Ending 2024
In December, the farmer brings the year’s harvest to the table for the end-of-year feast, recalling the labors that made this moment possible. Looking back through the seasons at the many efforts invested, some always stand out in bold outline because they were especially joyful, difficult, or both.
In December, the farmer brings the year’s harvest to the table for the end-of-year feast, recalling the labors that made this moment possible. Looking back through the seasons at the many efforts invested, some always stand out in bold outline because they were especially joyful, difficult, or both. The same holds true for this past year in our school.
Physical gatherings always stand out because of the heightened emotions, efforts, and understanding they kindle. Our spring gathering took us to Northern Italy, where we enacted the story of Abraham and Sarah. This Biblical couple’s fate compels them to abandon their country, family, and father’s house for a foreign land, epitomizing that fundamental leap into the unknown required of all practitioners in this work. We inevitably fall asleep to the familiar; what we know becomes mechanical. Thus, awakening always demands stepping beyond the threshold of the known, the familiar, and the comfortable.
Our fall gathering approached this universal theme through the lens of another culture. In India, we performed The Great Departure, dramatizing Prince Siddhartha’s awakening to his palatial confinement. Like Abraham and Sarah, the Prince must leave his father’s domain—but first, he must realize he is confined. The play traces his journey from innocent youth through growing awareness to the pivotal moment of departure. Our finale drew inspiration from a relief in the Mumbai Museum depicting this very scene: Siddhartha’s horse stepping beyond the two-dimensional plane into an unknown dimension (see image below)
Death is the ultimate departure into the unknown, for which all previous departures are but preparation. 2024 brought this truth home to us with particular force. In October, we lost a member who had been with us for three years. She had planned to join us in India. Her sudden death in a car accident left an empty place in our gathering—a tangible absence that accompanied us throughout our journey. As we enacted Siddhartha’s awakening to life’s impermanence, we lived our own version of this realization. Her death pressed upon us the questions that all practitioners must eventually face: How do we best use the time given to us? What can we create that transcends our brief passage through this life?
This year also marked a new phase in our school’s development with the establishment of two communal houses – one in Benevento, Italy, and another in São Paulo, Brazil. These physical outposts, along with others that will surely follow, open up possibilities we can yet hardly imagine. They also embody what I consider the most significant harvest of 2024: the deepening bonds between practitioners. As we’ve gathered to study, perform, and now live together, we’ve verified an essential truth: while no one can make the payment of inner work for us, the journey becomes more meaningful when we travel across the bridge of life alongside fellow practitioners.
Happy New Year. Here’s to another cycle!
