Last year, I had delicious plans to go on a summer camp with some of my favourite humans to hear Wade Davis and David Abrams at Hollyhock. It felt like something, AT LAST, to look forward to, after the pandemic’s hard yards.
And then, the day before I was supposed to jump on the ferry and head to Cortes Island, I tested positive for COVID-19. Cue that sound of the buzzer telling you that you answered the question wrong and just lost the $20,000 prize money you had slowly accumulated over the last three episodes… Happily, I was too sick and feverish to feel FOMO while they were away, and then, my lovely friends came around for a debrief dinner on their return and shared some of their takeaways, (along with treats, hollyhock seeds and genuine empathy)… one takeaway was “we should make this an annual thing”, which I obviously clung to like a life raft. So, when Kim Slater, the Climate Stream producer for Hollyhock asked me randomly if I’d serve on an advisory council for a Hollyhock retreat she is tasked with planning, I brought all the energy of my unfinished business with the place, to the task. LOL.
If you’re looking for a week-long retreat in September, September 17-21 on Cortes Island, where you can grow your ability to dream brighter possibilities, this is the week for you.
Because these days, it seems increasingly important to me to develop my resilience. I want to be a future-steader. I want to contribute with my creativity and my effort to radical futurisms. I don’t want to give up when life feels too much like the Cormac McCarthy book (that almost caused me to give myself a DIY hysterectomy to ensure I wouldn’t accidentally bring a life into his dire future forecast.)
I need to skill up. And I don’t think it’s just in knowing how to make fire with a bow drill or field dress a deer. I think the skills I’m lacking are around personal resilience, and being with hard things. Being able to sit with despair and still do the work to metabolize ancestral trauma. To keep radiating presence, when I’d otherwise be freaking out.
Giving up on a beautiful flourishing future is simply not an option. My son is 10 years old. He created none of the mess. It is my sacred task to create as many life affirming avenues for him and his generation and the more than humans who we share this planet with, and all the ones to come. I feel that conviction with such a ferocity. And I have no idea how to do it. And that’s why coming into community with others feels like such an important thing.
Hope in a Time of Precarity has been conjured up as an intimate convention of folk who are interested in reimagining how we might respond to the climate crisis. This gathering has been designed to strengthen our mental, emotional, and spiritual stamina.
Facilitated by PalesaKoitsioe of Imbali Bloom, Hope in a Time of Precarity will feature LaUra Schmidt, founder of The Good Grief Network, and author of How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet. She is a thoughtful leader focused on personal resilience in the face of environmental and societal struggle. She’ll join Abbey Piazza, a passionate community organizer who teaches activists and changemakers how to centre wellness and regulate their nervous systems so they can be more resilient and visionary in their work.
My anticipation is that this week will be heart fuel. Galvanising. Enriching. And radical, in the true sense of the word – of bringing us back to the roots. So we go away with something really solid and deep-rooted and supportive to move out from.
One of the things that seems to be keeping us stuck in the paradigms we’re in, even as they’re becoming obviously imperilling, is the sheer magnitude of the unacknowledged and unexpressed grief, around the loss of so many possible futures, the harms of the system we’re in, the harms that have impacted people and things we love, the harms we’re complicit in.
In the face of that powerful undertow, denial is a far easier path.
Working for best outcomes within the status quo is easier.
“Fighting” something is easier.
But I think there’s such a richness and generativity in heading into the dark, and learning to lead from our hearts… even when we’re doing rational, strategic, academic, rigorous work. (Especially then.)
“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
There’s this fantastic language from Rilke about the future not actually being a far off place, but something that comes to life through us, and has to land first in us, in our bodies, in order to come to life. What am I allowing into the existence, through my thoughts and actions? What am I gestating and incubating? Can I acknowledge the generative power of precarity and reclaim and revitalize my imagination?
Probably not alone. The magic happens in community. It happens in context, in ecologies. Because that’s how we are wired psychologically, and it’s also a fundamental principle of physics and biology – we’re intricately interconnected.
Hence, retreats like this. Places to swap some seeds, collect some kindling or have your spark re-ignited.
Last spring, I came together with a group of 10 women aged 20-something to 70-something, for 8 weeks, to learn about Joanna Macy’s Spiral of the Work that Reconnects, and practice it outside, in a circle, in the places we care so much about protecting.
The photo above is from the final gathering of our Active Hope Climate Squad, when the early summer heat had triggered such melt that navigating away across this little creeklet to our favourite sit spot was almost impassable. Somehow, without saying anything, we formed a human support bridge. Somehow, without saying anything, we were emboldened.
Ironically, we gathered just a few weeks ago to acknowledge the one year anniversary of our experiment, and the place that had held us through all those sessions has been utterly devastated by heavy machinery bulldozing down trees, clearing brush and smashing a bunch of the creek-bank cottonwoods. We hadn’t know this had happened, and so we were able to practice, in circle, the Spiral again as a way of being with such hard things, such unnecessary damage – sharing our gratitudes, honouring our pain for the world, learning to see with new eyes, going forth. To me, the photo symbolizes what I learned from that experience – how utterly utterly life affirming heart warming and delightful it is to be facing these challenges and these sorrows together. These women are some of my most beloved climate activists, but the way their activism plays out is in community contribution and care.
It’s something I wish for, for everyone. To be part of a community, no matter how small, of people who share your level of care/concern/hope.
I hope to go to Hollyhock this September to bring back some treasures, some treats, some seeds, some medicine, to share, and to help me grow my stamina, to be the kind of futuresteader my son is counting on. And I hope some of you lovely people will come too.
Check out the details or register: https://hollyhock.secure.retreat.guru/program/hope-in-precarity-23/?lang=en #HopeHH
Lisa Richardson Bylines 