Ripening The Fruits of Our Soul: 

A Year Long Walk to Discover Wisdom in a Troubled World

We are living in a time in history when chaos appears to be overtaking and obscuring our connection to the sacred. Finding ways to unlock and discover pathways to the sacred in everyday life brings us face-to-face with our true life, light and Wisdom’s ways. 

In the early days of Christian formation within the Roman empire, the desert mothers and fathers must have felt a sense of chaos in their times. We know they retreated to the edges of the ‘known’ and sought to deepen their intimate and collective relationship with the sacred.  The ancient wisdom from the Abrahamic tradition, illuminated by Yeshua, was their framework for discovering and walking a new paradigm of truth, beauty, love and light into a time of darkness.  

Communities of Wisdom seekers have done this walk throughout the millennia.  Another prophetic example are the Celts whose peoples migrated to the very edges of the known world on the Emerald and British Isles. There they created monastic communities designed to preserve lineages of wisdom and establish centers for safeguarding practices of the sacred ways.  Like their ancestors before them, these Celtic monasteries  were spiritual nodes that helped keep the streams of divine wisdom and light flowing into the world.  These groups borrowed heavily from the Desert Mothers and Father as they forged new relationships and insights into the divine mysteries that had been unfolding for millennia through the Abrahamic stream.  And again, they retreated to the ‘wild edges’ of space and time, found refuge and sacred engagement in the world of nature.

As our systems appear to be breaking down, many of us feel there is also something that is trying to ‘break through’ . So, I invite you to help create another node of  seekers willing to take a deep dive into the wisdom left to us by those Celtic monks.  We will do this  by exploring  some of the spiritual practices they developed to create sanctuaries of light as darkness descends all around them. By allowing Wisdom to speak to us in ways that have stood the tests of time, the divine realms can help inform our ability to discern what wants to be heard and seen, using the lens of our hearts. 

Our ancestors stepped out of the mainstream and went to the ‘wild edges’ found in nature to do this work. We will spend 12 months doing 12 practices (1 per month) within whatever ‘wild spaces’ of nature we can work within.  As many sages, master teachers and their followers have done in the past, we will engage the natural world to assist us as we listen and respond to the sacred call of the creation.  The goal is to move out of our regular patterns and systems to catch a glimpse of what is newly arising, bringing us closer to the interbeingness of all life.   All of Nature’s beings know something about the web of creation, and can be conduits of inbreaking of love and divine light.

This year-long virtual and in-person workshop series is aimed at allowing us to experience 12 ancient Celtic spiritual practices in both an inward personal way as well as in a community setting.  Participants are encouraged to join one of several ‘in person’ gathering sites for a 4 day retreat at the beginning of the year and again at the end of the year.  Each of the sites will be connected via zoom on the internet in order to create the larger communal aspects of our work together.  We will then gather via zoom one evening each month to share our experiences with the particular practice we are engaging that month.  Each month we will go out into nature with a new practice and listen, ponder, inquire and engage with the wisdom and knowledge resident in the elemental, plant, animal, and spiritual realms.  Just as the spiritual practices of the Abrahamic stream have been strengthened by the braiding of Jewish, Christian and Islamic knowledge that encourages wisdom to arise, every person on this year-long retreat will be encouraged to bring the wisdom they have gleaned from within their own spiritual/religious traditions.  This braiding will work to enhance and enrich the experiences for us all.  Each practice provides a clear approach to engaging it.  Our talents, learning types and desires to apply timeless ancient knowledge to our current life situations will make the year’s efforts and gains all the more rich and grounded in the light of sacred wisdom speaking here and now.

We will be using the book The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred by Christine Walters Paintner, Abbess of the Abbey of the Arts in Galway Ireland as a guide for our practice.  Current issues, the sharing of wisdom and knowledge from our own current spiritual path and a series of additional guiding questions for each practice will be provided each month as the year unfolds.  We will each be asked to deepen our exploration by using drawing, singing, chanting, journaling , and/or gathering of poetry or wisdom sayings that speak to the insights each practice is designed to elicit.  In whatever way we each engage both our left and right brain qualities will be the pathway ‘beyond the known’ to explore.

Time and Space Details:
First retreat: June 22-25, 2023

Monthly Zoom Sessions: Second Thursday of the month 7-9pm EDT.  

Closing Retreat:  May 20-23, 2024.

Retreat Sites: Beaver Island, MI and Ann Arbor, MI (Other sites are welcome)

There is space for 25 people total to form our first nodes

Cost:

Help us create a new system of energy exchange.  I have gifts to give and would love for them to be used and shared.  However, in today’s world, things that are ‘free’ are typically undervalued, paid less attention, and given low priority. What is the ‘right’ type of giving for you to value, pay attention, and prioritize this important work.  Is it money? Is it time? Is it resources?  Some things are easy - e.g. if you attend one of the in-person retreats, it would be great to give $25/day for meals, beverages, and other things we use at that person’s house.   What about the teachings? Think about it and find your own way of giving.  I am sure it will be lovely.