Becoming Ready for What Comes Next

I went to Glastonbury a few weekends ago for a Coralus retreat. I didn’t go because I was searching for something. I went because I believed in the room — and the garden, and the Tor on the horizon — that would be there.

I was right.

Vicki Saunders, MJ Ryan, and Louise Tarrier had brought together a multi-generational circle of women. Some I knew, many I didn’t.

What struck me almost immediately was what we didn’t have to establish. The shared values — that the current financial system is not working, that extractive must become equitable, that power concentrated in a few must flow to many, that the cramped logic of zero-sum and scarcity must give way to abundance and multiplier effects — were already bedrock. So the conversation could start further down the road.

We read John Paul Lederach on fog. We drew oracle cards by candlelight. MJ read a poem that opened with the lines: When you stop fighting the moment, you don’t withdraw from the world — you stand more firmly inside it.

We walked to the Chalice Well. We ate Indian food together on a Saturday night and landed the weekend at a pub called the Mitre — which, as someone noted, is both a crown and a threshold, a shape that points upward. It felt less like lunch and more like a quiet ordination. 

Integration, not elevation.

What I found was a group of women willing to look inward, not just outward. Willing to do the inner work that community actually requires, not just the networking. Sober about the scale of the challenge. Informed about what the data says. Open to uncertainty — to staying in the fog longer than feels comfortable — and still, genuinely, oriented toward what’s possible.

One of the beautiful women in our group and a dear friend, Sana Kapadia, wrote a poem after we left that captured it better than I could. She named it “Chaos to Chasm to Creation.” It is about the release of old structures, about the signal that comes when you go quiet enough to hear it, about the land of Glastonbury itself — its goddesses and witches and deep, matriarchal patience — and about what it means to arrive at wholeness.

She is whole. She is you.

By the end of the weekend, I had my word. Not hope. Hope implies waiting. The word I landed on was ready.

Ready to confront what isn’t working. Ready to build what should exist.

Ready to dream without apology and act without hesitation.

What propels me forward isn’t optimism as a mood — it’s conviction about action, and about what becomes possible when you find stronger allies and stop working alone.

Cathy Bennett said it well when she left on Sunday: “Leaving lighter. And grateful.”

That, too. But also: fully loaded. Ready for what comes next.