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 quite a lot to offer.

Darkness — non-metaphorical, the lack of light in the physical world — is an increasingly rare phenomenon, although it certainly feels like we have an abundnace of darnkess in these northern hemisphere winters. Darkness — metaphorical, all the difficult things in the world – is, unfortunately, not an increasingly rare phenomenon. For this call, we’ll focus mostly on the former, but just as it’s crucial to acknowledge the necessity of darkness for the critters and habitats on Earth, it’s neccessary to acknoledge the darkness we feel (gently, of course — we don’t need to dive too deep into the darkness of the world).

What lessons can we and, whether we want to or not, must we learn from darkness, physical and metaphorical? On this call, we'll figure a bit of that out together.

"Good things come to those who wait." “Patience is a virtue." Perhaps, but at the very least we all have experienced the necessary practice of patience in our own lives. On our final call of this shortened cycle, we'll convene around the practice and lessons of patience, which can feel especially challenging when we feel so much urgency.

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.