Seasons Change
 

Please join us for Gay Spirit Visions’ Winter Meditation gathering, January 17-19, 2025, at The Mountain Retreat and Learning Center. During our time together, we will consider, meditate on, and share about two things – the seasons of earth and the metaphorical seasons of our lives – and how they both are changing. We’ll explore this theme in uncluttered, natural isolation, and mutual safety and trust. We may hope to relax defenses, gain receptivity, broaden perceptions, expand emotional access, and open to possible new steps in our personal journeys.

 
Earth’s seasons have been until recently remarkably stable, predictable, and entirely accommodating with our expectations and trust, affording us a sense of safety, allowing the illusion of unchangeability. The seasons imbue cycles stamped deep in our biology, seeding cultural myth and tradition. They are catalyst for action, inspiration, and muse, feeding the metaphorical seasons of our lives a chord with which to tune our personal, even our spiritual, seasons. 
  
Earth spools out this illusion just enough to keep us in its thrall. Earth is in truth a dynamic home that has always experienced change. Changes tiny and sometimes large creep up unexpectedly amidst earth’s familiar hum, shaking our perceptions, then fooling our nervous systems back into a sense of normalcy before advancing again, approaching ever closer to within reach of devouring our illusions. The seeming equilibrium through which all life on earth has emerged, thriven, and fallen has forever been subject to perturbations, moving us from one pseudo-equilibrium toward another one around which life gathers anew, favoring some lives and not others.
 
We are in the midst of significant change in earth’s climate, caused by us humans burning too much, leading to vast disruptions of biological, oceanic, and other earth cycles. Does anyone not remember what the seasons were like earlier in our lives and see, feel, and know in our bones how they have changed even in our short lifetimes? 

So rooted are we in earth’s seasons that we often experience and frame our lives through the metaphor of the seasons – the spring of youth through the winter of later life. While we often feel a sense of certainty when we’re young, this is another illusion that dawns on us as we age. No matter where we are in this progression, we come to know that our personal life seasons are no more stable than earth’s recent changing climate. In fact, living brings with it increasing uncertainty as we move through spring, summer, fall, and into winter. We float in the sea of our life experiencing little equilibriums bounced by endless ripples – sometimes waves – of perturbations, conveying us ceaselessly forward into the unknown. 
 
When we find earth’s climate or our personal life seasons between equilibriums, when perturbations happen, tumult ensues. It can be a chaotic time where competing forces vie toward some new set point around which a new equilibrium may form, albeit as susceptible to future change as before. The chaos places us literally between two worlds, at the threshold of a doorway to someplace new. There lies opportunity, a possibility to summon our personal, perhaps collective, self-determination. 
 
The gay/queer community is no stranger to changing times. In response to perturbations impacting our community many among us became agents of change. Becoming sources of perturbation, adding our stone to the scales, we moved gay culture and American culture through tumult toward new and beneficial cultural, political, even spiritual set points. Assuming a prerogative to “walk between worlds,” our community has abundantly delivered messengers, visionaries, and movers. In those changeable times and through such turns of power, Gay Spirit Visions came to be. 
 
Nature tends to urge its threads together. It’s a philosophical basis for much of our understanding of earth and our existence. If part of our identity – our physical, even our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual selves – is rooted in living on earth, then how could the seasons of our lives not be entwined with the seasons of earth? A way then reveals itself. ‘Who are we?’ at its core does not ask of us a static answer but points to a dynamic, fluid, and changeable thing that doesn’t push away but rides change when it comes to our life’s shore, regardless of the seasons we find ourselves living in. 
 
Many questions arise along these twining threads, and they will form the heart of this year’s Winter Meditation gathering. In this exploration, we will use the physical and temporal isolation of The Mountain as a means to approach, perhaps even touch on entering altered states of consciousness. An altered state of consciousness is something that can happen to any creature. It can be a moment of striking awareness, where unseen connections may reveal themselves not on an intellectual level only but through experience that crisscrosses frontiers of body, heart, and mind, blurring borders within and without. We may find ourselves in the profound, feeling beyond limits of skin, seeing beyond vision; the present moment crystalizes, earth is luminous. Words can fail, and such is the doorway offered to us beyond former experience and thought – perhaps the heart leads, offering our bodies a new step forward?

GSV gatherings have often been used for physical, spiritual, and mental journeying, and so are perfect for entering into sacred space where we may individually and collectively approach transformation. In winter, the elements narrow our attention further as life retreats into its warm holes. Winter Meditation, then, is a perfect time to invite explorations of presence, feeling, and choice.

Over eons, humans have discovered and practiced many methods to achieve altered states –occupying unfamiliar surroundings, conducting special rituals, using repetition (such as chanting over long periods), ritual partaking in taboos, and deprivation and exhaustion (such as fasting and lack of sleep).

At this Winter Meditation, we will use some of the gentler of these methods for moving toward altered states. We’ll gather in a series of three activities loosely centered on accessing the body, the heart, and the mind. For example, breathwork/meditation or sacred touch, followed by meditative gong music, and finally ritual communication in the form of sharing in pairs what comes up when prompted with a question. The series will repeat twice over the gathering, offering in succession invitations to visit:

• How do we perceive and experience the changes in the seasons of earth and in the metaphorical seasons of our lives?
• How do we feel about these changes?
• And where do we go from here?

The three cycles of this series create a spiral that invites us to relax our defenses and gradually allow more open, receptive states for whatever may come to the surface, where we may feel our way and deepen into questions focusing on the changing seasons of earth and the metaphorical seasons of our lives. Enter willing to contemplate with courage and share your thoughts, feelings, insights (luminous or dark), fears, and joys to mix in strange alchemy in the shared vessel of Gay Spirit Visions.

Financial assistance in the form of scholarships is available. Our commitment is that anyone who resonates with our mission and community, and who has the desire to attend, can join our gatherings. To that end, we offer scholarships through the Raven Wolfdancer Financial Assistance Fund. Please go to the Financial Assistance page on the Gay Spirit Visions website for more information about scholarships and for a link to the Gay Spirit Visions financial assistance application form. Please note that the financial assistance application submission deadline is Friday, January 10, 2025. 
  
Note also that Gay Spirit Visions currently plans to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 guidelines in effect at the time of the gathering. 
   
Registration is now open via the Gay Spirit Visions website, so please join us. Register early so that The Mountain will know how many cabins to warm up! Private rooms are available on a limited basis. The registration deadline for our gathering is Friday, January 10, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. ET. 
 
Karma  
John Schendel  
GSV 2025 Winter Meditation Convener

Seasons Change

Please join me for Gay Spirit Visions’ Winter Meditation gathering, January 17-19, 2025, at The Mountain Retreat and Learning Center. During our time together, we will consider, meditate on, and share two things – the metaphorical seasons of our lives and the literal seasons of earth – and how they both are changing.

We often view, experience, and frame our lives through the metaphor of the seasons – the spring of youth through the winter of later life. No matter where we are in this progression, we soon come to know, sometimes to our wonderment and joy, often to our bewilderment and dismay, that our personal life seasons inexorably convey us forward. It is a mysterious journey that encompasses the entire universe of experience – yearning, expectation, joyous surprise, and unexpected loss and challenge. While we often feel a sense of certainty when we’re young, this is an illusion that we learn as we age. In fact, living brings with it increasing uncertainty as we move through spring, summer, fall, and into winter.

What was once known becomes unknown. Meeting ourselves in the seasons often requires effort, emotion, and spiritual strength. It is a hero’s journey, really.

As stage and backdrop against which the seasons of our lives play out, the source of our metaphor – the seasons of the earth – have been until recently remarkably stable, predictable, and entirely accommodating of our expectations and trust, affording us a sense of safety, allowing the illusion of unchangeability. The seasons are catalyst, muse, and inspiration, feeding the seasons of our lives a chord with which to tune our personal, even our spiritual, seasons.

Human-influenced climate change has been with us for some time. Does anyone not remember what the seasons were like earlier in our lives and see, feel, and know in our bones how they have changed? What was once known becomes unknown.

Many questions arise along these twining threads.

• How do we perceive the changes in our life’s seasons and in earth’s seasons?
• How do these perceptions and our personal experiences of the changes influence our corporeal, emotional, and spiritual selves?
• How have our senses of safety, trust, and faith been altered?
• Do we mourn the loss of what once was – the wonder, energy, freedom, and opportunity of youth; the deep snow in winter that now rarely visits, the nourishing sun and warmth of summer without withering extremes, or rains and winds gentler than we now know?
• Is there a connection – whether troubling and difficult or energizing and inspiring, or both – between the changes in our bodies and the unexpected changes occurring in the earth’s seasons?

These questions are the heart of this year’s Winter Meditation gathering. It is an invitation to deepen into these questions. We will offer time and space, and meditative, physical, and emotional room for whatever may come rising to the surface. In the dim light of deep winter, amid the warmth of our lodgings, common spaces, and those of us assembled, we will create safety. Come willing to contemplate with courage and share your thoughts, feelings, insights (both beautiful and terrible), fears, and joys, to mix in strange alchemy in the cauldron of Gay Spirit Visions.

Financial assistance in the form of scholarships is available. Our commitment is that anyone who resonates with our mission and community, and who has the desire to attend, can join our gatherings. To that end, we offer scholarships through the Raven Wolfdancer Financial Assistance Fund. Please go to the Financial Assistance page on the Gay Spirit Visions website for more information about scholarships and for a link to the Gay Spirit Visions financial assistance application form. Please note that the financial assistance application submission deadline is Friday, January 10, 2025.

Please also note that Gay Spirit Visions currently plans to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 guidelines in effect at the time of the gathering.

Registration is now open via the Gay Spirit Visions website, so please join us. Register early so that The Mountain will know how many cabins to heat up! Private rooms are available on a limited basis. Please note that the registration deadline for this gathering is Friday, January 10, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. ET.

Karma
John Schendel
GSV 2025 Winter Meditation Convener

Register: Winter Meditation