"Thank you SOULand for turning your gentle light onto long forgotten place and spaces which were desolate and ghost like within me. " Apprentice "The strong, robust and respectful container you wove created a space for me to express my grief in all its wild forms. I love that. More voices ~ What did some of the Apprentices say after the first level of Apprenticeship to Soul and Grief Composting this March? They were invited to write a letter to SOULand...Dear SOULand, It’s as if I took the long road back to this place and though this journey was long, the calling was longer. Without knowing it fully, I have been carrying this place in my bones for a very long time and so I was welcomed back, back into the loving arms of my sorrow, my grief, my loss, my darkness and all of this I have felt from others also. I was weary of carrying such burdens alone. I went through forests of fear and disillusionment for decades. I fell into despair and thought it was my “sickness” to bear alone. To have my love and grief turned into sickness was another grief in and of itself. That shame around these precious truths almost persuaded me to take my own life. And now, here in this village. I come to know a family of hearts, a container for my deep truths and I am witnessed, held, praised and loved for them. Now I can find myself a home in a land between, the valley of death and the illusion of the world around me. Another continent is rising out of the sea and on it is this plateau, this safe haven island, village. It is a place where I can hold my hands out and in one hand hold the darkness and the other hands hold the hope. That this bridging is happening later in life is a blessing in truth. I needed to drop to the soul of my longing and rise again, alone, so that I would even recognise the place of “Soul Land”. The tools and vision woven here, I pray will continue to nourish me, in my mind, body and soul until the day I die. Blessed be SOULand, Charlotte J. Kessler ~~~ Dear Souland, Deep Gratitude for your heartful, bold and essential work. For weaving your life, art and longings into your offerings and for waking up and calling out ours. I am completing feeling inspired to create an altar for all of the meaningful threads and a void from where they came from. Thank you Azul for your bold and humble presence, for your depth-honoring and life bringing insights, for the clashes of your heart and the shared tears of our souls. With love and deep gratitude, Halina ~~~ Dear SOULand, Thank you for offering me a place in this circle you hold in love, in nature amongst awakening humans. Thank you for your weave of traditions which has enabled me to touch in just enough to my longing, my grief, and my gratitude so that it feels like a beginning that will move through me, whilst also being an honouring of all I have lived with and through until now. In my own words of this morning : I was mush for the first two days and now on the third day I feel clear enough to feel excited to go back to life with a rich renewed soil and seeds replanted, ready to be tended daily with my altar and committed practice. I feel re-woven. Azul, how you show up as teacher, human and Queen spirit gives me strength and courage to keep opening up and sharing more of myself. I could learn more from you and I have plenty to live on with. Thank you so much. Thank you for how you listened to the energy in the group and responded to our needs. I felt loved well. Love, Mari ~~~ Thank you Heart Full to burst ~ We untangled to re-weave ~ Your presence is something I can lean on. Thank you for being yourself and for calling a circle of sanity which is a beautiful bubble of reality in these unreal and insane times. I feel relieved and not alone. I am quite isolated and burnt by community so I have new faith in people. Love, Camel ~~~ Dear SOULand, I love being led by a woman. An elder who is choosing to take loving responsibility of her experience and wisdom to share it with the world. I have learnt through your modeling how it is to embrace the sacred masculine and sacred feminine within. I have witnessed and embodied the experience of being led with the spirit of love, the flow of water, depth and groundedness of the Earth, the wisdom of the winds of change and guidance of spirit. I leave feeling nourished. It has been a journey so physical that my body aches and it feels good. I found it hard to access the grief I expected to show but instead touched new and unknown or unexpressed priorities. I felt held and loved. I felt like we are doing something important. We are. It is not a course. Through touching and experiencing the release of the collective grief it has loosened the stuck bits in me. The first day was very full. I was tired when I arrived and quite fearful of my exhaustion after the first day. I’m not sure if that is a necessary part of it or if it is not. I am leaving inspired to do all of the homework that was set for beforehand. I means more to me now. I love the weave. It enables me to see a little more how I can weave together the strands of my own journey, into something cohesive and my own, everyone’s honouring the deep and diverse lineages. Thank you. Wopila Mitakuye Oyasin, All my relations. Leona ~~~ Dear SOULand I am so grateful for the offerings you are bringing to us at this time. The past three days at the Apprenticeship has met my longing for so many things that have been lost to me and that I need. I felt the loving preparations you had made to receive us and was really touched by the beauty and care we were given. The strong, robust and respectful container you wove created a space for me to express my grief in all its wild forms. I love that. The emphasis on personal responsibility and sovereignty is a welcome addition to allow me to find my own way. I am leaving today having reclaimed some of my birthright and with a clear map to continue my journey home. With thanks and deep love, Linda ~~~ Thank you SOULand for turning your gentle light onto long forgotten place and spaces which were desolate and ghost like within me. For your work, courage and vision to take yourself to depths inside enabling a spacious landing place for us to arrive to be opened, unearthed and aired into the vitality of wholeness and being. The honoring of this sacred act and emotion and the reverence with which you delicately ease her flowing through us enables us to welcome this passing and arriving within us. The tapestry is woven from so many delicate and beautiful strands. Colours we have long forgotten about now no longer faded into memory but woven with grace and gratitude. I take home with me a welcome returning and opening of simple sacred values. Of new openings in the spaces between our togetherness where new life can emerge. ~~~ As a collective of apprentices we spent three days in the rich embrace of SOULand. It is now a few days further along the road that I can reflect on the qualities of that embrace and give echo to what struck me and stays with me as I integrate and walk along. SOULand is a place that opens with a question: What is your longing? Are you ready to die for it? Are you ready to give yourself away to it? What do you have to give ? Can you keep giving regardless of the rest? Can you move with grief away from lack and complain towards giving and repairing? Over and over, SOULand presents me with the occasion to give, repair and be of service. This spring, we gathered as apprentices to Grief and Soul. Once more, I felt the confirmation that grieving collectively is a gift to life, to the lives of our ancestors and to the life that is to come. It is the freeing of the river that clears my vision of stiffening regrets. In the darkness of our Grief Composting ritual, I experienced tears of despair, transformed progressively into a screaming desire to live, and finally rested into a quiet readiness to appreciate what is and come back home to laughter. In darkness still, I could hear our individual voices merging into a large song of grieving, loving and questioning what aches. Here we learn how to sit with each, supporting each other and not saving each other, entrusting the expression of our grief to the alchemy of compost. ~~~ Time is dense as every-thing, every-one and every of their expression is amplified by the attention it is gifted within the very particular embrace of SOULand.There is consistency in this attention, there is commitment, there is the belief that over time and breakdowns, there is the possiblity to transform all that matters. Here I learn to make prayers, to say them out loud, to infuse them into what I do. I am encouraged to make mistakes, to stumble and fall, and stand back again. SOULand cultivates deep care and beauty and asks us to visit the edges of this comfort where the fertile soil lies to grow our longings and bring them into form. Titiane ~~~ Dear SOULand I am deeply appreciative of the weaving and crafting of what SOULand offers. It is so much more than the welcoming of grief in community - and this is essential and life serving work enough! For me I glimpsed and was deeply nourished by seeing the bigger fabric of what SOULand does. I saw and felt the importance of personal practice and finding ways to connect to what we value. I saw how important it is to feel, express and begin to live our longings. I saw the essential nature of prayer and praise. I’m left feeling richer and more human, more woven than before. Azul’s love for this work and for the world shines through what she does. It is rare to find both depth and ease, playfulness and humility in a person. I can highly recommend spending time with Azul and anything she offers With gratitude Peter Here is the rest of the emerging SOULand Events for 2019/2020 ~~~ with strong love ~~~
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Women all over our Earth are gathering and rising from the ashes of genocides, slavery and betrayal. There is a new tide and all of life is at stake! Time to mature and offer our gifts fully with the support and blessing of our Sisterhood! Women...
The sisterhood is gathering... | When I was kindly invited to the first WomanFest near Frome, Uk last year, I had no sense of what I was going to. I just could not say no! Something in its calling courted me. All was in place for the Grief Composting Circle and WomBelt to be offered to this extraordinary and timeless gathering! My luggage were mostly filled with yarn and my heart growing with trepidation to arrive on the edges of what we know where life thrives! I was not sure why I went all the way from Slovenia to Frome...until I got there. I soon found a tree, tied myself to her and wove a WomBelt ...for three days. I invited many Women to write on a tiny scroll the World of their deepest Longing. Each piece of fabric was carefully rolled up and inserted in the 4 meters WomBelt. Many tears and heart sharing were witnessed by that sweet tree, delighted she was to see us women so raw and real. The belt was then offered to Tiana Jacoult who held the original vision of WomanFest. We know what it costs to hold Visions to better our world. We need support from all willing. Three of us wrapped the belt around her womb and hips to bless, protect, guide and praise all of her future actions in service to our world's well being and sanity. Women all over our Earth are gathering and rising from the ashes of genocides, slavery and betrayal. There is a new tide and all of life is at stake! Time to mature and offer our gifts fully with the support and blessings of our sisterhood! SOULand will be present at WomanFest this year in a Black Tent created especially by the Blissfull Belltent . We will be in the woods at the radically participatory WomanFest 2019 this Aug. We will be there for the Maturing of Women's Soul offering tasters of the full programme of SOULand. ~ Inner Council of a woman Queen ~ ~ Black Tent Council for menopausal women ~ ~ WomBelt: Weaving Women Back into Matter ~ Returning to Earth what has been Stolen ~ ~ Grief Composting apprenticeship ~ ~ Soul ripening emergent rituals ~ ~ Earth Temple ~ ~ eARTh: Art Infused with Ritual... for Earth! All this to prepare and ripen each woman to offer her praise to Life, her Genius and her Innate Gifts to our dear Mother Earth in our incredibly enlivening, troubling & transmuting times... Azul-Valerie Thome SOULand: Making the World of our Longing www.souland.org |
How can a human-built space restore a broken relationship with the natural world? The temple is a place to welcome all, locals, passer-bys or refugees. We would like to offer the opportunity to engage and explore the different facets of this project : | How can a human-built space restore a broken relationship with the natural world? The vision is for Earth Temples to be built on the edge of all cities and respond to this question. The Earth Temple is a round place to rest, reflect, reconnect and restore our relationship to the natural world. It is a place of belonging to the Earth that is open to all; a place of beauty, made of local natural materials, and designed to include the presence of all beings of the natural world. We are sharing this vision along with first architectural drawings to invite you and hear from you if and how you would like to imagine engaging in bringing this vision into life - from model making to the finding of place, the realisation and the tending of the space. The design of the Earth Temple Touching the drawings on paper, you may imagine the warmth within thick walls of Earth and the unique sense of refuge in the city found in the silence of this space. The Earth Temple is envisioned to be 26 meters wide, round, made of natural material found on site. Its four entrances are designed to celebrate the Sun in the East, Water and Plants in the South, Earth and Soil in the West, Air and Animals in the North. An olive tree stands in the center as a symbol of peace and the sculpture of a woman and a man seating. The roof is made of glass. Within the walls are places of rest and underground at the center is a kiva, a dark cave, a place of reflection and deep listening. The temple is a place to welcome all, locals, passer-bys or refugees. At the first gathering in Totnes around the vision of Earth Temples, we started imagining Totnes as a potential place to welcome a first Earth Temple. We would like to offer the opportunity to engage and explore the different facets of this project :
Please do get in touch with questions and remarks, or suggestions of people to contact to make this happen. The vision of Earth Temples in Cities was brought to life by Azul-Valérie Thomé, designer of rituals, artist and activist devoted to restoring humanity back to a deep relationship with the Earth. She holds an MA in Ecological Design Thinking from Schumacher College and is currently based in Totnes. Azul Valérie Thomé for SOULand www.souland.org MEETING ARE HAPPENING IN TOTNES in 2019. See Facebook Page for more details or email me :soulandinfo@gmail.com |
It seems to me that we are still negotiating with a truth which is: We have reached the end of the human experiment. We have not learned. We stayed immature, amnesic, separated and anaesthetised to the impact of leaving our Earth's Living Web. We objectified all, controlled most and destroying with great success. We can blame the 'authority'. We can shame ourselves and our species. We can zone out. We can kick and scream about it all or... We can live the next few years wisely and make amend. I love this word, making a-mend... we can act as if we are sorry for the mess we created, we can mend what we broke and regain a little sanity and perhaps dignity as well , lifting that heavy burden we all carry in our Soul. We can become a movement of deep gratitude. We can make the most beautiful gestures of restoration and thanks to our Earth's sentient beings. It is good medicine for the Soul I feel. I understand that if we have not learned to lean into communal Grief, into Interconnected Love, into the Beauty of Death and the Mystery of reBirthing we are profoundly empoverished in meeting our short precious time left in Life on Earth. We must skill up and enter conversations with the FOUR SISTERS: Grief, Love, Death and reBirth...they long for us to enter the forest and seat with them again around the Chidlren's Fire. The Message of Water gives us an other 3 years. What I am saying here is not sordid, negative of prophetic. It is what most of us might feel in our bones right now with little context to place this extraordinary experience into. So I would like to propose: Let's become and make our lives a Gift to Earth ~~~ a Give Away ~~~ of such sacred beauty that the whole universe will sense its true grace. Let's use the next few years to create the most outrageously beautiful and generous departure. Well, that is what I will be doing and working with the next 3 years. I will not be spending the precious time we have left blaming, shaming, hoping, neither running away from the task and invitation at hand. We are the ones they are waiting for. Let's turn round and join the greatest possibility of all: To join the web of life once more in a great restoring celebration of wild imagination and deep care.. If the Water, the IPCC report, the UN, Extinction Rebellion, Mission LifeForce, and others were 'wrong' . If we have much more time to live as a species to make a-mend can only benefit all living beings. It reminds me of a book I read many years ago: One Year to Live by Stephen Levine. If we have three years to live would we live the same life that we are living now? There seem to be a sacred invitation from Life to become initiated into a wiser and more mature species. It is up to us to make this rite of passage a conscious one or a very rough one! Azul Valérie Thomé | We have reached the end of the human experiment. We can become a movement of deep gratitude. We must skill up and enter conversations with the FOUR SISTERS: Grief, Love, Death and reBirth again We are the ones they are waiting for The Message of Water gives us an other 3 years. |
“It’s Important”. We shared our deep longing to be engaged in the profoundly bewildering times of our collapsing and transmuting world. thus bringing up an immense grief, un~skilled and feared in many of us. They are not dead. Death being food for the birthing of new life, no ~ they are extinct! ... can we ponder on the difference in our own heart and the impact on our soul? Each of us will carry a stone representing an extinct species. | “It’s Important”. “It is love”, wrote Poppy, 8 years old, at the end of our Totnes Life Cairn community meeting. We gathered in Totnes, last week, to design together the creation of a memorial for the honouring of Extinct Species for the 1st December 2018 on Sharpam Estate*. Most of us had read the IPCC report* adding weight to the Message of Water* and most recently Extinction Rebellion* and Rising Up* all rippling in each one of us as we sat. We shared our deep longing to be engaged in the profoundly bewildering times of our collapsing and transmuting world. How can our actions really matter? How can we attempt to make meaning when reading the published numbers* of our extinct species being between 100 and 150 species a day? Every 24 hours ~ animals, invertebrates, fungi and plants will never court, sing, nest, seed, dance their life bringing rituals again. They are not dead. Death being food for the birthing of new life, no ~ they are extinct! ... can we ponder on the difference in our own heart and the impact on our soul? As an designer of eARTh rituals including Grief Composting Circles I know that we cannot and must not meet this stage of awakening alone. We are increasingly noticing that we need to gather and rise up in circles and community groups to meet the enormity of the consequences of our long term disconnection to the inter connectedness with all of Life thus bringing up an immense grief, un~skilled and feared in many of us. We seem to be totally astonished by the depth of our love for our Earth. The child’s presence, her holding of Love as a beacon alchemised the space and the meeting. Her mother sat there by her side, strong and open. I felt that Poppy’s presence brought some sanity to our community. I remember doing the Council of all Beings* with a whole classroom in london some years ago. Each child chose an other than human being to speak for and from. Animals, rivers, mountains, tiger, worms and bees entered the class room among others . The children made masks to personify each of the sentient beings. They then spoke from that place sat in council with a talking stick. I then understood that children know what is going on here on Earth at this time. I feel that children deeply need and deserve beautiful, strong and lovingly held spaces where they can bring their voices to the adults and to each other about what is going on in our world. Thank you my dear Poppy for bringing your beautiful self and your lion heart to the meeting of the memorial for extinct species - a life Cairn which will be created by our community on 1st December 2018 . We will depart from STEAM PACKET INN at 11:30am in a procession towards the site on Sharpham Estate about 30-40 minutes walk away, following the river Dart. Each of us will carry a stone representing an extinct species. We might stop a few times for a song or a poem. We might carry a mask of be face painted . We will then, once on the site offered by the Trust, place our stones, naming these animals, plants and other organisms that are no longer on our Earth... We will then have a grief ritual with music and songs and allow what needs to move, move through us. After a while we might feel a natural move towards celebrating who is still alive that we long to protect. It is important and yes it is love! Join us! All welcome. Azul Valérie Thomé More details at SOULand Facebook event Page: Life Cairn in Totnes |
The Last Forest appears to my left. A haunting scene gathered in my eyes calling my full attention.
A circle of empty logs where 4 very large slumping characters sat there.
A small fire flickers in the center...
I approach. I present myself and make an offering. I ask them who they are and why they seem so sad and depleted:
"Us four: Grief, Love, Death and Life are seating here lonely, despondent and sad around a tremblotant fire. It has been to long since your species has joined us for conversations. We are the backbone of your existence, come back and seat with us...we have been gradually disappearing from your Psyche. Come back and weave conversations with us...come back"
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18 women sat on these logs | The 4 Sisters are now alive in our psyche |
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