November 13-15: GLASTONBURY, Chalice Well, Somerset
Residential retreat weekend for women with Carolyn
This workshop is woven around Carolyn’s most recent cycle of work Ashes and Earth, which describes four spirit women who embody a winter journey into the primordial cauldron of crows, the vessel that holds our most profound mysteries of death and life, as we enter the earth along the harsh edge of winter and deep into the silent lands.
We will travel through a starkly beautiful landscape of death and restoration, touching into dark solitude with the Dissolving Woman (who carries the burden of wounds within the deep belly of the cauldron);
silent incubation with the Hollowing Woman (hidden far inside the marrow of ancient bones);
inspired renewal with the Bleeding Woman (as she follows the strange seam where death and life are knitted together);
and the blessing of lament with the Illuminating Woman (who dances on the cauldron rim where the ultimate gifts of light are finally revealed).
Through all of this we trace our intimate connection with the moon as she carries us around the circle road.
The waxing and waning of the moon move her like a shuttle on the loom. The symbolism of spinning and weaving, of spun threads and woven cloth, extends into all life. The fabric that gives shape to birthing and living and growing and dying is frayed, picked apart, cut and rewoven into new cloth. And so cloth forms a significant aspect of this work and a physical testament to the ancient hands that work the sacred loom. Old fabrics woven on hand looms, memories and songs sewn into skirts, the shawl in which we nurse our babes, the veil that protects and binds, the threads onto which we bleed, the shroud into which we are sewn, the spindle that winds us out to the very edges of death, all the weavings of loss and return…
Adapted from the workshops and prints page at Seventh Wave Music
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