Fire&Water continues to evolve, as every living thing does–in itself, with a new cohort and a finishing one, but also within me, part of the second cohort, winter 2021-summer 2022. First collaboratively with one friend, then with another, I have co-facilitated (informally, lightly) a monthly coffee-club gathering of F&W folks via Zoom. I am feeling that coming to its own completion, even if the connection I feel within the F&W lineage remains lively within me. Having been in the lineage of a couple different circle-way communities, I often find myself musing on the arc of life-death-rebirth each has held for me, as well as the communal reflections instigated by such arcs. It’s easy to presume something is wrong in the later part of the arc, even as I suspect impermanence is simply the way of things here. Everything in its season. Everything in its own lifespan.
Doesn’t hurt to muse ‘aloud’ what rises, I figure, and perhaps something in me yearns to find out what I’m feeling, thinking, here.
Living in the loneliness-era (or epidemic, depending upon one’s energetic spin on the whole thing) places me in a near-constant yearning for deeper intimacy, deeper connection. My entire life’s work has been a “clawing my way back to my body” in hopes of actually participating in such things, not solely thinking-writing about them. The overwhelmingly disconnected and even dissociated age we live in makes forays into deeper community episodic, at best. Human beings in this time come together seeking new-ancient ways to gather, to remember collaboration, to co-create, even to experiment with making decisions in other ways than apparently available in declining institutions, grasping for stability and power-over. True memory is recovered in intentionally crafted, short-duration ways: a colloquy, a fellowship, a leadership program lasting anywhere from 1-2 years. Separation. Threshold. Integration.
It’s the integration work that ultimately makes the difference in transforming a life, I think, even as completing such work means just that: completion. Endings that are then new beginnings. Separation. This is hard, particularly when one then separates from–leaves–some or all of one’s (previous?) intimates in the journey, so to grow into the next round.
What does remaining part of the community mean?
What remains in each of us from our shared, deep intimacies as members of the community continue to evolve, to mature (hopefully), to strengthen in their own life’s work?
What does community mean when such seekers are often cycle-breakers in historically-wounded lineages, when such folks are more comfortable with the periphery of transformations than with being in any communal center?
These questions have lived with me for several years now, long before I landed in Fire&Water’s leadership-initiation work. The circle-way community within which I dove most deeply, committed most fully for over ten years, offered me a life-death-rebirth journey I’m only conscious of completing relatively recently. The discovery of community and the invitation to Life these circles brought me (2012-2024) enlivened and transformed almost every aspect of my life–personal-embodied, marital, vocational, spiritual, familial, communal and more. I suffered for years through my own refusals of the death(s) required in such a growth journey. Not only had this way of gathering transformed my own life, I had committed my own professional-vocational life to crafting-holding circles for others’ lives to be transformed. I had evolved into recognized leadership of the leadership trainings, finally offering the Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy training in 2017 for the mother-school. I was therefore not remotely prepared to have the dying-to-rebirth part of the arc begin to “happen to me.” I refused to surrender to the obvious: I was outgrowing the community’s capacity for change. I was pushing for the vision I thought we had shared, but which “we” did not. Or at least in the same way (to be diplomatic about it). Knowing myself as a teacher, I spent years trying to teach a community how to learn what it did not want to know, at least from me.
One of the largest challenges the leadership sisters wrestled with was how to retain that sense of shared intimacy, known so deeply in specific leadership cohorts, across the leadership cohorts that came after. An annual retreat of leadership sisters was the obvious choice, which worked well enough for nearly a decade, maybe more. As the number of leadership sisters grew, however, the ethos and possibilities began to change. Those playing more executive leadership roles began to discern how to limit, to control the size of the gatherings, so to retain the intimacy of the whole. Except that changed the ethos of the circle-way wisdom from ‘y’all come’ to ‘come if you merit being here.’ No critique or blame, here. It’s an un-solvable (so far) challenge of community evolution in an era losing its wisdom about community’s depth and growth, breadth and evolution.
All of which led me into Fire&Water, though I almost refused this invitation to rebirth. I had lost faith in the power of human circles to sustain community that mattered. I was in a hopeless place, convinced that entering in was ultimately a fruitless pipe-dream, an idealistic waste of time. The piece I had been missing was how to grieve. How to surrender into the death-into-rebirth part of the arc.
I’m sure I’m still missing important parts I will learn in the times to come, about the invitations to Life, the necessity of death, the energies of rebirth. How it never seems to end, but only simmer or boil along. I remain sad a good portion of the time, grieving what I perceive to be the sh*tshow of today’s “falling apart,” today’s “Great Turning,” but the sadness no longer drives my body-ship, nor does it determine my spirit’s wonder, curiosity, renewed willingness. I sit with it, in other words. It no longer sits on me, suffocating me.
Yet the questions named above–about community, its longevity, its authenticity–remain active and invitational within me. I see my active participation in Fire&Water coming to some close, though I remain with a deep sense of connection to my own cohort’s companions. Particularly as some have been woven into the leadership of new cohorts, in roles of apprentice to its founder, Quanita Roberson. I recognize they are moving forward within the F&W circling in a way inaccessible to the rest of us, without sense of lack or loss. Just different roles, ways of service. The friendships that are to be a part of my own growth path continue to nourish us both. Those that were more part of the ‘rim’ of the circle begin to fade away into memory. But the grief is quite close to praise, recognizing this to be part of the impermanence of things. I am so very grateful for rim-holders, even as I am grateful for those closer in to my own journeying today.
It seems to be the divine order of things today for our “found communities” to wax and wane in their cycles of life-death-rebirth. Each lineage makes its contribution into the whole, for the lifespan in which it strives to remain, to contribute, to thrive. I hope Fire&Water continues to teach us all this impermanent path and I bow to the realities of its evolution that may or may not require anything of me, overtly.
One of the greatest gifts it has given me, which I hope to mirror back and offer as often as welcome, is that pursuing one’s own particular work sometimes means feeling like one is differentiating from the community while pursuing the Work that beckons. Not disconnecting, per se, but committing to the Work more than staying in stagnant or life-draining roles familiar to the community-of-the-moment. It feels a bit like something is dying, perhaps because it is, but trusting the arc as a whole leads to rebirth, eventually.
Given we are all connected…given we are each other…all becomes well, all will be well.
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