Crew News: Inspiration in Service to Life

Growing connection, courage, creativity and community in despairing times - May newsletter

dan burgess

May 27, 2024

Greetings Earthling

The world feels even more brutal today.

We live in violence.

From live-streamed genocide to climate chaos and extractive capitalism,

We are a civilisation experiencing extreme relational crises.

The only thing that feels certain is the need to cultivate our collective courage to face into the unknown.

We find courage by growing our connection to the Earth, to ourselves and to each other.

To grow our own unique creative intelligence to be of service in these times, through other ways of seeing, relating, knowing and becoming.

The Spaceship Earth Podcast and Becoming Crew offerings exist for these times.

Conversations, gatherings and experiences for (un)learning together.

Letting go of the destructive story of separation, learning to connect to wider intelligences and cultivating the practices of humility, generosity, care, compassion, imagination and being in right relationship with life.

Find news, offerings and invitations here in response to this moment.

Thank you for your support.

With love and courage

Dan and the Basecamp Crew

WATCH

Introducing Becoming Crew Youth Program

Since July last year we have been dreaming up and prototyping a Youth offering.

With a focus on 18 to 24 years, we begin with on-land gatherings this year and a 6 month pilot in 2025 in collaboration with a leading academic partner in the UK.

The foundational approach for this work is:

Practice-driven change
Kinship with all life
Creativity in service to life

The weekend gatherings include nature connection practice, community building, peer-learning and creative practice.

Creating spaces for young people to explore their deeper questions and express themselves freely.

A long post with more details coming very soon.

David Orr captures the spirit of this offering:

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind.
It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
David W. Orr
Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics Emeritus at Oberlin College

We are seeking long term funding partners to support this work and journey with us, and organisations and businesses to sponsor weekend gatherings to help underwrite the costs.

Get in touch: dan@becomingcrew.com

Rachel Donald: Duende: From Scream to Song at the Edge of Insanity

I’m a big fan of

Rachel Donald

- check out her vital weekly podcast Planet Critical if you haven’t yet, and this writing from Rachel last week hit me in the chest.

“Duende exists at the edge of all things: life, death; joy, sorrow; art, experience; song, howl. There are no mirrors at the edge, only flesh and bones and elevated heart rates and dilated pupils and spirits with whom we battle to invite one another into rapture.
There exist spaces beyond language, beyond the world of mirrors, where even words may begin to make sense if they come from the very roots of us that have spent millennia in this soil. There is meaning to be found at the very edge when we come together with raw throats and red eyes and dare admit the terrors we are facing. There is sanity to be won by coming home to our bodies.”

READ

LISTEN

Episode 84 - Alnoor Ladha & Lynn Murphy: The Age of Consequence, Healing Wealth & Growing Post Capitalist Realities

I’m plugging this episode again because there is so much in here for this moment if you’re grappling to understand the violent mess we are in.

The conversation is deep, it sets out a dynamic perspective on ’the waters we are swimming in’ today and the ‘Age of Consequence’ we are now experiencing.

There is also real hope and possibility in this conversation, to begin the work of growing post-capitalist realities.

The team put a lot of energy into the sound design on this one, headphones on.

Long and extraordinary.

Available on all platforms

LISTEN

A thoughtful and helpful reminder on self-care practices shared by Lyla June

PARTICIPATE

Live online gathering with special guest Bayo Akomolafe - Tuesday May 28th 6.30 pm GMT

Do you feel stuckness in this moment?
Have we been captured by the logic of 'whiteness' or is 'whiteness' the 'logic of capture'?
Is 'white stability' wobbling ?
Do you know how to shapeshift ?
What does any of this mean ?
Come and join us on May 28th for a live online gathering as we welcome back very special guest Bayo Akomolafe to explore this and his invitation into fugitivity. A two hour session including reflective and creative practice to work with the content we receive from Bayo.

Everyone welcome - a space for (un)learning together.

First in a series of three monthly gatherings - join one, two or all three.
TICKETS
Share
Ticket purchase includes ongoing access to our community of practice gatherings around the Wheel of The Year

TICKETS

SUPPORT

Where Olive Trees Weep

"Where Olive Trees Weep" offers a searing window into the struggles and resilience of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation.

It explores themes of loss, trauma, and the quest for justice.

Ancient landscapes bear deep scars, having witnessed the brutal reality of ancestral land confiscation, expulsions, imprisonment, home demolitions, water deprivation, and denial of basic human rights.

This emotional journey bares the humanity of the oppressed while grappling with the question: what makes the oppressor so ruthlessly blind to its own cruelty?

The film launches next week.

Watch the premier and/or host a screening

SUPPORT