What Stirs Beneath the Surface?

What if we allied ourselves to the energies of the season?

What if the darkening season isn’t something to get through, but something to enter?
An Elder to apprentice with?

The trees are letting go and going downward. Mycelial networks continue their underground exchanges. Seeds are keeping their own mysterious counsel. Darkness gestates. A whole ecology of life is unfolding beyond the reach of sunlight.

Perhaps that is the case for us as well.

Meanwhile, the OverCulture would have us keep the lights on. Brighten up. Speed up. Keep producing. Keep consuming.  Keep the great machine humming.

The fungi are breaking down the last season’s work. Darkness is offering its wisdoms. And the dreamscape comes alive, under no obligation to make ordinary sense.

What might happen if we took our cues from the living world?

If we slowed down enough to listen for what is quietly pulsing beneath the surface? If we entered the darkening season intentionally, with curiosity, creativity, and a willingness to befriend some of its mysteries?

This is the invitation of Within the Cave Something Pulses, a six-week winter circle beginning December 6.

THREE DOORWAYS OF THE CAVE

1. Apprenticing to the Season
Rather than resisting winter’s invitations, we practice entering its rhythms. Slowing down. Listening. Letting go. Learning from decomposition, dormancy, darkness, and the more-than-human beings who know how to winter.

Not simply observing the season, but allowing ourselves to be seasoned by it.

2. Entering the Imaginal
Through poetry, dreams, shadow stalking, monster love, creative experiments, and shared witnessing, we make room for the unexpected.

What longings are stirring? What old stories are ready for composting? What strange intelligence might our dreams and shadows carry?

3. Ceremony on the Land
Around winter solstice, each participant is invited into a supported, self-generated solo ceremony on the land where they live. We’ll prepare together, listen for an intention or the question that won’t leave us alone, and make room for each person’s particular relationship with place and pace.

Then we’ll return to our circle for a Council of Return in the new year, where stories can be witnessed and mirrored, without needing to be fixed or explained.

What happens inside the Cave?
We gather as a small circle of fellow spelunkers. We listen, inquire, write, dream, experiment, and accompany one another. There is no requirement to arrive with answers, to be experienced in dreamwork, shadow work, or ritual, or to disclose more than feels appropriate. There is poetry, laughter, uncertainty, and room for the unexpected.

And perhaps, as we apprentice ourselves to the fruitful dark, we discover that something has been quietly pulsing all along.

“This has been a spiritual lifeboat to me during this time.”
—Verna Lim, Oakland, previous spelunker,
Within the Cave Something Pulses 

Within the Cave Something Pulses 
A Seasonal Apprenticeship to the Fruitful Dark

December 6 – January 17  
Six Sunday gatherings · 10 AM–12 PM Pacific
(no gathering December 27)  
Online + a solo solstice ceremony on the land  
Self-selected sliding-scale exchange

All participants receive a copy of the new collection of the same title:
Within the Cave Something Pulses 
and the Cave Companion: Practices for the Fruitful Dark.

Explore the Cave & Register

I’d love to journey with you.

Wishing you a slower week.

with autumn’s gifts of reds and rains, 
Ryan