Circle Creative Collective has produced performance events and workshops in the Hudson Valley for the past four years. Last spring at the Stone Ridge Orchard, Circle brought BLOOM to the community with the generosity of creatives, volunteers, and sponsors. This was a rare journey on candlelit paths where performance merged with the unexpected through improvisational and interactive scenes. Thanks to overwhelming positive feedback and the encouragement to create again, we quickly dreamed up LUMINOUS: Tales for Seeing In The Dark. This was presented this autumn on the paths of Rosendale’s Snyder Estate and within the powerful cave of The Widow Jane Mine. We again collaborated with nearly 100 local artists, performers, musicians, healers, and production people to make the many gorgeous and powerful scenes.

LUMINOUS was another performative experience, this time bringing visitors into the cavernous heart of the Earth through a contemplative story about death and rebirth. Together with BLOOM, this second offering of hope and healing completed an important story of life’s most essential cycles of birth and death. At the heart of LUMINOUS were gifts to help us find powerful, heartfelt light in the dark through re/connection, story and song. By honoring grief, impermanence, and the wisdom of the unseen world, we were reminded how each precious moment can indeed become more amplified. And we can feel less alone especially when held by an inspired and loving community, through the transformative powers of creativity!

LUMINOUS showed us how even in the coldest, darkest times we are held by beauty, that we are magic, and that each of us can be a light in the dark.

We offered two consecutive evenings to ponder and honor the importance of death, grief, and the burdens we carry…for there is no day without night. Especially powerful was the experience of moving through the LUMINOUS journey as a group, processing loss as a community in a way that felt unabashedly original and sacred, as well as (yes, even) joyous. Not as alone as we often think or our society would like us to believe, we walked flanked by new and old friends, held invisibly by generations of ancestors and loved ones who have come before us.

A season’s end is also a death, one especially felt by many of us who live in the Northeast. The stark and sometimes lonely wintry months can amplify feelings of grief or anxiety. Winter is also a perfect metaphor for any cycle or process that feels harsh or isolating. Thankfully, being bathed in the abundant natural offerings of this valley can also help us through the dark times, for it is here we can appreciate the balm of the elements, the changing seasons, and our Earth’s lessons in impermanence. Just as the trees must release their leaves, we too, must embrace change to allow for new growth!

LUMINOUS and this issue of IN-CIRCLE is an offering to you and anyone feeling loss–whether of a way of life, an identity or aspect of self, a dream, or a loved one. We hope you will appreciate the reminder to walk life’s path with an open heart, a curious lens, and a trust in Grace. Together, let’s welcome each step as an unexpected and important experience in our Spirit’s journey and as rich fodder for growth. Let’s fearlessly create original and authentic beauty in all forms! Together, you and me, and her, and him, and them can remember that our own challenges can be beautiful guideposts and teachers of compassion and overcoming. That alongside the essential powers of grief, we may also give ourselves permission to play, discover, mend, and heal the world. Of course all that is a tall order though without the presence and powers of art and community. Through those, in the most visceral ways, we can come to alchemize our grief, and transform individually and as a collective.

To everyone involved in this production, everyone who joined us as a guest, and you, dear reader, we thank you for your courage–a word that etymologically means “of the heart.” This has all been a wild invitation and loving reminder that we are truly connected to each other and the Earth.

Martin Prechtel had this to say about grief: “To not grieve is a violence to the Divine and our own hearts and especially to the dead. If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So grief and praise make us alive.” Indeed.

May we weep, and grieve, and sing so that we may live more fully and joyously, honoring those and that which we have had to release, while embracing the new in unexpected ways.

Co-creating these offerings has been my great honor and joy.

—Jenny Wonderling