EcoGathering: Conquerers
2025-01-29 13:30 - 15:00 (America/New_York)
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Humans are offered – forced into, really – relatively few roles and identities in modernity. On this first call, we’ll unpack how we’ve been made to live as conquerers, occupiers, Homo colossus, separated from and domineering over the living world. Our population, our consumption, and the myths we’ve been offered all inform this role we can choose to resist.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:

Genghis Khan (Part 2) – How to Take Over the World podcast
Conquerors and Culture – National Geographic

EcoGathering: Stewards
2025-02-06 19:30 - 21:00 (America/New_York)
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What is our place in the world? What should it be? What do we have to offer Earth and her living and non-living (so far as we think we know) communities?   We regularly see appeals to the privilege or necessity of humans as stewards of the Earth. But what do these claims imply — ownership, power over, possession? Are we above the Earth, separate from her, as her managers? Where does our stewardship lead — or, how do we choose to make decisions as stewards? Do we choose what’s best for all beings, or do we consciously or unconsciously shape the world for our specific benefit?  The idea of being a steward does get at an important point of course: we can and should have a role in co-creating an abundant, diverse living world. Could we do that as stewards? Or perhaps it’s better to imagine ourselves as siblings or neighbors, a more horizontal relationship with all other non-human members of the living world.
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Mordecai Ogada: The Big Conservation Lie
Lyla June: 3,000 Year Old Solutions to Modern Problems
Rob Lewis: No Nature Poems, Please

Good Grief
2025-02-09 11:00 - 12:30 (America/New_York)
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Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief guided by 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.
Join us for the first of a series of five sessions in which we will discuss and tenderly hold the grief that awaits us at The First Gate of Grief, which welcomes in the familiar grief accompanying the understanding that everything we love, we will lose.

Recommended Resources
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, Chapter 3For this first session, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The First Gate: Everything you love, you will lose”
The Five Gates of GriefA brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

EcoGathering: Citizens
2025-02-12 12:00 - 13:30 (Asia/Karachi)
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What does it mean to exist as a “citizen”? A citizen of where, exactly? We are only told to identify as a citizen of a nation-state (in the context of empire), and we are reduced into so many other flattening categories conducive to the growth of oppressive systems (“consumers”, “voters”, and other labels that amputate our role in the world and leave us only as captured participants in abusive systems). Can we simultaneously exist as citizens of empire, of our smaller communities, and the living world?
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
1. Nissa Coit: The Good Citizen
2. Jon Alexander: Citizens not Consumers or Subjects
3. Political Philosophy with Dr. Laurie Johnson: Who is a Citizen?

EcoGathering: Kin
2025-02-20 19:30 - 21:00 (Asia/Karachi)
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There is one identity that cuts across all other labels we could apply to humans and more-than-humans, no matter what kinds of citizens or conquerers or stewards we and others might be. Beneath it all, we are all irrevocably kin.  This relationship to each other has been (and must be) suppressed in the name of growth, progress, and superiority. Join us this week as we discuss how we can welcome back kinship into the interconnected world.

Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
To read:
Kinship Beneath the Family Tree: Emily’s blog post about expanding the limits of our understanding of Kinship
Kinship is a Verb: A conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Hausdoerffer, and Gavin Van Horn
To listen:
A Little More Than Kin: A conversation with Richard Powers
To view:
Ancestral Mathematics

Rage and Joy
2025-02-22 15:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Hard-Pressed Community Print Shop, 12 VT Rt. 15, West Danville, Vermont
Are we allowing rage and joy, grief and celebration, to remain fiercely connected to each other?
Are we tending to each so that neither trauma nor delusion define us?
We will start by exploring how we might express our individual and collective rage without being overwhelmed and subsumed by it. Rage may at once be a true reaction to the events around us, or perhaps a debilitating manifestation of other emotions such as grief, fear, or impotence. How might we discern between these valid reactions and metabolize the helpful parts of that energy into something useful action and sustainable?
On the flip side of holding our rage is to find glimmers of joy to sustain us despite all that is going on around us. How can we use expressions of joy to balance our rage, to sustain our fire and celebrate the little things as a form of radical resistance?

Abundance
2025-02-26 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
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The gardens of our imaginations may be verdant and flowering places, but a tremendous amount of what’s done in the name of horticulture, infrastructure and agriculture creates landscapes of botanical and ecological scarcity. Whether mowing lawns, mulching garden beds, or paving a parking lot, we have created, are surrounded by, and have become acculturated to the very voids that nature abhors. Given this ecologically impoverished state of affairs, how might we summon the ecological abundance that exists in our midst at the scale and pace that is needed to offset what is passively termed as “habitat loss?” We could follow the cues of charismatic weeds and build flourishing landscapes that fulfill the needs of the human and non-human world alike. Could cultural and botanical reproduction co-create new lands outside of conventional capitalist paradigms? Might we call this approach “eco-maximalism”?
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Nick Anderson: Improvised LandscapesNick Anderson: The Opposite of ExtinctionOlogies Podcast with Alie Ward: Ethnoecology with Leigh JosephThe Wildlife Homestead: I Built a Wildlife Pond

Good Grief
2025-03-04 19:00 - 21:00 (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 second session, our first meeting will be for sharing the grief that arises for each one of us at The Second Gate, The places that have not known love. Holding tender space for the places within ourselves that have never been given the chance to know love, this Sharing Session is an opportunity to release our grief 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 3
For the second session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Second Gate: The places that have not known love” (pages 31-46)
The Five Gates of Grief
A brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

Living Time
2025-03-05 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York)
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The physical spaces we inhabit both shape and reflect how we spend our time and what our overculture values. We infrequently immerse ourselves in lush landscapes, taking time to wander off path, stopping to notice an oak gall or to observe that you can only find butterflies around the weedy goldenrod growing in the ditch. Far more often, we drive past at 60 miles an hour, completely encased in plastic and metal. We don’t let sprouting acorns planted by squirrels grow to maturity. Instead we mow them and all the other “weeds” down, then budget massive amounts of time and resources into cultivating trees and ornamental bushes offsite to then transplant them. But the living world doesn’t work on the impatient timescales of the dominant contemporary economy. Beings, ecosystems, and all their interconnected relationships take time to form, time to grow to maturity, and time to recover when damaged. We humans don’t take the time to understand ecosystems, to engage with them and to humbly ask what they need. If we want to contribute to a more resilient, emergent abundance, we must examine how we all relate to time — goldenrod and oak trees included.
Recommended resources for this gathering:Deep Time Diligence: An Interview with Tyson YunkaportaFrihet, by Peter SandburgGrowing Through Grief: Derek Jarmin, by Maria PopovaModern Nature by Derek JarminDavid Farrier: Wild Clocks

Post Capitalist Parenting
2025-03-08 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York)
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Capitalism has placed us under many spells that influence and limit what we believe to be normal and natural. Parenting is one intimate site where capitalism’s spell is particularly impactful. Often leaving parents and children to feel especially isolated, alone, and precarious—perfect for keeping working people separated and oppressed and for grooming children into docile workers under capitalism.
To kick off Upstream’s new series on Post Capitalist Parenting and intersect it with EcoGather’s interest in Parenting at the End of the World as We Know It, we invited on Toi Smith, mother of four and a Growth and Impact Strategist. Toi’s work centers on doing life, business, and motherhood differently and collaborating with people who are countercultural, liberatory, and revolutionary.
In the this episode-anchored EcoGathering, we will consider what Capitalism has whispered to us about what parenting should look like and what it is for. Join us to deconstruct mothering, fathering, and caring for the next generations under capitalism and swap post capitalist child-rearing strategies.
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Upstream Podcast: Post Capitalist Parenting with Toi Marie SmithForget Hallmark: Why Mother’s Day is a Queer Black Feminist Left Thing, in Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, Alexis Pauline GumbsOur Role As New Paradigm Parents, excerpted from Raising Children in the Midst of Global Crisis, by Jo delAmorNicole Civita: Parenting at the End of the World as We Know It

Good Grief
2025-03-11 19:00 - 21:00 (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 for The Second Gate of Grief, The places that have not known love. Through guided discussion and ritual, we will allow this 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 3For the second session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Second Gate: The places that have not known love” (pages 31-46)
The Five Gates of GriefA brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

Necessity
2025-03-20 13:00 - 14:30 (America/New_York)
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We are a planting species. For thousands upon thousands of years, humans have tended to ecosystems, and perhaps our most substantial partners in that co-creative relationship were, and still are, plants. Matters of regeneration and rewilding are immensely necessary to help the living world — and by extension, us — survive the onslaught of civilization. But rekindling and nurturing an abundant, emergent relationship with plants and ecosystems is also necessary for us to express that innate, deeply human part of themselves that has worked intimately with plants for millennia. On this final call, we’ll gather to appreciate how essential an ecomaximalist world is. Ultimately, we can begin to ask: How can we learn to see and empower the living world differently?

There are no resources to read or listen to for this week’s call. We’re going to explore the abundance and aliveliness in our daily lives. Take a few moments throughout your days to notice and appreciate the lives around you!

Solidarity
2025-03-20 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Hard-Pressed Community Print Shop, 12 VT Rt. 15, West Danville, Vermont
Our work as people who want and deserve better is to understand the game, stop playing in the ways that we can, get clearer about the kind of world in which we want to live, and be more involved politically and in our communities instead of less. – Toi Marie Smith
Through the lens of collapse awareness, interdependence is apparent and solidarity becomes essential to survival. We recognize that we are all beings suffering from a devastated biosphere, an insatiable extractive economy, and socio-geo-political decline. When we say all, we really mean all: all human beings, all more-than-human beings, all communities of all beings, and all future beings who will inherit the effluent of empire. Ultimately, nobody will be spared the sufferings of collapse, especially those humans and non-humans with less wealth, power, or protections. We share far more in common with present and future living beings than we do money, machinery, the economy, or the aspirations of empires.
Solidarity invites us to show up for other people fighting what turns out to be the same fight as ours – even if we are not positioned on the front lines. It offers us an opportunity to contribute what we can (in whatever forms or concentrations we can share) to a struggle for survival that may not be distinctly or acutely ours, but diffuses easily across the porous membranes between self and other.

What is Work?
2025-03-25 18:30 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
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By some estimates, contemporary humans, on average, spend about 1/3 of their lifetimes “working”. (Actual proportions of time spent “working” vs. sleeping vs. engaged in leisure pursuits vary widely based on culture, economic system, ability, need/wealth, gender, — and also based on what we actually count as “work.”) Without question, it’s evident that work makes up a significant portion of the human experience. In a clever capitalist catch-22, we spend so much of our time and energy working, that we never really get the chance to explore the question of what really is work, anyways? Where did it come from, and who does it serve? Is there inherent value to work? And why do we spend so much of our precious time living doing it?
In the 20th and early 21st centuries, we’ve tended to narrowly define work as the labor we perform in exchange for wages or other monetary earnings. This construction is broad in that it covers a wide range of roles across all aspects of society, necessary or essential, productive or value-adding, non-essential and incidental to profit generation, and questionable or degenerative. But it is also narrow in that it excludes the typically unpaid labor required to meet the demands of daily living. This oft-unpaid work (known variously as carework or social reproductive labor) has been disproportionately assigned to women in recent centuries. (Indeed, the persistent non- or under-compensation of this work is a powerful means of upholding the patriarchy, but we’ll get to that later in our Exploitation session). For now, suffice it to say that what is or could be considered work varies widely. So, we will begin this cycle by unpacking a familiar term, exploring our perceptions of work, and evaluating definitions provided to us by physicists, ancient Greeks, and modern society.

Recommended resources for this gathering:
The School of Life: History of Ideas – WorkMichael Luong: The Past, Present, and Future of WorkMuch To Do: Relating to and Reuniting with Our Working Lives

Good Grief
2025-03-27 18:30 - 20:30 (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.
Join us in our third session as we direct our grief to The Third Gate, The Sorrows of the World. 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 third session of this series, it’s highly recommended that you read the section of this chapter subtitled “The Third Gate: The sorrows of the world” (pages 46-53)
The Five Gates of GriefA brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

Alienation and Exploitation of Labor
2025-04-03 11:30 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
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Our exploration of work questions the differences between jobs, care, creation, production, and more. There is no question that in order to stay alive work needs to get done. It takes energy to grow photosynthetic leaves, forage for food, to hunt for prey, to sow seeds to harvest, to shop at the grocery store, or to make enough money to eat out at a restaurant. There are plenty of arrangements for doing the work of sustenance and subsistence. Most critters alive are responsible for procuring the energy to do work to stay alive themselves, or in collaboration with a group. But, in our modern human societies, many people are able to meet their needs by using someone else’s energy without reciprocation. This is (or runs a very high risk of) exploitation.
We have already explored the processes of Primitive Accumulation and Enclosure that established capitalism and coerced people into meeting their material needs through wages rather than subsistence. This rift separated (or introduced a middle-step to) the work done for meeting materials needs. Indeed, the work done for wages is sometimes referred to as alienated labor. And under Capitalism, the alienated labor of workers is a key component to making profits, which mean that labor must be compensated at less than its true value. Because laborers receive less than the full value of their work, members of the working class who must work for another person or entity to earn wages so they can pay for the necessities are typically working in an inherently exploitative arrangement. (Degrees of exploitation vary tremendously, of course.) Additionally, capitalism relies upon – and is continually subsidized by – unpaid work in the so-called “informal economy” (or non-monetary economy). Think here of the work associated with maintaining a car for commuting, shopping for “work appropriate clothing,” making and packing meals, and even the maternal labor of gestating the next generation of exploitable laborers. In this EcoGathering, we will explore the often invisibilized micro and macro examples of exploitation that result when the work we do to meet our material needs is exploited, and separated, or alienated, from the work we spend most of our lives doing.
Recommended resources for this gathering:
Much To Do
A big long blog post on relating to and reuniting with out working lives. For this session, we recommend reading the Exploitation and Devaluation of Necessary Work sections.

The Myth of Freedom Under Capitalism by Upstream
Home is Where the Unpaid Labor Is
Marx, the ‘Metabolic Rift’ and Capitalism’s Assault on Nature
The work of care is vital. Why don’t we pay like it is?

Make Work
2025-04-09 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
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In a time of crisis, there is so much work to do. Most of us exist in a state of alienation that amounts to having two full time jobs – the work for wages and the work for ourselves, leaving little left for (the work of) pursuing passions and participating in community. To add insult to injury, as many wage-labor jobs have been automated or accelerated by technology, there has been an increase in the amount of work we are doing that is decidedly not necessary. There is so much important work that isn’t being done or isn’t properly compensated because it is not profitable to capital. Folks are too overworked to have the time and energy to do it. Rather than redistributing the work that is essential to more people and reducing our working hours, or mobilizing around the many existential crises we face, we have all continued to work faster and longer to meet our needs and eke out some semblance of individual security in an uncertain world.
Why do are we doing so much unnecessary work? In part because it generates profit for someone, somewhere. In part, because few places have pro-social systems of wealth distribution or even adequate social safety nets. And in part because an un- or under-employed populous lacks the money to generate more economic activity as consumers. (So even as essential work is made more efficient, workers aren’t given their time back, they are compelled to work increasingly less necessary jobs that grow the economy.)
In the words of David Fleming “[we] are conditioned by the market economy; [we] have to be competitive, and cannot forgo an immediate advantage from which [we] would individually benefit in favor of a future (and larger) advantage from which everyone would benefit.” In this EcoGathering, we will explore the many ways we continue to be exploited and alienated from our labor, as well as how we might recreate a culture that would allow us to slow down, and actually get the important work done.

Recommended resources for this gathering:
Much To Do
A big long blog post on relating to and reuniting with out working lives. For this session, we recommend reading the Creation of Unnecessary Work section.

On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs A Work Rant by David Graeber
I Didn’t Want a Job by Aimee McNee

On Meaningless Jobs A conversation with David Graeber

Reclamation of Labor
2025-04-17 12:30 - 14:00 (America/New_York)
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There are plenty of examples of labor movements throughout history (spanning rights recognition, practical advocacy to improve wages and working conditions, and radical re-envisioning), from worker unions and cooperatives, fully automated luxury communism and neodecadence, social security and even insurance, to universal basic income, wages for housework, and expanding who is allowed to work for wages. In this unprecedented time, we might begin to consider how prefiguration and divestment from the myths of progress and efficiency might play a role in re-establishing forms of subsistence and work-life integration that heals the rift of alienation, meets our needs without exploitation, and values finding joy in the work that we all love and rely on. What diverse arrangements for getting the work done in a weird world can we imagine anew and return to?
Recommended resources for this EcoGathering:
Much To Do
A big long blog post on relating to and reuniting with out working lives. For this session, we recommend reading the last section, subtitled Reclamation of Labor.

How to Drop Out by Ran Prieur
Retreats: Marble Hill Short film documenting the life of Mark Boyle, The Moneyless Man
Jem Bendell: Keeping Your Job at the End of the World (As We Know It)

Good Grief
2025-04-19 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.

The fourth session will focus on The Fourth Gate of Grief, What we expected and did not receive. This gate provides us the space and grace to acknowledge and grieve the expectations we have held for ourselves and the world around us that cannot be met. 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 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 GriefA brief summary of each of the five gates of grief

Work
2025-04-19 15:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Hard-Pressed Community Print Shop, 12 VT Rt. 15, West Danville, Vermont
We spend so much of our time and energy working, that we never really get the chance to explore the question of what really is work, anyways? Where did it come from, and who does it serve? There is no question that in order to stay alive work needs to get done. Living in a time of upheaval, we sense that there’s very important work to do — and for many of us, that’s not the work we’re actually doing.
Further, today it is common to meet needs through someone else’s labor, without reciprocation. Such arrangements are prone to exploitation and are entwined with the greatest challenges of our time. Simultaneously, under capitalism, almost all laborers receive less than the full value of their work. Thus, members of the working class (all who must work for another person or entity to earn wages so they can pay for necessities) are typically working in inherently exploitative arrangements. Additionally, capitalism relies upon – and is continually subsidized by – unpaid work in the so-called “informal economy” (or non-monetary economy).
Most of us exist in a state of alienation that amounts to having (at least) two “full-time” jobs – the work for wages and the work for ourselves. This leaves little time for (the work of) pursuing passions, participating in community, and pursuing transformative change. To add insult to injury, as many wage-labor jobs have been automated or accelerated by technology, there has been an increase in the amount of work we are doing that is decidedly not necessary. Rather than redistributing the work that is essential to more people and reducing our wage-working hours, or mobilizing around the existential crises we face, most of us now work faster and longer just to meet our needs and eke out some semblance of individual security in an uncertain world.
In this unprecedented time, it is imperative that we examine our relationship to and reclaim some control over our labor, individually and collectively. If we divest from the myths of progress and efficiency, we might find ourselves inclined to re-establish forms of shared subsistence. We might reorganize power and practice prefiguration in our workplaces. And we might even toss out dated and impossible-to-achieve notions of work-life balance in favor of work-life integration.
If you’d like to meets more of your needs (and those of your neighbors) with less exploitation, actually respond to accelerating crises, and find joy in good work, start by joining us for this EcoGathering. What diverse arrangements for getting the work done in a weird world can we imagine anew and return to?

Examining End Times Fascism
2025-04-23 15:30 - 17:00 (America/New_York)
A focused, ad hoc EcoGathering to discuss the analysis put forward in Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s recent article in The Guardian, The rise of end times fascism.
Please read the featured essay in advance, it will take approximately 30-40 minutes, as per The Guardian. We’ll gather to discuss.

Register!

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 (America/New_York)
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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 (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 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 (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 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 (America/New_York)
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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 (America/New_York) | 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 (America/New_York)
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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 (America/New_York)
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 (America/New_York)
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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.)
