Wild Church

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Dartington Yew
One of the hopes for Open Spirit has been that it might stimulate some of us 'in offering and being involved with interspiritual services or 'future church'So it's exciting to feel the Spirit already moving and to see the beginning of one such offering already beginning to emerge. Sam and Beth have started to reconnect with local Christian congregations and to dream up a 'Wild Church' that we hope may bring established and emerging Church together and also offer a new way of celebrating the sacred that is welcoming to all and that draws us out into the wild, in celebration of the community of all beings and the spirit of the earth.

As we enter the new Christian year today, on the first Sunday of Advent, we are looking ahead to our first event next Sunday, December 7th. Beth and I will be joining the established congregation at Dartington Church for their Sunday service at 11.15am, at which visitors are always welcome. We hope some members of the congregation will then join us and there will also be a warm welcome to people of any faith or none to come along for a 'Bring & Share' Advent Sunday Lunch in Dartington Village Hall from 1pm. Lunch will start with a natural blessing and conclude with an invitation for donations to cover costs and to raise funds for Dartington's LandWorks Project, which is a work based training scheme providing a supported route back into community for current and ex-prisoners.

After lunch, from perhaps 2.30pm we'll be exploring some Wild Church, starting with some reflections and meditation to awaken our senses, before setting off outside into the twilight for a silent walk to the ancient yew by the old church on the Dartington Estate. Any and all are welcome to join us in this celebration of the spirit of wild. We'll close with a short, simple, elemental ceremony and blessing by the yew, with the option to 'walk and talk' back to our starting point for those that wish.

We will walk whatever the weather, so do come prepared with strong shoes and good waterproofs. Some of us love the dark and will walk unlit into the gathering night, but do bring lanterns if you wish.

This event will be the first in a series of Wild Church gatherings on a similar pattern on the first Sunday of the month. We are planning a month by month pilgrimage up the River Dart towards the source... and perhaps also back down the river towards the sea. We are still building our website and Facebook page but do look out for River Dart Wild Church and we hope you come along along and join us in 'bringing Spirit back to Earth'!

Held by the Great Mother

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During our first Open Spirit day, Held by the Great Mother, we took inspiration from our Palaeolithic ancestors whom it seems expressed something of their sense of the sacred through travelling deep into the dark womb of the Goddess in underground caves. Around the world there remain many examples of ancient sacred art created with natural earth pigments and charcoal on the walls of caves, some in places that lay deep underground in complete darkness.

The lighter openings of caves and rocky overhangs also offered shelter and camp sites, especially it seems by the sea and during the winter months, as food would continue to be available there for hunter gatherer people. I remember visiting a site in Scotland where the rock is still stained black by the smoke of ancient fires and where great heaps of discarded shells (shell middens) have been found and excavated by contemporary archaeologists.

Some of the earliest burial sites in Europe have been found in the UK and are also in caves, such as the so called 'Red Lady' of Paviland in South Wales. 'She' actually turned out to be a palaeolithic man (currently dated to around 32,000 BCE) who seems to have been ceremonially buried in a red dyed garment with hoops and wands of mammoth ivory and a collection of perforated periwinkle shells, perhaps a necklace or for divinatory use. (See the book 'Pagan Britain' by Bristol University professor  and historian Ronald Hutton for further reading).

Here in Devon we are blessed to have another significant ancient cave site on our doorstep, so when our Open Spirit group was looking for our first field trip, Kent's Cavern at Torquay was our obvious choice.
So a handful of us set off for Babbacombe on a lovely sunny November morning. Having gathered a little late for the first guided tour, we got off to a good start by shouting and staggering along in the darkness of the caves in search of the rest of the tour party, only to discover they were in fact all standing behind us, no doubt rather bemused by these odd women! It's fair to say that we were probably a thorn in the flesh of our tour guide with a combined tendency to break out into sacred chants, ask too many questions, get out sketchbooks and wander off the beaten track into the dark rather than being good and sticking to the well lit and well trodden paths.

We did have a wonderful time though and there is something very special about journeying into the earth in this way. The caverns themselves are very beautiful with their pillars of calcite in different forms and many still in the process of forming and so slick and shining with moisture in a way that seems both strangely molten and solid at the same time and with some of the fantastic shapes reflected in dark pools of water.

We stood in a bear's den and were shown the bones of animals that had lived in the caves long ago, sometimes alongside our early human ancestors... But perhaps the most powerful moments, certainly for me (Sam) was that of all the lights being extinguished, such that we could really experience the rare and complete darkness of being underground. Later, walking into the dark caves on my own, with no sense of where I was other than the feel of the earth beneath my feet, I felt rested by the depth of this darkness and by the way it slowly sharpened my other senses to the music of dripping water and the cool tang of the air. Contemporary culture is so well lit and so visually dominant and often over stimulating - so, if you are reading this, why not close your eyes for a moment and cup your hands over them... take a few slow breaths and rest in a few moments of deep, dark stillness.

Emerging later from the caves, we walked down to the sea close to Ansty's Cove. Following recent mornings of study and meditation on local geology, with the Wood Sisters Celtic Circle, it was a particular pleasure to meet the limestone and red sandstone cliffs and find many beautiful stones on the shore. Some of our hardier members stripped off for some wild swimming and then we all gathered in a circle to create a natural altar and share a spontaneous silent communion (featuring a breaking apart of 'the small orange of Christ' in place of the more common communion wafer and spring water in the place of wine). We then headed home for hot chocolate, so all in all, it was a great day of good company and wild and wonderful explorations.


Holding Sacred Space

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Day 1: Holding Self to Hold Others 

It is Sunday – our traditional day of Sabbath, which means the day of the week that people for many hundreds of years have been dedicating to spending sacred time together. Our ‘holding sacred space’ workshop is an explorative enquiry and embodied practice into how we can create sacred space for ourselves and others, and in doing so begin to develop a collaborative way of ministering.


The questions that opened our day together were…
What do you long for?
What is sacred space and how is it different from normal space?

Into the pot were placed longings for deeper relationship, for community, for a remembering and renewing of our traditional sacred space, for a rebalancing of the sacred masculine and the sacred feminine in the wider world and in one’s life, an honouring of both the light and the dark, the external and the internal...

We followed this with some musings on the responses of what sacred space means to us. The photograph above reveals some of the words and phrases that emerged in the group.


The model for holding space is one developed by Sam and is based on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This is a model of four worlds, which when mapped onto ourselves begins at the level of Body or Physicality, and then Self or Psyche, then the Bigger Self or Stable Witness, and finally Divine Being or the All.


To hold space for others we must hold space for ourselves. Holding space for ourselves is based in the capacity to consciously inhabit these four worlds; that means being embodied, becoming aware of the self, expanding awareness to the bigger self, and having a sense of being held by ‘the All’. It is not a one way transcending ladder through each world, but rather an inclusive journey through each world, so that each one is acknowledged and present, and you are therefore able to hold space that invites all these dimensions in others.


Knowing these different worlds in ourselves, we can become better aware of what resources each dimension needs to thrive. What I need on a bodily level is different to what I need in spirit, and in fact the tangible realisation of my day was that often how I feed myself in body is in response to hunger on a deeper level for connection. It is evident to me that we live in a society transfixed on bodily needs – exemplified in the over-consumption of food, entertainment, sex, drugs, etc. This kind of feeding gives us a shallow and temporary sense of fullness. It is unable to reach the depths of hunger of our human soul – the need for true relationship, love and nourishment. In our world today, Sunday is no longer such a sacred day. The churches are emptying and the shops are full. But can shops really replace what our sacred houses provide? There is a fundamental difference between the two – shops feed only our material needs whereas sacred space has the potential to feed all.


Our sacred house for this journey is Juliette’s beautiful home in Dartington, and here on this Sunday we collaboratively created sacred space for ourselves and one another.


Articulated by one group member:

The day reminded me of contemporary accounts of Jesus' community; at a time of turbulence and great spiritual anticipation, where people gathered in small, intimate gatherings within the home, long before the great cathedrals were built and long before their revelations were to become a religion.  

The altar at the end of the weekend with additions of soil and rock, poem and tree.

The Restoration of Love

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Day 1: Held by the Great Mother

Our altar at the start of the weekend

This blog post marks the first weekend of Open Spirit’s brand new and pioneering course, and it also marks my first contribution to this journal.

After many hours spent this summer in Sam’s garden discussing the work I was developing for my holistic science dissertation, I am now entering into the work that Sam has been developing for the past 30 years, work that she calls holistic spirit. The movement from holistic science to holistic spirit is evidently a fluid one, and actually if I am honest holistic spirit has been what I’ve been studying all along! Really, there is not much difference. Both are explorations into the nature of being human, of being animal, and of being creatures of the universe.

What does the word ‘holistic’ mean? The word finds its root in the Greek word holos, meaning whole. Its most dominant usage has been in the context of holistic medicine or holistic therapy, which examine the whole of the person rather than dividing the person into separate parts. In the context of science, holistic means to utilise our whole selves in the scientific enquiry, exemplified by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who used direct perception and imagination to come into relationship with his study subjects and therefore encounter his study subject in their wholeness. So, what does holistic mean in the context of spirituality? What does it mean to practice holistic spirit? What does a holistic spirituality look like? Following on from a thought of one group member, I will leave these as open questions with no answers and carry the question marks with me as I journey through the year.

What I do know is that when I read the vision of Open Spirit, it felt like a meeting of words on paper with unspoken and unknown words in me. There was such a deep understanding and a deep connection, I could barely contain my excitement. When the day finally came to begin our explorations into holistic spirit, I found myself a little overwhelmed. On the invitation to introduce myself to the group and to say a little about what my intentions were with this course, the bigness of what all of it meant to me felt like a wordless ocean, ebbing and flowing through every cell. The words that came out did not do justice but they were to do with developing an embodied spirituality authentic to my own native traditions. Basically it’s about returning home; to myself, to community and to the Earth.

We began our journey of the day by placing our human story in the context of the wider story of the Universe, and arrived in human form as hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers we became, first through a trance telling from Sam, and secondly through our own meanderings, foragings and beings. Here is an account of group member Kengo’s experience with the curious eyes and inquisitive hands of a hunter-gatherer…

I got up and went outside, towards the explosive reds of a maple with the sun behind. For this exercise, we were to spend one hour alone, in silence, in the spirit of our innate hunter-gatherer, lead only by that which most draws us in. Amongst the dazzle of five-pointed leaves, I came across a small wind chime held by the alert figure of a robin. His handsome red chest crafted from stained glass, fluidly mixing with the buff and brown of his plumage. So much care to capture his essence, how the wire frame turned into his spindly, poised legs. 

Kengo's sketches
I continued to saunter around the garden and noticed an earthen figure of a hare looking up at me from between two flower pots. Its eyes were of a steely glaze, ears pulled back with a look of wild determination. What was it that was drawing me to these objects? It struck me when continuing my journey into the dark corner of the garden. Hanging shamelessly upside down from a string was the figure of a bat, wings outstretched, revealing its little rodent body. I chuckled to myself. It was made from plastic, a cheap child's toy with visible mould lines, but unmistakably bat-like nevertheless.

Whoever made this, probably a Chinaman, had taken the time to look, as I have, and notice what makes a bat, a bat. As had the creator of the robin and the hare. I stepped back and realised the placement of the figures; the robin high up in the maple tree, the hare, hiding between the flower pots and the bat in the dark corner of the garden. I was moved by this sensitivity, how we as humans, create figures that give us joy inspired by the beings we share our world with and then we even place them where they would feel most at home.

Before this day, I had been feeling unusually black in my heart, mourning the catastrophic damage that we are causing to our planet. Trivial as it may first seem, in this hour I touched a glimmer of hope, amongst all the madness, of an aspect of the human spirit that if fully embraced, could just save us all.

I end with deep gratitude for this first step in our journey into the restoration of love, and with a poem from group member Abigail and a tree from Juliette…


Child of the Earth
Art piece created by Juliette



Heart beats blood
swallowing death
swallowing terror
listening to the stories
she can  barely speak
I can barely listen to

She trails her violation
an endless ghost of extinction
in this insane world

horror upon horror
human cruelty
and the pull to love
and the need to trust

myopic repetition
ruthless suppression
no voice for the raped
no justice in death

only in the lightening of the edges of clouds
and the shimmering of insects
and the climb of the rose
only in the steady, persistent joy at waking to the sun,
knowing warmth loves us into being
can we know we are of the earth and made by the stars