Community Circle: Celebrating Endings
"Celebrate endings – for they precede new beginnings."
– Jonathan Lockwood Huie
As we say goodbye to summer and welcome fall, we are reminded that all things must come to an end. This year we have explored sacred practices to support our efforts in staying present and embracing what is emerging.
This month we turn toward the ending itself.
We've spent this year looking ahead — toward what's emerging, what's possible. Behind us is the ending we already walked through, and most of us moved through it without ceremony. Our culture is fluent in beginnings — launches, fresh starts, new chapters. To get there, we tend to ignore or rush through the endings. We move on quickly, call it closure, treat it as a task to complete. We are usually alone in our endings, and sometimes ashamed of how long they take.
Yet most of us are living through several endings at once — a role, a certainty, a way of working, a version of ourselves we can't get back to. Some we chose. Some were done to us. Most were never marked by anyone.
And endings rarely arrive as a single feeling. Grief and relief come together. Anger sits down beside passion. There is fear about what's next and a strange, unwelcome excitement about it. We think we have to pick one — that if we're sad we can't also be glad, that if we're relieved we must not have loved it.
This month, we make room for all of it to be true at once.
Our gathering this month is a Community Circle. No speaker, no presentation. In small groups of four, we'll tell each other about something that is ending, what is still working on us, and what may be arriving in the space these endings make.
Bring whatever you're carrying. And when we come back together, we'll ask the question:
What does sacred practice look like to honor endings?
Join us next Wednesday! It won't be the same without you. Your voice matters!
In service to a world that works for everyone,
Beth Scanzani, Andy Swindler, Susan Alexander & Todd Hoskins
The True Purpose® Institute