Editors note: This conversation was originally released in the Lorian Podcast. The transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.
James Tousignant: Welcome to the Lorian podcast. This is a special podcast, the Lorian Festival podcast with Lucinda Herring, Linda Engel Ara Swanney, and Freya Secrest.
Lucinda Herring is currently living on her family forest in Alabama, helping to create a conservation easement there. For Lucinda, celebrating with all of life and with Gaia at the seasonal gateways of the year is a living, cyclical way of remembering the deep beauty and joy of who we really are as human beings.
Linda Engel lives in Melbourne, Australia surrounded by her beautiful garden. She has been participating in Lorian programs now for nearly six years. Linda loves being part of this wonderful community.
Ara Swanney is a New Zealander living on the Kapiti Coast, north of Wellington. She describes feeling a sense of wholeness as together we participate in these seasonal Gaian festivals, acknowledging both hemispheres simultaneously and yet relevant to each of us wherever we are on this beautiful earth.
Freya Secrest lives in Douglas, Michigan on the shores of the Great Lake. Freya shares, "Festivals are important to me as they open a relationship with nature that strengthens partnership, wholeness, and the joy that comes with celebrating life."
Freya Secrest: This is Freya Secrest. Our Lorian team of Festival-makers are inspired each year to do something around the festivals, and this year to create a circle of wholeness. We describe this March Equinox festival as a festival of balance, widening, inviting and focusing. The equinox marks a moment of threshold, balance and pause, when the tilt of the planet in its orbit means that the sun's rays fall in a horizontal line along the earth's equator. Equinox is derived from aequi–equal and nox–night. At the time of the spring and fall equinoxes, day and night, light and dark are balanced and of approximately equal duration all over the planet. The March Equinox becomes a threshold doorway for Gaia’s breath expanding since the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and contracting since the Summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It meets in the middle, so to speak, at the equator. We in the North stand in the doorway between winter and spring, inviting new growth and blossoming and widening light. Members of the Lorian Gaian Commons Community from the South stand in the doorway between summer and fall, inviting the withdrawal and narrowing of light and life into seed and a more focused intent. By celebrating the Spring and Fall Equinox together, we are once again creating a Gaian festival of wholeness. That's our description.
James: That's wonderful. Tell me more about the planning of the Equinox Festival. You have a change in the way that you're going to be doing it.
Lucinda Herring: I’m happy to share. Last year for the solstice, we did the gesture of the spiral. In the Northern Hemisphere, people walked meditatively into a spiral to the center. And in the Southern Hemisphere, you were at the center and you walked out of the spiral to express the expansion of the Gaian breath.
When the Equinox came last year, we realized that it's equal day and equal night, and Freya and Jeremy came up with the gesture of the lemniscate, the figure eight. There’s a point in the middle of the lemniscate which is the threshold where you're going from one season to another. On the Equinox, whether in the Northern or the Southern Hemisphere, you're standing with one foot in one season and one foot in the others. The Gaian breath has moved in a sense to the equator, the line in the middle of the planet–the place of equal night and equal day, equal light and equal darkness. The lemniscate capture that.
But then we had a conversation with David Spangler about festivals and a deeper inquiry into what is a Gaian festival, and David encouraged us to think that maybe we don't stay just with the seasons, but we work with what a Gaian festival might be. We decided to stay with the seasons because we'd only done one year and we wanted to deepen with that. But at Solstice, we decided together to make the gesture a circle of wholeness–not the spiral like we did on the prior Solstice. And now at this Equinox, not the lemniscate, but staying with this vision of a circle of wholeness and encouraging people to create their own circle of wholeness wherever they might be.
There's the challenge of what does one do in that circle, what is the dance, what is the movement of that, what is the gesture. We have been discussing what would be a gesture of balance and equilibrium, and we'll have to decide how to do it for the Equinox. The main focus will be the circle of wholeness, because in it, the ability to stand in a circle and to feel your own Sovereignty, your own radius, your own agency and Light, then to reach out to the land where you are–and this is land that spans the globe for each person who's participating–you stand in your own land and invite it to the dance, essentially. And then feel the wholeness of Gaia herself and the pause of the breath. It's not expansion or contraction when we're at the equinox; it’s this sacred pause and balance.
It's very powerful to experience. We experienced that last year, and I'm hoping that we will again–the fact that no matter where we are in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere, at the Equinox, we are in this line or place of equality, and that has its own deep gift and power. This is what we will be working on and we will be inviting into our circle the allies of our place. We’d also invited people at the Solstice time in December to think of an ally that they want to deepen their partnership with in the coming year. We're now one turn of the wheel into that and so we'll be encouraging people to remember that ally or partner that they wanted to partner with and deepen with and that invite them to the dance.
James: Thank you. How is it that you came together to start the festivals?
Freya: I think in the Gaian Commons Community, the idea of festival and sharing celebration–especially celebrations around the Earth–have been important to me. Here we were talking about Gaia and I thought perhaps it would be nice to celebrate Gaia, and a time-honored way of doing that was using the seasonal festivals. I know Lucinda as one who has been a festival leader and creator for many years in her background with as a celebrant, as a Waldorf teacher, as a woman of deep attunement to cycles in life. So I called her and said, Lucinda, would you like to help me set up festivals for the Commons? And I'll let you take it on, Lucinda.
Lucinda: I was very excited when Freya did reach out to me. It's how long ago now, Freya–two years? We've done one full year of Gaian festivals and we were very excited to know that Ara and Linda were our representatives, our women of wisdom in the Southern lands, the Southern Hemisphere. Freya and I worked together at the beginning and invited Ara and Linda in, but over the course of the year, it was very clear that Freya and I both really wanted Linda and Ara to be part of the foursome, to actually tune in together and create together what we wanted to do. So probably halfway through the year, we started meeting together as the four of us–is that right Ara and Linda?
Freya: It definitely brought in the fact that this is a Gaian celebration, not just our local celebration. They’ve been very important in helping widen it in that way. Linda or Ara, what drew you in, what interested you to share your celebration with the Northern Hemisphere?
Linda Engel: Well for me, firstly you invited me to join, and I loved the idea of bringing the energies of the South to the North, creating the wholeness. And I felt this very important that Ara and tend to be the sole representatives of the Southern Hemisphere–I mean, there are a few more dotted around. I just love bringing those energies and creating this beautiful circle of wholeness. Whenever we've done these ceremonies, I felt in the sacred pause this beautiful energy of Light right through the planet coming from the South up to the North and back, and it's really palpable for me. I just love that whole essence of creating this beautiful energy of global Gaian celebration.
Ara Swanney: For me, I was delighted because for many years, I've been involved in seasonal festivals here in New Zealand. We used to turn them upside down because everything was Northern Hemisphere-centric, but then we began to shift. Our Spring Festival, which is Easter in the Northern Hemisphere, is actually in August-September down here. We had to make those changes and adjustments all the time, whereas this involvement feels whole, it feels like we've been brought into the fold and included. For me, that's a great thing and I love the fact that Lorian is focusing on the whole of Gaia at one time. Sometimes I've celebrated these festivals in another part of the world. Being able to join in from my perspective has felt really special.
James: Thank you. What are some of the gifts and challenges that you face doing festivals online?
Lucinda: The gift, obviously, is that the four of us from all over the world can do these festivals and other people can join us from all over the world because we're on Zoom online. The challenge for me as a festival-maker who loves being together, embodied, being able to feel someone's hand that you hold next to you and to smell the fragrance of the season where you are and create beauty together and dance and sing–you can't really sing very well on Zoom–things like that have been a challenge. But it's also such an opportunity to feel the wholeness of everything. One small example was at Solstice in December. It was dark and cold for us in the Northern Hemisphere, but on Zoom, this little bird–Ara, I’ve forgotten which bird it is–but there were these birds that were singing, and every one of us heard it on Zoom all around the world. We were in the Winter Solstice, but they were in the Summer Solstice with this bird song.
Freya: What was the bird, Ara?
Ara: It was the Tui.
Freya: That's been part of the magic for me of this. I've celebrated festivals quite a bit, and to include the Southern Hemisphere has been particularly notable for me in terms of the Winter Solstice, both this last year and the year before when Linda and Ara came on with their bounty of flowers and fruits they had put in their circle that they had created. There I was with my greens and white outside and the very stark trees and that widened my perception of what was going on for the planet. It's been a way of grounding and making very tangible the fact that we are one whole planet. Gaia so multi-life, multivalent, so diverse and holding so much all at once. It brought joy, both to see that there, but also to feel it. It gave me a deeper connection to the seeds underneath the ground in my winter territory that were just getting prepared, filling themselves up in that deep time of winter silence to be ready to burst forth in the spring. That's a magical part of it all for me.
Linda: I've never done any of these celebrations, really. I mean, I always honored the Equinox and Solstice times of the year, but I never actually did the celebrations until we started together. I remember that first solstice celebration. I was with my daughter and halfway up the coast of Australia and it was really hot that night. I’d made a spiral in the grass and I made this beautiful altar and I was sitting in the sun. Everyone in the North was sitting by their fires and it was snowing. But eventually I had to move because I was getting so hot and I was afraid the computer was going to explode from the heat! [chuckles]. It was such a beautiful flow of energy and connection here I was sitting in this heat, and then I was just looking at everybody else (besides Ara, of course) sitting huddled by their fires, almost like this dark room I’m sitting in now. It was really special.
Ara: Another thing that has come to me over this time of us presenting this together and celebrating is that for it has inspired me to research the things that our indigenous people, the Maori, have done for millennia in relation to these festivals, and it’s given me more depth of understanding. Everything they do resonates with Incarnational Spirituality, and it’s lovely to bring that flavor into it, the indigenous festivals which are absolutely connected to Gaia rather than just our Eurocentric way of doing things. That brings me closer as well.
Linda: One of the things that I just love about Lorian–I think it started with the kinship circle–is that honoring of the land that I'm standing on. In most speeches you make in Australia now, anywhere on TV, in government, etc. you honor the indigenous land that you're standing on. I just loved starting whatever I was going to say by honoring the traditional land, the custodians of this land. I think it's really something very special. It connects me more to the land that I'm standing on.
Lucinda: Yeah, I'd like to follow that because one challenge I've had in these years of trying to create the Gaian festivals is that I've moved around so much. The presence of the land has been foundational in how I open the festival gateway and how I know how to celebrate, and so it's been a challenge for me. I think the first one I was at my sister's house in Asheville in the mountains, and then by spring, I was in Maryland at White Oak farm, and then last Autumn Equinox I had moved to my land here in Alabama. I'm grateful that the Equinox that we're going to be doing, I'm still going to be here in Alabama because I've created a circle here.
But I've realized that there's been a gift in moving around like that as well because each of those lands has been so different. Even though I'm in the Northern Hemisphere and the seasons have been the same, the expression of those seasons is so diverse and so different depending on whether I was in Asheville in the mountains or in Maryland by the coast, and now in Alabama in the woods. We’ve made a point of really standing in our own Sovereignty and opening to the allies of the place where we are when we do these festivals, as you were saying, Linda and Ara. It's amazing the different allies who have come to the festivals in my year or so of doing this. That's a great celebration and joy to me to see how different the actual festival is in my being, depending on which land I'm standing on.
Freya: I also have been traveling during some of these festival times when they've come up. For me, it's not totally been the land that's changed. It's been the people that I've been with, though we started at the end of covid when we were in our Zoom boxes coming together. One time I was with my daughter and my son in-law. I think that was last Spring Festival. He got very excited and ran outside and gathered some spring greens and created wreaths for his daughter and his wife and myself for us to wear. We were down in the basement, we weren't outside in the land at all. We needed to be in the basement because the kids were taking naps. There was an enthusiasm and a sense of "what a welcome thing to celebrate and I can join in too!" It wasn’t just with Lorian people, my family members felt welcome to include themselves and join in the celebration. I know that's been your dream, Lucinda, to be able to have more children–your granddaughter was around that you could share some of it with her. And I know Linda, you have done that and Ara too, I think with your grandchildren.
Ara: Yeah. The very first time it was the Summer Solstice and I was in Australia and I had my granddaughters help me pick the flowers. We laid out this beautiful thing on the table with the flowers and stones and things that we'd found. That was really special to me to bring them in, and it’s been an opening for other conversations that we've had since as well.
Linda: I found also just collecting flowers, stones and different aspects of nature for the spiral or the lemniscate was sort of a meditational practice. I found that really special. Creating a garland of flowers–I’d never done that before. I love doing it. I spent hours doing it and put it in the fridge to make sure it stayed fresh for the next morning because it had been so hard for me to make. I just love to do that because I never did it before. For this Equinox, I'm going to be away, I’m going to be in Seattle. So that's going to be interesting, bringing in Southern energies like Ara last year when you were in France. I'll be in the North.
James: This is this is quite interesting. The individuals who would be listening to this podcast, some are in the Gaian Community and some are in the public. The phrase that is really striking me right now is "I can do this too.” What you were just describing weren't limitations; they were opportunities to dive in a little bit deeper with what you have in front of you, whether it's a different place or different people or different seasons. How can people join this festival, the celebration that's coming up on the Equinox?
Freya: We have it listed as one of the activities in our Lorian Commons. And so the most straightforward way would be to join the Commons and that's a subscription for a year that is $15 a month. However, if someone was really interested in joining in with just the festivals, you can write to me at freyas@lorian.org and express your interest in joining the festival and the link for that festival could be could be sent out and include you. For some folks, that’s all that they can come for and we welcome that.
Linda: We wanted more people from the Southern Hemisphere, and last time we invited Lindsey, who lives in Zimbabwe, so we had three from the Southern Hemisphere. It's lovely to get more people from the South.
Freya: We are really, in this work, looking to work with the pull, the gravity, the attraction that is there in connectedness. When we were doing the circle last year with a circle of wholeness, we asked everyone to envision themselves with the North heading clockwise and the South counterclockwise, so you had a sense of meeting each other, so there was a sense of coming together. Linda, I think you had some experiences around that, that were very alive for you.
Linda: That was that pillar of Light, it was very strong. It was a sense of oneness, of Light through the whole center of the planet. It was actually more like a spiral, really. That's what it feels like.
Freya: These festivals are a little bit of an exploration. There’s certainly the time-honored, traditional celebration of the seasons, but we're looking to say, how can we celebrate a planet that has in different seasons going on all the time? And not just North and South–for instance, Zimbabwe is closer to the equator with more of an even experience of things–and just stretching out our capacity to find representations of that in our sharing. In the Equinox, when you look at the symbol of equals, it's two lines, one on top of each other, relating to each other moving in more of a flattened circle. There’s still a circle, they're still connected, but they're more of a flattened elliptical. But there’s also a way in which they come together at that center point, which is Earth sovereignty, Earth’s place of standing in its wholeness, in its presence. That seems to be a little bit of what's coming out.
And then when we invite our subtle allies–or “neighbors" is another way to say that…My ally is a particular tree in my yard that I notice and appreciate for its being present in my life. Giving time and attention and noticing these neighbors, as I say, or allies, we strengthen our bonds of connectedness, the gravity that connects us with our world and our ability to be in partnership with and to be present to it and to let that be more part of our daily exchange with the world. In some ways for me these festivals are a way to carry out a relationship and find ways to weave it into daily life, not only festival days.
Ara: And to hold an awareness of the whole. For me on a Zoom, I know that I'm in a different part of the world because of my background–I can see there's light or there's sunshine. And the beings here are different from the ones I experience when I go to Australia or France. Knowing that and just being part of it and holding it in my consciousness really helps me
Freya: I don't know if the bird that’s singing is coming from Linda's dawn that we see outside her window or from ours a little bit later in the morning.
Linda: It’s mine.
Freya: They’ve often joined us in our festivals and circles. The birds have come to join in, which is so delightful.
Linda: I'm also liked how we used the four gates from the Sidhe card deck in last year’s Solstice celebration, and each of us called in the energies of that gate. I thought that was really beautiful. I thought that was very special.
Lucinda: Yeah, I think we decided to do that more consciously. I've experienced each time we've done these festivals a kind of delight and gratefulness from the Sidhe world and the Devic world and the natural world, a gratitude that we are doing these and creating containers of opportunity for us to be together. I particularly have felt that from the Sidhe and I remember that somewhere along the way Marielle said to David or he wrote about it, that we used to go to stone circles, long, long ago as human beings, and we celebrate the festivals with the Sidhe. That there would be these times in the Earth year, where humans and Sidhe, which are actually on some level cousins, would still meet and celebrate together and create beauty together. I’ve always experienced that there's this opportunity for us to create beauty together and to cultivate presence.
And so I really like that emerging part of our Gaian festival exploration and it feels exciting to me. It feels truly emergent that somehow we as humans, and with our allies in the natural world and with the Sidhe and with the animals who might come to the festivals, like the birds–a bird came and presented itself in the circle–that we are cultivating presence, we're cultivating it and nourishing it. We are expanding our own presence to know that we are Gaian that the Gaian presence is who we are and we are the Gaian presence. It feels very exciting to me. Being able to celebrate these festivals on a regular basis gives us opportunities to know that and nurture it and remember.
Ara: Yeah, I think that's a good word you used, Lucinda–nurturing it, you know, with the, with the cycle and returning and then growing it as well.
James: That’s a lovely place to stop for this for this podcast. Thank you all very, very much for showing up at different times in your day to come on. And again, the celebration for Lorian for the Equinox festival is noon Pacific, on March the 19th 2023 noon, west coast of North America time. So thank you all again. For for coming on.
Lucinda: Thank you, James, for having us.
Ara: Thank you James, and everyone.
Freya: What a wonderful opportunity to be able to talk about it in this way. This is just lovely.