​Let's get together.

We are social animals. Those of you who know us well will catch the irony here—we are uncomfortable in dense crowds, we ache to get out of the city, we are most often in bed by 10pm. We ain’t exactly the life of the party. But because we are human, we are bound to the wisdom and the company of others. Like everyone else, we are seeking connection. It’s in our DNA.
 
So we’ve been thinking lately about communities: how to build them, how to belong them. This past month has been a kind of case study, as we’ve travelled around Canada, teaching in Vancouver and Ontario, nestling into the ample branches of Liz’s family, and reconnecting with some of the friends who inspire us most.
 
Towards the end of June we celebrated our third annual Groove Yoga Festival on Liz’s parent’s property in rural Ontario. As the festival drew near the number of guests swelled at dinner time—we were six, then eight, then twenty teachers and musicians and artists packed around the dinning room table with all the leaves pulled out; there was too much of everything: an abundance of voices, of stories, of laughter, an abundance of food. We ate leftovers for days, fed the leftovers of our leftovers to the chickens. What the chickens would not eat we fed back to the compost, back to the earth to be made whole. We were reminded that the problems of the world are not problems of scarcity, but problems of distribution. While we gathered we caught glimpses of a joy enormous enough to satiate the world, if we could only figure out how to share it.
 
On June 26 we celebrate our first wedding anniversary. A year of being in community with each other; 365 days as the nucleus of a family. It’s a Sunday: we go into communion with the woods. We walk the Salmon Lake Loop in Frontenac Provincial Park, a 17km trail through solitary forest. And although we are alone in the woods, we belong still to the web of things. We are in community with the enthusiastic ranger who greets us at the park office, with the curious border collie who nuzzles our hands at the trailhead. We are in community with the relentless deer flies, and the snakes startled out of dozy S curves, and the trees who yield but do not break. We pause to rest in a sun dappled clearing where the lake laps at the shore; Liz drafts this newsletter, while Roland plays the harmonica, while the butterflies take up the harmony and spin it out on the wind with their delicate feet. We are in communion with spirits both ancient and alive and we are learning to listen so that they may show us the way.