July 2, 2015: Online Work Bee

Revision 43071

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SolSeed archive migration
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Create maintainable Markdown archive revision
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Thursday Agenda

Check In

Opening Blessing

We push against the wheel, and nothing happens. We push more; it begins to turn, slowly, slowly. Once it's moving with momentum, it's hard to look back and see a point at which things changed from stopped to moving. We know this, and so we work and we push, even though it feels like things aren't moving. May we continue the work, regardless of external markers. --Blessed Be

Newsletter

The SolSeed Movement is in full event-planning mode. In and around the ongoing discussions for our big August event, the Shiny Green Festival, we've somehow managed to pull off celebrations of both the mid-Spring cross-quarter and the Summer Solstice on both sides of the continent. We've also found time for philosophical discussions about artificial intelligence and the sacred stories we live by.

Eric has been participating in tree-planting events around the midpoint of Spring for years. This year, he joined *two* such events, and also participated in a "Tulipathon" to benefit the Multifaith Housing Initiative. Meanwhile, in Portland, we traveled to the planned location of the Shiny Green Tribal Convergence to participate in a Hoyt Arboretum gardening work bee, helping to weed and mulch the Winter Garden and plant a few new flowers. That evening, we held a movie screening at the Seed Village.

The movie, a new documentary called *Planetary*, provided part of the motivation for our subsequent discussions and a blog post about sacred stories. The currently dominant sacred story in our culture says that "each of us is a free, independent individual separate from nature and in competition with everyone else." Both Planetary and the Pachamama Alliance, whose Game Changer Intensive course I participated in from late March through early May, agree on the need for a new story of connection and interdependence, which dovetails neatly with SolSeed's ideas about how "each of us is a cell in Gaia's body."

Of course, we also embrace Carl Sagan's insight that "we are star-stuff," which helped motivate the West Coast contingent's decision to focus on stargazing for this year's Summer Solstice celebration. We traveled to Maryhill, Washington, to visit a replica of Stonehenge, a monument which may well have been built by ancient astronomers, and which provided a stunningly beautiful setting for our Drumming the Eons ritual, with a great view of the Columbia Gorge, Mt. Hood, and dozens of nearby wind turbines. That evening at a nearby campground, we got to try out Brandon's new telescope, taking advantage of the dark skies far from city lights.

Throughout the season, we've been working hard on developing the plan for the Shiny Green Festival. Of course a lot of the agenda will come together after the event begins, Open Space style, but we're coming up with a few activities in advance to help draw people in. These include hikes through the Arboretum and around Portland's slightly famous 4T Trail, hands-on activities like making Permaculture seed balls and new test CELSS jars for our duckweed greenhouse experiment, a visit to a belly-dancing festival that Eric's wife Michelle is participating in, and an exciting Spectacle I'm putting together that will have to remain a secret for now. If you want to find out what it is before the next newsletter, you can join us at the Festival!

May your season be blessed with life and love. Thanks for reading.

Evaluation

Closing Blessing

We don’t know how fast we are moving toward our vision or our highest aspiration or even if we are moving at all. By embracing science we can maybe learn whether the strategies we have chosen are bearing fruit. Until then we do the work, believing that it is worthwhile in and of itself. -- Blessed Be