Firekeepers tend to the living flame at the heart of our inquiry into a culture of care and kinship rooted in radically shared aliveness. Like the keepers of an ancestral hearth, they help sustain the field of care and responsibility, ensuring that the space honours the interdependence of all beings.
Firekeepers come together as a body once a year to form a physical Firekeeper Circle. Throughout the year we gather online, tending to the flame. At the yearly gatherings, through facilitated experiences, deep listening, and embodied reflection, we track, deepen and strengthen the collective practices and capacities that form the preconditions for a culture of care and kinship – evolving towards radically shared aliveness.
You can read more about What Happens at a Firekeeper Gathering here.
The 2022 gathering was the first, held in Pontresina, in the Grisons canton of Switzerland. It was a moment of birth: Firekeepers came from across the world and from all walks of life, and began to form a larger we.
The design carried two commitments from the outset: that the inquiry would unfold over a long arc of seven years, and that it would practise radically shared aliveness in its own unfolding. Embracing this as a method, not only as a destination.
When asked who they were here for, Firekeepers named the generations not yet born, the rivers and the soil, the people whose voices go unheard, and love itself. Over three days, the thematic strands that would come to structure our work began to surface, alongside early observations of the practices that would make radically shared aliveness possible: presence, slowing down, silence, play, sensing. At the close, quoting Joseph Beuys, Otto Scharmer offered three words in answer to the question of what our responsibility now was: protect the flame.
Our gathering then met the wider world through Viva la Via, an outdoor street festival in Pontresina, with donkey walks and conversations on the rights of nature, breathing with rocks and trees. We also welcomed the World Future Council and its councillors, who – upon invitation by the World Ethic Forum and municipality of Pontresina – held their AGM there. From the many interactions, cross-weavings, and deep reflections, the Pontresina Declaration emerged: a public call for the Future of Life on Earth.
