One of the most important teachings that I learned early through The Art of Hosting is harvest. It is the efforting and attentiveness to make visible learning and experience that have arisen.
For many years, I’ve nuanced that teaching into four layers.
- There is the harvest that is data — words, write-ups, images, poems.
- There is the harvest that is process, naming where the data of many forms arises, from — partner conversations, small groups, etc.
- There is the harvest that is relationships — the connection that people come to feel together, softening of edges, enough realness to amplify joy and to stay in the inherently hard things.
- There is the harvest that is spirit — it is a field of energy, of relationship with the unseen, of inspiration.
I continue to learn that there are many aspects of us humans that help to create and share harvest.
The one I’m paying attention to this morning, on the heals of hosting five days together with a group of twenty in Fire & Water Cohort, is feeling. It’s embodiment. It’s letting my body be changed by friendship, laughter, hard questions, teasing, sharing meals together, being quiet together, tending fires, walking labyrinths at dusk, and all the rest.
Feeling — the attentiveness and honoring of the inner — oh my. How sweet to travel with, not from, what has been cultivated so sweetly over days together.
I’m grateful. For harvest that is all of that.