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This new moon cycle will bring to you the depth and magic of both the embodied grief and radical reconnecting in these threshold times.
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Hi friend, I had hoped to write today with the exciting news that our annual community supported publishing campaign for Dreamfruit 2024 had officially launched. But life is having her way with me, so I am flowing with the river. And anyway, I wanted to say thank you. Your messages of love and condolences following my mother’s death are filled with such beauty, wisdom, and compassion. It has been humbling and deeply supportive to receive your cards and comments. I hope that you, too, find yourself blessed with such a supportive community of care at the times you need it most. I am sure that as I write this, each of us is carrying subtle or tectonic grief — personal or collective. I hold you, and us, there. Notes from the Field In these few weeks after the loss of my mother, where I expected to feel a heavy grief stone, I am instead discovering a buoyant appetite for life. As a friend wisely said, we are simultaneously aware of grief’s “wicked and joyful ways.” Together, we come to know that these grief stones will vary in weight and character over time. This is how life moves. Like a river carving its path along soft banks — sometimes deep, sometimes eddies, and sometimes the current moves boulders and breaks open new ground. Case in point, I’ve just returned home from a profoundly nourishing weekend in Los Angeles. (By grace and chance I was able to get last minute tickets to the final night of Nick Cave’s solo tour at the Orpheum Theatre.) Trips like this are extremely rare in my life, but I feel something is shifting in me since my mom passed. Somehow, at this moment, grieving feels more like freedom than a heavy stone. “What remained to fear? What was left to lose that I could not survive? I felt extraordinarily liberated by this, protected by the calamity itself and perversely invincible within my own vulnerability.” ~ Nick Cave
And I know it’s not just me. We are witnessing the world we have known shift and dissolve and, in places, break completely open. Dreamfruit Themes in 2024 In next year’s Dreamfruit adventure, along our journey of radical belonging, we are looking for ways to sing to and sacralize the dying, even as we give water to the new and strange sprouts of the future. Next year’s Dreamfruit is a daily and lunar guide for Earthlings who wish to grow toward the Beauty that we can only see by relinquishing our hold on the world we’ve known. Growing soft around our habits and calcified certainties will unlock a new set of possibilities we could never have imagined for ourselves. These were the themes emerging within this year’s Dreamfruit even before I went to my mother’s side in August. Being present through her dying process created the strange blessing of writing the new Dreamfruit journey within the crucible of a tender and potent life transition. What I know for sure is the 2024 Dreamfruit will bring to you the depth and magic of both the embodied grief and radical reconnecting in these threshold times. Community Supported Publishing (on Indiegogo) I’m genuinely eager to bring Dreamfruit 2024 to you. We are down to the final touches on this year’s Community Supported Publishing Campaign, and you can expect an announcement to splash into the river of your inbox in a matter of days. Of course, there is much to say about the campaign itself, the 2024 Dreamfruit adventure, the formats and features of this year’s books, and more. But for now, I’m resting in gratitude. Thank you for being a part of this journey, and for leaping again and again into the river with me… moon by moon. Yours on the journey,
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