Coming home to love made visible
"Work is love made visible" Khalil Gibran
Sixteen days ago, we carefully emerged from our gathering. We slowly started leaving Tertulia, a beautiful permaculture farm and coliving, in the forested hills of Mugello, Tuscany. We gathered here for the second edition of Taste The Shift. Leaving physically was one thing. Mentally, I am still wandering through the gardens covered in flowers and the chestnut forest carefully sprouting in the first spring warmth. I keep revisiting the conversations that unfolded in the presence of carefully held slowness and emergence.
Normally, my pen flows, pouring out reflections and insights after coming home from an event or gathering. This gathering felt and still feels different. It felt all-encompassing and vast. Lightness, humour, heaviness and discomfort naturally wove a tapestry of shared experiences. Each conversation nurtured by everyone with their full presence, courage and curiosity.
For seven days we questioned, explored, expanded, danced, (un)learned, cooked, laughed, cried, told bedtime stories, marvelled at sunsets, foraged herbs, unravelled old stories and woven new ones. We peeled off the visible and invisible layers holding us hostage in business-as-usual. We remembered our innate capacities for love & care. Holding space for ourselves and each other. We expanded our language, ideas and perspectives. We shared stories remembering our alignment with life on Earth. We created the conditions needed to ground our ability to show up regeneratively. Even when it feels the world is collapsing, and a constant presence of existential urgency demands all sorts of things.
Coming Home
This gathering felt like coming home to me. For years, I have been wandering through corporate sustainability, impact innovation and circularity. Constantly forcing myself to believe in green solutions and rapid innovations, because what else was I supposed to do in the face of existentialism as a species? I needed certainty, hope, something to hold on to. Until one day, years ago, I wandered into the steadily expanding world of regenerative practitioners. Here, my struggle to fit everything in a neat linear sustainability box fell away. Finally, there was the space and understanding to connect and pattern. No longer I needed to practice mental gymnastics to compartmentalise systems, trends, behaviours and institutions, for the sake of progress or solution feasibility. With this shift of horizons, a new struggle emerged. Within all this vastness and with a newfound realisation that solutionism and innovation are more often than not leading away from regenerative futures, what was I going to do in this space?
My desire for a cookie-cutter job title, with a clear career path and a consistently increasing income, vanished many years ago. I am not even sure it has ever been really present in me. Instead of seeking a career, I was searching for a role in life, not a purpose but a role, simply a way of being. Am I a storyteller, weaver, conveyer, wisdom keeper, builder, guider….? The activities and projects I am drawn to always felt aligned, but scattered, until the emergence of Taste The Shift. Co-hosting this gathering felt like coming home to my role, as weaver and space holder. In times of urgency, solutionism, innovation, progress and speed, I want to be there for people. just simply be there. To hold spaces for their questions, discomfort, hesitations, confusion, courage, dreams, grief and joy. Nurturing opportunities where they can connect, truly connect. To themselves, each other and the more-than-human world. To hold room for the unanswerable questions, the uncertain journey, and the sheer difficulty of showing up regeneratively in a business-as-usual world disarmed by a state of collapse awareness.
“Work is love made visible”
Always together with others, in unexpected ways, grounded in deep time, wider nature, and art, embodied and grounded, I am here to hold space. Facilitating Taste The Shift’s and other immersive regenerative gatherings has been the most daunting and uncomfortable role of my journey so far. To hold space when people want answers, solutions, and clarity is both challenging for the answer seeker and the space holder. This is why it must be an equal reciprocal relationship, where the role of space seeker and space holder naturally shifts back and forth. This is exactly what happened, everyone showed up with the willingness to hold each other and to bring richness and depth into our shared space. This gathering clearly showed us, designing and facilitating immersive regenerative gatherings is about creating conditions, not guiding conversations. By holding space for emergence, the gathering was so much richer than we could have ever realised with a programmed shut schedule. Musical experiences, games, play, wild imaginations and an abundance of stories enriched our time together.
Like conversations around a dinner table, they are not just sparked by the right question or topic but by the whole ambience; food, light, people, music, relationships and context. Co-hosting Taste The Shift felt like honouring the wise words of Khalil Gibran.
“Work is love made visible”
Khalil Gibran
Participants, volunteers, chef, facilitators, hosts and the wider community, all together we wove a co-creative web of love made visible. By creating the conditions for kindness, patience and openness, everyone had the opportunity to show up as their favourite self.
Taste the Shift Creates an Environment Where You Can Shift Your Heart, Mind and Work in Alignment with Stewarding Life on Earth
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I still have no words for it. I wish everyone to experience this themselves. It has brought me so much beauty and wisdom. Thanks again to everyone.
"all together we wove a co-creative web of love" - this resonates so much and it's so warming to hear that you felt like you were coming home. Thank you for sharing your articulate reflections of our time together, and for sharing your gifts as a weaver and space holder during this amazing gathering. Such a special experience that I can highly recommend too.