Join us in The Shining Tribe Exploratorium to Walk the Ways this year.

You can join for a year or just the two months of Walking the Ways.

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The sun rules the summer season and, like the plants, we humans can respond to its exuberant invitations: reach for the light; grow to new heights; express ourselves and our delight; sing, dance, travel, paint (or whatever form your creativity takes); let our bodies love another and the earth upon which we walk. The explosive sun also invites us to release our anger, rise up against injustice, shake off our constraints.

If we take up the summer sun’s invitations, we can transcend the boundaries of body, mind, and spirit to seek integration and wholeness within ourselves and in connection to others. While winter is the season for change through inner work, the summer gets us out and walking the ways for growth.

One day isn’t enough to celebrate the season of the sun so for the past 11 years at Soul Path Sanctuary we have Walked the Ways of the Summer Light beginning the 4 weeks before the Solstice moment. Each week leading up to the Solstice, we wisdom wander in the place where we live inspired by a different element and gathering questions to support our soul tending. Then gather virtually to share our experiences.

When we arrive at the Solstice on June 20th, we select one of our questions to seek an answer to. After the Solstice, we embark on a pilgrimage—which might be a big trip or finding a spot in our neighborhood to sit and observe—to seek an answer to our question.

While the sun is the star of summer, the moon through its changing travels brings a unique gift each year. This season the new moon arrives on the first day of Walking the Ways, Monday, May 26, and, through its correspondence with the Tarot’s Lovers card initiates us on the path of Love which travels through the Solstice before delivering us to the next new moon on June 25th.

Love. What is it?

The most common love stories more often than not offer only small and proscribed visions. Love = romance. Love is only between and for certain people. Love is just a feeling.

But the writer, teacher, and social critic bell hooks tells a different story. One where love is more complex and dynamic as are we when we seek to love. hooks tells us that love is not a feeling, but rather a verb, a practice. She writes:

Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

Interesting how closely this aligns to the mix of meanings given for the Lovers card where the earliest Tarot tradition highlights the meaning of choosing even more than love.

hooks also writes: There can be no love without justice.

Here hook obliterates false barriers set up between the personal and the collective. We may directly experience love as being held within our personal relationships, but these relationships exist within a larger whole. This larger whole must be just for love to exist.

Justice, like Love, comes into being because of will, the will of the collective to uphold truth, balance, right order, and all to have equal access to Justice’s protection. The work of Justice is never done, is constantly negotiated, always being renewed. So, the same must be true for Love.

The entwined existence of Love and Justice are under attack certainly in the US and in so many other places in the world.

So, this Solstice season let’s defend Love and Justice.

Even better: let’s cultivate the renewal and expansion of their life-giving qualities. Let’s keep giving our Love away as we move toward the Solstice.

Walking the Ways will be offered as a container to support growing your understanding and practice of Love in these ways:

~ Virtual sessions to close and open the season for paid subscribers of The Shining Tribe Exploratorium on May 25th and June 29th at 12:30pm ET (time zone converter). In our opening session, we will dive deep into Rachel Pollack’s vision of love from her Lovers card and I’ll go over the practices and elemental weekly flow of Walking the Ways.

~ Weekly posts on The Shining Tribe Exploratorium for any subscriber (free and paid) to prompt working with the elements to deepen your practice of Love, connection to the natural world, and knowledge of Tarot.

~ In-person gathering on Saturday, June 21st from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm at Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton/Northampton, MA. Save Sunday, the 22nd, as a rain date. We’ll be connecting in love to the land and picking questions to find an answer to. We’ll spend a good chunk of time out in the sanctuary. There are trails and an accessible boardwalk/path for doing the right amount of movement for you. Sliding scale offering of $6 to $60 (Get it? 6, The Lovers!). Registration deadline is June 13th because you’ll need to do a little prep.

You could do one, two, or all of these offerings. Those coming to the virtual sessions and in-person gathering will get an overview booklet that lays out all the happenings and practices of the season.

Don’t hesitate to ask me questions. I’d love to help you put a plan together for cultivating Love in the summer season.