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
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!
Ahead of our ecogathering tomorrow, December 3, we asked our community what mystery and enchantment means to them.
In this post, we share some of their responses.
Let us know in the comments, what does #mystery mean to you? How does it show up in your life?
Join us tomorrow at 5:30 PM ET as we explore the mysteries in the world around us and appreciate the mysteries in our own lives.
Cover photo, slide 7 and 10 by @nielsdevisscher
#enchantment #communitytalk #stories #vintage #ecogathering
What does it mean to express and celebrate our gratitude amid ongoing theft? Can those of us on #TurtleIsland reckon with and within paradox?
How do we take an honorable relationship to an ill-conceived holiday that simultaneously celebrates genocide and serves as the most prominent opportunity to center gratitude in U.S. American culture?
This should not be an easy holiday for anyone.
Pause to consider why non-Indigenous people are prone to so much dark humor about dreaded, contentious conversations around the #Thanksgiving table. It might not be because our families are full of terrible folks. Perhaps it`s because we`re failed to reckon. We`re grasping for something we so desperately need -- a time to celebrate sharing, abundance, and togetherness -- and tethering it to a tradition rooted in exploitation and erasure. That`s bound to be bumpy. Perhaps it`s time to let go of this holiday AND replace it with new traditions...
Pause also to imagine what this whole extended holiday weekend is like for the indigenous people among us. What must it be like to watch as the false stories about early contact are transmitted to another generation. To be the survivors of one genocide forced to fund another through their tax dollars. To witness abundance commodified and an orgy of consumerism follow the feasting. Can we do more than mourn for and with them? Can we also honor them and open ourselves to their leadership? They are the keepers of cultures and stories and knowledges that are so desperately needed now.
If we hope to become naturalized to Turtle Island, we must do more than just spoon cranberries onto our feast plates once a year. We must take the medicine of these bog berries — which were used for millennia as a poultice for wounds and, mixed with cornmeal, as a cure for blood poisoning. Before we can treat a wound, we must acknowledge that it is there in the first place. Then, we must treat it...
with tenderness.
"No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment." - John Muir
As we enter into the last month of the calendar year and approach the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, we`ll take time to explore the magic that can so naturally fill this time of transition – into winter or summer – and of extremes – of nighttime or daylight. This lunar cycle`s theme will be Enchantment, and our individual EcoGatherings will cover Mystery, Spirit, Story, and The Sacred. We`ll gather to discuss what we might discover when we allow ourselves to live in an enlivened, connected, conscious world, and what stories we can inhabit that might inform and encourage such a world.
To find out more and register for free, follow the link in our bio!
#community #gatherings #enchantment #mystery #conversation
EcoGather asked @nimonte of @thefarwoods to design an alluring piece of art to represent who we are and the work we do.
After spending some time getting to know us and participating in an EcoGathering, Nina conjured a scene that captures our wildest and smallest aspiration: being and be-long-ing as part of the living world. She felt moved to depict people gathering on and around a huge mother tree.
Nina comes from a long lineage of artists. When she feels blocked creatively, she often asks them for help. “..I’m writing a book right now and when I can’t find the words for something I’m trying to convey, I turn to my Chilean great-grandfather who was a storyteller, and my Swedish grandfather who, as a minister, wrote sermons weekly.”
“My relatives’ commitment to #art as a beautiful way to live life was infused in my upbringing and I hope my two daughters are absorbing this now from me as well. But I don’t take any credit for their #creativity — I have seen the way that they, from day one, have been naturally inclined to express themselves creatively. And I think maybe we all come into this world with that same sacred force that is creativity. For so many of us, it is not encouraged, or worse, stamped out. But I think that for everyone it’s inside, waiting to be rekindled when the conditions are right. But yeah, generally the overculture doesn’t value or support the arts, so it’s a special thing to be part of a lineage committed to this sacred force, generation after generation.”
You can read the full interview with Nina on our blog by clicking the link at the top of our profile.
Do you want to help us distribute the poster in the US? Send us an email (see blog) and we’ll get you a few free copies!
#belonging #earthcare #goodancestor #art #environmentalprotection #motherearth
“Why surviving?”, we asked Surviving the Future course host Shaun Chamberlin. “Well, because that is about the size of it, already, for so many of us. Especially when we expand `us` to include the non-human.”
In a modern world built on a persistent colonial legacy, Shaun reminds us that the thriving of the happy few comes at the expense of the majority of “others”. “We live in a culture where the norm is seeking your own thriving ("look after number one!"; "self-care!"; "I earned this!") while operating within systems that are built on the colonizing and suffering of others.”
How we have come to think of survival is itself starkly reduced. Writer @alexispauline speaks beautifully to how “survival has never meant bare minimum, mere straggling breath, the small space next to the line of death.” Instead, she argues that survival “references our living in the context of what we have overcome. Survival is life after disaster, life in honor of our ancestors.” This corresponds more closely to the etymology of “survive”, which is to “outlive”.
Yet, we have created a condition wherein the profoundly unsustainable products of our own making far outlive us, visible in the plastisphere and the #plastoscene — our epoch, visible in the sedimentary layers of plastics now found in the earth’s interior.
For Shaun, there is great wisdom in respecting the limits of what`s possible in a given circumstance. Surviving shifts the baseline of our conversations and challenges the norm that survival is already a given. How can we look “The Long Dark”, as Francis Weller calls it, straight into the face and commune with it, rather than disengage from darkness in the pursuit of the luminous ideal?
EcoGather and Dark Optimism are hosting Surviving the Future precisely for those who crave holding difficult conversations and learning together to encounter our predicament.
You can find more information about the upcoming learning journey through the link in our bio!
#climatechange #survival #ancestors #collapse #modernity
Stories are powerful, so powerful, that we sometimes forget they are stories. They grow roots, and before we realize it, they have spread in all directions like "Arctic tundra or sea ice" as Rebecca Solnit wrote.
The Tragedy of the Commons is one of those stories. Simplified, universalized, and founded on false assumptions and personal beliefs rather than tested with scientific rigor.
The first female Nobel prize winner in economic sciences, Elinor Ostrom showed that people are indeed capable of sharing finite resources without depleting them. In fact, as we discussed in our essay, post, and EcoGathering on enclosure, before the enclosure of the commons, most land was successfully stewarded by commoners, who had a vested and long-term interest in sustainably stewarding land.
In our full-moon EcoGathering on November 12, we will wax into two pieces: one lovely podcast with Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm and an excerpt that describes these traits from David Bollier`s book Think Like a Commoner. In it, he quotes commons scholar James Quilligan: “A commons-based economics raises the possibility of experiencing value through the practical relationships that arise among individuals, the resources of the world, and that which exists between people and the world."
Next Tuesday, November 19, we will explore re-commoning, or what it means to put into practice the strategies and paradigms essential to remembering and re-developing a culture capable of commoning.
You can register for free to both online gatherings by clicking the link at the top of our profile.
Resources and further reading:
The Tragedy of the Commons is a False and Dangerous Myth by Michelle Nijhuis on @aeonmag
The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons by Ian Angus on climateandcapitalism.org
Garrett Hardin on splcenter.org
At Work in the Ruins by @dougaldh
Thinking Like a Commoner David Bollier
@frankandreasweber
Photo on slide 6: Tea Rooms by Pierre Sernet (2002)
#stories #commoning #tragedyofthecommons #mythbusting #myth #ecogathering #community #thecommons #patriarchy #capitalism
The day after the election, we spontaneously hosted an EcoGathering to bring together our core #community.
Our Network Weaver & Creative Collaboration Director Nicole Civita @plenty.enough shared a message with our community to inspire hope and provide an alternative perspective. Both our community and team deeply appreciated it, which is why we wanted to share it with you.
"How are you feeling today? Because I`m actually feeling pretty good, and while I know that might just be like a big dose of rebound neurotransmitters after yesterday`s unshocked despair, or it might be the very real benefits of having spent time coming together with our community and grieving together last night. But I am. I`m feeling like fired up, in a way, of being filled with light and warmth. I`m motivated this morning.
"These giant cracks are real opportunities. We can shift consciousness in moments like this, when things break open big, more folks become aware of the ruptures.
Fewer people can ignore the chasm between the world as they have been told it is and the world as it shows itself to be.
We can stand above this big crack, and we can pull people out of despair. We can lay planks across it and bridge to some folks who did not like their choices but knew they needed to move themselves off of the fault line.
And then we can climb into some of the smaller fissures and conspire and create there. We can light the dark and see each other. We can protect each other and let new things grow from underground."
The song is called Before the Stars Have Left the Skies by Salt of the Sound, Dear Gravity
How is your hospicing modernity going? 🤔
#meme #modernity #patriarchy #metamodernism
This week’s EcoGathering explores enclosure — seen by many as the beginning of capitalism as a dominant economic system. Enclosure is the process by which early capitalists laid claim to the commons — land, rivers, fisheries, etc., by privatizing and limiting access to them, including to those who managed them for generations. Inherent in the process of enclosure was the act of breaking people`s connections to the land, to their lifeways and livelihoods, and to each other. #Enclosure is a predicate for separation.
These domineering and extractive ways of relating weren’t just limited to the land and livelihoods but also to the bodies of people assigned the role of woman, disrupting bodily sovereignty. During the enclosures, the majority of women were forced to provide labor, in the form of care work, without compensation or at minimal wages and their subsistence was taken away. Those who resisted or practiced rituals that reaffirmed relationality to the land, were condemned as witches and, oftentimes, executed.
Though buried under several centuries of history, awareness of the enclosures is essential to understanding some of the deep-seated drivers of contemporary power-relations and politics. Some say that authoritarianism is inevitable under late-stage capitalism, others aver that #capitalism is late-stage patriarchy. Capitalism and #patriarchy both got a huge boost through the enclosures.
Join us to explore these connections and some of the historical shifts that set the stage for a volatile present in which access to land, rights to inhabit particular places, bodily autonomy, reproductive behavior and labor, and the very constructs of gender are again being used to consolidate power, wield it undemocratically, and condone violence as a tool of control.
#USelection #resistance #power #witchtrials #womensrights
Find the link to sign up in our bio (click upcoming ecogatherings). Thursday, November 7, 6:00-7.30 PM ET.
Political polarization. Bipartisan genocide and ecocide. Corporatocracy. Duopoly. Staggering short-termism. The 2024 US federal election is big. But our predicament is bigger.
As our friend @natehagens recently said: “Who wins is important, but if we take a step back and look beyond the short-term fervor of election politics, it becomes clear that what ultimately matters isn’t which person wins but how we - as individuals and as communities - respond....[O]ur current government will continue to contribute to a future that is far from sustainable - regardless of who heads the next administration. The ‘bend not break’ moments of the future will require informed policies that go beyond what can be addressed in today’s political environment.”
We agree — and we’re trying hard to avoid cleaving along the lines of terrible electoral choices in a captured representative democracy. Those of us looking to avoid winding up where humanity is headed understand that politics (and profits are) subordinate to the state of the biosphere, the quality of our relationships, and the vitality of our cultures.
So today, we’re reminding ourselves that:
1) Voting is just one way we participate in a broken political system with an electoral college that disenfranchises so many. Approach your choice strategically. (Check out @swapyourvote )
2) We need way more democracy - and more direct democracy — not less. Work toward democracy in forms and places that we aren’t used to seeing it — in citizens’ assemblies, in our workplaces, perhaps even where we buy and sell essential good and services.
3) Deep pain and a roiling sense of betrayal is coursing through U.S. American society right now. We must tend these flows of grief, the feelings of being wronged, of being complicit. Metabolization of big feelings and needs to happen in community... (continued in comments)
For September`s print, Renée was inspired by Ecogather’s recent themes of weaving, (re)connection, lines, and shapes. These prompted her to think about spiders in the dark making webs. This is something that honestly used to unsettle her, but more recently, she`s begun to think about spiders and their webs in new ways and with new feelings.
Renée slept with this piece of linoleum by her pillow as part of the creative process, reclaiming the night as something connecting rather than alienating, aware of the spiders probably out there making their own pieces of art throughout the night, inspiring her.
In a small but meaningful effort to make art a bigger part of our experiences at the end of the modern era, EcoGather has commissioned Contributing Artist Renée Barry to create a series of twelve block prints that support sense-making in the space between. Each month, EcoGather will share a new piece of Renée’s work and a brief statement about the print or it’s inspiration. The collection will build over the next year, populating our free art page with art that is intended to be accessible. We encourage you to download these files, print them, post them, share them, given them as gifts… We ask only that you credit Renée (@reneebarryart) and point folks toward EcoGather (@eco.gathering) when you do.
Swipe to see the other pieces she has made so far!
Link in bio to download and share!
Some of us understand the seriousness of our times, while some choose to be oblivious to it.
Surviving the Future is for those aware of our predicament, ready to hold complex conversations, and eager to find the others.
It is a co-learning journey for anyone who refuses quick fixes and techno-solutions and seeks to co-develop different responses altogether.
Hundreds of people went through "Surviving The Future" Deeper Dive, and many found the courage and knowledge to "plant the flag" in their communities, mobilizing allies to lead profound change.
The annual Deeper Dive offers a long moment — a 10-week opportunity — to slow down, pull back, and explore responses as part of a small global community, among and alongside some of the world’s leading thinkers and doers.
Confirmed guests include @natehagens, @vandanashiva1, @davidriversabram, and @planetcritical. They will infuse our spaces with their knowledge, yet your presence, wisdom, and experiences matter just as much.
Enroll now for The Deeper Dive 2025. Follow the link in our bio!
#survivingthefuture #ecologicalcollapse #predicament #survival #community #learningjourney #learning #collapseawareness