Hi Friend,

During our most recent Advent session this past week, we reflected on the Bear's patterns of hibernating for winter. It starts of course months earlier, in late summer. The eating. So. Much. Eating.

As one of the participants in the session pointed out, the Bear eats many medicine plants before hibernating. Before fully turning to deep rest and deep sleep - and, for mother bears, before giving birth.

The creation and recreation of life take a lot of energy. A lot of medicine.

It made me wonder about the kinds of medicines we need to feed ourselves as we prepare for.... for winter, yes. For whatever is coming.

It also made me feel a little bit better about much of the busy-ness that accompanies this season. Sometimes, that busy-ness does feel like fuel for later: because I am looking forward to doing a lot more writing in January (I have so many things, it's going to be hard to choose!), so that means I need to start preparing for that time now.

To be in the present frequently engages with both the past and the future. Time is not linear - on so, so many levels.

Temporal deities - those gods and goddesses and supernatural beings (who might not see themselves as gods at all) who engage in time, the ones that arise from so many different cosmovisions, are often both feared and respected. Kali. The Wyrd Sisters in Nordic mythologies (and their echoes in Greco-Roman myths. Even Jesus, who encompasses and defines time.... hence the Western calendar starting with his birth.... and ending with his resurrection, or so some Christians say (this is not a view held by all Christians).

I know, secular society rarely explicitly thinks of time as ending... except we do - we think about it all the time. It's a major past time - from science fiction and fantasy films and books to politics and economics and ecological thinking.

What apocalypse are you thinking about the most these days?

There are many one might focus on. The anxiety in the zeitgeist is high. You might be experiencing anxiety-visions. It's hard to tell, sometimes, which one to pay attention to, and what is just free-floating possibilities laced in dread.

We need to keep grounding in the reality - of how much we are loved, in the inherent power and cycles of Earth, in community. In seeing clearly, as well as in being open to our interpretation of what is before us shifting.

I see working with space/time to be both a critical discernment question and a sacred relationship. Within it is the opportunity to return our relationship to time to something that is not part of the dominant system. That's true about our Circular Time Calendars.... and it is also true for my ReMembering Course, Origin Stories Course, and even the What Lies Beneath Course.

Recently, I submitted a proposal to talk about cyclical time for an upcoming Rematriation Symposium. (And if you are able to go and if you are into thinking about the Sacred and the Mother and various forms of indigenous wisdom, I do recommend you consider attending!!!) This was part of my proposal:

Cyclical reckonings of time prevail in contemporary and ancient matrilineal cultures. Ecological calendars, which are critical components of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), link Indigenous cosmovisions and cyclical temporal cycles enabling temporal technologies to shape collective consciousness in ways that center life. One of the many damages wrought by colonization was the (usually) forced movement of time into linear configurations, exasperating lived experiences of insufficiency, the falsehood of perpetual progress, and the tyranny of clock time over Earthtime.

So if these kinds of musing interest you, I want to encourage you to join our Circular time offerings.

And I also want to be sure to extend an invitation for the next ReMembering Informational Webinar.

I used to think that ReMembering and Circular Time were two really different offerings. Often both offerings drew the same kinds of people, but I thought that was because they were both cool offerings and I get really, really cool people into all of my programming. People like you!

But then, during a ReMembering class, one of the participants started making connections to circular time: and about how ReMembrering is bringing us into a relationship with the past that enables us to live in both place and time in a more-real way.

And I suddenly realized that both of these offerings are part of this much bigger thing: of returning ourselves, and our lives, and all that is sacred including that which has been torn asunder, to the Great Mother. (Who might be totally gender-fluid - it's not for me to say, or, probably, to ever know.)

How cool is that. We, in our life times, get to engage with this bigger work - what I refer to as ReMembering and ReEnchanting. Work that is not and cannot be finished within our small lifetimes. That might be a helpful thing to keep in mind, as you engage with various forms of excitement, hope, anxiety, and preparation.

Best,

Sara Jolena