Fall session – Saturday, December 4, 2021
With shorter days upon us we shifted our meeting time to give us more hours of daylight. What a lovely weather day it turned out to be! Gender Creatives spent our time playing and laughing, singing, and creating.
Some of our projects this fall have included making plant-based dyes and tie-dyeing pieces of silk, carving walking staffs and spoons, wool-felting, and watercolor painting. We have practiced fire-making and fire tending, all of us gaining experience at our growing edges which vary from being comfortable lighting matches to working on our friction fire skills.
We have been working on the epic project of making personal shields, which we hope to bring to completion next week. We are getting close! Shields are shaped, edges sanded, bosses (umbos) installed. We will be stapling on fabric, installing pipe insulation around the edges, and securing our handhold behind the boss. The final touch will be decorating them with our personalized designs, emblems, sigils representing what we choose to protect, what we value, from where we draw our strength.
We continually bring focus to the mission of deepening our connection with ourselves, each other, and nature.
Our work of connecting weekly around personal celebrations and concerns weaves the cloth of mutuality as we listen to each other, express ourselves freely, and find comfort in our shared experience. Every week we are growing more comfortable being in nature for extended periods of time.
Today we did service work, planting 40 oak tree whips in the wooded areas around our base camp. It was so powerful to ponder the strength and resilience of nature as we nestled the roots of these tiny beings into the soil of their new home. Knowing that some of these hold the energy and the bud to thrive into overstory someday is a powerful message.
What we tend in our lives may flourish; have care about where you put your focus and what you give your energy to!
