Soulmaking in This Time Between Worlds
Soul-making is an art and consciousness capacity that is latent within each of us – a way of seeing that enables humans to intimately relate with psyche (soul) as a doorway to anima mundi (world soul). It is the (re)membrance of Reality as intrinsically mysterious and intersubjectively co-arising.
Since I started practicing with collective wisdom technologies like Collective Presencing and Communal Reverie, I was struck by how people can deeply attune to a collective field of awareness, from which transpersonal forms of insight can be channeled through the “middle” of the field. I also noticed that certain bodies are more sensitive to these “non-ordinary” realms and dimensions (I also like Deleuze’s term “planes of immanence”). I attributed these deeply intuitive or even “awakened” ways of seeing and sensing to “Oracular Bodies” or “Soulmakers” – not to elevate them as “special”, but to be seen for their gifts (they are, in fact, often pathologized or ostrasized for this sensitivity by Modern culture). Since then, I have co-hosted collaborative in-person experiments exploring the potential of Collective Soul-Making, such as Participation Mystique in Berlin, Germany (June 2022) and the Soulmaking Gathering in Bergerac, France (September 2024), where oracular bodies are gathered to investigate and experiment with these unique capacities for collective sensing.
So what is Collective Soul-making? This question guides an action-research project of embodying and reflecting upon a vital phase in the metamorphic process underway in Collective (W)hole-making (from Hole to Soul to Whole). It is an esoteric and mysterious art form, one that seems to elude simple guidance or description (even though some “Oracular Guides” – living and dead – referenced in the letter below, have transmitted poetic “maps and patterns” to support others through this individual-collective labyrinthian journey). Even though it humbles me, it felt important to gather some of the emerging threads and patterns that constellate a “soulmaker of this time”. This is why I wrote this “letter” as an offering and invitation into the middle, shared with others who made their own unique contributions to the question: “What is Soulmaking?”
The letter below was written in August 2024 for the Soulmakers gathering (Sept 17-21, 2024; Bergerac, France)
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Dear “Soulmaker”,
You have been invited mysteriously to a gathering in Bergerac, France in September 2024 with very little information, and for some reason, you felt moved to say “Yes”. You follow the trust of relationships – perhaps you know Cheryl, Tucker, Rosa or River. You have been identified as a “Soulmaker” – or at the very least soulmaking-adjacent – alongside ten bodies gathering in space together. This may feel disorienting or strange to you, or extremely precise to your shape and being.
What is a Soulmaker? This archetype seems to gesture to a posture and quality of being that re-enlivens a way of seeing that is enchanted, mysterious, meaningful, and creatively alluring. To invoke the word “soul-making” is to connect with a rhizomatic lineage of living in deep polarity and tension – in-between joy and grief, belonging and homelessness, equanimity and desire. Perhaps you are familiar with Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking Dharma, Bill Plotkin’s nature-based Soulcraft, James Hillmans’ alchemical psychology of Soulmaking, or Gloria Anzaulda’s invocation of the liminal-artist Nepantla.
Yet here, in me, there is a call to create a new definition of the Soulmaker that is uniquely born of this pluriversal Zeitgeist, of this ghost of our “time between worlds”(1). I believe there is an archetypal pattern of the “Soulmaker” that is being filtered uniquely through this culture and time (2) — through each of our bodies and through the murmurations and constellations that we create in movement together. Do we dare to make a collective declaration and invocation what it means to be a Soulmaker in our Time Between Worlds?
I’m going to take a leap of faith and trace the sinew and contours that are alive for me in the psycho-biological musculature of this body:
The Soulmaker is a living root bridge between realms – a metaphoric creature who transmits and translates from the realm(s) of the Imaginal to the realm(s) of the Actual (3). They are indigenous to the Liminal. They enter the world half-born; their oracular bodies are not merely visionary portals but interdimensional umbilical cords that connect Source and Earth.
The Soulmaker is a post-tragic visionary – a mystical being who is aware of their soul-contract to corporeal existence, to being an embodied, enfleshed being who is entangled with Earth and Body and Relationship. Their post-tragic innocence is a portal to wonder in the mundane. They implore us not to away from Reality through an otherworldly Imaginal, but to become ever-more intimate with the Real.
The Soulmaker is a ritual artist – a creative alchemist who sees and falls in love with the diaphanous potentials that can only be gestured towards through poetry, stories, song, dance. They make with sweat, blood and tears, the ritual tonglen transmutation of suffering into beauty. They go through the discipline and work of making and fabricating new visions and worlds – because the “Gods they belong to”(4) demand devotion, duty and dedication.
And most importantly, the Soulmaker of this time is networked – a hybrid, entangled chimera that recognizes and can consciously harness the capacity of the collective and the sangha – of distributed, harmonized intelligence and wisdom. They are the tentacular transmitters of the “networked teachings”, deeply attuned to the intersubjective co-arising of Reality through their own unique contribution to the unfolding Whole.
This is why the Gathering of the Soulmakers feels vital to me; it is an alchemical vessel to experiment with soul creativity, to unleash the potential “scenius” of latent potential. It is a love affair with the future. It feels perfect to be holding it with each of you who said “yes”, to be co-hosting this with Tucker, Rosa and River, to be rooted to the place of “Life Itself” in Bergerac, France, in the family home of Sylvie and Rufus. I have no expectations other than a finite container to play and create and taste in infinity.
Yet even this frame of “Soulmaking in our Time Between Worlds” is also just one way of seeing – this is the siren song of my soul. The work demanded of us is collective and relational, and also, individuated and unique. This is not a field where the hosts will pre-determine the agenda or goals for a singular “collective project”. You are all invited as Soulmakers with your own unique, tender offerings. It is my deepest desire to see and behold you, to spotlight, support and unleash your soul teachings as the tender archeology of your particular pattern buried within.
I have faith that there is a fractal pattern language for Collective Soulmaking – ritual scores of harmonizing with our Souls, each Other and the Whole – that wants to be discovered and created, transmitted for generations before us and generations to come. As each soul is ignited in recognition, we become the living beacons and lighthouses (5) that constellate into The Sacred Pattern for our time, waiting to be remembered.
From Cheryl, one of your co-conspirators for this gathering
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References:
(1) The term “Time Between Worlds” comes from Zak Stein, who invokes it to specifically gesture to this historical-epochal period of vast transformation – a period where kairos and chronos collide with great potential and collapse.
(2) As River Kenna wrote in a tweet thread about the archetypal pattern of the “Shaman”: “Every archetype is filtered through the medium of whatever culture, person, and time are expressing it, and those expressions often get sticky with residue from previous people, cultures, times.”
(3) Rosa Lewis is pulling together a collaborative project called the “Imaginal Realm Project”, connecting these Imaginal adepts and practitioners who can: “can unleash creativity, strengthen connections, deepen emotional resonance, heal trauma, uncover true purpose and unlock new paradigms”.
(4) The “Gods we belong to” is a term I attribute to River Kenna. His writing on Valueception (as well as his practice teachings on somatic-resonance and mytho-poetic cognition) is a guide to how to perceive and align with your values and deepest soul’s calling.
(5) From Tucker’s soul work on activating, creating and connecting a network of “Lighthouses” – “houses of devotion where we celebrate the miracle of Life, commune with community and co-create with Creator”.