Entering a Season of Remembering

I often find myself pulling up my calendar to remember traces of times both small and significant. On July 6th, I set my autoresponder at 4:44 pm, logged out of my calendar and email, and stepped into an intentional month of rest and reflection. 

After a full season of resetting at Coralus, it was time for me to do the same. 

I didn’t make plans to travel, launch an exciting project, or cross something major off a bucket list. I wanted something quieter and less defined: an open vessel of time for being, rather than doing.

To slow down and stay local. To remain soft to the grief and possibility of our times. To fall more deeply in love with the beautiful ordinariness of my life at home, with loved ones and my local community. 

While July was a season of rest, it started my own season of remembering alongside Coralus’ own. 

I spent many afternoons staring into the sky or napping in my garden, letting the days loosen their edges. I often forgot what day it was as the days softened and bled together.

I began marking time with first garden harvests, beautiful sunsets, and new blooms from seeds I planted earlier in the season. I was forgetting dates and deadlines, but tuning into deeper ways of remembering.

After being at the centre of Coralus’ day-to-day for the better part of five years, a conscious act of resetting sharpened both my remembering and gratitude for returning.

On my first day back, I offered myself a slow and gentle return. Yet almost immediately, a familiar muscle began waking up. Questions I had allowed to float untethered and unoptimized during my time away began finding and forming connections across the Coralus field again.

That day, I rediscovered a timely question handwritten during a Mad Hatter tea party at our team retreat in January:

That evening, I joined a Remembering Gathering hosted by Jennifer Simpson, who was part of Coralus, then SheEO, from its earliest days. She moved in and out of its evolution as we expanded into the United States; sometimes close to the centre and other times building her own business and focus elsewhere. 

We arrived from our own corners of the world: Jen in Colorado, Caresse in Pottsville, Australia, Nalini in Toronto, Gail in Singapore. And there I was, re-entering from my backyard hammock in Waterloo, Canada.

I loved that I could show up gently held in the hammock where I recently floated inquiries against an open sky.

As I swayed and smiled at everyone who showed up, before a word was even said I quickly remembered the feeling of being held by this community of possibility.

Then, I looked to the garden that held me during my rest. The papery lanterns protecting my first ground cherries made me think of the dreams and dreamers that have entered Coralus, held with belief and ripened possibility.

The thousands of tiny seeds on my Love-Lies-Bleeding amaranth reminded me of the thousands of people who have contributed their capital toward a different future. Its beautiful, drooping form seemed to hold both the grief and possibility of this moment in time.

Around me, people remembered being believed in before the proof was complete. Success indicators from broken systems we replaced with what really matters; Relationships that changed the direction of a business or a life; Finding people who shared values they had not yet found words for.

We remembered capital moving as money, but also as attention, introductions, courage, knowledge, friendship, visibility, and belief.

Being inside these stories together strengthened my faith in what we already know can be true: that relationships can be infrastructure for transformation, generosity can organize resources differently, and people can recognize and amplify possibility in one another in ways beyond what we could ever do alone.

This was not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.

I left feeling more firmly rooted, not only in where Coralus has been, but in the future we are already living into.

During last week’s July Moon Call, Frankie Edwards described Coralus as a spiral, bringing us back to familiar points “in a new body and seeing through new eyes and new lenses.”

Perhaps the spiral is one shape our remembering and transformation takes.

We leave and return. Our journey with Coralus oscillates in spirals as we build businesses, shift identities, follow questions, experience loss, rest, and together, become the future we could not yet have imagined at the beginning.

Each time we return to the centre, it feels familiar, yet neither we nor the story are quite the same.

The future is not waiting intact somewhere ahead of us. Pieces of it are already distributed across this community, carried in people, practices, relationships, ventures, and stories.

Remembering as a practice helps us recognize those pieces.
Remembering together helps us see how they connect to the future we are already living into.

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