Crew News: Inspiration in Service to Life
Growing connection, courage, creativity and community to regenerate the world around us - April Newsletter
Greetings Earthling,
April came and went.
Beltane fires were lit.
The energy on the land of late has been vibing.
And yet the grief and pain of late stage capitalism, the decaying systems and exhausted stories of modernity and the spread of authoritarianism is ever present.
I’m finding the extreme contradictions of witnessing life on Spaceship Earth as challenging as ever.
From the stunning hedgerows where I live, vibrating with life, where the Hawthorn blossom this last week has been popping outrageously like blizzards, while at the same time my instagram feed continues to show me starving children in Gaza, where food and medical aid has been blocked for nearly 70 days in total breach of international laws. And while media and politicians remain silent.
How does one hold the hypocrisy, the racism, the double standards, the selective empathy?
Personally I’m making space for grief and processing, for speaking intentionally to the madness and destruction of this decaying world order. Not through silence and suppression.
By getting out onto land and communing with our more than human family.
By finding small practical ways to tend to what is alive, to re-entangle with the great mystery of life and to continue to practice in community other ways of showing up, new ways of becoming.
Ways which centre connection, care, generosity, solidarity through creating space for processing, reflecting, listening, and slowing down.
The kinds of qualities we are going to need in abundance with the future that is unfolding.
And by committing to creative practices, to keep expressing, to sense make creatively, to find joy and to grow resilience and courage for challenging times ahead.
There is no time to wait for things to change, or someone in power to sort it out, (that’s not happening btw) we must become those changes in the places and spaces we occupy.
It’s uncomfortable.
As growth always is.
It matters how we show up, how we see things, how we treat each other, how we treat the living world, the words we use, what we give our attention to, never more so than now.
I guess if there is a theme with this months newsletter it is perhaps the invitation into uncomfortable participation, to tune into our abundant creative energies, the fire energy and growth of Beltane, to trust in our heart intelligence and begin to actively prepare the grounds for a shift in consciousness that centres care, connection and compassion between all humans and more than human nature.
I hope you enjoy these offerings and invitations.
Thank you for your support.
With love and courage
Dan and the basecamp crew
WATCH
There is a massacre of innocent humans continuing in Gaza, now intensifying, using the most sophisticated and violent weaponary ever created and now intentional starvation by blocking food and aid from entering - it’s indescribable if you choose to witness it . You won’t know it if you depend on mainstream media for ‘news’. Or maybe you’ve tuned out completely.
Who do you trust when it comes to claims of genocide and the breaking of International laws. Media and politicians in faraway places ?
I trust the grounded realities of doctors and the medics on the front line.
Listen to these international doctors and medics who have been working in Gaza, listen to what they have experienced.
There is a much bigger silence that is growing atop of the genocide in Palestine, it’s spreading across our institutions and cultures, watch the British actor and activist Khalid Abdalla speak to it in this powerful talk last week.
I have no idea what to do anymore, but silence cannot be. We must keep speaking. In our families, communities, work places, to the trees - anywhere.
Truth and integrity matters.
What else is there?
READ
In this recent post - ‘the world is procrastinating’ Elisa suggests the antidote in these times of overwhelming crisis may be to just experiment where you are with what’s right in front of you…imperfectly… Read and subscribe
“the world is procrastinating. if nothing short of profound transformation will do, as all the crises in all their intensifying forms assure us, how do we begin to alter?
the mindset that demands perfection and speed in our approach is a familiar one. we know it as the voice that drives us in so many punitive ways. we’ve seen it defeat itself, repeatedly. the chances that we can change, quickly, when what we tell ourselves is that change must be perfect, instant, large-scale, all at once, well.
my fiercest attempts to force change in my own being, top down, they never work. instead, it’s in opening space to slow down, play with this, welcome the partial, imperfect, the smallest possible step to simply begin, it sparks something. we let go of stalling on perfectly-finished, by inviting partially, imperfectly-begun. “
LISTEN
It’s been a few months of fallow on the podcast, I’ve taken extended time out as I needed some headspace to process the conversations and learnings from 2024 and for my own self-care. However, there’s a disturbance in the podcast force, Episode 102 is a recent live panel recording mixed with reflections from a River Avon Pilgrimage to mark the launch of local (to me) Bio-regional project We Are Avon.
This is an episode about moving into a deeper relationship with the more than human world in the places we call home, in this case the River Avon, becoming beings of place.
Centering food, river and land as powerful anchors for reconnecting people to place, this project aims to re-identify humans as 'regenerators’, as active participants in service to the climate and nature crisis we collectively face. Full details here
More episodes coming soon.
Oh and……I recently guested on Coconut Thinking podcast, where Benjamin Freud turned the mic on me to riff on my learnings and experiments over the years.
PRACTICE
Tree Wisdom. Do you have a difficult decision to make that you are sitting with ? Try taking it out to a favourite tree if you have one or just walk and find a tree you are drawn to. For me this is often an oak.
Simply sit down with the tree, greet the tree, touch the tree and then take some time to share your situation and the decision you are trying to make. Speak aloud, speak to the tree like you mean it. Explain the details.
And then just sit for 20 or 30 mins, longer if you feel you need. Phone off. Observe and notice, in your body and around you and the tree. Chances are you’ll leave with a decision. Thank the tree . More on cultivating a Wild Intelligence
PARTICIPATE
Francis Weller and a wide crew of Grief tenders are catalysing two decentralised grief solidarity days in May and June and encouraging folks to hold their own grief circles wherever you are. They have a preparation and info event on May 12th to help you prepare with Kai Cheng Thom, Desiree Adaway, Francis Weller, Alexandra Blakely, and Holly Truhlar
in their words
To everyone and anyone longing for a more liberated world: You are invited to gather and honor your heartbreak. Grief is not what pulls us away from the movement, it is what roots us deeper in care. And we were never meant to carry it alone.
I discovered Francis Weller’s book the ‘The Wild Edge of Sorrow’ in 2018 when I was experiencing extreme burnout and breakdown.
I realised through reading it that it was years of unprocessed grief that had floored me.
Through his work I have come to see grief as a vital flow of life energy, which in Western culture has become tabooed and suppressed. A grief and death phobic culture as he puts it.
I witness grief manifesting everywhere, often just under the surface for folks, but barely given any space for proper tending. Personal loss, loss of perceived futures, love that wasn’t received, the vast sorrow of our Earth’s destruction, and then there’s the current extreme and violent world order spilling out on our screens.
It’s immense grief.
I can see grief work becoming an essential strand in composting the decaying stories of modernity, part of a cultural initiation, collective soul work towards preparing the ground for more life-centered ways to take root.
Tending to grief as a creative portal for what could become.
Register here for the preparation event
SUPPORT
We Are Avon is an emergence of a place-based movement for regeneration in the UK.
It aims to act upon the interwoven crises of river pollution, climate change and food insecurity. Led by the people, a diverse web of communities, regenerators, farmers and projects who collaborate to regenerate.
This is a grassroots movement to provide healthy and affordable food resilience for the region whilst also regenerating the communities, landscapes and watersheds of the catchment area beginning from the local level with river and land in this Avon valley.
After a year of visioning and development, We Are Avon has launched its first crowd-funder to formalise and activate a number of community engagement projects. Any support you can give would be much appreciated
CONNECT
We’re now open for hosting organisational teams who want to spend a day on a wild regenerating landscape to create space to connect, process and reflect.
As the world gets more extreme - slowing down, connecting, reflecting, creating space for processing is a radical act.
It might just be the most regenerative move you can make right now.
We will host and guide these days on Ghostwood Down, our new home for on-land work on the edge of the city of Bath, two hours from London.
Last month we guided our first crew through a Community Solo Weekend on Ghostwood Down.
Two days of nature connection and personal exploration, fire circles for deeper listening and sharing our most alive questions and an overnight nature solo; a rite of passage for these times of great transformation.
It was quite an extraordinary experience, captured here beautifully by Ellie, one of the crew.
We are open for booking for two more weekends - Summer/June 13-15th and Autumn/September 19-21st.
With ongoing integration and community connecting Online.
Come and join us around the fire
DANCE
Sama Abdulhadi is a DJ and Artist from Ramallah, Palestine. Her sound is punchy hypnotic, energetic techno which she totally embodies as a performer. This set last year at Tomorrowland Festival is quite something - energy, intensity and transcendental vibes - a masterclass. The fire energy of Beltane for the dancefloor.
#thespaceshipearthpodcast #becomingcrew #crewnews #inservicetolife #practicedrivenchange
oh dan, i’m honoured. thank you. so much to enliven us here.
Great stuff, Dan. I could literally get lost in the content of Planet Earth's newsletter. And therein lies the rub. Getting lost in yet another "movement," if you'll forgive the term. The "powers-that-shouldn't-be" are safe to continue raping the earth, sacrificing all life on the altar of mammon as long as those of us who value life above money remain spread across a myriad of "movements," dividing our energies without ever achieving "critical mass" for change. What can Planet Earth and its crew do to congeal energies and actions toward a new paradigm?