I feel the shift in my bones first.
After what has felt like several glorious yet unsettling months of almost no rain, it is a shock to the system to see the water returning to the landscape again, and the roar of the west wind in the trees.
Apples strewn across the garden - it’s a bumper crop.
Acorns adorn the path - it’s a mast year.
Swallows gathering on telephone wires.
Hedgerows full of abundant delight.
River in long-forgotten spate.
Just like that, change is in the air.
Something new, something different.
Abundance and descent.
Beginning and ending.
All at once, all at the same time.
The shifting of the seasons is a profound one. It is a gradual slow, creeping transition, a deep relationship with the cycles of the sun, and sometimes the moon, that is punctuated by occasional rapid shifts that wake you up like a jolt.
The first time the sun feels warm on the skin on a spring morning.
The first balmy summer evening sitting outside.
The first storm of autumn.
The first blast of an icy north wind.
Wake up, wake up, wake up.
To pay attention to those feelings - noticing them and feeling them, rather than letting them pass by is a gift. To acknowledge in our hearts the simultaneous joy of the anticipation of the shift and the lamenting of the passing of what has been.
Both/And.
I also notice how hard it is in the modern, constructed world to offer that quality of presence and attention to the change in the living world around us, let alone the shifts that happen constantly in cycles within each of us too.
Maybe that is why the first big seasonal shifts hit so hard?
Presence and attention feel more important than ever.
But oh-so scarce in a world of distraction and despair.
Presence and attention
So how might we practice showing up with all of our attendant messy-ness, weirdness, fears, feelings and vulnerabilities in these moments of transition within us and around us?
How might we start to pay attention again, to the cycles of birth, death and rebirth over and over again?
Noticing that we too move in cycles just as the living world does.
At Becoming Crew, we work with the idea of practice-led change, that change doesn’t come through a big idea or a complex change model, but rather from an inner-led process of adaptation that is grounded in a series of practices that act like compost, through which new forms of becoming might emerge.
As guides, there are a handful of practices that we have been apprenticing to, in one form or another for over a decade now, through training and mentoring. They are our anchors on the stormy days, compasses on the misty days, maps to return to when all feels lost. They inform each of our offerings, on-line and on-land, and they support each of us as guides with the ever more challenging task of paying attention.
These practices lead us into entanglement with the more-than-human world and allow us to explore a world beyond the story of separation from nature, from ourselves, and from the mystery beyond the rational that the modern world dictates.
They lead us back into relationship with the cycles and patterns of the most ancient of systems, learning to let go of the illusion of control and certainty. Trusting the mystery of life with courage, compassion and insight.
Crucially they are what you might call living practices, very much alive, emergent and mysterious. They create the possibility of movement in times of ‘stuckness’. They invite us to let go of what know longer serves, to compost, and harvest the seeds of abundance - asking more beautiful questions of what comes next.
What is mine to do?
Not everything. Not nothing. But something.
Something rooted in relationship.Response-ability.
Foundational Practices for these times
Here are three foundational practices that we use explicitly and implicitly in our individual practice and our community offerings in the Becoming Crew Action Learning Community.
Growing into the Fullness of Each Season - The Four Shields of Human Nature
“All that we do and teach at the School of Lost Borders may come down to this simple intention: to tap into the deep memory that we are not separate from nature, that, indeed, we are no different from the land on which we live. To know this simple truth sets us upon the path to becoming “fully human.”
Steven Foster and Meredith Little
To reawaken our entanglement with the shifts happening outside and within us requires a different kind of consciousness, one of inter-connection and reciprocity. Composting the story of separation that governs the violence and oppression of modernity.
Remembering
We are nature.
We are the autumn slowly unfolding into itself.
We are abundance and decay.
But in a culture built on separation, the path through our human lives has become lost and we are walking in the mist. Lost, alienated and disconnected from ourselves, from others, and from this planet we call home.
“Because the maps of modernity are damaged, spoiled. No longer viable.
And yet the terrain is still alive.”
The Four Shields of Human Nature is sometimes described as a map, or a compass. It is a contemporary rehydration of ancient teachings handed down to Steven and Meredith of The School of Lost Borders. They are an invitation to return to our roots of connection and belonging, a place to notice, acknowledge and move through change. They offer the possibility to heal the story of separation that is at the root of the crises we are experiencing within us and around us.
At the centre of The Four Shields is a remembering that everything in nature, from the seasonal cycles the qualities of the directions incorporate all aspects of what it is to be human.
Other wisdom traditions have their own maps and compasses each one slightly different attending to the cultural and seasonal variances unique to that land.
But each one is grounded in the same foundational idea.
We are:
- The four seasons
- Dawn, fullness of day, dusk, and night.
- Body, psyche, mind, and spirit.
Threshold time - rites of passage for our becoming
In a world devoid of presence to the cycles of nature and the spirals of death and rebirth, we have become detached from the practices that allow us to mark, celebrate, and pay attention to the fundamental transitions, identity shifts, and developmental stages throughout our lives.
These can be foundational shifts that happen to us all through the beauty and pain of life and sometimes they can be more subtle becomings that emerge and decay more gently through the simple passing of time.
We use solo time in nature as a foundational practice to re-awaken the remembering of these transitions, offering a rite of passage or an initiation so we might step into an emerging sense of our becoming.
Typically we would imagine it is a three-step process → severance, threshold, incorporation.
Severance from the modern, constructed world. Stepping away from the busy-ness, our accumulated responsibilities and wounds of modernity. Letting go. Inviting in a deeper consciousness.
Consciously and intentionally stepping across a threshold. Letting go of what no longer serves, inviting in a deeper, animate relationship with the more-than-human. To offer our prayers and our longings to the universe and to sit, still, for what might be a few hours, or a night, or even 4 days and nights. Then to return back across the threshold with a gift, in the form of a story, that has the possibility of being of service to our community.
The gentle and tender process of incorporation. Embodying the story, allowing it to slowly and intentionally meet our lives. What is it inviting us to step into, let go of? Who, or what might you become?
Threshold or solo time is the foundation stone of our on-going practice. There is a wisdom ‘out there’, way beyond what it is possible to know through a human-centric world view, if only we knew how to listen.
Way of Council - speaking and listening from the heart
Talking of listening. What would be possible if we cultivated the practice of speaking and listening from the heart? The ancient form of Council is a practice that moves us to a deeper, more honest and empathic level of communicating and being.
Sharing our stories, speaking to what matters, what needs to be said. Not worrying about making sense, or being ‘right’.
Truly listening, with our hearts wide open, without judgement, or trying to resolve or fix.
A simple and timeless technology yet a forgotten art and one that needs to be supported with compassion and empathy.
Way of Council is a specific and particular way of holding space, at Becoming Crew we use circle work of all kinds in our offerings, on-land and on-line. It is how we work together as a crew of guides and how we meet our wider crew community.
It is how we meet change, how we acknowledge it and how we build communities of care, love and compassion.
Community Solo - an invitation to practice with us this autumn equinox
If you are interested in experiencing these practices, if you are feeling the changes happening, both on the inside and outside, if you are wanting to explore the practice of letting go as we turn towards the darker months, then Becoming Crew Action Learning Collective are hosting a final Community Solo this year.
It is a weekend on the land including working with the Four Shields as a guiding compass, Way of Council as a way of being in community and a fully guided overnight nature solo as threshold time into what needs to come next.
It is at Ghostwood Down, Nr Bath - 19-21st September -
Jump in quickly, a couple of spots left
This is a mere surface scraping of what are deep and profound teachings offered by The School of Lost Borders, Animas Valley Institute and many others.
It is intended as a glimpse into the practices that we’ve adopted, cultivated and that guide me as well as our other guides at Becoming Crew.
With deep gratitude who those that have guided and mentored me for the last 15 years as I deepen my apprenticeship to this work.
Annie Bloom - Buffalo Dreaming Lodge and former lead guide Animas.
Pip Bondy - Ancient Healing Ways
Betsy Purluss - School of Lost Borders