It’s strange, the cultural idea of a date on which a season commences. Spring, in particular. I remember Spring Day being something that was marked at school, all of our hopes of warmth, light and flowers pinned on the 1st of September. I’ve been so aware this year of spring as a gradual shifting, a tentative unfolding.
More birdsong. The plants that respond to the shifts in light rather than to warmth. Starting my early morning meditations at dawn rather than in the dark. Watching my son play a late hockey game and the floodlights only coming on right at the end. But also the internal shifts - new shoots of creativity, a greater desire for movement, an urge to clear the decks.
The Dharmagiri team are offering an online “practice series”: four Tuesday evening sessions (SA time), each facilitated by a different Afro-dharma practitioner, on the theme of safety. The series starts on the 26th of August, and feels perfectly suited to the seasonal shifts.
The theme of safety brings to mind this Anaïs Nin quote:
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was greater than the risk it took to bloom.
Doing the work to cultivate safety provides a way for us to navigate the vulnerability of emergence, the edginess of being in the world: not just for ourselves, but for what an internal spring offers the collective.
We live in a world and time of a plethora of offerings - often overwhelmingly so. So why this series, and why now? What I love about the facilitators (and why I’m delighted to be in their company) is the shared orientation towards embodied practice - this isn’t about bypassing our human experience, but rather learning how to more skillfully navigate it, as it is. And this isn’t about cultivating safety in a narrowly self-interested way. All four facilitators share an understanding of how these quiet, inward practices ripple out into the world. This is the activism of rebuilding safety: in our bodies, in our homes, in our communities, and ultimately for all beings.
Like this pattern of branching in the picture below, this tree with its new shoots, the practice of safety is a fractal, a repetition of a pattern at every scale.
Hope to see you in this sacred circle that is gathering from across the globe. Sign up link here.
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