Back from the Ancestral Healing Intensive in Hamburg. I’m still blown away by what a powerful, beautifully crafted working it was. Daniel’s expert facilitation, the impressive team, the courageous participants, and the joy of finally getting to sing and drum and sit in circle with everyone and not just on zoom are still with me, along with the sense of a big ritual working well done.
I’m so grateful for how very grounded this particular path is, even though it involves ritual work that transgresses our cultural agreements, no matter how commonplace it may be in most other human cultures. Because of this, and because of the lack of consensus on truth these days, it’s even more important that my path is grounded in the physical reality of the lineages through which we came to be, and a deep respect for the animist, very much alive world, and the very specific places where we live, where our ancestors lived, and where we do ritual.
And, grounding in tangible reality – what a collective mess to return to.
I don’t know whether or not we’re at a pivot point of descent into an authoritarian, racist, religious regime, but the fact that it’s a question is deeply disorienting. It feels disconnected even to write about anything else now. Of course we (as the state of Israel) are responsible for holding another people under an authoritarian regime, and that’s bound to affect us. And at the same time, the pivot point of descent into climate catastrophe looks obvious, but the population in Israel doesn’t take to the streets over those.
Last week I was privileged to take part in a ritual working that felt far larger than anything I imagined possible. I wish I knew how to put together one big enough to even begin to address our current troubles, but I don’t. What I am sitting with, though, is a sense of how much more is possible than we suspect, and in ways that are vastly different from how we usually go about things. Which doesn’t at all make things simple, or easy, or safe. But it does expand the realm of possibility.