Hi Friend,

Part of my personal practice of ReMembering is to visit and make offerings to certain lands that are sacred to me. These are places where I experience being re-membered into the ancient song of the winged ones and the grazing creatures and the growing of trees and grass and running water, where I reliably experience that peace of wild things. This week, I've been giving prayers of thanksgiving for the lives of teachers of poetry and song and standing for what is true and right - gratitude to Wendell and Dolly and Gertrude.

Another practice is… practicing via deep listening to the pattern within patterns- especially of the unfolding of ministries in people’s lives. Often, during visits and sessions with clients and former students, I can hear the songs of their own lives. Sometimes I can make out some variation of this refrain:

ReMember, ReMember.

ReMember your Ancient Mother.

ReMember, ReMember

Your ancestors, your Place, your People, your Family

ReMember, ReMember,

You are kin to soil and star and the webs of power.

Here is a story of such a thing from this past week.

A former student recently invited me to her home nestled in between oak trees this week: a home full of love and grief, as there had recently been a death in their family. We shared long hugs. I felt her lean into the embrace just enough that she was not even pretending to carry it all herself. I can hold her in this way because I too have been held.... this kind of holding (and being held) is part of how we are re-membered into one another: sharing with and in one another the commonalities of grief and joy.

A friend of theirs was helping around the house, cooking pasta and washing dishes and folding laundry: the work of kitchens everywhere. The work of the continuation of life herself. As introductions were passed around the kitchen, our hosts started telling their friend about my work.

About how they first heard me give a teaching about the witch hunts and colonization, and it sent waves through them that stayed with them for years. And then one of them took my ReMembering Course. She said that course helped her get to what she had always known was true but did not have the words or evidence for it. She said it helped to bring her back to her own power.

When I started teaching, I never could have guessed that several years after someone took the ReMembering Course, they would say that it helped return them to their own knowing and their power. I would have been happy with people having learned more accurate histories. But instead, this other thing started happening. Not for everyone. But for a lot of people. I am in awe of this: of the power of ReMembering.

I'm so glad you are doing this work, said their friend to me. Every action she took in their kitchen was purposeful, efficient, not taking up too much space, but also not hiding. I knew I was watching kindness in motion.

How did you get started? How did you even think to do this? She asked me.

How do I explain the journey of a lifetime in the midst of someone preparing lunch on a Tuesday afternoon?

Well, I said, I wanted to get to the root of climate change; I wanted to find spiritual processes that would help us survive. Help us connect to the Earth. But when I saw people try to connect with Earth - and I saw it in so many ways - it was as if a veneer of separation persisted. Eventually I realized that gap was the gap of the long histories of colonization. Naming and understanding and engaging with those histories—with that which our culture consistently avoided— could help people see, understand, and to close the gap.

That makes total sense, she replied, though I would not have thought of it, she continued.

Oh, me neither, I assured her. I only saw it because of my very particular journey. But once you see it, you see it everywhere.

We sat around their table and shared food together while the couples’ two babies napped upstairs. I listened to their stories: of death and grief and the ongoing presence of those who had passed over. I too shared stories: of death and estates and paperwork and the upcoming class that Krissy and I are teaching this October. (We've just figured out how to make it even better.) And other stories - of the hope gathering around the Great Law of Peace at a big conference in D.C. that many of my colleagues and former students had recently attended; of a herd of white buffalo that is still very much alive in the middle of the country, despite everything; of comedians who make me laugh so hard I almost cry; of some of the exciting people who are running for congress in some of the most unexpected places.

After lunch, my former student told me of some of the big patterns she is noticing and of some of the work that she feels is growing within her, which might bring her into the next chapter of her work in the world; I think of it as her ministry. We sat with the big patterns together, noticing the shifts and change within the particular section of the web that she is growing in her capacity to tend. It was clear that her relationship to her own ancestors was shaping this new endeavor: that her relationship to the history that we she had learned alongside me (or rather that I had accompanied her in encountering) during the ReMembering Course cohort that she was a part of several years ago was influencing her next steps on her own journey of contributing her life energy into the shape-shifting of the web.

The practical work of re-membering and re-enchanting new ways of being and crafting different structures to support different forms of relating is rarely easy. It takes analysis and courage and spiritual growth and a lot of partnerships and a lot of conversations. It takes letting go… and holding on.

I left with my heart and mind encouraged: amidst so much that is falling apart, there is also so much that is coming together. And this work of ReMembering is so powerful.

ReMembering has many forms and many ways and many teachers and many students. Of which I am one (both a student and a teacher).

We will have our next cohort of the ReMembering Course starting this coming November. (After the election.)

Perhaps this is a time for you to join us. Or to take it again. Or to share it.

Maybe you want to join the next webinar.

Maybe you've already been to a webinar, and you are ready to take the course.

Let me know.

And in this time, as the busy season of Fall comes upon us, may you know the blessings of ReMembering.

- Sara Jolena