Wayfinding in Turbulent Seas
Our weekly Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders and allied organizations. Keep checking back for more of these videos here in our blog.
Just click the picture above to watch the video.
Pitch and yaw, roll and heave, what is the water telling us about our location on the sea?
Using ancient wayfinding techniques, experienced navigators can pick up patterns of “bounce” or “disruption” waves in the water, reflecting off of islands hundreds of kilometers ahead. Assessed and perceived within the sailors’ bodies, the waves’ movements can be understood as rhythms, some slow and smooth, some choppy and staccato, all coming and going in different directions. Over generations of oral tradition in Hawaiian and Polynesian cultures, this ability to interpret wave patterns as signals and signatures, allowed navigators to identify their location without a compass or a map.
Today’s Community Call, facilitated by Dan Hines, brought us into a bodily awareness of our own sea of experience. Listening to Dan’s storytelling, we were guided into reflection on the wave patterns and wave disruptions in our lives and spaces — individually and as retreat centers.
Dan shares, “We are all wayfinders. The traditional navigational practices of wayfinding provide insights and skills that are needed when one is ‘off the map’. These skills are especially important in storms of dynamic change and confusion, as we are voyaging together in this uncertain time of pandemic, revealed inequality and injustice, and profound social disruption. I’m grateful to be invited into cultural learning and to respectfully guide a shared learning from a set of stories, images, meditations and reflections from the ancient art of navigation.”
Dan guides small group experiences as a freelance facilitator, in the lineage of Circles of Trust and the Center for Courage & Renewal. He is involved in founding an intentional community, political work and leadership consulting and coaching. He is intrigued and passionate about the dynamic tension between spirituality and social activism. For a decade of his life, he managed a zoo (alas, a true story). He was born, raised and lives in the unceded territory of the Secwépemc people (Kamloops, BC); his ancestors have been ranchers, loggers, and government employees in the valley for three generations.
Pronounce: Sheh-wep-mec
Notes and audio recording from this conversation are also available at the link below.
Books and poetry referenced on today’s call:
Hawaiki Rising by Sam Low
The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis
Embers by Richard Wagamese
“Trough” by Judy Brown