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 fourth gathering, in 2025, marked the midway point of WEFo’s initial seven-year arc. It also marked a physical movement from the mountain heights of Pontresina down to Männedorf, beside the lake of Zurich. Stones used in Pontresina to hold the fire were brought down, together with a bowl of water, and the ashes from a ritual burning of the grief in 2023, materially linking this gathering to the previous ones. The element Air held us, as the invisible medium we share with every living being, and breathe. The calling question was: what compost have we built, and what is now longing to emerge?
Kinship was the animating theme, not as an abstract concept but as lived practice. It was enacted by tending the fire through the night, cooking together, shaping clay from local earth, and listening for the more-than-human messengers: storks circling above, dragonflies resting near the circle, wasps redirecting the firekeeping. Over the gathering, kinship emerged as a form of justice work: a way of rebalancing attention toward the unseen and the silenced, and reorienting belonging toward the whole.
Read a longer reflection on the 2025 gathering.
