March 2019 - Happy Mardi Gras! - Dreaming Stone Arts and Ecology Center

Mardi Gras Blessings and creative updates!

Mardi Gras! Carnival! Fat Tuesday!

Relish the perennial wisdom of these ancient festivals! Even commodified and co-opted by profiteers and the powerful elite, the carnival tradition persists because of folk traditions that focus on community resilience, defiant hope, and a centering around the voices of those who are historically marginalized. Today, I invite you to rekindle that spark that flares whenever we dismantle the idea that the status quo is necessary or inevitable. Burn with faith that a more beautiful world is possible!

Insights from Recent Travels

I am finishing two rich weeks of study, travel, fellowship and formation. I helped staff the BCM Institute, “Land, Law, & Language: Indigenous Justice and Christian Faith” (group pic above), visited with friends and folks in the radical discipleship network, and then attended a Grief Ritual Retreat at Sacred Groves on Bainbridge Island (grief shrine above). This journey’s theme was hospitality, as native teachers and elders generously offered wisdom and relationship, as vulnerability was given an honored seat at the table, as we opened ourselves to new perspectives and embraced our growing edges. Hospitality also helped us discern the difference between mission as conquest and mission as convictional action: co-creating the world we long for. The potency of this time will percolate in my spirit for a while, but for today … some insights:

Transformation requires regularly bumping up against our growing edges.
We will never find our growing edges without attempting to do things we don’t yet know how to do.
As white settlers, we cannot discern our blindness to other’s pain without increasing our capacity to sit with and learn from others’ pain.
Indigenous worldviews not only offer instruction about right relationship with creation and with community, but medicine and antidotes to the poison of white western patriarchal worldviews.
We must seek healing, not only from personal traumas and toxic social narratives that have shaped us, but from intergenerational trauma and patterns of brokenness and ignorance within our family systems.
There is greater value in persisting through hardship and confusion with love and openness than in having all the answers.

Change on the horizon.

Thank you for your support for Holy Fool Arts and for your accompaniment! This spring Jay and I turn 40. This summer, we move to North Carolina and will erect a yurt for ourselves. Then in the fall and winter we will help build a community house. There is a lot coming our way right down the pike. We know that our vocational calling with cultural and educational work will have new breakthroughs in this new location. This exciting journey to new life also entails losses and good-byes and lots of opportunities to listen and discern.

So one last insight from our friend Jimmy Betts during our travels: “There is no solidarity without relationship!” We are deeply grateful to be in relationship with you and look forward to sharing more as plans take shape.

Carnival Blessings!
Tevyn East
Director, Holy Fool Arts
www.holyfoolarts.org
Artistic Director, Carnival de Resistance
www.carnivalderesistance.com