Dear Friends -

As spring enters and the ground softens, my eyes turn, again, to the soil. We live in a world that loves the pretty flowers and gives very little attention to the soil that enables those flowers to grow.

As Wendell Berry so beautifully said: "The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”

History has some curious commonalities with soil. History forms the ground from which everything else arises. Rocks themselves are living and (slowly) changing stories of what came before in Deep Time. Is history - our ancestors - both source and destination of our own lives? What does it mean to have a 'healthy history' (or 'herstories'!), or perhaps, a healthy relationship to history - to our ancestors, to our shared interconnected histories that shape our interbeing-ness?

Such questions are lead to some interesting potential metaphors for the ReMembering Course.

The ReMembering Course is like a pot of very rich soil - because it contains a lot of compost. That compost arises from my own journey - studies, experiments, learnings from many teachers and my own Guides - into the historical roots of our current dis-ease of climate change.

Most of the time, people are forced to plant their metaphorical seeds in soil that hasn't had the chance to receive compost. It's full of plastic and even poison. How can your seeds grow there? How can you possibly ground yourself?

The ReMembering Course serves to re-ground participants. Indeed, it is one of the most common things participants tell us: "This course is the grounding that I've been looking for."

Which, in a society that is so deeply dis-membered, where figuring out how to have a more authentic connection to one another and to this place where we call home can be so hard, is really, really cool.

Cool doesn't mean squeaky clean. Sometimes the process is muddy. I grew up working with a herd of horses and growing most of our own berries, apples, squash, and corn: I'm not afraid of mud.

Nor is the work we do in the ReMembering course always easy. It can be uncomfortable.

If it were comfortable, a lot more people would be doing it. The process of ReMembering is powerful, and effective, and helps people make better decisions. So, why wouldn't all sorts of institutions of higher education, schools, companies, environmental non-profits, places of worship, retreat centers, and social impact ventures want to engage with it?

Who doesn't want some really good compost?

Alas, our society still doesn't value (non-metaphorical) compost at a systemic level (happily, it is much easier to compost than it used to be!) It still prioritizes broken, inorganic materials (as evidenced by the power of fertilizer companies). That's cuz it wants pretty, cheap flowers. It pretends roots and soil don't matter. That the life of the flower is less important than what the customer will pay for it.

Our society still acts as if you can build a nurturing culture (cultivate, culture, and agriculture all come from the root word 'cult' which means 'to grow') on multiple forms of dis-membering. Both literal and metaphorical.

But there are those who know that their (metaphorical) roots need good soil. Soil that can nourish their whole selves. Soil that supports the growth of mycelium networks. Soil that re-members ancestors.

Which might be part of why participants (many of whom have already been through a lot of training) keep telling me "This is what I've been searching for for years."

We are starting our next ReMembering Course in just a few weeks - on March 25. We have an informational webinar in just a few days: Tuesday, March 12, 1-2:15 pm EST. If this course intrigues you, please join our informational webinar.

And please do share with people whom you think would appreciate it!

And - having written a whole email playing with this metaphor of the relationship between history and soil, let's also recall that there is an extent to which it does not hold true. I was sharing some of this metaphor-play with my friend Ramasubramanian, and he said something that I thought was brilliant:

'Soil is time. History is a record of time. soil embodies all ails and merriments of history, books of history can selectively hold only whatever they want. There is a difference."

Yes, there are similarities between history and soil. For those of us who like to play with metaphors, myths, and stories, it's a particularly fun sandbox. But, as Ram says, there is a difference. The differences matter, too.

Blessings upon your season of spring... and wherever your play of metaphors might take you!

Sara Jolena

ps - I really want to appreciate everyone who replied to my last email about the Rising Temper(s)atures! Thank you so much! I will be making several shifts based on the suggestions, and seeking a place to publish the article later this month. If I have not responded to you directly yet, I will soon.