“It IS an illusion that everything is broken,” says Ben Stopford as this rich conversation between two deeply rooted collaborators draws near to closing.
At any hearth where we gather, Ben reminds us, we can invite each other to turn towards what is deeply beautiful. And we must, because “these things need tending.”
Yes: our thriving, our loving, the “more beautiful world our hearts know is possible”—these things are not in some far off future maybe someday. They’re all around us, and we can choose every day to notice them, to take care of them, to offer back to them, to feed them.
That’s the only way they are going to be able to grow, right? If we feed them. If we joyfully feed ourselves their fruits.
And yes, as Veronica Stanwell affirms earlier in the conversation, certainly “there ARE elements of the world that are crumbling. There ARE systems that are struggling to hold on. A huge repatterning IS happening.”
So, then, what do we let go of, and what do we turn towards—how do we orient ourselves? Well, “TOWARD each other, TOWARD deep relationship,” Veronica says. And in that reorientation,
we will “remember, in a bone-deep way, that we ARE nature. And not in that cliche way—but we ARE nature! And if you watch what happens—I mean, I just revisited an abandoned field that we haven’t been to for three years, and it was a FOREST of blackthorn and bramble and witch elm, an absolute forest—if we remember that we have THAT capacity for growth and for healing and regeneration, we really can achieve this beautiful homecoming.”
Yes. Thank you.
Yes, that’s what I’m longing for, and that’s what I’m trying to nourish and learn and relearn in my daily life, imperfectly, and that’s what we’re reaching for around here, at Kinward Moves: toward each other, into that bone-deep remembering.
And it’s what Veronica and Ben are reaching for in the year-long slow study course they steward together, Deepen Your Roots, which is enrolling now.
I took this course with them last year, and you’ll hear me celebrate what they’ve woven in this episode. That year of course work and co-witnessing was a rich, grounded, generative spiral through bioregion, body, spirit and calling. Thoughtful seekers from around the world gathered around a virtual hearth to grieve, give thanks, and dream together into the futures we have the power to pattern, right here where we are. I couldn’t recommend the course more highly.
The very last council call of the Deepen Your Roots course, in January of this year, took place two days after I gave birth to my daughter. I was able to call in, with my tiny baby nursing and sleeping next to me, and to see Ben and Roni and the many faces of our fellow travelers along the 13-moon journey. Held in that collective field, I shared a few of the ways our work together had helped me to heal from the traumatic birth of my son and prepare to welcome my daughter.
On the other side of the birth portal—a liminal place close to death and the origins of the universe, a making and unmaking place—you’ll always be different. For myself, I was different in ways called forth and deepened by my journey along the spiral that Ben and Roni crafted together and tend. Some of those ways supported me in navigating a birth that was not what we were longing for, but which was still beautiful.
One of the things that distinguishes a traumatic experience from an initiatory one, they say, is that in the latter, your community witnesses your return. You get to come back and tell your story and be held. Your community acknowledges that you are new.
We talk quite a bit about initiation and rites of passage in this episode; it’s one of Ben’s particular longings right now and is an important facet of the body of work he has curated in his home place of North Wales: Conscious Roots.
Who among us came into adulthood with a call to “the hut at the edge of the village,” as Ben puts it, where a wise adult—an adult who has witnessed you and taken care of you all through your childhood—thanks you for who you already are, and helps you to see into the possibilities of your adult contribution to the community? Invites you into a fuller, deeper, more agential expression of your true self?
If you feel a burn in your throat imagining that, as I do, Francis Weller would call that feeling the Fourth Gate of Grief: “grief for what we expected but did not receive.”
How can we help our beloveds to receive the initiation into beloved community, into true adulthood, that so many of us still long for (better late than never)? How might the world be different if our children received this kind of witnessing and care as they crossed each of life’s inevitable initiatory thresholds?
In Ben’s words: “That changes everything, for me.”
Early in this episode, we immerse ourselves in an embodied invocation of that changed world: a world that has successfully made it through the Great Turning. In Veronica’s view, that world on the other side includes sturdier and more beautiful containers of many kinds: much more holding, writ large.
Carefully tended relationships with the land and the waters. The joy of seasonal food. Folklore remembered and reimagined while gardening and taking care of the beings who feed and clothe us. Handiwork with materials our ancestors knew intimately. And much more collective ceremony. More celebration, more time around the fire (and time kindling the fire), more home songs.
Ceremony is Veronica’s special calling, as expressed in her work inside of and beyond the Deepen Your Roots course, in the medicine for these times that is Rooted Healing. Through this body of work, Roni and her team offer nature-led psilocybin journeys, Ancestral immersions (“pop-up mini villages,” as Veronica puts it) and pilgrimages in the British Isles, a great podcast (which is what first drew me to Roni’s work), and an ever-evolving library of community offerings.
As we discuss in this episode, Roni and Ben and I share a conviction that the deep work of becoming the world we want, the deep work of the Great Turning, will happen—is already happening—in our actual bodies and in the vibrant co-learning spaces of our embodied relationships in place.
And it feels true, too, that there is a sporulation whirling, a weather system spinning, a signal sounding in us—a calling home—that is just beginning to resonate at the global scale. And that that our abstracted, flattened and also magical virtual networks and online spaces can, if well used, map and echo and amplify this signal—this signal that is pointing us back to Earth, back to our bodies, back to each other.
As Ben says, while mulling on the tension of tending embodied work in virtual spaces, the hearth that he and Roni tend, the hearth that is Deepen Your Roots, and other similar online spaces, can be thought of as transitory hearths for a time of transition.
“For now, I’ll be here,” he says. “I want to hear you, I want to know how it’s going. I want to know what you’re meeting and what you’re learning. And I will hear you. And I will give what support I can when you come to this place to meet with me. But there’s this endgame, which is like: and then, you’ll go back to where you are, and you’ll ask for that from your people. … Where is the hearth in your place?”
Where indeed? I’d love to hear your answers. What altars hold your offerings, what bulbs are you planting this fall, what old-timers are telling you stories of how it used to be, how it could be, how you could be? What are you sipping and eating as you sit and listen? When you feel yourself as a seed, what kinds of holding are helping you soften toward germination?
Tell us about it in the comments, or send me a voice recording for a chance to be heard on the podcast: CdV dot Saizan at gmail dot com.
Ben Stopford and Veronica Stanwell are incredible companions, thinkers, and weavers of the Great Turning, in their own ways and together, in Cornwall and Eryri (North Wales) where they live, and worldwide. I feel so grateful for the gift of a spacious conversation with the two of them. I hope this conversation feeds your soul as deeply as it fed mine.
Gratitudes for this episode include: to Ben and Veronica for tending the home hearth at multiple scales; to the many dreamers and workers who are helping to materialize the community orchard we are bringing into being here; to my beloved cottonwood grove (you know who you are) for your incredible golden leaves; to the medicinal waters of Hot Lake in La Grande, Oregon for a much needed birthday soak, and to my babies’ grandmother for taking care of them while my spouse and I were in the water; to our chickens for the excellent eggs; and to all of you, for listening.
Take good care.
