Welcome to the first podcast episode of the 2023 Autumn season! Learning how to navigate the darkness, literally and spiritually, is a skill that most of us would benefit from working on. Knowing how to be in the dark helps us to become people who are in touch with an older wisdom and can live out our deep service to the world.
Read MorePart 4 of the 4-part series, Unlearning Capitalism.
How many of our activities at home are in service to how we earn a wage? The laundry, the cleaning, the cooking - it’s so often crammed into edges of our days or weeks, in tiny windows of time when we’re not beholden to income-earning work. While this may have shifted early on in the pandemic, I’ve found that even for those still working from home, the size of the work continues to squeeze out the time necessary for homemaking.
Read MorePart 3 of the 4-part series, Unlearning Capitalism.
In the same way, your labor - the energy you exert to create beauty, nourishment, and care for yourself and others - can be a form of worship and communion with the natural world and the divine. This is possible no matter what you do for work, how others feel about your labor, or how much you’re paid to do it. Your labor can become sacred if you simply intend it to be so. And, you deserve to labor in the ways that work for your body and are a reflection of your soul’s giftedness.
Read MorePart 2 of the 4-part series, Unlearning Capitalism.
For millennia, time was a fluid and subjective construct. Work was done in alignment with the natural flows of life. Longer Summer days meant more time harvesting berries or building a new shelter. Cold Winter’s nights drew people inward, close to the fire to conserve their energy. Rather than requesting to meet on June 30th, our ancestors would have suggested meeting on the New Moon, or in the week after the caribou had passed through. The Earth’s rhythms were time, and they shifted according to the cycles of the Sun and Moon.
Read MoreI awoke around five in the morning on our last day in a remote wilderness lodge. The sky was still dark, the silence thick.
After having experienced an exceedingly luxurious few days of natural beauty, vibrant cuisine, and digital detox, I woke up with a sadness in my chest. Lying in the dark with a view of a pitch black sky, I felt the presence of a grandmother. Not mine, but a grandmother born of this place. She ached.
Part 1 of the 4-part series, Unlearning Capitalism.
Today, you likely work more than three hours per day for your wages and then also tend to your basic needs such as buying and cooking food, doing your laundry, paying your bills, and squeezing in some rest here and there. Your life may be full of joy and peace, and I truly hope that it is, but in my ideal world, the work that you love to do would be done because you want it to be, not because you have no other means by which to live.
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