BEFORE WE FORGET... ah, too late! It all slipped away. No one will ever know what happened at the “Metamodern Love" MSL in Vermont this Fall. Or perhaps I can piece it back together from random images, offhand remarks, and fragmentary quasi-memories...
An MSL is a Metamodern Spirituality Lab. The idea is to gather people attuned to the post-postmodern & metacrisis sensibility and aim their collective lens at the major chunks of human spirituality and religion while undertaking and evaluating experimental practices and collaborative ritual building.
This time: Love.
The whole thing was a beautiful mixture of DJs, prison reformers, philosophers, yogis, we-space practitioners, geologists, and monastic refugees set against the wild red and yellow shock of the Autumnal forests of Vermont. This time Dechen Ellen McSweeney joined Brendan Dempsey and me to co-hold the space -- and to continue some themes spilling over from the Gathering of the Sourcekeepers in Asheville in September.
Love is a tricky theme. How do we get the balances just right? Open to joy, friendship, and heartbreak without degrading into a cult of emotional catharsis or an aspirational New Age hugathon? How do we really touch our personal and shared spiritual depths while also being those beings who say Yes & No to everything all the time? Mixing heart, mind, and body. Mixing social and ecological. Mixing young and old, male and female, the experienced and the curious.
Personally, my favorite thing (other than the barefoot phenomenology of direct communion with the repeatedly established collective field) is how it all builds, grows, and enfolds its own variations. For example, during the pre-retreat week, people trickle in each day to expand the unfolding event. An expanding organic mandala we iterate in the lower field gets slowly larger and more intricate each morning. Group sits and post-meditation chanting, and improv choral music, saturate the space bit by bit. As we collectively feel into the landscape, we revisit our emerging processional ritual pathway again and again -- each time revealing another layer of what becomes the Stations of Love ritual at dusk on Friday night.
Stations of Love? We want to mark the beginning of the weekend deep dive by playing together in a sacred way, letting our embodied intelligence walk liminally through the emergent modalities of loving so that we have that experience before we start any intellectual inquiry. That was done as a passage through different “stations" in the wilderness co-created by different participants.
The first station dealt with pre-organic love. Gravitation and particle attraction creating the physical universe. Passing into the dark forest, the second station resonated with proto-organic love and the experience of the phospholipid bi-layer (a phrase repeated throughout the week like a hilarious mantra) of selective cellular mergers. Next came creaturely love with its courting, mating, protecting eggs, and younglings. Paleolithic sacralization. Cultural and contractual love. Late modern digital dating life. And finally, the fireside group contemplation of the cosmic and evolutionary nature of whatever we call Love.
It is enormously delightful and nourishing. I recall at one point, wearing a wig from Jeffrey's bag, while we were gathering local vegetation to boil it lightly and make the ecology breathable indoors, saying something like: “Vervaeke and I discussed serious play over dinner in Toronto last week, but I seldom see him prancing through the forest with his face painted. We're doing the actual serious playing here. It's important."
There were daily intersubjective practice sessions that experimented with different styles and culminated in a “shamanic" variant that evoked nonhuman, subconscious, and unintelligible roots of field building. We generated shared lore together by exchanging relationship stories in the evenings. We contemplated the role of love in Islamic mysticism. There were heart/mind/body exercises while trading places as speakers on the subject of philosophical and developmental friendship. Deep hangouts. Coherent pluralist pre-dinner prayer before a locally sourced organic feast. Love in dream worlds and subtle energy. The necessary and problematic aspects of Eros as a framing for developmental communities. Marriage and commitment. Bhakti yoga. Grief and loss. We experimented with neurophysiological exercises to elicit interpersonal emotional coherence. Love as action, politics, and ethics -- which turned into a very rich discussion around the incomplete implementation of progressive/green values, as revealed in many people's personal experiences with non-naive prison reform movements.
There was a Plato's Symposium in which toasts of in-house apple cider celebrated each person's improvised speeches defining or praising Love. Plus weird raffle prizes. Chickens and sheep. Playing in the rain. Exploring the role of AI in social change while carrying and stacking firewood for the farm. Spontaneous dance parties. Sauna nights. Ritual displays of photos of people's loved ones.
Basically, you're correct to be sad that you missed it. Provide, of course, that you are one of the people who can hold the vibe...
Next one: Immediately after ICON 2026 at the beginning of June.
