Fall 2024 Newsletter
Editors note: This is an updated version of Sitaram Dass’s letter from the Fall Newsletter that was sent on Oct 3rd, 2024. Sign up to receive our newsletters.
Autumn is here, and I take refuge in the quality of slowness that now permeates the Pacific Northwest. The sky loses its heat as air particles slow to a crisp chill. The trees' leaves lose their green as chlorophyll production slows to reveal latent undertones of maroon, purple, bronze, and gold. A slowing of human activity means a decrease in noise, allowing the ambient sounds of the wind and crows to take prominence.
I feel this shift most pronounced in my own being. My nervous system feels calmer, my calendar is less full, it is easier to relax, and I have less desire to accomplish goals. I find myself nesting at home, doing simple projects or walking in my neighborhood and watching the foliage change.
Sacred Community Project's activity during this Spring and Summer has produced fruit— two retreats, our first year-long Loving Rock Karma Yoga Training Program, three weekly Satsang Hangs, and a commitment to ongoing service.
But the Autumn calm has its own benefits; slowness yields the fruit of reflection. As I contemplate these last six months, I can appreciate what these events have felt like, and the name that comes to mind is familial mood.
A sense of warmth, closeness, and affection have pervaded these spaces, and this alone is intrinsically healing. We often don't experience this in our workplaces or marketplaces, and many of us did not grow up in family environments of mutual respect and care.
Both India and Greece have ancient stories about a previous Age of Truth where this affectionate warmth was the foundation of daily life, where we lived in harmony with the Earth and treated each other as beloved family. This gives me hope, and it is a hope completely independent of historical veracity. Even if this Age of Truth never existed in the physical world, it still clearly permeates the imaginal one. Even if it's not a historical past, it still resides in our collective memory. Somehow we know this is something worthwhile to yearn and strive for, and for thousands of years poet-sages have sung about this as Truth.
The ability to rest within consciously-curated spaces where the familial mood of Sacred Community can be intuited, felt, and actualized only increases my faith in its inherent power. But, hearing the ways that participants carry this forward into the rest of their lives is what really fills me: whether its harm-reduction work at needle exchanges, recovery work at addiction centers, mindfulness classes at underfunded schools, letters to incarcerated folk, food for those close to death, or undivided attention and care to raise a child with love, the community that makes up SCP inspires me with the ways they continue to sing this Song of Truth.
Slowness also allows the undercurrents of grief to bubble to the surface, and the inspiration from the SCP community lends me the strength to continue resting in that slowness. I am aware that many of us are connected to the Southeast of the United States that has been devastated by hurricanes Helene and Milton. If anyone is in need of additional support during this time, please reach out or attend one of our ongoing Satsang Hangs, including our grief-focused monthly gathering.
I am also aware that this tragedy is a direct manifestation of human-caused climate change, thus stemming from the same roots of greed, hatred, and ignorance found across the globe in abuses of power, war, wage theft, state-sponsored execution, displacement, apartheid, and oppression. We are now a year into the US-funded slaughter of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, a human-rights catastrophe that has created the most violent place in the world and the deadliest place for children.
My vow for this day is to feel this global grief as well as the wise hope that the SCP community inspires me towards.
I am reminded again of SCP's foundational statements:
Our core vision is a world of Sacred Community, where interdependence is valued over individualism, truth over manipulation, caring over exploitation, presence over distraction, and where an expansive, all-inclusive Love joyously welcomes all Beings into Its warm embrace.
For this to come to fruition, we believe we can no longer separate the systemic, the communal, the relational, the personal, or the Sacred. These are interwoven and mutually-dependent threads forming the tapestry of Sacred Community.
