Fourth Session: CORNUCOPIA OF CULTURE & THE SACRED MASCULINE
Fourth Session: CORNUCOPIA OF CULTURE & THE SACRED MASCULINE

Fourth Session: CORNUCOPIA OF CULTURE & THE SACRED MASCULINE

Early Fall: September 16-20, 2026

In our last session together the more practical teachings have to do with harvesting and preserving food. It is the time of year when our vegetive relations who we have been feeding with our love (and our compost) for months, whose seeds I have carried for decades, turn their love back toward us, burgeoning with fruits to sustain us through the long cold months to come.

The Harvest is a miracle every year. While farming seems solid and reliable, it is not. So many things can go wrong. A whole culture has to come together in a magical and knowledgeable way for it to work. And if your plantings are surrounded by the wild like mine are, you have to attend to the relations of that world (because of predation…) which intersects with and surrounds our domestic plantings. You only get one chance each year to practice this ancient art, so it takes many teachings and many years to be able to claim and step into our ancestral gardening wisdom. The other half of having a garden beyond generating and harvesting the bounty, beyond enriching the ecology, beyond keeping seed, but that is equally important is preserving and eating what you have been given. I’m ashamed at how often in the early days of productive gardens so much rotted or dried out before we could get to it. Or because we didn’t really know how to preserve things well.

In this last gathering of the fourth session we honour and work with the sacred wounded masculine. While some folks are moving away from binary views of the world, the reality is we live in a bi-polar dimension and these are archetypes that run way deeper than appearance and orientation. The feminine and masculine forces are like two sides of a zipper that hold the world together. We can speak about and come to understand these realities in ways that honour them and lift them up to their true potential. The role of the masculine and feminine don’t have to be diminished or pigeonholed as we have done in the past. These days no one even knows what a man is. Toxic masculinity is all we ever hear about. But the masculine is a beautiful guiding and protective force we all need, to direct and move forward in our lives. Art Solomon, a First Nations teacher, said to me forty years ago that it is women who will pick up their ‘medicine’ first, and only then can men learn who they truly are and stand in that power. I think it’s clear women are picking up their medicine. Now, it is time for men to regain their spirit. Only then will we be able to live in harmony with each other and the Earth.

I was guided to offer these essential teachings last. But it also seems appropriate to me. While we practice our cultured arts like agriculture much of the time we have the opportunity to dwell in the ‘present’ and ‘horizontal’ sphere of the plural feminine consciousness. Much of the spring and summer, the time of birthing and growing, feels that feminine flow to me. Whereas the planning, decisiveness and intensity of “the big harvest”, and the processing and storing of food and medicine to insure your security in the future, feels very masculine to me.