The River Under the River

For the past few months we have been offering retreats, more than fifteen now, across homes, three continents, and online.

In Aotearoa it began in the dark, the way Māori cosmology begins, with a song at the threshold before anyone could see the room. In Glastonbury it began in fog, at a birthing centre, with a door left open for the ancestors. On Prince Edward Island a fireball crossed the sunset over red earth. 

The same invitation, the same architecture — a necklace of practices and relationships strung across more than  fifteen grounds, three continents, and a scatter of screens — and not once did it arrive the same way twice.

An alchemy of retreats

We learned to settle our nervous systems, and met the passengers on the bus, those many voices that take the wheel while we are sure we are the ones driving. We framed the context we are living in as the meta- or polycrisis, to acknowledge the bigger systems at work. We brought art, and the non-rational, to shift state and perception. We practiced rupture and repair. And we shared dinner, breaking bread and eating together as a core practice of hospitality and nourishment. At each retreat, we drew cards from the Wild Unknown Alchemy Deck by Kim Krans.

Coralus, like its namesake coral, is not one creature but thousands – and a living system metabolizes its ingredients differently every time, according to who is in the room and what ground it stands on. So the same agenda became something all its own in each place. Practical things emerged like new skills, awareness, relationships, actions, and invitations. 

And something wilder was afoot.

Fields are wild things

I first learned about fields as a girl playing soccer – there was me and the other players and the ball and the weather, the chalk outline of the soccer field and then there was what happened in the spaces between us: the invisible, mysterious communication between many moving parts that made something bigger than any of us happen.

Little did I know I was getting a quantum education. A field is not so much a place as a living, moving entity – what my friend Rennie calls a giving field, “a place where we can go to un-tame ourselves.” 

At Coralus we are learning not so much to be in a field, but what it means to be one. And we are seeing how a wildness, an energy, travelled between the retreats illuminating the emergence of the field between us. Azul Duque follows the field and its emergent flocking here in her thoughts on facilitating.

Let’s take a look at what was being transmuted as it moved between us?

The river under the river

Following the sequence of the retreats this year, here is one incantation of what arose from each place, creating a necklace of experiences:

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Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the Jungian and cantadora, would call this the river under the river – the deeper meaning running below the surface. The transmutation of who we were when we came: people mid-transition, mid-leap, mid-grief, mid-becoming.

And it was through the hosting, in what arrived synchronistically around each retreat – the ceremonies that arrived unplanned, an altar built from what people carried in their pockets, a stone passed hand to hand and from retreat to retreat. The land hosted us. So did the weather, the trees, and the dead.

Place itself was an alchemical container.

First you must become undone

So, the Alchemy cards. 

At each retreat we took a card for ourselves, and each group took a “wild card” for their gathering. Read in sequence, these cards tell the story of our larger field – and offer us an alchemical process.

First, dissolution. The roles dissolve, the titles dissolve, the I-run-this-and-you-fund-that dissolves, and we enter the mystery without an agenda.

Then the burning – the nigredo, the alchemists’ blackening, where old disappointments and fatigue and things unsaid are met not to wound but to refine.

Then the weight that grounds us: lead, Saturn, a boundaried sobriety asking what is actually ours to carry.

Then the softening, when something tender returns – milk, moon, reflection – and we relearn trust.

Then the secret at the centre: the golden rose, the living field we are here to steward.

And then, only then, the new forms – spring, synchronicity, the unus mundus, the one world becoming visible behind all the separate ones.

Dissolve, burn, ground, soften, protect the centre, let it emerge. That is the river under the river: how a living thing becomes even more of itself.

Lead into gold ~ a social alchemy

So it seems as though we have been up to something quite juicy. Creating the conditions for collective alchemy via a container rich enough for the deep work in us, and between us, to happen.

What we brought to be transmuted was our vulnerability and rawness – the base metal of the social body itself. This kind of lead can only be cooked in company, in a vessel that holds us in the heat of transformation.

And the gold it yields – the gold we become – is a relation more than an outcome: it’s our relearned trust, seeing one another with new eyes, sensing the field coming alive. This is social alchemy.

Nothing transmutes without a vessel strong enough to hold the heat, and we became both the holding and the held. The work of alchemy has always been that whoever tends the transformation is transformed by it, that we cannot change what is in the vessel without being changed in the tending.

Maybe we are the lead, and we are the gold.

So what is Coralus actually up to?

The retreats are not a retreat from the metacrisis but more of a rehearsal for it. We can pull the island toward us, Stacey Marerora-Roberts says of her Māori culture. Biologists call this the adjacent possible: the future that is right at the edge of today and made possible through our engagement with it.

It’s maybe not that we are making Coralus; it’s that the field is making us – the reef sculpting us even as we are the creatures forming it.

So: how is Coralus remaking you?