"I was nearly overcome with grief," a participant in our Fall Equinox Gathering in the midst of the woods in Cheney, PA shared.
The cause?
Finding an apple tree with both a full-grown apple (which is normal at this time of year) and apple blossoms at the same time.
The seasons are no longer in balance.
This year our Fall Equinox gathering circles around the themes of grief and gratitude. I had the delight of co-creating it with two other women I’ve been creating sacred space with for years, both of whom are at least 20 years older than I am because we create a community that spans generations and take the experience and wisdom of older women and men seriously.
The apples and the apple blossoms were both beautiful.
But oh! The grief of witnessing this deep dissonance. Of feeling so often so powerless.
In such times as these, we need to come together. To sing and to wail, to move and to dance, to support one another in going into the winter/next season. Which we did.
We wove in and out of the following poem by Mark Nepo.
Adrift
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart
makes a duet of wonder and grief:
the light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory form their web
around the knot in my throat
The breeze makes the birds move
from branch to branch as this ache
makes me look for those I've lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger.
In the very center, under it all,
what we have that no one can take away
and all that we've lost
face each other.
It is there
that I'm adrift,
feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists
inside everything.
I am so sad
and everything
is beautiful.
We turned the poem into a song. And then into rounds with a chorus, and then into an entry into storytelling and sharing. Voices lifting and weaving.
At the end of the night, we went outside and we sang to the night.
Equinox itself is associated with balance: that brief 'equal' moment between day and night. Those meta-planetary rhythms are, fortunately, the same, for all that we have deeply unbalanced the seasonal rhythms.
More strangeness is coming.
The songs, poetry, storytelling, and collective sharing do not, in and of themselves, re-balance the harm that our society has and continues to perpetuate.
But they can and do shift our sense of what is possible; to help re-source ourselves, to re-align, and to fortify.
And, depending on who is in the room, they can create new/different alliances, connections, and possibilities.
So we need to keep doing them. To keep finding wars of connecting with that source which sustains, a source who/which often expresses itself through song and art.
Enjoy this season of harvest. Celebrate. Mourn. Laugh. Cry. Stretch it out and let it go.
May the balance- within and without- be restored.
Walk in harmony -
Sara Jolena
p.s. Join us in our upcoming, If Quakers Were Witches... (September 29 to October 1) and The ReMembering Webinar (October 1 pm ET).
