Start of the gathering
Today was the official start of the Art of Hosting on ’growing legs’ for the AoH community. When we just drove back from the farmhouse to our little studios here in a local hotel here in Platania, the local fishing port, we could hardly imagine that this was just one day!
Total strangers shared some of their personal stories and we did all the other stuff that makes a good community: making and eating food together and doing some physical work together. We harvested the olives from the last seven trees. I will never complain any more, or wonder why olive oil is so expensive. If you want to understand make sure you know how they are harvested! For me it was fun to learn a new gardening art: how to use the long sticks with the least effort but with the maximum of result. And fun too to climb in these old trees, to be able to reach the highest branches. I loved it.
The check-in of this morning revealed how most of us, eleven participants, are ‘at the bottom of the U’; at a point in life where it is not so clear where to go, or when to move on. We joked about that this is why so many people didn’t make it to join us: they were probably sure about their lives and didn’t need to be here?!
Like in the Art of Hosting on Art of Hosting, in June in Belgium, we used the tarot cards after we returned from the physical work outside, and laid out a certain pattern that could inform us about the deeper meaning of our gathering.
At the center, at the heart, was Eight of Swords, reversed. It tells us about the letting go of any thoughts, realizing that we are not limited by them, as they are not the actual situation. “We don’t have to grow legs, we have to use them!”
North was Five of Wands, which tells us about: What’s present? What is visible to the world? What we show is the trying out, the creative energy. So maybe it tells about growing up, do something with what we already have?
What comes in our consciousness? The Night of Swords: about the personal level of this community. Showing the world what we stand for (values and principles) and taking action from there. The sword brings the clarity of mind.
What do we need to let go of (past)? Again swords: Seven of Swords: the nightmare of the perfectionist. The person is carrying already five swords, and can’t take the two others that are left. We related it to the many different ideas we had as we were envisioning this gathering and none of them came through. Maybe we have to look at what works and go with that.
Again more swords (Ten) came for the question: What is the near future? It spoke of letting go anything that pins us down. There is something that the world is ready for this resonance; not fighting the system, but show it to the world, because it is now ready. We can come out of the unclarity.
Maybe our harvest is being stewards of clarity, and also take the time to gain this clarity; to find the clarity in the practice.
To close our session we took another card as a piece of advice: the Wheel of Fortune reversed. The wheel of fortune is the real change, and it seems to point us in looking where something is stuck, or not aligned.
A last question was how to heal that? Knight of cups: finding your grail, your own passion. Taking action on what we love, guided by the heart.
Tova spoke once about ‘the Heart of Hosting’; and Chris Corrigan spoke in June about ‘the Art of the Open Heart’. Our own passion is so essential; in these days we need to act from there.
Of course conversations didn’t stop when we had dinner together afterwards. Personally I had the sense that we were still not touching the deepest ground. In one way or another we came to speak about it, because nobody was stepping up to do the facilitation for tomorrow. Here are some snippets of different conversations:
- needing more silence
- holding the deep feminine
- the power of giving birth and being pregnant
- not to take on the masculine projections
- using the law of two feet in regular life
- do the grounding of the place in the collective!