The Alchemy of Gathering Together

Reflections from the Earth Daughters Festival

I have taken the month off from this space, not intentionally but as I launch into a busy creative season, I have been less at my computer, less in my mind. I am returning today with some reflections from the Earth Daughters Festival.

This is my 3rd time attending and participating at this women’s festival in the mountains in British Columbia. This year I offered embodiment photo shoots and worked with 8 beautiful women.

Each woman brought in her own unique expression. Some stripped down and wild, others soft and vulnerable. Each woman stepping into being seen within a wider container of radical feminine expression, community building, and ceremony.

Large gatherings of this nature always come with their challenges, for me, that is the point. I am seeking the alchemy of transformation that only takes place when I am stretched beyond my comfort zone.

What comes alive in the tension? What moves that was previously stuck? What pearl takes shape in the grit?

The resilience built by standing hearts open and arms wide in the storm is probably the most precious resource we can cultivate. As we collectively anticipated stormy weather, we braced, we contract, and in the bracing and in the contraction, some deep primordial feminine wisdom was awakened.

Wild woman medicine isn’t a performance piece (although we were blessed by one through Marya Stark and SheRose), it is in the thresholds we can’t control or predict, it is meeting the tension, chaos, dissonance and moving with, versus freezing up or running away from it.

This is why we gather.

Societal cracks have their own weather, writes Bayo Akomolafe. The weather we were experiencing together was a bit rough and unnerving, but this is the whole point of seeking one another in the midst of societal breakdown. For driving the distance, for overcoming deeply held beliefs around non-belonging.

When entering a ceremonial container of such a size, there is a deep sense that old curses and spells are being broken. This is the cracking open that so many of us have been training for in our independent spiritual work. It hits different in a group of 700 women.

The internal activation that the weather of collective ceremony on the threshold of societal transformation brings forward, is meant to unsettle us even further.

Each woman had her own journey with this level of deep somatic activation. I saw it everywhere I looked. I tracked it within myself.

For some, it was the undesirable cold and wet weather, for others it was the vulnerability of being with so many (700) women. For others it was stepping onto the stage and sharing their gifts for the first time. For others it was holding their babies and leaning into the support that was being offered from a stranger.

The exiting society challenges- climate breakdown, inequality, war and genocide, resource extraction, rampant racism, totalitarianism- call us to image beyond what we have been conditioned to believe is possible.

Social media itself is designed to keep us isolated. We are fed the illusion of connection and the result is that we don’t create community for true, rooted, in-person connection.

We need larger frames to stretch our imagination onto. This is largely why I am shifting away from photography as a professional service. I will be apply for my PhD in the fall with the intention of researching, through embodied community research, the threshold spaces and ceremonies through which an emergent paradigm might pass through our culture.

Such ceremonies as those experienced at Earth Daughters give structure for each individual to anchor to as we widen our imagination and felt sense of what is possible. And I believe we all need to be participating on this level. And while many of us feel the call and travel the distance (emotionally, spiritually and mentally as well as physically), many of us can’t yet tolerate the tension that such spaces activate.

The tension of landing in such a space isn’t so much to do with our personal narratives and identities, trauma’s or wounds, it is the tension that mobilization collectively towards wild imagination, especially as women, is incredibly revolutionary.

We feel it but we don’t necessary want to acknowledge it. To acknowledge it is to make a vow to honour the power such experiences have over our lives and to allow every aspect of our lives to be transformed in the process.

A few favourite images from my Earth Daughters sessions