Renaturing ritual Co-creating an ethics of care in the everyday by Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy

This is the Great Turning.

We as humans are being called to recognise the interdependence of the personal and the planetary.

The past, present and future flourish through making with, thinking with and feeling with the other-than-human world. Embodied, convivial and artful forms of secular ritual enable us to experience an interconnected sensibility that awakens our consciousness. Within bounded time and space, rituals offer safe refugia for nurturing solutions and inspiring practical, transformative action. Through dynamic, reciprocal encounters with our naturalcultural environments, such rituals inspire healing through the entanglements of:

memory & matter

human & other-than-human

rural & urbanlove & gratitude

mystery & history wound & witness

political & spiritual biography & biosphere

instinctual & intellectual sacred & mundane

arts & sciences autopoietic & sympoietic

personal & collective unknown & known

mourning & liberation kith & kin

psyche & soma linear & cyclical

myth & mysticism

As socially engaged artists, we are honoured to contribute to CIWEM's Planet Possibility project. Our artwork emerges from an ecological practice that seeks to enliven our human thinking, feeling and acting. We embrace the concept Planet Possibility as one which offers the radical possibility of reclaiming the embodied resources of our bodyminds and their expansive sensibilities– intuition, memory, the senses, emotion and imagination – all in service of our human longing to be receptive, responsive and respectful towards the animate Earth. For the Love of a Field: Water Ritual forms part of Touchstones’ ongoing dedication to encountering an agricultural field and its genius loci. Within these ritual exchanges, we are guided in our response-abilities to the field and its diverse communities as part of a wider ethics of care for personal, social and ecological regeneration.

To find out more about our work with the renewal of contemporary rituals, please visit www.touchstones.earth Our work is allied with the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University where we are Artist Research Associates.