- This event has passed.
The Ecology of Return: Saltwater Songs for Dragons, a spiral for Ching Ming Festival
April 2, 2026 @ 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm PDT
Event Overview
Saltwater Songs for Dragons
An online spiral for 清明 Ching Ming — also known as “Tomb-Sweeping Day”, a time of the year where Chinese all over the world tend altars, shrines, and tombs of the ancestors.
The Chinese diaspora is welcome into this spiral inspired by this ancestral practice, as well as all siblings curious about learning new ways of relating to the dead.
Thursday, April 2, 2026 · 1:00–2:30pm EST Online via Zoom · by donation/dana
Ching Ming falls on Sunday April 5th this year. 清明 — translates to “clear brightness,” and is a time when the living return to tend the graves of ancestors, sweep the earth, and make offerings. It is a time of grief and of vitality, of remembering what we carry and what carries us.
This gathering is a pilot offering from The Ecology of Return: Saltwater Songs for Dragons — a body of work exploring WTR spiral practice at the intersection of ancestor veneration, ecological kinship, healing collective trauma in the Asian diaspora — and our positionality and responsibility in decolonial practice.
We will move together through a gentle spiral that orients to Deep Time: open a threshold crossing, share ancestral invocation, and be led in a contemplative practice inspired by the WTR exercise: Harvesting Our Gifts of Our Ancestors. We will use breakout rooms (dyad/triads). Eastern traditions will be held with care and with honesty about how they are being carried.
This offering is rooted in both blood lineage (Guongdong, Hong Kong, and the Sán Dìu Indigenous peoples), and on-going depth inquiry connected to Confucianism, Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, and the animist, pan-theistic expression of ancestral veneration that traveled through both the Han Chinese and Indigenous peoples of China (the Baiyue Peoples) — and how ancestral longing, and our responsibilities, are revealed through the WTR spiral.
No prior experience needed. You do not have to bring your full capacity.
Come as you are, from wherever you are.
Pay what feels good in your bones.
Registration link here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Wo0V9-EkQyeul9ydMuBifw
Saltwater Songs for Dragons is a series of offerings for those learning to grieve well, remember deeply, and return — to ancestors, to water, to the more-than-human world.