WELCOME TO THE ESSAY JOURNEY
An Eight-Week Essay Journey created by Shante' Sojourn Zenith
Offered in partnership with the Inner Resilience Network
WELCOME TO THE ESSAY JOURNEY PORTAL!
Here you will find each week's essay in both a pdf and audio verision, links to each week's discussion forum, and links to the four zoom calls.
This Essay Journey is a collaborative learning experiment. I offer the essays as containers to provoke conversation. I am curious to hear how the essays resonate with you and hope you will share your reflections about the journey as a whole. I don't know what will emerge from our gathering and shared witnessing together—perhaps ongoing collaborations will emerge or perhaps something in one of the essays will ignite your own journey onwards from here. Please consider me a co-participant on this adventure!
In gratitude,
Shante' Sojourn Zenith
WEEK ONE: February 25th
Poetic Expressions of Belonging
A wordless longing for emotional expression invites a journey into the poetic imagination. Deeper forms of relationship with ecological beings ignite an ancestral memory of belonging to the experience of a Living Earth.
WEEK TWO: March 4th
Tending Communal Grief
The disconnection from a sense of belonging is a wound as deep as colonization. By reconnecting to ritual practices for tending communal grief, we can begin to weave ourselves into a sense of self wider then the boundaries of our skin.
March 8th, 1:00-2:30CT
Community Video Call on "Zoom"
We had an intimate, intuitive, and deeply soulful conversation ranging from the support needed to pull a firetruck across a parking lot, to the felt-sense with which we are drawn to trees and bodies of water, to exploring the necessity of diverse forms of perception and imagination.
WEEK THREE: March 11th
Initiation of Compassionate Witnessing
The first of five initiations to reconnect to a Living Earth, Compassionate Witnessing explores our relationship to the "village," drawing on practices of trauma healing, emotional release, and embodied presence.
WEEK FOUR: March 18th
Initiation of Ecological Imagination
The second initiation offers a reconnection to a child's imagination and relationship with nature, linking our personal creativity to the ecosystem of animistic relationships we are a embedded within.
Fri, March 22, 2:00-3:30CT
Community Video Call on "Zoom"
We had a beautiful conversation with Larissa, Derek, and Alma, exploring the entanglement between our capacity to grieve and our capacity to feel delight.
Watch/listen
Recording link
WEEK FIVE: March 25th
Initiation of Soul Medicine
The third initiation explores the role of adolescent rites of passage and the "dark night of the soul" in reconnecting us to a sense of soverignty and creative agency unmediated by human teachers.
WEEK SIX: April 1st
Initiation of Ancestral Healing
The fourth initiation draws us into practices of ancestral reconnection and decolonization, inviting us to explore the deep time context through which we came into being.
Fri, April 5th, 2:00-3:30CT
Community Video Call on "Zoom"
Larissa and Derek joined me, and we ended up having an amazing emergent conversation about ancestors, spiral time, time machines, spirit and the sacred, and how to crack open and let ourselves be dreamed by the imagination of the earth. Many of these themes will feed into the final essay of this journey, which I am in the process of writing this week. You can see the recording of our call here.
Watch/listen
Recording link
WEEK SEVEN: April 8th
Initiation of Nurturing Beauty
The final initiation explores our culture's relationship with mortality in the face of ecological devastation and social collapse, inviting us to explore practices of "nurturing beauty" as our core responsibility as humans.
WEEK EIGHT: April 15th
Adumbrations
In this time of intense survival energy and pressure to be “functional,” slowing down and allowing space for rest becomes a radical practice. Our deep listening to the rhythms of our bodies creates the conditions for transformation to occur.
Fri, April 19th, 2:00-3:30CT
Community Video Call on "Zoom"
The final emergent video call engaging in sacred conversation together about the essay journey.
Join URL:
https://zoom.us/j/667172768
HOW DO I...?
ACCESS THE ESSAYS
You will receive an essay journey in your email inbox each Monday. You can also access the released essays in pdf and audio format in the list below.
USE THE DISCUSSION FORUM
To go to the discussion forum: click here.
You will be automatically added to the discussion forum google group if you checked the "discussion forum" box in your signup form. If you change your mind and would like to be added or removed from the group, please email me at earthpoetedgeweaver@gmail.com
To access the group, make sure you are logged into the email account you signed up with when you began the essay journey. You can choose how you receive updates from the group by clicking on the "membership settings" dropdown menu (the image of theperson with the gear, second from the right towards the top of the page), then going to "membership and email settings" and finally clicking on "email delivery preference" to choose the frequency of the emails.
Participate in Community Video Calls over "zoom"
If you checked the "community video call" box in your signup form, you will receive an email with a link to a doodle poll so that I can factor in your availability when I am scheduling calls.
Zoom call dates will be posted here when solidified, as will instructions for using the video conference software.
FEEL FREE TO EMAIL ME WITH ANY OTHER TECH OR LOGISTICS QUESTIONS AT: