The World Ethic Forum (WEFo) is engaged in an initial seven-year arc of inquiry, exploring the preconditions for radically shared aliveness. The body co-holding this inquiry is a diverse group of more than 40 people we call Firekeepers: thought and action leaders from many different backgrounds and places. We connect, exchange, learn, and inquire throughout the year online and meet in person as the Firekeeper Circle during the annual Firekeeper gatherings, a time of focused inquiry unfolding over several days.
How does a group of regenerative farmers, community builders, researchers, artists, activists, practitioners, and engaged citizens committed to societal transformation towards a culture of care and kinship from around the world meet to inquire about radically shared aliveness? Of course, there is ‘the magic of presence’, but can we put clearer vocabulary on this magic without crushing it? What exactly happens at those in-person gatherings?
Deep Immersion to Uncover New Knowledge
WEFo is an inquiry-based organism, guided by ‘a calling question’:
‘How can we deepen and sustain a culture of care and kinship — grounded in radically shared aliveness — across our diverse fields of engagement, and in relation to the more-than-human world?’ The Firekeeper Circle, with its thematic strands, is a curated, emerging process to explore this inquiry over the arc of seven years.
Each yearly gathering is centred on a version of the calling question, a specific angle for the year, which informs the process design and the preliminary agenda. Throughout the gathering, we focus on deepening the work in and across the thematic strands, exploring the respective calling question, and relating to land, place and the more-than-human. As we do this, we also articulate and lean into what we call our learning edge: aspects of our journey that feel like hurdles, challenges, or faultlines – individually and for us as a group. This is with the intention to explore those hurdles, to co-shape a culture of care and kinship through our practice, and to deepen our capacity to embody such a culture ever more fully. Practically, over three to four days, we flexibly follow an agenda designed with a range of co-facilitated activities, experimentations and explorations intended to provoke thought, play, reflection and integration. While this agenda is designed with the hosting team in advance, we very much adapt to what is unfolding, listening to the dynamics calling for our shared care and attention, and making space for unexpected twists and turns.
Of course, the days expand beyond the core programme, and the process includes key ritual moments – the lighting of a fire or candle as a symbolic mark of consciously opening our space, moments to honor important intensities that show up during the process, such as grief and anger, or a ritual to close our time together by intentionally putting down the fire or blowing the candle, while keeping it alive in the ashes or the remainder of the candle we carry from one gathering to the next.
Our agenda marks sunrise and sunset to align with the elements. We gather, sing and play music from our different traditions for dropping deeper, sharing joy and connection. As far as possible, the food we eat is significant and curated to connect with the local land. And, we reflect on and invite the spirits of the land where we gather.
The inquiry itself is organised in at least two ways. One of those is what we call our seven thematic strands: seven key threads that are relevant to our overarching calling question. Throughout the year, dedicated thematic strand groups delve into each of them specifically. During the gathering, we hear from each other’s findings about those threads, explore their overlaps and interweave them, ensuring reciprocity. The other important aspect is around a growing importance and awareness of our collective practices and capacities that are showing up in and through our work, both in the thematic strands and as a whole group. We see these as key leverage points for enabling radically shared aliveness (see also the conceptual lens).
Two approaches we use every year for this collective weaving work are generative scribing and social field resonance. The first is a practice of deep listening using pen and paper, where a dedicated scribe – Marie-Pascale Gafinen – captures not only what is said, but also the atmosphere, the emotions, and the undercurrents of the conversation. The second is a collective process for the group to become aware of its deep dynamics through embodied awareness. Concretely, it is an invitation for participants to sit or stand in front of what has been scribed, bring themselves into presence, and share what they see, sense or feel. Generative scribing also enables a sense of continuity over time, as we put up generative scribing rolls from the previous years on the wall.
By the end of the gathering, we harvest our insights in a learning chronicle to inform the next arc, including the next year’s gathering, but also form ad hoc working groups on emerging questions and topics that seem essential to address, and continue tending to between the in-person gatherings. We lean into questions of, e.g. curation and form circles to look after specific aspects of quality and integrity in our process. We also tend to the existing, emerging and potential partnerships that might deepen and widen our relational field, with the Firekeepers’ respective organisations and beyond. This all with the aim to deepen our coherence, cultivate connections with likely and unlikely allies, and contribute towards the growing field of actors dedicated to regeneration, life-affirming and living systems work across sectors, places and scales.
A Sanctuary for Radically Shared Aliveness
Firekeeper gatherings are a living laboratory for collective transformation. We are engaged in an embodied experimentation, where learning is not just what we can articulate and share in writing, but informs our perspectives and how we allow for subtle and more substantial shifts to ripple through us, widening our perception of being ourselves interdependent. We are becoming marinated and seasoned practitioners of radically shared aliveness, as individuals and a collective. A key focus of our gatherings is connection: to self, to others, and to the subtle, as nature recognising itself – thus deepening our mutual understanding. We ask how we might bring more of the different aspects of who we are to the gathering, weave them together, and be more fully alive together to ground, attune and strengthen ourselves, and ripple into the world.
For this, some of the qualities we deliberately cultivate include:
- Spaciousness – taking time to meet and get to know each other better, on multiple layers.
- Relationality – focusing on our relational fabric and interweaving.
- Liminality – embracing what exists in-between ourselves, our worlds, our bodies, our thoughts or our thematic strands.
- Embodiment – being fully in our bodies and manifestations, and taking into account how our bodies inform us.
- Care – tending to each other and the more-than-human with gentle attention.
We learn to use different ways of knowing and modalities and attempt to integrate them, to bring them into coherence. We move and dance between different altitudes, from full immersion in the now of an experience, up to meta-reflection and everything between. This is not about us learning to use this or that modality for sensing and knowing, workshop-style, but rather exploring how we can weave together different modalities in a collective context.
The group we form in our gathering includes not just the Firekeepers who are present, but all the relationships that the Firekeepers bring with them: ancestors, communities, other beings, and how they interact and weave together. Meaning, we are forming a new relational tapestry, with ourselves and all we are and bring with us. We deepen a relationship between everyone and everything that comes with who is in the room, including lineages, experiences, and backgrounds we may not have yet known of each other. An important part of this binding experience is also connecting to the more-than-human, the land and its stories.
What we call into the circle, and engage with as part of ourselves, may include indigenous wisdoms and respected ancestors, but also the wounds and extractive patterns we carry, and that we have been informed or conditioned by. All of these aspects are invited and called upon: naming, acknowledging, honouring them – and together, finding subtle and fierce ways to transcend them, inside out:
There is also a calling to consciousness of new questions and sensings that come up through this felt interdependence. We embrace liminality, seeking what calls for being acknowledged, healed and reshaped – What needs to be named and made explicit now. We become conscious of our own assumptions about who we are and how transformation happens. Diversity gives rise to new shared awareness and allows us to widen our perspectives and scale deep.
Ultimately, we see those gatherings as sanctuaries: spaces and moments that allow for deep regeneration. Through them, in them, we cultivate new qualities, new cellular experiences, a still point in the intensities of our times. By coming together in this way, we transform as individuals and as a group, strengthening an energetic container for radically shared aliveness. From there, we can take them forward and weave them into our respective fields of work, places and activities, on the ground, in the world.