SECOND FIRE: Becoming Fierce Wild Wisdom
in the Journey of Midlife and Beyond
2027 Cohort
in the Journey of Midlife and Beyond
2027 Cohort
Calling all Fierce Hearted, Wise Women into ceremonial community to support an individual and collective journey.
An Online and In-Person Gathering beginning Late January 2027
The role of sovereign, wild wise women and elders in community and village feels ever more essential now in a time of unravelling and great turning.
RSVP Interest!
See Details Below
Near mid-life, we are called into a shape-shifting process from peri/menopause and beyond that holds the archetypal pattern of the initiatory journey. Guided by the wisdom of our bodies, myth, and earth-entangled imagination, we listen for the portals to soul - surrendering to the earth rooted regenerative cycles of life/death/birth - as we become our particular way of loving the world.
We welcome an intimate cohort of folks who identify as women in an embodied way and feel the shift into this potent second fire of life from late 30's into 80's eldership.
Together we become a force for honoring a cultural rite and life stage essential for wise, earth-conscious culture.
We embrace what has been suppressed and relegated to the physical and medical and hold it within the larger context of movement of Soulful human becoming.
This journey offers portals to deep authenticity and relationship with the unique and sacred powers that move through our beings for the renewal of the worlds.
An Online and In-Person Gathering beginning Late January 2027
The role of sovereign, wild wise women and elders in community and village feels ever more essential now in a time of unravelling and great turning.
RSVP Interest!
See Details Below
Near mid-life, we are called into a shape-shifting process from peri/menopause and beyond that holds the archetypal pattern of the initiatory journey. Guided by the wisdom of our bodies, myth, and earth-entangled imagination, we listen for the portals to soul - surrendering to the earth rooted regenerative cycles of life/death/birth - as we become our particular way of loving the world.
We welcome an intimate cohort of folks who identify as women in an embodied way and feel the shift into this potent second fire of life from late 30's into 80's eldership.
Together we become a force for honoring a cultural rite and life stage essential for wise, earth-conscious culture.
We embrace what has been suppressed and relegated to the physical and medical and hold it within the larger context of movement of Soulful human becoming.
This journey offers portals to deep authenticity and relationship with the unique and sacred powers that move through our beings for the renewal of the worlds.
Intergenerational Ceremonial Soul work in Community
This Second Fire time of life calls for intergenerational witness and relationship as we feel the gravitational shifts into sovereign/queen/creatrix to crone and soul elder.
Younger ones offer witness to the beauty and courage of elders - in whose faces we see our own becoming and who are living a remembered/new path into soulful elder.
Elders share stories and witness and encourage youngers' living truth and creative soul possibility. Elders might also engage this journey if conscious or cultural honoring of this shapeshifting portal was not available in their own life.
Community Circle work:
The deeply embodied nature of this journey means that each woman goes through this time in unique ways. As we listen and share in each other's embodied stories, we learn ways to tend our bodies and lives to become the deep allies, elders and ancestors we long for.
Ceremonial and Ritual Soul work:
We will be a learning community together - engaging sacred conversations, guided deep imagination, dreamwork, soul-centric embodied practices, ritual and experiences - supporting each person where you find yourself in this journey.
Living Intelligence of Earth-Rooted Relationship with Mystery:
We will be tapping into the intelligence of regenerative life-death-birth cycles as we listen for the ways the mysteries longs for us to become alive in this time of the dreaming The Great Turning/Great Unraveling.
Spiral Nature: There are layers in this spiral journey of life/soul journey. We have created a short enough time-frame that allows us to dive in together, pause, and listen for what comes next.
Younger ones offer witness to the beauty and courage of elders - in whose faces we see our own becoming and who are living a remembered/new path into soulful elder.
Elders share stories and witness and encourage youngers' living truth and creative soul possibility. Elders might also engage this journey if conscious or cultural honoring of this shapeshifting portal was not available in their own life.
Community Circle work:
The deeply embodied nature of this journey means that each woman goes through this time in unique ways. As we listen and share in each other's embodied stories, we learn ways to tend our bodies and lives to become the deep allies, elders and ancestors we long for.
Ceremonial and Ritual Soul work:
We will be a learning community together - engaging sacred conversations, guided deep imagination, dreamwork, soul-centric embodied practices, ritual and experiences - supporting each person where you find yourself in this journey.
Living Intelligence of Earth-Rooted Relationship with Mystery:
We will be tapping into the intelligence of regenerative life-death-birth cycles as we listen for the ways the mysteries longs for us to become alive in this time of the dreaming The Great Turning/Great Unraveling.
Spiral Nature: There are layers in this spiral journey of life/soul journey. We have created a short enough time-frame that allows us to dive in together, pause, and listen for what comes next.
Themes & Lineage of Teachers
We will weave with these thematic threads throughout the cohort and welcome others that emerge. We understand and deeply honor how each woman’s experience may be radically different and unique, on all levels and we welcome learning together.
Listening with the Body (and extended Earth Body):
As we are honed by change and belonging to this earth-rooted birth-death-life cycle, we reckon with death and life at different stages and experiences we’re in . . . surrendering, choosing and honoring change and the unfamiliar, unknown. We learn from each other's stories wise ways of tending to our bodies in these stages of life. How are our bodies guiding us to live on many levels?
Guided by Myth into our Own Living Story:
Finding ourselves in the larger, ancient story of potent regeneration that includes both sacred sacrifice and gifts understood as part of the sacred passage to eldership. (We may visit the story of the Handless Maiden, Vasilisa and Baba Yaga, Inanna, Persephone and others)
Listening with Fire and Water:
Our relationship with the elements of Fire and Water changed in physical and mythic ways over our lives. We'll be listening for the deep aquifers and piercing fire as guides to our wholeness and the mysteries of our soul journey.
What is our embodied soul’s relationship with Desire and Eros (as life force energy) at this time? How are we called to participate in life force energy as Eros in the world now?
How do the depths of the aquifers and wells call us now?
The Alchemy of Wounds and Gifts Becoming Soul:
In conversation, experiential practice and ceremony, we'll honor and support the reclaiming of deep gifts - some of which may have been outcast and some which may become ready for alchemized from shadow and the sensitivities under our wounds - including what may have been received from ancestral experience. Our relationship with body, eros, womb, blood may have been denied or might call for further embrace in the context of a culture deeply influenced by practices and structures of domination.
Becoming Fiercely Wisdom Together: Elder Soul Beauty. What is the wild beauty that calls us across the next threshold of our individual and collective lives? There is a different kind of beauty, a holograph, a poem, a song you live in relationship with the world at this time of your life. What emergent ways might we be called to that breathe life into cultural practices and daily living that honors the particular beauty of sovereign wise women?
Lineage of Teachers:
Our living bodies! Sharon Blackie; Animas Valley Institute’s Soul-Centric, Earth-Rooted models for the Initiatory Journey of Soul and Human Development; Courage & Renewal Principles and Practices, Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects; Interplay/Body Wisdom, inc.
Resources:
Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude and If Women Rose Rooted; Clarissa Pinkole Estes Women who Run with the Wolves, Annie Bloom’s Buffalo Dreamer: A Lifetime of Wilderness Vigils . . .perhaps Kasia Urbanavik Unbound and more . . .
Listening with the Body (and extended Earth Body):
As we are honed by change and belonging to this earth-rooted birth-death-life cycle, we reckon with death and life at different stages and experiences we’re in . . . surrendering, choosing and honoring change and the unfamiliar, unknown. We learn from each other's stories wise ways of tending to our bodies in these stages of life. How are our bodies guiding us to live on many levels?
Guided by Myth into our Own Living Story:
Finding ourselves in the larger, ancient story of potent regeneration that includes both sacred sacrifice and gifts understood as part of the sacred passage to eldership. (We may visit the story of the Handless Maiden, Vasilisa and Baba Yaga, Inanna, Persephone and others)
Listening with Fire and Water:
Our relationship with the elements of Fire and Water changed in physical and mythic ways over our lives. We'll be listening for the deep aquifers and piercing fire as guides to our wholeness and the mysteries of our soul journey.
What is our embodied soul’s relationship with Desire and Eros (as life force energy) at this time? How are we called to participate in life force energy as Eros in the world now?
How do the depths of the aquifers and wells call us now?
The Alchemy of Wounds and Gifts Becoming Soul:
In conversation, experiential practice and ceremony, we'll honor and support the reclaiming of deep gifts - some of which may have been outcast and some which may become ready for alchemized from shadow and the sensitivities under our wounds - including what may have been received from ancestral experience. Our relationship with body, eros, womb, blood may have been denied or might call for further embrace in the context of a culture deeply influenced by practices and structures of domination.
Becoming Fiercely Wisdom Together: Elder Soul Beauty. What is the wild beauty that calls us across the next threshold of our individual and collective lives? There is a different kind of beauty, a holograph, a poem, a song you live in relationship with the world at this time of your life. What emergent ways might we be called to that breathe life into cultural practices and daily living that honors the particular beauty of sovereign wise women?
Lineage of Teachers:
Our living bodies! Sharon Blackie; Animas Valley Institute’s Soul-Centric, Earth-Rooted models for the Initiatory Journey of Soul and Human Development; Courage & Renewal Principles and Practices, Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects; Interplay/Body Wisdom, inc.
Resources:
Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude and If Women Rose Rooted; Clarissa Pinkole Estes Women who Run with the Wolves, Annie Bloom’s Buffalo Dreamer: A Lifetime of Wilderness Vigils . . .perhaps Kasia Urbanavik Unbound and more . . .
Holders of this Gathering:
Laurie Adams is a listener for the story under the stories and the patterns by which mystery calls to our deepest longings. She lives in service to the holy wild and the sacred waters. Her own initiatory journey was guided by the womb as deep aquifer of soul and the alchemy sacred wound work, and right into this work of honoring blood rites from creatrix to crone. She has participated and trained with Bill Plotkin and Animas Valley Institute for over 12 years in Soulcraft and the initiatory journey of soul; she’s a facilitator of Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects and a former hospice chaplain and clergy. She guides retreat, wilderness vigils along the Navarro River and mentors individuals and small groups. www.sacredsoulwaters.net
Carol Kortsch is our “Elder Anchor” for this cohort. She is a seeker, soul guide, community gatherer. She who thunders Messages from the Bones. I’ve wandered the globe for over seven decades. I write to inspire community so we listen in fresh creative ways to our soul bones moving us into action on behalf of our planet.She is a retreat facilitator trained by the Center for Courage & Renewal (Parker J Palmer) Carol offers nature-based retreats from her wilderness soul. As a life adventurer and Earth listener, she recognizes our essential and critical human need to stop, slow down, and listen to our lives and all our relations speak. www.eldersoul.org
Carol Kortsch is our “Elder Anchor” for this cohort. She is a seeker, soul guide, community gatherer. She who thunders Messages from the Bones. I’ve wandered the globe for over seven decades. I write to inspire community so we listen in fresh creative ways to our soul bones moving us into action on behalf of our planet.She is a retreat facilitator trained by the Center for Courage & Renewal (Parker J Palmer) Carol offers nature-based retreats from her wilderness soul. As a life adventurer and Earth listener, she recognizes our essential and critical human need to stop, slow down, and listen to our lives and all our relations speak. www.eldersoul.org
Arc of our Commitment
Late January - early October (with a 2 months' Summer Pause): 10-11 Online Gatherings. Primarily Sunday or Wednesday evenings.
In-person, on-land gathering in Late May/Early June in Mendocino, CA
(Possibly in Boulder area for our beginning, in January)
We request that Cohort participants commit to at least 8 of the online gatherings and ideally can participate in the In-Person, which is a powerful experience together.
There will be opportunities for listening buddies outside of the online gatherings and invitations for individual work throughout.
In-person, on-land gathering in Late May/Early June in Mendocino, CA
(Possibly in Boulder area for our beginning, in January)
We request that Cohort participants commit to at least 8 of the online gatherings and ideally can participate in the In-Person, which is a powerful experience together.
There will be opportunities for listening buddies outside of the online gatherings and invitations for individual work throughout.
To Step In to this Circle:
RSVP Your Interest Here.
We will be finalizing Dates and financial Reciprocity very soon!
RSVP Your Interest Here.
We will be finalizing Dates and financial Reciprocity very soon!
Reciprocity and Investment to shared cost: We gratefully receive reciprocal gifts of “Dana” to support our capacity to plan for, vision and hold this group over these months. We trust the "whole" to support in ways that individuals of diverse means can participate.
We will invite a flow of “Dana” for our time at 2 points in the flow of our gatherings: At the time of registration as a way of inviting your full commitment and at the midpoint of our time together to sustain our flow.
We envision an in-person gathering along the Navarro River in Mendocino county in late May/early June. River's Bend Retreat Center is a land full of meadows, gardens, redwoods, oaks and remarkable river 20 miles from the Pacific that has guided Laurie through this time of her life. We will conjure creative ways we can meet that together.
**IF you know others who are ripe for this work or longing for community to share, please invite them - we would be delighted to hold a group of women who are already in strong relationship to share this work.
We will invite a flow of “Dana” for our time at 2 points in the flow of our gatherings: At the time of registration as a way of inviting your full commitment and at the midpoint of our time together to sustain our flow.
We envision an in-person gathering along the Navarro River in Mendocino county in late May/early June. River's Bend Retreat Center is a land full of meadows, gardens, redwoods, oaks and remarkable river 20 miles from the Pacific that has guided Laurie through this time of her life. We will conjure creative ways we can meet that together.
**IF you know others who are ripe for this work or longing for community to share, please invite them - we would be delighted to hold a group of women who are already in strong relationship to share this work.
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