Next Sunday: A Winter Retreat
A special 90-minute sacred place for creative incubation.
Next Sunday, December 8th, 10-11:30am PST, join me for a Winter Retreat with other paid subscribers. The link to register is below.
Amidst it all, my life has been beautiful lately. I’m aging (not always comfortably) and there’s something about the experience that keeps rooting me back into the ancient and timeless. In every stage of life, I feel increasingly related to the people who have walked in this world before me. Meanwhile, I have been moved by profound synchronicities and unexpected encounters that feel purely mythic, or proof of a divine web in which we all rest. The felt sense is so visceral, so undeniably beautiful, that there is little else to say or try to explain.
Of course, this all exists alongside daily news that is more apocalypse film than anything I’d ever anticipated actually living. I can’t help but feel that the same science-fiction stories I’ve watched as stark warnings, some others have consumed as blueprints. It seems we’ve been taking notes on opposite lessons.
So, for the moment, I look at the news less and less each day. I don’t think this is leaving me ill-informed. Not yet. The shock effect—another bottom-of-the-patriarichal-barrel nomination—is simply depleting. At the moment, in order to continue living in this world as it is now, there is another kind of preparation that I know I absolutely must do.
As this year comes to a close, as family gathers and my work schedule lightens just a bit, I am leaning deeply into sacred spaces. However mundane. (It’s the mundane, or even profane, that calls most deeply for something sacred to return.)
You must have a room, or a certain hour a day or so where you do not know what was in the newspapers that morning; you don’t know who your friends are; you don’t know what you owe to anybody; you don’t know what anybody owes to you.
-Joseph Campbell
When Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell met for their Power of Myth series in 1988, they had this exchange.
Moyers: What does it mean to have a sacred place?
Campbell: This is a term I like to use now as an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour a day or so where you do not know what was in the newspapers that morning; you don’t know who your friends are; you don’t know what you owe to anybody; you don’t know what anybody owes to you. But a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are, what you might be. This is a place of creative incubation. At first you might find that nothing is happening there, but if you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen.
This small conversation is 2-minutes long, but so nourishing to hear. (The whole series, really.) Campbell continues with this other gem that I find is simultaneous mystifying and entirely clear.
Most of our action is economically or socially determined and does not come out of our LIFE.
We’ve been so conditioned by external expectations of the economy and society that it can feel like the most ancient of riddles to ponder: what is life if not those roles and demands?
When the outside world feels unrelenting and unforgiving, how can we clarify who we are at our deepest essence?
How can our relationship to what-is-important grow in these times, versus be destroyed?
How can our relationship to that-which-truly-matters be honed and refined by the intensity of the world?
These are some of the questions I’ve been pondering and that we’ll explore together next Sunday.
Winter Retreat: Sunday, December 8th at 10 am PST | 1pm EST | 6pm UK
A 90-minute gathering to create and lean into sacred places.
Coming up next Sunday, I’ll host a sacred place for 90-minutes where we’ll have a chance to touch into what we need most in these times and explore how to carve out (or deepen into) nourishing time for life and the sacred going forward.
One hour away from the news. Twenty-minutes with a single poem or short story. Thirty-minutes with a candle and a journal. A walk in nature. A swim in the ocean. A sunrise.
What does your place look like?
This winter retreat will be an opportunity for quiet, personal contemplation, and nourishing community.
Please join us live if you can. A replay will also be available for paid subscribers if you can’t be there.
If finances prohibit you from joining, reply to this email or send me a note at satyadoylebyock @ substack.com. I’m happy to comp you a subscription.
If you are already a paid subscriber, there is no additional fee to attend; these monthly workshops are a perk of your subscription. Just scroll down to register!
And remember that we have an end of year ritual with The I Ching and Elise Loehnen on December 29th. Mark your calendar to join us!