Announcing the Mutations Retreat - "Calling in the Future" - September 2024

Join me starting on September 12 for a land-based 'mini' retreat.

Dear friends,

I am excited to announce a mini-retreat for September 12-15, 2024: “Mutations - Calling in the Future.”

The retreat is hosted with the Living Land Project in Guilford, Vermont.

Both myself and my partner, astrid montuclard, are co-hosts of this event.

I’m calling it a “mini” retreat for a few reasons: it will be hosted here, on this mountain. We don’t have many rooms/bed available in the Community House, but will be encouraging folks to camp directly on the land, or have us arrange a homestay nearby (we have some idyllic locations available here in Guilford). You can select your requests/preferences in the registration form.

Shower and restrooms will be available. Meals will also be provided, but participants may also bring (and prepare) their own food if desired.

Registration will be under the principles of the gift economy. All are welcome to attend. Monetary or other forms of reciprocity will go towards the costs of the event (such as food, etc.), the co-hosts, and the Living Land Project.

Now, about the event:

“CALLING IN THE FUTURE” is the very first gathering of its kind for the Mutations network, a vibrant online community concerned with the direction of our world and seeking new and transformative ways of being.

The first Mutations retreat is a four-day event designed to become a creative ‘zone’ for personal and intersubjective insight.

Mixing silence and speech, theory and praxis, and creativity and contemplation, “Calling in the Future” is designed to creatively explore, enact, and embody the key principles of an emergent, integrative worldview.

This feels like a big deal. No matter how humble a beginning it might be, this is the first in-person Mutations event. How appropriate that it will be on the land, in the very place I have been slowly hammering away at the Fragments manuscript (not to mention, slowly learning the many lessons of fatherhood).

As I said, this is a ‘mini’ retreat. I like to think of it as a gathering of friends, or a call for creative fellowship. It will be a time where many of the practices of living a more integral way of life, a more integral mode of embodiment, will be workshopped. I will be sharing core ideas and readings from my manuscript (Fragments of an Integral Future), which will be near completion. Workshops and spaces will be made for others to share their work. Together we will be exploring how to embody the principles of an integral life, and an integral future.

The hope is for us to walk away from this event with a shared sense of creative fellowship.

The themes of the event follow the rhythmic pulse of expansion and contraction, or aggregation and dispersal, entertaining the core idea that oscillation (between world views, modes of being, or structures of consciousness) can bring about intensification. Mutation. Metamorphosis.

Moving back and forth between worlds, human beings are able to bring forth new forms of culture and consciousness. New world views. When we can learn to move with a moving world in a state of heightened intensity and contemplation, we begin to ‘call in the future.’ As the poet Mallarme wrote, ‘the star ripens from the ‘morrow.’

This retreat has been, in part, deeply inspired by the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and her concept of nepantla. Nepantla is the way of intermixture: it is a mode of being that exists between world views and between realms. Surely, today, humanity finds itself in such a place, and such a time. Let us learn how we might navigate it skillfully, towards the remediation and regeneration of our world.

In this present, let us call in the future.

Please reach out to me if you have any questions or requests about the event. See the event page for more information on the retreat schedule, accommodations, and travel. I so look forward to spending time with some of you here.

-Jeremy

PS: More in-person events for 2025 are in the planning phase, so, if you can’t make this one, no to worry. There will be more. Next year has an especially big retreat planned, but I can’t talk about it quite yet.