The First Gatherings

Before there is a retreat to be offered, there are gatherings to be held. A gathering is not a retreat and not a conference. It has no price and no agenda. It is a small number of carefully chosen people, meeting around a single question that genuinely matters, held with enough skill that something occurs which could not have occurred otherwise.

The gathering proves, in a few hours, what no document can prove: that the curation is real — that these particular people genuinely belong in a room together; that the facilitation creates something the individuals could not have produced alone; and that people leave altered, in some small and undeniable way, from how they arrived. The questions that hold the first gatherings are not questions about Providence. They are questions about the world — the questions that people of genuine purpose are already living with and have rarely found adequate company to think through. 'What are you building that you have been afraid to say aloud?' 'Where, in your work, do you feel the gap between what is and what could be?' And at the end, only this: 'Would you want to do this again — and would you bring someone?' If the answer is yes, we have begun. And if the four streams were quietly running through that gathering, with consent, we will also have our first genuine data — the first evidence, in the bodies of people who would know, of whether presencing can be measured after all.