What was the Particular Narrative of Your Disenchantment?
So many of us are feeling the extreme tension between an urgent desire to participate in the Great Turning and our feelings of powerlessness. Our capacity to trust ourselves, our bodies and each other is at the heart of our courageous activism. More accurately, our capacity to remember that we––our bodies, our longing, our rage, our grief, our sexuality, all of it––are expressions of Earth, just as numinous and powerful, just as essential and on-purpose as the Sun at dawn or the rainbow trout gliding over smooth river stones. The fact that most of us do not remember this is, perhaps, one of the primary reasons we are in such tremendous peril at this time. This disenchantment that is our forgetting is catastrophic.
What was the particular narrative of your disenchantment with yourself? Did it have to do with the volume of your voice? The size of your waist? The level of your sensitivity to others’ actions? Perhaps it had to do with your capacity to see through to the heart of the matter and ask the unacceptable questions that reflected this gift? Or perhaps it was your endless request for more (substance, quality, contact) or the fact that what you received never seemed good enough.
No matter the content of the messages we each received, their effect is universal. They instill in us a distrust of and disenchantment with ourselves. This disenchantment doesn’t just remain with and about ourselves. We tend to ‘share’ these toxic embodied narratives with each other, noticing the places in each other that look familiar to those unacceptable aspects and attributes that were denigrated in us. Here we judge and silence each other, further disenchanting each other, our daughters, our sisters. You might have noticed that we often disenchant each other far more efficiently and ferociously than the culture at large manages to do.
And if this is true, that we’re far more ferociously efficient at undermining ourselves and each other, the other side of this coin is also true––that we are the most powerful re-enchanters, re-wilders of each other’s beauty, ferocity, integrity, erotic wellbeing, and full-throttle expression.
But where do we go to undo the disenchantment and re-weave the tenacious spell of our wellness? In our consumer-conformist society it’s not easy to find places that are truly what they advertise themselves to be. The landscape is crowded with programs that promise things they are not able to deliver. Programs that, in all probability, are more likely to deepen the divide between ourselves and the brilliant braid of Life that is Eros. There are no ‘seven easy steps to…’ or ‘five practices guaranteed to…’
We have witnessed a very different sort of environment that is conducive to our reclamation journey back to embodied enchantment (and the resultant activism that necessarily comes with it). This environment isn’t particularly amenable to the domestication of branding or other mainstream marketing endeavors. But we all know it when we see it and smell it. The Verdant Collective 4-Month Immersion is one such rare environment. One in which we are not expected to like each other all the time or to be nice. But one in which we are expected to learn from and support each other as we each navigate our respective journeys alongside one another.
The world is in collapse. From the intimate to the most universal and global, the systems we were told were unassailable and intelligent are unraveling between our fingers and beneath our feet. There is an invitation at this time, not to save anything, but rather to midwife what is dying and what is ready to emerge. This is an act of ferocious love. Yet we cannot love anything (ourselves or anything else) if we are numbed and frozen or enraged and on fire from our own disembodied disenchantment. This work is ours to do, with and for each other. And we have the perfect place for you to do it. Join us, we begin in three months.