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In October 2024, I organized a webinar through The Work That Reconnects Network on Hospicing Modernity with Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti and Azul Carolina Duque. Over the course of two hours, Vanessa and Azul guided participants on a journey toward reimagining ways of broadening our personal and collective response to the demise of modernity. The experience was profound and participants expressed interest in a follow up conversation, so the Network hosted a café which closed with even more interest in further engagement with the material. A few more meetings organized by Wren Ribeiro followed. Then Wren and I met and we found ourselves in the emergent place of collaboration as we created an offering for a deep dive into the practices and guidance offered in Vanessa’s book, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism.
This is exactly the kind of collaboration I love. A couple of facilitators, in the thick of an aligned field of practice, recognizing a need and responding with love and trust. Love – our hearts are in this work and this is where we chose to start. Our planning sessions begin with the lighting of candles and intention setting. Trust – we have been brought together in an emergent moment of courage and synchronicity. We were made for these times and we recognize that a greater force is guiding the process. Tender Extraction: An 8-week Practice Group in Hospicing Modernity is our response.
Vanessa reminds us that in this work we are “tenderly extracting ourselves from modernity.” I sense the pull of the heart in this phrase. I recognize the starting place of “gratitude” of the Spiral of the Work That Reconnects. I’m reminded that while sometimes it feels as if I’m mired in Business as Usual and the work seems impossible, when I drop from my intellect into my heart – when I move with gratitude, tenderness and trust – the journey starts to become navigable.
The pain there too, is also a teacher. As my intellect grapples with the news that humanity has passed seven of the nine planetary thresholds – that humans have pushed the limits of survivability by causing irreversible damage to the systems that support life on earth – I want to scream.
Based on Richardson et al. 2023, Steffen et al. 2015, and Rockström et al. 2009
To feel the implications of that – the possibility of near-term extinction. To feel my role in that – my complicity and my resistance. It is in the allowance of the feelings as they rise up to be met and acknowledged, that the work of metabolization and composting happens. To be held in ritual and practice with other humans, as we feel and name our emotional states of being, befriend and accept our inner landscapes, we remember that we are not alone, we belong and we have a role in the healing that needs to happen.
Vanessa frames this tender work of extraction as a “different way of breathing together, where we learn from the wrongs and mistakes of the past so that we can only make new mistakes in the future.” This is the guidance that we’re leaning into for our upcoming series – Tender Extraction: An 8-week Practice Group in Hospicing Modernity. We begin on December 18. We’d love to welcome you there.