’t weakness; it is the architecture of fruit.

PARTICIPANT CONTRIBUTIONS:
Sit Spot Noticings.

Iris by the pond

Slack pod spilling seeds
No promises, just potential
Flourish or rot
Compost or Bloom
Both a gift. 

Self heal in autumn - haiku

Self heal flowering
Hidden, quiet, blooms discrete
Perfect and worthy

Gather Teachings

  • Community includes the more-than-human

  • Listen instead of assume; listening is a form of participation.

  • Welcome quieter forms of belonging

  • Accepting transition as part of growth

  • Letting descent be a form of flourishing

  • Growth asks for rest as much as effort


Emergence is slow.
Flourishing takes time.
Gathering is communal.

“…not because we pushed, but because we allowed.”