I’ve mentionned our four day ceremony several times here and some of you, I hope, are wondering just exactly what we were doing.

I called the ceremony: Re-storying our Modern Lives – A Ceremony to Renew a Living Myth for Eairth.  For more about why I spell earth, eairth, please read Per Espen Stoknes essay titled: Eairth’s Imagination – Rooting the Expressive Arts in the Elemental Creativity of the Biosphere. I’ll refer to this essay again in my next post, so if you don’t want to read it now, there’ll be other opportunities.

Eight of us responded to the invitation to spend four days in creative, ritual space. Two men, six women, some local, some from far away, three of us Ph.D.’s, maybe a Master’s level or two thrown into the mix, one of the women drives a big rig and rides a Harley with the correct leather jacket,  two ride horses in the Olympic mountains, one nearly died from perforations in her intestine, another has fused vertebrae, one grew up in a huge city, another on a Wyoming Indian Reservation where she felt very much at home despite her Scottish and Scandinavian ancestry.

All of us appear quite ordinary, have families, jobs, obligations and response-abilities, successes and failures, fears and courage, love and losses; we vote in elections, take classes, travel to other places; some have I-pods and I-pads and I-phones while another refuses to watch TV though DVD’s are ok; some read kindles and others still prefer the sensory tingle of turning pages in books.

We range in age from 35ish to bordering on 72. ( That’s me – I still barely believe I’ve lived so long. )

And I think I can say unequivocally that we all love living on this planet.

In other words we are an eclectic gaggle of two-leggeds. We could be anybody and everybody. Like you! None of us shopping in the supermarket would be noticed as being different.

And yet we are different in the sense that we’re willing to make time in our fast moving lives to live in the creatively expressive flow for four days, to commune with forces larger than our egos, to imagine how we can be more fully human in this modern age.

Each of us feels the evolutionary tug to expand our human awareness of our interdependency on this tiny globe spinning in the vastness, to expand our human notions of what it means to be “normal,” perhaps to weave a more responsive and richer storyline for our urban, “techno” cultures.

We begin by gathering round the dinner table for our first night together knowing we are about to enter a tee pee. Do you hear the anticipatory drum roll?? dah da daht duh…

The story continues next time.