Life.Art.Being convenes this week. Here is a peek inside:
I’m guessing this summer has been eye-opening for a large majority of us — systems are collapsing, and we are waking up to the rift between ourselves and our world that has been slowly deepening. I might not be the only one whose mind feels chaotic; and lacking a container to respond to the unimaginable changes upon us, it’s easy to tumble into busy-ness, confusion, and despair.
Oh so long ago, I focused my college studies on environmental policy and social engagement. I then founded the Center for Sustainable Living, a community education project in mid-Missouri. In those years I was angry, I was grief-stricken, and I worked an irrational number of hours each week attempting to respond to the world as I was coming to know it.
It felt like the world and my mind were intensifying at great speed and in pace with each other. After spending over a decade in activist culture, my passion for the earth was reduced to exhausted ash. I came to the conviction that the fundamental challenge we are confronting is in our frayed sense of inter-connection.
It is my belief and inspiration that we can begin to restore that connection through our most proximal tools – body, heart, breath – and that we can make something beautiful of it in the process, using the full palette of human experience.
My wish for all of us is that we engage tools that can help us return to ourselves – our senses and perceptions; each other – the capacity to connect, give and receive; and our world – the restored ability to listen and tend. The opportunity at hand is for us to return to our sacred contract as stewards of this living earth by mending the bridge between us.
Life.Art.Being exists to bring us together in these practices. Even if you are unable to be with us during the Festival (though passes are still available), I hope you can get a moment with just you and Nature and these suggested exercisesto clear your senses & stir the seed.
Heartfully yours, Elizabeth