Mapping Revelations
On 400 year old oak trees and emergent gatherings.
I’ve learned that when my friend Court invites me to something, just say yes.
She asked me back in January if I would come to an emergent gathering to be held in France, and share a talk on eco-eroticism and the wisdom of trees. I was mid-hibernation writing my book and scrambling to complete PhD thesis edits, but the invitation felt resonant.
The weekend opened a buried seed in me. The seed that knows entangled community is lifeblood. Co-created emergent ones are so rare, that when it’s found, the body recognizes the medicine at once.
We gathered at Chateau du Fey, a special community outside of Burgundy, France, where people can co-create, and experience alternative modes of living. There are secret art pop ups around every bend, untouched forest, and wildflowers springing up on rewilded lands.
I do not often get to weave the threads of the academic and the sacred together in one place. Often these spaces feel at odds in me and I have spent years softening the edges so my own ecosystem can flourish. This gathering was an exception.
It was an absolute pleasure to share a talk and practice on eco-eroticism and the wisdom of trees between two 400 year old oak ancestors with 100 mischief makers, dreamers, scientists, artists and healers. Special thanks to Ruby Reed of Advaya Life for one of the most generous introductions I’ve ever received.
As part of my talk, I invited people to listen to their tree kin.
“To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer
I was touched by what happened when we listened together.
Two people even shared songs the trees gifted them to the rest of the group.
The experience reminded me that the wisdom of the earth is always for everyone.
The trees, and the earth, is waiting for us.
They are speaking.
We just have to listen.
How easily we forget. But like any relationship, it is one we must practice daily.
By collectively returning to the earth, our bodies taste our birthright of belonging with the earth.
The weekend was called “Mapping Revelations” and I think of it as a collective fabulation. To experience the sustaining creativity of people who care.
We made string figures with the threads of the reciprocating energies of consciousness, arts, ecosystems, ecologies, music, community and the sensual.
We studied the twists of oaken arms made heavy by 400 years of loving. We pressed the faces of new friends to our heart like flowers, watching as the color of their petals tye dyes our own.
The weekend reminded me: we are to make art together, and that life is art if lived together.
Perhaps this is how you map a revelation. Through tracing the cartography of curiosity and kindness, and of dance, music and taste. By etching the maps of lovingly-held spaces for people to co-become.
The red thread was generosity. Everyone contributed to the weekend, and the energetic of such was resonance and immanence.
As I sat on the train leaving the weekend, I thought of my most beloved writer, Annie Dillard. She writes,
“Give us time! They say. It never stops.
Here is the word from a subatomic physicist: ‘Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves.’ Let me trust the meaning. Here it comes. The particles are broken; the waves are translucent, leaving, rolling with beauty like sharks. The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.”
Let us be particles and waves side-by-side.
We must find places and spaces where we can gather and co-become that are not monopolized by capitalism, stripped bare by promises of progress. We need to give and receive patterns, to use the words of Donna Haraway.
If we are committed to crafting conditions for flourishing here, for every living thing, then sacred spaces like this are consequential, and maybe even beautiful. We can find something that wasn’t there before, of re-stringing connections between ideas and people and creatures and critters that matter.
In increasingly terrifying global unravelings, spaces of time out of time can re-root us to our entangled futures.
Two invitations:
Try spending just 5 minutes with the earth, every day, with the sole intention to listen.
Gather friends where you are and invite people to offer something, to practice entangled emergence.
Tell me your thoughts. I would love to read them.
All the photos are by my talented friend Benjamin Henretig