So many of you have outreached, even infrequent visitors to PrayerFarm, sharing your sense of loss as we prepare to release this gathering place we have all so loved. From my perspective, grieving this loss of “home” is a micro for the BIG grief about our loss of home…most of us can’t quite face the fact that our world is in ruins* and what’s next is in limbo…as we release PrayerFarm our community is simply acting out this larger reality. A microdose of the true loss that is finally catching up to us as a species…we do not have new stories, new compass points, new truths to claim…we are in a time where what’s next is unborn, unknown, unseeable…
WHOA this challenges the hell out of us doesn’t it?
Where will we do our work, where will we gather, who and what are we losing with this change? Will the community we love – even if we rarely visit but just enjoy knowing is there—lose a compass bearing or get distracted? What now?
Our home will be wherever we are. My sense of knowing for our home as a community, especially as we release PrayerFarm is in re-vision yet I trust the course. I must also say this: Like everyone in this uncertain time, I do not know what the future holds and need to trust the invisible currents over my ideas and desires. THIS is also why I am offering so many out-and- about gatherings over the next few months—let’s re-enter the world from these years of being able to rest on the edges. Let’s do our work from the top of Grizzly Peak, let’s gather at the headwaters of the Rogue River and by the roaring ocean in Port Orford, lets gather in Costa Rica…these are all sacred homes to me, to anyone who is called.
Let’s make our home closer to the ground, more integrated into the roars and twitters of the landscape…let’s remember that we are part of the web, that our home is the same home as that of all the other livingnesses and lets bravely face the ruins, the unknowns, the mystery of our future TOGETHER.
*I have taken the liberty of borrowing this phrase, which struck me to the core, from authors Frieda Nixdorf and Sandy Ibrahim. Here is a fuller quotation from their work in an online course called Writing In the Liminal:
“We are living miracles navigating the threshold of a world in ruins. We are on the verge of a new world – our feet sometimes catching on the roots of that which we’ve outgrown and that to which we still cling, for no other reason but familiarity.
Let us slowly disengage from the monotonous thrum of the mechanisms of our experience. Remember the intentionality of our call to embodiment. The core of our existence depends on our remembrance and slow re-storying of what we’ve been given, what we’ve taken and what is actually true.
Let’s listen for the call of the winding way forward. It asks us to reclaim the wild landscapes of our inner terrain and infuses us with longing. Let us remember our joy. Pleasure. Let us honor our grief.”