About this Event
All around us news of loss, greed, injustices of the most appalling variety, classist and racist policies, ecological destruction, war. All while we carry our own personal losses of loved ones, relationships, homelands, parts of ourselves, and dreams of how our life would unfold. How do we navigate life in these times? How do we keep our heart alive amidst this madness?
We are coming to understand we can no longer do this alone. This time is calling for radical acts of re-imagining, re-membering, and re-invigorating our capacity to share with each other, to relate in reciprocity with each other and all of life.
Communal grief tending is one way to do this good work. As Francis Weller says, we go to grief ritual to make our hearts more spacious, more capable of falling in love with the world. Grief work is aliveness work. To welcome our grief is to welcome our joy and the full range of human expression. Because to suppress any feeling is to suppress all feeling!! In welcoming our grief we find ourselves more alive, more able to move in the moment with what arises, and having more room for all feelings and sensations including joy.
Throughout our time together we will sit in circle, we will sing, we will listen deeply and share with each other using the practices of council, and have the opportunity to visit the grief altar and honor our grief in a ceremonial setting. We will move through our time with care towards trust and connection with ourselves, each other, and the more than human world. While we ask that in choosing to attend that you are intending to participate fully, we also have so much grace for the not knowing of how it will feel to sit in such a circle and what will arise in us asking for our presence. You will have sovereignty to pass on an opportunity to share and to ask for silence rather than speak.
I, Megan Eberhardt, facilitator of our day, stumbled upon grief ritual 6+ years ago at a 3-day community singing gathering. I walked away from those few hours with Laurence Cole more alive and present than I had ever felt in my life. I knew immediately that I needed to live in a world where the people come together to grieve and that I would do what it takes to make it happen. Within months I attended several more rituals, trainings, and even organized a couple grief rituals that were held at the Sebastopol Grange. After a cross-country move to Chicago during the great Pandemic Pause to tend family and roots I eventually heeded the call to begin facilitating community song circles and grief ritual in my new again homelands. It's such an honor to now return to this place of my own deep becoming to step into circle with you.
On lineage: Our facilitator, Megan Eberhardt, studied in-person with Francis Weller, Laurence Cole, and Martín Prechtel. Most of the tools we will utilize in the ritual originate long before civilization: singing, sharing in a circle, and expressing grief as sounds and movements through the body. While the lineage of this ritual came through Malidoma Somé and Sobonfu Somé of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, as carried by Laurence Cole and Francis Weller, it could not be called a Dagara ritual without relationship to that land and that place, without generations inhabiting the land, without myths and song and communal ritual learned and practiced from birth within the same village with the same villagers. We bow deeply to the Dagara origins and roots of this ritual practice and come with a curiosity around what it is to attempt to recreate it on this landscape with a group of folks that at best will be a village for a day. We come with a recognition that most of us have lost our shared rituals of renewing our relationship with the sacred, and we come with a desire to find our rituals again, towards the possibility of a shared future that includes a living and conversational relationship with the land, the sacred, and each other.
Logistics: Doors open at 10:30, arrive no later than 10:45am. We will have 45 minute lunch break. Plan to bring some things to eat, we will have warm vegan kitcharee to supplement your lunch. Tea will available throughout the day.
Location: Exact location to be given upon registering. We will be well held on gorgeous land in Occidental California.
Cost: Tickets are sliding scale $120-$180. Please give what feels both generous and affordable to you. There are a limited number of discounted work trade spots available. If money is a barrier and you feel called to join please reach out. You can pay by Zelle to avoid fees to [email protected].
**Not sure if this is right for you?? Please contact [email protected] with any questions**
Highly recommended reading: The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller and The Smell of Rain on Dust by Martín Prechtel.
Megan Eberhardt is cultural activist and community songleader based out of Chicago, Illinois. She spent a decade of her adult life living in Sebastopol where she apprenticed with Stargazer Li for over 8 years and began teaching the stars, studied with thinker and author Martin Prechtel, and began organizing community song circles and grief rituals. Now returned to her roots in the Midwest, Megan currently leads monthly song circles at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, facilitates community grief ritual, and teaches the stars under dark skies across the Midwest. At the heart of her work is her devotion to fostering aliveness, belonging, and connection in and among us and with the natural world. Some of her teachers include Martín Prechtel, Orland Bishop, Stargazer Li, Liz Rog, Francis Weller, and Laurence Cole.
**photo of the Laguna de Santa Rosa by Ed Lark
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, 15290 Coleman Valley Road, Occidental, United States
USD 0.00
