Editor’s Letter

Isabel Maria Mares

From a community conversation, some floating, resonant words about our community and its first journal: 

A fire made from the embers of our stories.

This is fertile ground for people’s creative works. 

The process of decolonization is to create something new. 

These are the byproducts of having intimate and creative engagements with history.

The nudge of community gets you to do/make/say things you wouldn’t otherwise think possible...

Sequoia Samanvaya has been my community for three years. Whenever someone asks me what Sequoia Samanvaya is, I tend to tell a story. I tell a story of a woman (myself) seeking answers, a woman who got a degree in dialoguing with the Divine (a Master’s in Theology), but was still so thirsty for Truth. I tell the story of a friend who had the gift and calling to teach ReMembering - which in many ways is just deep, deep listening. I tell the story of re-integrating the history of climate change into the history of colonization. I tell the story of taking a first course that not only educated my mind but reminded my soul of something it nearly forgot. I tell the story of how the most revolutionary classrooms are shaped in a circle. I also tell the story of encountering great personal tragedy, in my own life, and being carried by a community through the healing process. I tell the story of starting a journey by myself and arriving at various milestones with more and more friends and collaborators and visionaries to travel with me. 

Then the people ask: How?

I have taken several Sequoia Samanvaya courses, led by its founder and my dear friend, Sara Jolena Wolcott. I began with ReMembering For Life - a two-part course that digs into the root causes of injustice and ecological disasters, as well as into your own inheritance and your family’s ecological history. Well before the world went remote, we met in intimate, online cohorts. Alongside in-depth delves into the last five hundred years (and beyond), we were encouraged to craft, make art, make music, make mutterings, and even make new myths. Sara has always recommended members of the community begin with this course - the foundational course to the work of Sequoia Samanvaya: to ReMember and ReEnchant the world. As someone who began there, it was the most instrumental integration of knowledge - historical, spiritual, and kinesthetic - I have ever received/achieved. 

After this experience, I trusted Sequoia Samanvaya to be the home of my lifelong learning. When I needed creative support as a writer, I took a course for women-identified writers. When I needed to deepen my relationship with my ancestors and the land, I took Origin Stories. When I needed spiritual and creative accountability, I entered two of Sara’s “Divine Feminine” cohorts - which she designs periodically to support current and prospective community members in their work in the world. 

Sequoia Samanvaya has remained steadfast in designing and providing courses, gatherings, and rituals that respond to the needs of our growing community and humanity at large. I and so many others have benefitted from countless offerings that have become a huge part of what it means to be in this community. We mark time together. We weather storms together (protests, tumultuous elections, ecological disasters, Covid-19). We dream up worlds together. Better worlds. Worlds that acknowledge and integrate the past. Worlds that re-member.

It is revealed that it’s not only practical but necessary to ReMember the still-living past - colonization, The Doctrine of Discovery, the grips of Empire, alongside indigenous and ecological wisdoms from around the world. ReMembering the often dormant knowledge of our ancestors that lies in wait inside of ourselves. Waiting to be woken. In this connecting of the disconnected, we find that the myths of who we are are always evolving - returning.

Sara and I both agreed that this journal is among the best ways to showcase what happens inside the living container of the Sequoia Samanvaya community. Testaments of our work in the form of songs, prayers, poems, stories, myths, paintings, photographs, sketches, collages, and rosaries. These are some of the wondrous things that have been inspired, and that we hope to inspire others.

Some words on the Solstice

This is a storytelling time of year. In many parts of the world now, it is dark, it is cold, and we gather close to stay warm. We make fires for this purpose, and to also see each other’s faces in these shortening days - the long nights. What do you do when so much of the world takes a sabbath from growth? When the seeds in the ground are still and waiting? We find evergreens and candles and fragrant wood. We eat things that make us warm. We look to the most resilient animals of the season - the deer and the bear and the owl. Oh, and the bold cardinal against the white of snow.

And what do we do to fill this season, to bring more light into this womb-time?

We tell stories, we paint things in bright colors, we speak of stars and angels and miracle births. We layer ourselves with woven things and the skins of generous (often un-thanked) beings. We talk to spirits. We dance around Death. And we sing, we sing! We eat the miracle of ripe pomegranates and citrus fruits and ginger. We mold people out of snow, like we once were made from clay. We define hope, we wrap gifts and give them to one another. We promise each other, without speaking, in all these myriad enactments of anticipation, that the Sun will return again. 

A Song

While there is no end to this work and it’s meaning, I offer, in closing of this letter, a song that I composed between the Autumnal Equinox and Samhain (Halloween), which in many ways conjures the theme of our journal - Gathering Fire, Summoning Wolves.

the veil is thin / the moon is high / a fire burns / and wolves cry / a spirit knocks / at my door / someone knows me / from times before / fires burn / wolves cry out / spirits knock / spirits know