EcoGather is a co-sensing and learning community.
Together, we help each other make and sustain our paradigm shifts. The vast majority of us didn’t learn how to show up for the predicament we’re facing. So we gather to help each other move from collapse awareness (and fear) to collapse responsiveness (and courage). Together, we figure out how to simultaneously be alive in a world of endings and weave the more beautiful world(s) our hearts know to be possible.
EcoGather offers courses and recurring gatherings to find like-spirited people who treat the exhausted earth with reverence and want to reclaim the human story. Find hope in each other, and explore the resources necessary to engage meaningfully in your place and community.
Paradigm Shifts
Recognizing our kinship with the life that surrounds us is the first step. Moving into relationship with those elements is the next.
As humans, we have an active responsibility to consider our more-than-human kin just as much as we would all the human kin on our family trees.
In fact, considering those humans and their futures requires that we actively work to support the living world that they all exist within and depend on.
Human kinship is only one nested network in a greater web of interconnectedness with the more-than-human kin that surrounds us.
This understanding releases us from the myth of separability modernity relies on to continue its tirade of extraction and exploitation of the living world, and asks us to reassess or re-image our human roles as conquerors, stewards and/or citizens using the lens of kinship.
Join us in this week’s session as we call into question the limited understanding of kin, and how we may re-member ourselves to the greater web of kinship we belong to.
📆 Date: Thursday, February 20, 2025
⏰ Time: 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm UTC+5
As always, for more resources and registration, follow the link in bio. 🦋
As our Surviving The Future: The Deeper Dive live course moves in full swing, we’re sharing some of the quotes from our live sessions with our speakers.
This week we share @natehagens insight into Energy blindness, economic super organism, attention economy, and becoming a communal root system.
Nate Hagens hosts The Great Simplification podcast and YouTube channel, lectures around the world on the big-picture facing humanity, and sits on the board of the Bottleneck Foundation, the Institute for Integrated Economic Research and the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future.
A former Vice President at the investment firms Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers, he holds the unusual and valuable combination of a Masters Degree in Finance with a PhD in Natural Resources, and when we first met he was lead editor and an outstanding content producer for The Oil Drum, an outstanding but now defunct hub for energy analysis.
Thank you @natehagens !
@dark_optimism
It’s #BlackHistoryMonth and we are sharing our favorite quotes from some of our favorite authors. Most of all, we want to celebrate their creative prowess in the face of all the destruction and adversity that they have faced. This type of creativity is liberating. It is not confined to the creative, artistic act, but the totality of living. These authors show us how to flood our lives with radical edginess, to use the tools at hand, to deepen ourselves into the web of relationality.
If you’d like to explore your own creativity anew, unburdened, free, and centered in the marginal experiences of our experiences as individuals and collective, we invite you to join Edgework: Care and Creativity at the Margins course this spring.
Sign-ups end March 7th.
To learn more and register, follow the link in bio.
#bhm
EcoGather’s Vermont based facilitators of community learning are collaborating with @hardpressedvt Community Print shop in West Danville, Vermont to offer a series of EcoGatherings in the Northeast Kingdom.
We’re eager to share space, snacks, and substantial-talk – the opposite of small-talk –with folks who are craving conversation about who to live well in a time of endings. These casual, cozy events are an easy way to connect in community, practice co-learning, and get connected to EcoGather’s globe-spanning cosmolocal network composed of beings and communities ready to courageously confront the collapse of both the natural systems that we depend upon and human systems that are hostile to life. We help each other make and sustain paradigm shifts.
We will also be partnering in hosting larger events around MAY DAY and Summer Solstice, building community resilience through celebration. With so much shifting all around us, we sure do need each other to share the Rage and Joy, thicken and activate Solidarity, reclaim the power of our labor and dignify Work, explore the power and limits of Language, and muster the radical imagination needed to build new worlds In the Shell of the Old.
We hope you’ll join us for these community gatherings!
As a result of the ways #modernity fails to acknowledge and process death, our relationship to #grief is similarly strained and misconstrued. It is too often presented as a problem that we must learn how to deal with so that it does not interfere with our abilities to be productive and efficient. It’s viewed as an obstacle we must overcome, a diagnosis to be treated, or a personal struggle to deal with in privacy.
In Autumn last year, EcoGather hosted a series of conversations that touched directly on grief. We will be holding additional online space to collectively hold and tend to our grief through a series of EcoGatherings we`ll be calling: Good grief, hosted by @butteratroomtemp
May Good Grief be a reunion with the love that was once incredibly alive inside of you, which failed to find a way out after loss. Through community, ritual, imagining and witnessing, may we honor grief as a sacred gift that allows us to maintain our connection to the life that came before us and all the sacred wisdom it holds.
In a series of five individual EcoGatherings over the next few months, we will work through each of the Five Gates of Grief from Francis Weller’s work The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Join us at the first gate “All that we love, all that we lose” next Sunday, February 9.
Click the link in our bio to sign up! We hope to welcome you and grief in #community.
#Stewardship is a convoluted term, used and co-opted by christianity and corporations alike. But what does it mean to be and act as stewards?
Humans can be a part of making our habitat better. All of us have the potential — as well as the responsibility, right, and honor — to be stewards.
Clearly, stewardship is a fraught and often misused concept. However, it becomes more approachable – and more life-giving – for those who do the work to identify and resist domination over the Earth and other peoples.
Join us this Thursday as we consider what stewardship means to us, and if we can become the stewards this magnificent planet needs. Click the link in bio!
#environmentalstewardship #ecology #community
“The World Is Changing”, Reneé Barry 2024
An inky block print, black and white, of a groundhog grounding itself in the grass with the text “THE WORLD IS CHANGING” and a dandelion.
On this auspicious day, we are introducing the first artwork from the upcoming series by @reneebarryart , comissioned by @eco.gathering .
For this piece, Renée connected with the groundhogs she often watches through her kitchen window, as well as the ones who venture into the neighbor’s yard. Her neighbor keeps trying to get rid of them, but the groundhogs keep coming back. They have no intention of leaving their their favorite spot, their home.
Staring at groundhog’s brought to mind Groundhog’s Day, the holiday, and started a wonder about what the groundhog might have to say about the changing climate.
This activity also got Renée thinking about Groundhog’s day, the movie, which seemed especially relevant to a quote on EcoGather’s vision board, which reads: “We are the world breaking old habits..”
This piece encourages comfort with what can’t be denied and reminds us that we can be part of good endings, breaking out of patterns that repeat over and over again. Embracing change means that we do not have to stay stuck.
The commissioned art is made accessible to the public and can be downloaded on https://ecogather.ing/art.
Last week, Mark Boyle, author of The Moneyless Man, reminded our participants of Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive about the possibility of living off-grid, disconnected from many of modernity`s commodities we believe we can no longer live without.
Instead, Boyle argues that we need to develop "direct relationships with things" such as our food and the natural elements.
Boyle encourages us to dedicate our precious time on earth to the more beautiful things we can do in our lifetime. “There’s always a beautiful way to live. How we respond individually can be ugly or can be beautiful. I’d highly recommend dedicating your precious time here to the more beautiful things that you can do with your life. Life is short, and it’s only getting shorter. The world spins quicker by the year. What do you want to look back on when the time comes to look back in life. Do you want to say I’ve done something that wasn’t fulfilling your heart, or do you want to look back and go, ‘that was a life worth living.’ If you’re going to be dead at some point, you might as well take the bull by the horns and do something that means something to you… Destroy what needs destroying, and create what needs creating. Good luck. Make the most of it.”
While the Deeper Dive course is in full swing, you can still sign up for the self-paced Surviving the Future: A Path through Tumultuous Times Learning Journey.
Click the link in our bio or comment FUTURE to learn more!
#survival #course #survivingthefuture #offgrid #markboyle
Welcome to a new lunar cycle, and a new round of EcoGathering topics! This time we will explore some of the roles we`re expected or encouraged to occupy as humans. We won`t necessarily offer clear, definitive claims on what human nature is
Instead, We’ll explore the roles humans are offered to provide more context for understanding aspects of what might be our nature: what we all have the potential to be, or what seems innate but isn`t necessarily. While this is no complete list, here are four possible aspects of being Human: Conquerors, Stewards, Citizens, and Kin.
Register for free on our website and join the conversation that matter! Link in bio.
#kinship #citizen #communityconversation #ecogather #conqueror
In the latest blog, @nakasifortune shares her journey about finding the path to her own creativity.
This is for those, who don’t consider themselves “creative” in the way society views creativity.
In the piece, she asks:
What if we expanded our definition of creativity to include more than just the art we make?
What if we include the life we live?
What if we acknowledged the creativity inherent in decision making?
What if we recognized that even our hesitation, our reluctance, our doubt is part of our creative process?
Read “Juice, Jitters and the Joy of Quiet Creativity” on the EcoGather blog!
Our Surviving the Future Deeper Dive is in full swing. This week, we welcomed Climate Corruption Journalist Rachel Donald (@planetcritical). Rachel spoke about AI, the history of fascism, and the power of organizing socially to resist the grip of neoliberalism. She encouraged participants to look at the LA #wildfires through the lens of compassion, understanding how our attention is channelled towards those who have money and status, rather than those most disadvantaged by the system.
We have gathered our three favorite quotes for you.
Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us, Rachel!
Mountains move across aeons. Some flowers take up to 8 years to bloom, awaiting the right conditions to rise above the surface. Countless beings embody patience — not only do they understand it, they live it. It is encoded in their bodies. Life requires that we tend to it with patience. Why, then, can it feel so difficult for humans to extend the grace of patience to ourselves?
In recent years, it has become common to think of rest as a radical act, but what if patience is equally radical?
In this post and in our upcoming EcoGathering on Patience, we`ll convene around the virtue, practice, and lessons of patience -- which can feel especially challenging when we feel so much urgency. Join our conversation on January 21. Register for free through the link in bio.
Text by @nielsdevisscher and Erik Tasso-Johnson
Images by @nielsdevisscher
#deeptime #patience #regeneration
Stillness encompasses Presence, Darkness and Patience.
The latter two of the themes we will be exploring in the remaining EcoGatherings for January.
As always, we align our gatherings with seasonal shifts.
Peraphs, in darkness one must become still, present, patient.
The technological tools of modernity give us many ways to evade darkness – artificial lights flood the indoor spaces we occupy after the sun goes down so that we can continue to work.
Whether it’s the wage labor we rely on for paying the electricity bills to keep these lights on or the unpaid labor left after that paid workday is over, the tasks we are required to complete in a winter’s day depend on more light than what nature provides this time of year. While nature prompts us to be in the darkness, we have lost our ability to do so by subscribing to a system dependent on our exhaustive labor and dependence on a near-constant state of production. The demands of capitalist society do not accommodate the cyclic changes of our natural seasons.
Join us in two remaining sessions through link in our bio:
Darkness
📅 Wednesday, January 15
⏰ 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM ET
Patience
📅 January 21, 2025
⏰ 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM ET
Featured paintings in the following order:
Godfried Schalcken, Young Girl with a Candle. 1670-75
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Forest. 1907
Domenico Fetti Or Feti, Sleeping Girl. 1621-22
This shorter cycle’s will focus on slower, quieter themes as we begin the new calendar year that will surely be full of more disruptions and uncertainty. As winter begins to settle in deeper for us in the northern hemisphere, we’ll sit with the elements that accompany this time of year (but are relevant, of course, anywhere on Earth at any given time, no matter your hemisphere of habitation): Presence, Darkness, and Patience.
Modernity pushes us into ever more rapid performance, consumption, and reaction. In the accelerating chaos unfolding around us, we can all benefit from some Stillness in our lives. Whether through meditation, prayer, habit, rest, even sleep, stillness has a lot to offer us as we prepare for a year sure to be full of more upheaval.
Emily Shaljian, who hosted the wonderful EcoGathering cycle on Composting this past October – Hospicing, Metabolizing, Grieving, and Attending – will join us for this cycle as well, and host the Darkness gathering at the full moon phase of our cycle.
Find the link “Upcoming Gatherings” in our profile to register.
📅 January 9, 2025
⏰ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm PT/UTC+5
Cover art: Winter Night in the Mountains by Harald Sohlberg (open license).
"When we begin to experience the sacred in our everyday lives we bring to mundane tasks a quality of concentration and engagement that lifts the spirit." - bell hooks
For our final gathering of the year, a few days after the solstice, we will come together to appreciate all the sacredness that still surrounds us on this generous and precious planet. This gathering also concludes our cycle on Enchantment, and what better way to close out the gifts of Spirit, Mystery, and Story than with a celebration of what we hold sacred in our lives.
If you find yourself in the mood for a few hours of relaxed community during holiday busyness and end-of-the-year frenzy, join us for some reflection and gratitude!
This Monday, December 23rd, from 11 AM - 1:00 PM ET.
As always, EcoGatherings are free for everyone, and you can find the link in our bio!
NEW COURSE ALERT 📢
Edgework: Care & Creativity at the Margins.
📆 When? March 31st - May 23rd, 2025.
🎨 What? Over the 8 weeks, we’ll explore creativity as care, survival, healing, and resistance.
Hey you! Yes, you! ✨
The one who’s been told you’re not creative.
The one who’s been quietly or even loudly reimagining and rebuilding the world without the fanfare and applause.
The one who has noticed gaps or challenges in your community and felt called to take action. We see you. We know you. In fact, we might even be you.
We are building a space that honors your unique genius. Because we know what it is like to be told that the way you create change is not enough, or doesn’t fit the neat definition of who or what is creative. We know what it’s like to make something from nothing. To turn constraints into possibility. We know. Because we have lived it.
🌟This is an invitation to join us for Edgework: Care & Creativity at the Margins.
A space to us to remember. To unlearn. To redefine. To reimagine. To simply be.
From March 31 - May 23, 2025, we’re going to explore creativity as a human experience and care as foundational to that creativity.
This space and these 8-weeks are for you. The non-artist. The edgeworker. The change shaper. The dreamer. The doer. The ones at the margins. The messy. The brave. The quiet. The loud. This is for you.
🌟 We’d love to create dangerously together.
📢 Applications are open. Find the course page on our profile link. 🔗
Your host @nakasifortune 🙌🏼
@rebeccasolnit said in her book A Paradise Built in Hell, “Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.”
This is strikingly apparent to those that have endured the most visible forms of human-caused disruption to safe and stable human and more-than-human systems.
In the Vermont floods of 2023, EcoGather`s Nissa was displaced from her home and lost many of her possessions. Exactly a year later, more Vermont communities were flooded, some for the second or even third time in a year. Just months later, she watched as her hometown was destroyed by Hurricane Helene, and the EcoGather community waited anxiously to hear whether our community members, including Lauren, were safe.
We are so buoyed by the demonstrations of community care, unity, solidarity and effective action we see in the wake of these disasters. We want to be a part of maintaining this beautiful energy and supporting the continuation of redirecting efforts away simply returning to normalcy.
To this end, EcoGather recognized that our enduring, entwined relationships to two flood impacted communities at opposite ends of the Appalachians, and our faith in cosmolocal collaboration, gave us a distinct way to engage.
We`ll be hosting an event in Asheville to bring together the disparate groups already doing this work. This way, we can identify synchronicities, gaps, overlaps, and opportunities for support and expansion of these efforts, beyond the specific locations and times of acute crisis.
If you are in or near the areas that were affected by Hurricane Helene, and are craving these types of conversations, we would love to have you at Urban Orchard Cidery on December 30th at 6pm. There will be food, music of @bobby_frith and convivial discussion about where we are headed.
“Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.” - Rebecca Solnit
Slide 1, 5, 7, 11 @8_miles_per_gallon , Slides 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10 @sweenaw, Slide 3 @mountainmulepackers
RSVP at the link in bio.
#hurricanehelene #mothernature
Tom Hirons @bearspeakstothestars is a #poet and storyteller, based in southwest England. His best known poem, Sometimes a Wild God, continues to reverberate far and wildly and recently reshared in @nickcaveofficial`s The Red Hand Files.
For our upcoming EcoGathering, we will be joined by the English poet and storyteller. For who better to accompany us with lantern and wellies into the dark night of myth and story than the bard himself?
We all know you don’t travel into the Underworld without first learning the appropriate etiquette. That’s why we sat together with Tom for a conversation that reaches into the depth of the poem and his poetic life.
Trading with the muses, it turns out, isn’t as romantic as Tumbler makes it seem. “There have been times when it has been excruciatingly hard to picture making a living from my words”, says Tom. Yet, when poetry is your soul’s devotion, ignoring the impulse to create is a direct attack not just on one’s soul but also on the soul of the world that longs for “truth spoken with power.”
📆 December 17th
⏰ 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm ET / 8:00 pm - 9:30 pm CET
Find the link to sign up in our bio, and Read the full interview on our blog.
Interview and photographs by @nielsdevisscher for EcoGather
#poetry #underworld #tomhirons #paganpoetry #wildgod #NickCave
"If you don`t know where you`re going, you`ll wind up someplace else" - Yogi Berra
Many before us have pointed out that we don`t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
When left unexamined, the stories we tell about the future are a direct reflection of our personal and cultural values and norms. Whether Star Trek style exploration of the Universe, or building an air-conditioned green corridor in the blazing desert, such stories are often so divorced from the truth that actions ripple out through webs of consequences. The world kicks back.
It does us good to reflect on the stories we uphold and tell each other collectively. Together we can put to rest stories that do not serve us. As Vanessa Andreotti reminds us, "We don’t realize that when stories expire, their vitality is already gone; and if their vitality is gone we are also stuck, because our vitality comes partly from stories moving things in the world and within us. If we want to get unstuck, we need to put these expired stories to rest.”
Penetrating their spell, we may catch glimpses of a truer world. And can start to weave vitalising stories that honor our homeworld and the limits of our physical reality.
If, like us, you are regularly disenchanted by the dominant stories, and seek challenging realities over comforting fantasies, come be part of Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive.
There are now just a few spots left on our forthcoming adventure in hospicing dying stories together, and in weaving others more humbly attuned to the realities spoken by our breathing planet.
#stories #ecologicalcollapse #survivingthefuture #futures #collapseawareness #learningjourney
"Spirituality is the art of transfiguration. We should not force ourselves to change by hammering our lives into any predetermined shape. We change when we find a way of inhabiting our current condition differently." - John O`Donohue
Though most of us are now raised under an institutionalized, empire-approved form of either (monotheistic) religion or aspirituality, many of us still feel some more-ness exists in our experience of the universe.
This Wednesday, we`ll explore that more-ness in the world through the perspective of spirit.
Join us if you want to co-exploratively tap into the spirit of the world and share stories of soulful experiences. How can we reawaken our souls? What does it mean to meet the world with soul? How do cultivate once again an animist society?
This Wednesday, from 7-8:30 PM ET
EcoGatherings are online and free. Find the link in our bio!