Martha is an educator, writer, musician, facilitator, and reskilling farmer. As an ordained interfaith eco-chaplain, Martha offers workshops and retreats using the Work That Reconnects as a primary delivery system for people to wake up, grow up, and rise up to meet the call of our planet for fully conscious and loving human stewardship.
Why I am called to facilitate the Work
I appreciate how the spiral process offers a (spiritual) practice for personal and communal reconnection to Life, the Planet, and each other while recognizing and facing fully the truth of now, even in these difficult times. I appreciate how Joanna's life story, particularly around nuclear proliferation, and her engaged buddhism led to the WTR, and then my grasp of Active Hope inspired me to accept and build on my own history as a child of a nuclear physicist in the cold war. The WTR, from the moment I first experienced it over ten years ago, has given me my primary tool for articulating my life message, which was struggling for the words to come out. It helps me inspire healing and service in myself and in others. My purpose in facilitating WTR is to promote growth in consciousness, community, individual purpose, and greater numbers of folks committed to the Great Turning by helping people express their gratitude, honor their pain, see with new eyes , and go forth as members of a new "tribe." In recent times, I have come to call this Deep Adaptation. In Marianne Williamson's language, I find WTR helps me choose love and compassion over succumbing to fear.
How I see the Work serving the Great Turning
Holding a day or more of the WTR gives us a forum and a container, both physical and emotional, to witness our observations and speak of our experiences of "business as usual," The Great Unraveling, The Great Turning, and now, the potentiality of imminent complete collapse. It is the place where we speak with vision of the Great Turning, including geo-justice, (or environmental justice and integral ecology), and radical, new (and actually wildly old, indigenous) ways of Being and Living on the planet, with a lighter footprint. This to me is what it means to face Business As Usual, to be unafraid and welcoming of the Great Unraveling, to exert our active hope in The Great Turning. The WTR can enhance the bonding and resilience in local communities. I have found that using the spiral in workshops and in personal meditation also helps to grow consciousness and is a wonderful tool for promoting a more integral way of seeing and living. This opens up deeper reconnection with all that is, a sense of inter-being, and helps us stop objectifying other people, the earth, the animals.... and helps us see as Thomas Berry would hope for, the universe as "a community of Subjects, not a collection of Objects." This is so important, whether we are able to change and adapt or not.
Audiences I work with
youth
music teachers
eco-chaplains and ministers
retreat centers
local communities
Recent Comments