EcoGather

Good Grief
2025-04-26 14:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York)
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Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief through the frameworks of Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief (The Wild Edge of Sorrow). Inspired by our EcoGathering on Grieving during the autumnal Composting series in 2024 and an increasing urgency to process the compounding loss we experience as the continuation of modernity relies on genocide, ecocide, omnicide and fascism’s impingement on our basic rights and liberties, we will hold space to tend to the complex and often unaddressed grief that accompanies these losses and expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a skill for navigating uncertain futures.
In this Integration Session, we will focus on working with the grief that was revealed in the last week’s Sharing Session focused on The Fourth Gate, What we expected and did not receive. Through guided discussion and ritual, we will allow this newly unearthed grief to move into practice as we venture into a collective Apprenticeship with Sorrow. It’s highly recommended that you attend the companion Sharing Session offered the week prior, for the sake of group continuity and comfortability, as well as the opportunity to fully sit with the experience of witnessing and processing the grief at this gate.

Recommended Resources:
Rough InitiationsAn article by Francis Weller which details the teachings of Malidoma Somé on trauma vs. initiation cultures.
The Four Mountains StoryAn excerpt retelling of the Cree knowledge keeper, Cash Ahenakew’s story of The Four Mountains from Vanessa Machado de Oliviera’s Hospicing Modernity.
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, Chapter 3
For the fourth session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Fourth Gate: What we expected and did not receive” (pages 54-63)
The Five Gates of Grief
A brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

Progress
2025-04-30 18:30 - 20:00
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‘s For this lunar cycle, we’ll dissect the narratives told to us by modernity, and how they falsely shape our expectations for navigating the modern world. First up: progress, and its vital role in the mythmaking of empire.
One of the most popular, powerful, and pernicious myths of the dominant culture is that of perpetual progress. Watch any car or electronics advertisement, and you’ll be pelted with appeals to ever-improving technology. Listen to any politician, and amongst appeals to nationalism and exceptionalism, you’ll get flooded with appeals to past progress and promises that this particular politician is best if we want to keep advancing. Read any report on the stock market, and you’ll be invited to celebrate or assured we’ll soon resume the perpetual upward growth of the economy. Progress is used to justify cultural and technological colonization, economic expansion, and political power grabs. The myth of perpetual progress (shortened to MPP by some authors like Chris Ryan) permeates the dominant culture and most nations’ self-understanding: we’re all advancing, moving forwards, away from a dismal past that’s best discarded and forgotten.
But is the narrative of progress at all true? We’re promised that progress will bring us somewhere… better… but better by what standards, and according to whom? This week, we’ll explore that omnipresent narrative of progress, to what extent it drives and justifies modernity, and all that it misses.
Recommended Resources:
Daniel Schmachtenberger’s most recent interview on Nate Hagens’s podcast
Death in the Garden podcast: Who Were the Luddites? (start this one 8 minutes in)
The World is a Mess, and It’s Still the Best Time to Be Alive
Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed

Good Grief
2025-05-06 18:00 - 20:00
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Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief through the frameworks of Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief (The Wild Edge of Sorrow). Inspired by our EcoGathering on Grieving during the autumnal Composting series in 2024 and an increasing urgency to process the compounding loss we experience as the continuation of modernity relies on genocide, ecocide, omnicide and fascism’s impingement on our basic rights and liberties, we will hold space to tend to the complex and often unaddressed grief that accompanies these losses and expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a skill for navigating uncertain futures.
In this fifth session we will focus on The Fifth Gate of Grief and the last entryway into the Weller’s Communal Hall of Sorrows, Ancestral Grief. Walking through this gate asks us to address the generations of untended grief and compounded losses of our ancestors, passed on to us to heal and hold. In this Sharing Session all participants are welcome to release the grief that arises at this gate to be witnessed and held in the collective well of sorrow. It’s highly recommended that you attend the companion Integration Session offered the following week, for the sake of group continuity and comfortability, as well as the opportunity to fully sit with the experience of witnessing and processing the grief at this gate.

Recommended Resources
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, Chapter 3For the fifth and final session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief” (pages 63-69)
The Five Gates of GriefA brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

Good Grief
2025-05-12 18:00 - 20:00
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Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief through the frameworks of Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief (The Wild Edge of Sorrow). Inspired by our EcoGathering on Grieving during the autumnal Composting series in 2024 and an increasing urgency to process the compounding loss we experience as the continuation of modernity relies on genocide, ecocide, omnicide and fascism’s impingement on our basic rights and liberties, we will hold space to tend to the complex and often unaddressed grief that accompanies these losses and expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a skill for navigating uncertain futures.
In this Integration Session, we will focus on working with the grief that was revealed in the last week’s Sharing Session as we opened up the fifth and final gate to address Ancestral Grief. Through guided discussion and ritual, we will allow this newly unearthed grief to move into practice as we venture into a collective Apprenticeship with Sorrow. It’s highly recommended that you attend the companion Sharing Session offered the week prior, for the sake of group continuity and comfortability, as well as the opportunity to fully sit with the experience of witnessing and processing the grief at this gate.

Recommended Resources:
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, Chapter 3
For the fifth and final session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief” (pages 63-69)
The Five Gates of Grief
A brief summary of each of the five gates of grief
Seeds, Grief and Memory with Rowen White
A beautiful conversation relating ancestral grief with seed keeping as a means of remaining connected to the cultures of our ancestors.
Roots Deeper Than Whiteness
An essay on the historical emergence of whiteness and how it coincides with the forced assimilation and inherent disconnection of European peoples and their distinct cultures and traditions.

Prosperity
2025-05-14 17:30 - 19:00
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Modernity has brought us more energetic and material prosperity than the royalty of antiquity experienced. This prosperity comes at an obvious, though intensely hidden, human and ecological cost. Most economists and CEOs want to convince us our levels of prosperity aren’t nearly enough, and we need more energy and more materials. Certain thinkers, such as Derrick Jensen, think that none of this industrial prosperity justifies the costs, and we should disband with our material and energy wealth altogether in order to save as much life on the planet as possible. Others, like Jason Hickel, think that we can maintain relatively high levels of prosperity – every human being can still own a laptop, for example – and we can still maintain a sustainable existence on the planet. Considering the myth of perpetual progress and the massive human population, how should we weigh arguments about our wealth? There are plenty of definitions of wealth outside of the dominant materialist, individualist, growth-based culture, so what really is wealth anyways?

Language
2025-05-17 11:00 - 13:00 | Hard-Pressed Community Print Shop, 12 VT Rt. 15, West Danville, Vermont
How does language shape the way we see the world? What ideas are we more or less able to access, hold, and develop because limitations of the languages we speak? What is the value — and the limits — of having a robust vocabulary, and developing shared, nuanced definitions of words? Somewhere around 20% of the world’s population speaks English? How might this expand or constrain the diversity of concepts that can be communicated? As Rowen White has said: “If we are bound by the constraints of language and lexicon, how is modern culture really going to shift in the powerful and positive ways it needs to to restore our collective spiritual power.”
How can we can communicate ideas that we haven’t even imagined yet? Can we make up our own words? Should we? And if we do, how do we do we define and translate them so that we can continue to communicate across differences and with newcomers?

Peace
2025-05-22 12:00 - 13:30
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Just as modernity has shaped the narratives of progress, population, and prosperity to its own benefit, there is a story of peace that we’ve been told which deserves some critical analysis and questioning. In a culture where “peace deals” are synonymous with a temporary pause on genocidal bloodshed carried out by an incredibly unbalanced power dynamic, our very notion of what “peace” actually is has become warped by our conditioning to witness and increasingly tolerate unspeakable violence. The question of peace must hold an aspect of social spatiality… peace where? And for whom? A pervasive “Protect your peace” type of neo-spirituality has arisen in modernity’s hyper-individualized society. It requires its followers to ignore the very violences that their so-called peace depends on, as well as the conflict that inevitably arises from the unaddressed violences. But there is no peace in existing amongst the comforts of modernity when those comforts are dependent on the extraction and exploitation of other life.
How does our ignorant pursuit of modernity’s “peace” exacerbate the many conflicts of the polycrisis? How has our growing inability to address the inevitable conflict that arises, on both macro and micro scales, contributed to even more disruptions of the peace we claim to want for the world? In the last session of this cycle, we will break down the peace narrative we’ve been told, and make space to build out a new one which acknowledges the inevitability of conflict and our response-ability to address it with maturity and inclusivity.
Recommended resources for this gathering:

“The Duty of Repair”
Concluding excerpt from Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman

Recommended Quiz:
Which Conflict Archetype Are You?
Take this quiz to find out!

Recommended Listening:
Navigating Conflict with Kazu Haga
A conversation from Prentiss Hemphill’s podcast Becoming the People

Reimagining the Family
2025-05-25 11:00 - 12:30
We’ve partnered with Upstream once again to host a discussion on their recent episode with Kristen Ghodsee, Post Capitalist Parenting Pt. 2: Reimagining the Family, which, expectedly, continues their mini series on post capitalist parenting (their first was another EcoGather collaboration with Toi Marie Smith). Join us as we share the difficulties we’ve experienced as parents, caretakers, or children under capitalism, and explore the alternative ways of being we can strive for (many of which Kristen mentions in the episode and her book!).
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Upstream Podcast: Reimagining the Family with Kristen Ghodsee

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Dystopia
2025-05-28 19:30 - 21:00
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Our realities are shaped by the physical world we inhabit; whether that’s the nature that surrounds us, the humans we interact with in community, the food made accessible to us, or the stories that reach us, filled with knowledge our own realities or those far away. But just as much as we absorb these inputs from the outside world to shape our understanding of it, we are also exerting our own inputs into the realities of others. We all contribute to a greater understanding of the physical world which surrounds us, the Topia we exist in. In this lunar cycle, we will examine the different Topias, from the more familiar types found in literature, Dystopia and Utopia, to the more generative and less well-known genre of Thrutopia and Ourtopia.
The dystopias we familiarize ourselves with in literature have long warned us of the dangerous potential of humanity to create worlds of incredible suffering. But where does the fiction end, and reality begin? At least 90% of oceanic fish populations are overexploited. There are microplastics in every human body, in every mother’s breast milk, as well as our hearts and in our brains. Only 4% of Earth’s remaining mammals by biomass are wild beings – 96% of mammals are humans and our livestock. The dominant culture has created a dystopia for every non-human being, and for most human beings too – yet our dystopias look different, and will continue to unfold differently. In this EcoGathering, we’ll discuss our dystopia, driven in large part by the human population-consumption dynamics in this dominant culture.
Recommended resources for this gathering:
“Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel, Chapter 6
(It’s less than two pages long, and you’ve already gotten maybe half of it quoted above. But maybe give this another read, and imagine what would be on your own list.)
Slaughterbots – a short film by Dust
(This contains depictions of violence and blood – not too much, but this is a video about theoretical dystopian killing drones – so if that’s not for you, totally pass on this video.)
Worldmaking in the Dark with Octavia E. Butler, with Ayana Jamieson and Sophie Strand
(This touches on Dystopia and its opposite, Utopia, but like any good conversation with wonderful minds, it wanders about and doesn’t stay just on the topic of topias.)

Utopia
2025-06-03 13:00 - 14:30
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Broken down into a literal translation, Utopia means “no place.” This Topia is the territory that is often labeled ‘off-limits’ by an understanding of what is possible, based on what has been possible. It is where the imagination roams when left unbound and free from the limits of realism. Unlike the dystopic stories we question might be playing out in the real world we exist in right now, the utopia is inherently fictional. That being said, it can still serve a functional purpose in world-building. There is incredible power behind the unbound imaginative creative process that occurs when certain limits are removed. New pathways may be revealed for different ways of organizing ourselves into better forms of existence. If there’s any room for delusion in Topias, let it be a hopeful delusion which allows us to believe that there is always a better way of being. Join us this week as we wonder with unbound curiosity what utopian ideals we might be able to learn from, comparing lessons from history and literature with our current predicament.
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Hanzi Freinacht: What’s The Difference between Utopia, Eutopia and Protopia?
Upstream Podcast: Everyday Utopia and Radical Imagination with Kristen Ghodsee
David Fleming: Utopia from Lean Logic

In the Shell of the Old
2025-06-07 15:00 - 17:00 | Hard-Pressed Community Print Shop, 12 VT Rt. 15, West Danville, Vermont
The systems and institutions of society are not living up to their promises. That might be old news for you. Or it might be a recent revelation. Either way, after noticing the things aren’t as we were lead to believe, it’s worth taking a closer look. Are we dealing with surficial cracks in the paint that could be patched and restored? Or are we seeing the evidence of deep structural flaws? Put differently, do we need to confront the fact that honestly made and long-upheld principles and promises are suddenly being broken? Or is it time to reckon with the fact that those same principles and promises we always dishonestly proffered?
If we accept – or even strongly suspect – that human-made systems aren’t working well and are leading us somewhere we’d rather not go, we might be tempted to pursue significant, large scale, rapid and transformative reform of the system. But after so many decades of clamoring for action on an array of important issues, we also must admit that the massive shifts needed are unlikely, if not impossible, to bring about at the pace of worsening crisis or in the face of regression. This admission is not one of defeat. Rather, it is an invitation to stop trying to change, repair, or redeem “the system”) and, instead, build a new world in the shell of the old.
Taking matters into our own hands involves rebuilding cultures of commoning and cooperation. It also means not waiting for anyone to come save the day. We must take care of each other and get to work. As the old world crumbles and cracks, we can discard the parts that no longer serve us, we can take the pieces that work and start rebuilding the world we want to live in, here and now. This is a task of trusting that other worlds are possible – even if they straddle or hover just beyond the edges of our current imaginative capacity. It is also about committing to doing the work to build with who and what we have immediately around us. And it requires courageously accepting (perhaps even embracing, uncertainty – surrendering to the reality that we cannot know what our new world(s) will be or bring, recognizing that we are in the slipstream, doing the work of generations. It begins when we we show up, whether overwhelmed or undaunted and trust that “[w]e know what we need to do. We need to build the sequel, to draw inspiration which has lain dormant, like the seed beneath the snow.” (David Fleming)

Thrutopia
2025-06-12 17:00 - 18:30
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We can benefit from imagining, ideating, and criticizing utopias and dystopias, but what about right now? Utopias are unachievable and dystopias are undesirable, so what worlds should we inhabit and build, especially now and in the near future? In the pursuit of utopia and in the rejection of dystopia, we encounter Thrutopia.
As philosopher and writer Rupert Read originally envisioned it, “What are desperately needed, but as yet barely exist, are what I term thrutopias. Thrutopias would be about how to get from here to there, where ‘there’ is far far away in time. How to live and love and vision and carve out a future, through pressed times that will endure. The climate crisis is going to be a long emergency, probably lasting hundreds of years. It is useless to fantasise a shining sheer escape from it to utopia. But it’s similarly useless, dangerously defeatist, to wallow around in dystopias. We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul. Visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.”
Join us this week as we explore what thrutopia could look like and mean in this stage of modernity and its ongoing collapse.
Thrutopia newsletter
Recommended Resources
Thrutopian Dreams with Manda Scott on Sounds of SAND podcast
THRUTOPIA: Why Neither Dystopias Nor Utopias Are Enough To Get Us Through The Climate Crisis, And How A ‘Thrutopia’ Could Be by Rupert Read
Why building inspiring alternatives is necessary to counter authoritarianism by Barbara Peterson
The Way Out is Through: On Thrutopia with Manda Scott, a conversation by advaya

How to Fall in Love with the Future
2025-06-27 13:00 - 14:30
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In this final EcoGathering, we have partnered with Upstream for a conversation with Rob Hopkins discussing his forthcoming book, How to Fall in Love with the Future. The book comes out June 17th (available in the US on September 16th) and you can order at the link above through Chelsea Green Publishing (use discount code CGP35 for 35% off your purchase). This collaborative EcoGathering serendipitously falls at the end of our cycle on ‘Topias, during which we explored the many ways our stories of the future shape our actions and orientations now. Rob invites us to consider how vividly and sensually imagining the future we want, based on real examples of eutopias strengthens our efforts to bring about the rapid, radical change we need to create vivacious, beautiful communities – and it’s not that hard to build with who and what we have around us. Since this is our final gathering as EcoGather, we will also use Rob’s invitations and tools to dream about what comes next for us as otherWise.
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Upstream Podcast: How to Fall in Love with the Future with Rob Hopkins
