Come join Damaris Chrystal and Elizabeth Meacham, PhD as we call the circles and ancient ways to greet, cultivate intimate relationship with and tend the local spirits of place in ways familiar to our blood and bones and welcomed by the spirits of the Earth. Elizabeth will be headlining Saturday, October 8th beginning the day at Affelder House and probably concluding at Sulpher Springs in South Chagrin Reservation, Bentleyville, OH or in Gates Mills, OH and Damaris will be hosting on Sunday, October 9th at West Woods/Affelder House in Russell Township, OH for the entire day.. Or we each might do both. Don’t know yet… We’ll have to see how the winds are moving….in any case we are celebrating more joining of our beloved Earth/Spirit tending and dreaming work together.

Come back anytime to find everything else you need to know and to register.

Listen….. listen to the gathering susurrus of the wild river, singing like your blood, casting primal spells of Eros through the land, initiating life. Listen to the soughing of the winds caressing the trees, flowers and tall grasses– and you too!-- sharing their ancient secrets with the day, sustaining life. Notice the murmuring of the sun catching gold fire through the dawn fields, limning the ears of Rabbit and other furred folk, illuminating life; Sense the quiet whispering of night as all form shapeshifts into dreamtime while the stars exult the wisdom of your fine senses, perpetuating life. Hearken to the chthonic mythbeings inhabiting the fierce liminality in the interstices of your awareness, fertilizing life. And under it all, this mysteriously gathered and uncontainable momentum is rippling ecstatically beneath the skin of the land, east to west; the heart of Earth beating her power and passion into each new day……

With the beauty and participation of your presence, this gathering will offer earth honoring practices and ceremonies to cultivate the deep well of inspiration within you and provide nourishment for you to be available to truly listen with a fertile, receptive imagination coupled with a stable ground; to listen without acquisitiveness or unaware projection; listen as we discover ourselves arriving full-bodied, intimately, discretely, within a lovingly tended reciprocal relationship with the spirits of the land where we actually are, whatever our ancestral inheritance or traditions. These beautiful, wise spirit beings we live among include the human ancestral spirits; the land spirits—vegetative, mineral, animal, elemental, devic, guardian; beings of the hidden kingdom and those of liminal space/time. And they are responsive to our acknowledgment, bringing true magic to our lives.

We will have the opportunity to respectfully greet, commune with and tend these relationships, to learn from and give back to, through the sharing of stories, trance journeys, sound/music/silence, movement, creative rituals and ceremony. Under sun and ancient starlight we will have the opportunity to come into deep community together over the course of a weekend, touching in creative, intimate ways some of the most moving and crucial longings and expressions of our breath and blood; the cosmic patterning in our dreams and bones. What does it really mean to be fully, beautifully human on this wondrous, dreaming earth in sacred relationship with our human and other than human kin, seen and unseen, and how do we effectively bring these relationships home into our families and out into our communities?   

Conscious connection and communication between humanity and the other spirit beings of Earth is essential to knowing who we ourselves really are, and thus how to live in balance, for we are intertwined; weaving, dreaming, en-joying, grieving, tending, dying and being born within and through each other, endlessly. (text by Damaris Chrystal)

Please join us if you can!

There will be some digitally available resource materials available post-retreat

art: Sue Davis(vachonarts.com)

Time: Saturday 10am-9pm

Sunday, 10am-7pm

Cost: Full cost is $325 which we believe accurately reflects the content resources of this gathering; however in response to what we’ve recently observed is a current difficulty due to inflation, we’ve added a sliding scale which begins at $200 and goes to $325. Please make your payment in conscious consideration of your needs, intentions and ability ; Registration is now open. Please make registrations by September 30th if possible. $175.00 due upon registration whatever date it is. If not paying full amount upon registration, remaining payment of $150.00 is due by October 6th. All payments due by October 6th. To make these payments go to: https://www.damarischrystal.com/payments-1

If you would like to have your payment made in three installments, then register by August 15th and use this link to make your initial payment: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=EMR8GLG5GADXS

Food: Dinner will be provided both Saturday and Sunday. Please bring your own lunch both days.

What to bring: Camp chair, blanket, whatever you wish to sit on/with to be comfortable; water bottle, drum, rattle, percussive companions, note-taking resources, layered clothing.