🌸 Reawakening With Spring's First Bloom
Your guide to rooting deeper, growing truer, and blossoming wider in our PNW community.
Welcome back! 🌞
Back to sun-filled days beckoning us outside and into nature. Back to planting seeds, tending dreams, and spreading wings. And of course, back to Seeding Community’s bi-weekly roundup.
Spring calls us forward into a rebirth—a reawakening and renewal towards another cycle of life, growth, and maturation ahead.
Winter’s descent isn’t meant to keep us in the underworld forever. And now, as we ascend out of the soil and back into the light of the above-ground world, we bring with us the learnings, lessons, and transformations the darkness nurtured in us.
This doesn’t mean we ignore the dark now, or exile it back into the shadows of our hidden closets, but rather bring it with us into the light—integrating it into more and more wholeness with each circling of the seasons and cycles around us.
With this conscious illumination, comes the truth and scale of the unimaginable amount of grief in the world today—so much neglect and oppression inside and around us. And it’s all needing to be held and cared for.
We are witnesses, victims, and perpetrators in this—most distantly witnessing it in war-torn countries across the world, and most intimately oppressing and neglecting inner parts of ourselves, oftentimes without even knowing it.
Can this grief guide us out of this?
Grief can be a teacher pointing us towards where our energy is needing to go. Grief can be the medicine showing us how to come back together. Grief can be community, waiting to be felt and remembered. If we just let it be.
Throughout history, change has happened when people are brave enough to bring our grief together. Maybe that’s one of the most important things we can do today—simply find others to grieve together with.
How can we be in solidarity with our grief? How can our grief be an act of solidarity nurturing togetherness and care into the world?
May spring bring light to all that is needing it.
Welcome to this edition of Seeding Community.
Back To Our Regular Bi-Weekly Rhythm
For those new to us, this Seeding Community newsletter is cocreated by Aloysious and Jordan Lyon. We are simply the best. Or something like that...
Every two weeks, we share events and gatherings happening in the Salish Sea region, primarily focused around Seattle, original unceded lands of the Duwamish peoples. While what we share touches many different themes, experiences, and lineages, the main thing they all center on is our individual & collective healing and liberation.
🎶 These might be gatherings around the arts—dances, song circles, musical performances, art exhibitions, poetry readings, crafting workshops, and much more.
🌲 Some will be around nature—land healing and ecological restoration work days, herbalism classes, local foraging tours, urban gardening and farming support, etc.
🙌 They may be focused on tending to our somatic or spiritual bodies—grief work, meditation retreats, sensuality, embodiment, and relational healing workshops.
✊ They also may be culture change work—mutual aid pop-ups, direct action opportunities, grassroots movements, upcoming protests and marches, and more.
In the “Community Happenings” section, you will always find a list of things, categorized with an emoji, coming up in the next two weeks so you can show up for what matters to you and connect with community around it. If you’d like to have something added, please let us know about it through this form.
The core of our why in curating this newsletter is around community and belonging. Community is the medicine the world is needing and we hope this Seeding Community newsletter can do a small part in helping guide us back/forward into togetherness and care, interconnection and interdependence, and living with ourselves, each other, and all of nature in reciprocity, right relationship, and love.
Gathering to Embody What’s Possible
Abbey Arts presents: Ayla Nereo, LŪKA, Brotha Jag
This Saturday, on March 23rd, come join this heart-centered evening of song, dance, and community at Washington Hall with musical performances by Ayla Nereo, LŪKA, and Brotha Jag. Learn more and get your tickets here.
Ayla Nereo is a singer, composer, producer, dancer, and visual-poetry creator from the mountains of eastern California. Grown in forests and rivers, she is a bridger of the timeless and modern, weaving poetry and sound into a magical and emotional world of sonic beauty. LŪKA writes songs of, and for, healing—music that both feels rooted in the natural world, as well as shimmers with blips of the technological. Brotha Jag creates an immersive sonic experience that guides us both deeper into our heart and also wider into a connected and powerfully unified group.
There is no UNKNOWING: A Vision Birthed of our Wails for These Times
Next week starts “There is no UNKNOWING: A Vision Birthed of our Wails for These Times"—a guided group space to support individuals in their own empowerment to realize (and clarify) their callings. No one else will not do it for you.
It’s not about being filled up with someone else's answers, it’s about remembering the medicine you already carry and your unique way of bringing it that is actually exactly what we need. Your gift(s) is not an accident. Learn more and register here.
Community Screening: Land Stewardship and Awareness Documentary
In our evergreen state of Washington, nestled between the bustling city of Seattle and the quiet hum of Sammamish, a high school senior at Skyline High School is channeling his passion for film into a powerful force for environmental advocacy.
This Saturday, March 23rd, join a community of screening at The Beacon of Aran Pandey’s documentary featuring local land stewardship organizations like The Heron’s Nest and Issaquah Alps. We hope to see you there!
Workshops & Rituals For Healing
The Asherah Pole: An Ancient Bridge to our Future Liberation
Even before Abraham, ancient people’s spirituality was intrinsically connected to the earth. The Asherah Pole is a symbol of that connection. The essential teachings of the Asherah Pole are that true integrity comes from solidarity and liberation is only achieved when we open our hearts to remember we are all one.
There is so much intelligence in our bodies capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism have conspired for us to suppress. This workshop invites us to partner with a lineage of teachings to heal our inherent connection with earth, root ourselves in resistance work and extend our branches to meet our souls calling. Learn more and RSVP here.
Conflict in the Body: How Attachment & The Nervous System Impacts Your Relationships
As beings that have survived and evolved through social bonding, relationships are deeply important to us on a biological level. Because of this, the presence of conflict in our relationships can activate our threat/survival responses - fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
Learning to understand, track, and support your nervous system responses and your attachment system will help you navigate conflict with more clarity, compassion, and connection. Learn more and save your spot here.
Community Happenings
This Week
🎶 Grab your drum and jam out at this weekly Drum Circle (Monday, 3/18)
💃 Dance & sing welcome to the equinox with Drumspyder (Tuesday, 3/19)
🎉 Celebrate Ostara at this fertility ritual & ecstatic dance (Wednesday, 3/20)
🙌 Explore mindfulness at this ecofeminist meditation (Wednesday, 3/20)
🌲 Grow your PNW ecological fluency at Wild Plant Walk (Wednesday, 3/20)
✊ Bridge into liberation at this Asherah Pole workshop (Wednesday, 3/20)
💃 Move your body and feels at Om Culture’s Ecstatic Dance (Thursday, 3/21)
This Weekend
💧 Grieve & release in brotherhood at this Men’s Grief Lodge (Friday, 3/22)
💃 Welcome in the solstice at this Flow Church ecstatic dance (Friday, 3/22)
🌲 Explore ancestry as a doorway to grounded land stewardship (Friday, 3/22)
😎 Watch this cinematic journey of environmental advocacy (Saturday, 3/23)
🎤 “Remember the Call” at this ritual storytelling gathering (Saturday, 3/23)
🌲 Learn & practice ethical harvesting of wild foraged plants (Saturday, 3/23)
🙌 “Wake the dragon” & heal in motion at this Grief Groove (Sunday, 3/24)
Next Week
🙌 Deepen in alignment & purpose at Moonday Attunement (Monday, 3/25)
💃 Jam into darkness at this contact improv immersion (Tuesday, 3/26)
🙌 Practice showing up better in conflict at this workshop (Tuesday, 3/26)
💃 Dance as the sweet creature you are at Om Culture (Tuesday, 3/26)
🌲 Grow your PNW ecological fluency at Wild Plant Walk (Wednesday, 3/27)
💗 Share love & touch at this Level 2 Body Love Temple (Wednesday, 3/27)
🙌 Explore the ethereal w/ sound at this shamanic journey (Wednesday, 3/27)
Next Weekend
💃 Get your ecstatic dance on at this Flow Church event (Friday, 3/29)
💃 Awaken with spring at this cacao & ecstatic dance ritual (Friday, 3/29)
🎶 Explore your voice without judgment at Song Church (Saturday, 3/30)
🙌 Emerge from the chrysalis at this journey of renewal (Saturday, 3/30)
🌲 Craft natural medicines from a seasonal sacred harvest (Sunday 3/31)
🙌 Connect to your highest vibration at this OM chant (Sunday, 3/31)
🎶 Sing & catch songs with ahlay blakely at this workshop (Sunday, 3/31)
💃 Dance/Movement | 🎶 Music/Song | 🎤 Performance | 🎨 Arts/Crafts | 🙌 Spiritual/Healing | 💗 Sexuality/Sensuality | 🍄 Plants/Medicine | 🌲 Nature/Land | 💧 Grief Work | ✊ Social Justice/Community | 🎉 Celebration/Festival | 🌈 Queer/LBGTQIA | 🍲 Food | 😎 Other
Planning Your Seasons Ahead
📅 To keep you up to date on all the upcoming big gatherings, retreats, and festivals.
April 13-14 — Rites of Passage's 2-Day Grief Retreat
April 19-20 — Wecelium Weekender
May 2-4 — Men’s Grief and Praise Gathering
May 4-5 — Healing at the Roots’ 2-Day Communal Grief Retreat
June 27-30 — Straw-Clay Natural Building Workshop
June 28-30 — Kindling Wisdom: Lighting the Path to a Resilient Future
July 6-7 — Sacred Groves’ 2-Day Outdoor Grief Retreat
July 20-24 — Manifest: A Transformative Gathering of Dudes in Nature
August 23-25 — Heart Expansion Earth and Sky Festival Campout
September 6-8 — Imagine Music and Arts Festival
How can this newsletter better support you?
Help us cocreate this community resource! If you have any suggestions, ideas, feedback or questions, please reply and share what’s alive in you. And if you have any things for us to add to our next edition, please share them through this form.
And if you feel in abundance and called to support this community work with a monthly gift, please share that contribution by clicking the button below.
In community and with love,
Seeding Community — Aloysious and Jordan