Saltwater Songs for Dragons: Raising the Dragon, a spiral for 端午節, Dragon Boat Festival

Event Overview

Saltwater Songs for Dragons: Raising the Dragon A spiral for 端午節, Dragon Boat Festival

June 19, 2026 @ 9:00 am – 10:15 am ET

Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/IqerTj4jRBSTLtntvqbMoQ

Before dynasties rooted in so-called China, before the ornate spectacle of dragon boat races — on the fifth day of the fifth lunar moon, the Baiyue people beat drums on the water and called the dragon to rise.

This is older than the story we were told. It is still happening.

Dragon Boat Festival — 端午節 (dyun ng zit)— is the threshold festival of midsummer. The double-fifth: a cosmological peak, maximum yang, the moment where the great turning begins: what reaches its height inevitably begins its retreat. All things manifest cycle in a primordial dance. 

Before it became the story of a poet drowning in a river, this ritual was something more mysterious: the Baiyue peoples of southern China — whose descendants became the Tanka, the saltwater people, the boat-dwellers of the South China Sea — calling to their dragon ancestor. Not through command, but through petition. Offering the youngest rice shoots into the water, they asked for safe passage, for blessings, and called the dragon up from the deep.

A word about your facilitator, 張家敏 Jessica Cheung (Murray): I belong to a Chinese diaspora specifically rooted in what is now called South China. These offerings are woven through dreams, research, and the lived experience of what it means for bloodlines from the Guangdong 廣東 and Hong Kong 香港 region to be displaced, assimilated, and moved to Turtle Island — and to remember forgotten stories and practices. 

龍現. The dragon reveals itself. This gathering is specifically created for the Chinese diaspora – and any siblings from all ancestries who are curious are also welcome. 

In this gathering, we slow down to feel the current still moving beneath us.

Drawing on the practices of the Work That Reconnects, we move together through a simple, embodied arc:

• Arriving together into the ecological self
• Somatic grounding that orients to water, invites song as offering, and the drum-pulse already living in your body
• A deeper check-in from our fuller, mysterious, watery selves
• A shared practice of drum-assisted deep time and deep ecology — petitioning the living waters our ancestors knew
• A closing circle: what did the water give back?

No preparation or prior experience with WTR is needed. Come with your hands, your heartbeat, and water. This is a space to be held, and to hold — to petition the spirits of our Ancestors in blood, bone, and spirit to meet us here.

Dana-based / pay-what-feels-good here or consider offering a donation to my sponsor Sierra Club Canada, here.

This is an offering as a part of the Saltwater Songs for Dragons series. Future gatherings to come:

• 中元 Ghost Month — August, the unnamed dead
• 中秋 Mid-Autumn — September, moon and longing
• 重陽 Double Ninth — October, elders and continuity