We hope 2024 has greeted you with ease, nourishment, and sweetness. May this be your / our most liberated, love-filled, aligned year yet!
Thank you for your continued support, presence, and connection as our journey ebbs and flows.
As we watch the world around us drastically and irrevocably change we remain committed and steadfast to creating a space and community that will weather whatever is to come and embody liberation.
In 2023, we balanced patience, responsibilities, and big steps as we moved closer to our long-held dreams. The summer of 2023 was spent in North Carolina caring for a family member as they recovered from major surgery. Alongside offering care, we purged our belongings and sold the home we had there. It was a long and labor-intensive summer that held lots of shifts, releases, and openings. We intentionally invited ease and sweetness into the process and it has been great medicine as our dreams and goals move along timelines that are outside of our control.
As we continue to dream into land stewardship, we have used this incubation time to think about alternate power systems and housing options for our family. With the support of community through fundraising, we were able to acquire a Jackery solar generator to power our needs when on the land. This is vital to prepare us for the transition to off-grid living.
As a family we are making more intentional choices in how we show up each day: from kitchen composting, reducing our use of plastics, reducing purchasing any new items - opting for used, gently used, recycled items as much as possible, learning how to make foods we enjoy (like bread!) from scratch, saving seeds, educating ourselves on plant/bird/sea/insect life and ecosystems, and sharing what we learn with others. This intentionality infuses our physical movement, wellness, and mindfulness practices, and our connection to nature and the people’s movement for liberation. Deepening within our intentionality of living and living in right relationship has brought with it a sense of alignment and hopefulness for the future.
CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICE:
We each are navigating changing inner and outer worlds. We all are striving to live fully and authentically in a world that requires us to give those very things up. As you traverse landscapes that may feel challenging, new, different, curious, unsure, and lively, we offer to you a moment of pause. A pause to continue reflecting and connecting with yourself.Â
Please Enjoy this Breathing MeditationÂ
As you emerge from your pause, notice what has risen within you. Reflect on the ways your body, mind, heart, and spirit felt within you:
What thoughts, feelings, wonderings, questions, memories floated through you?
What is the dialogue of the inner record playing?
What themes do you notice rise in the quiet and stillness of your being?
What does it feel like, look like to reflect, and contemplate these things without judgment?
We trust and hope that these questions offer the spaciousness to travel more deeply inward and can be returned to again and again as needed.
Remember, there is only one you in the entire Universe and your unique expression of life and living is one of the many threads that weaves the tapestry of our collective existence. You and how you embody your living is important, life-giving, and life-altering.
Thank you again, for taking this journey with us as we continue towards land stewardship, food sovereignty for all, healing for all, and community-led liberation.Â
If you would like to further support us on this path, please check out our new Unshackled Alchemy Creative Portal!
UA Creative Portal is our small curated online donation-based shop where we offer home decor, handmade goods, art, and more. The shop supports Unshackled Alchemy, a regenerative land reclamation farming project in upstate NY. Your donation specifically supports the UA Land Project.