August 2026 - Indoor Gathering
August Message: Remembering We Are Nature
✧ Listen to the gathering recording here.
GATHERING MESSAGE
✧ This month, we are turning toward a truth at the heart of our mission that is easy to forget: we are not separate from nature; we ARE nature. On Sunday, we gathered at Atria Hall to remember this together, not just in our minds, but in our bodies.
We opened with a short grounding breath, arriving fully in the moment, before settling into a poem by the first Indigenous Poet Laureate of the U.S., Joy Harjo. Her words in "Remember" oriented us toward our place in the larger web of life.
From there, Jen shared her personal story of coming home to nature after a lifetime spent in cities and suburbs, boxes next to boxes, concrete and small patches of grass. Moving to the woods of Wisconsin didn't bring the instant belonging she had hoped for. It brought fear first, a nervous system still stuck in hypervigilance, braced for a world that no longer existed. Coming to trust the woods was slow, and over time her fear transformed into a sacred relationship with the more-than-human world.
We read Wendell Berry's "The Peace of Wild Things," and it echoed in our hearts, reminding us of the times we have experienced solace in the wild, and free, natural world.
We then immersed ourselves in our central teaching on the four elements: earth, water, fire, and air, the primal forces that many indigenous and mystical traditions hold as sacred. We explored how each element is not only symbolic but literal. The meal we ate became the calcium in our bones. The water in our bodies has been cloud, ocean, and glacier before it was ever ours to borrow. The warmth of sunlight becomes vitamin D in our skin, our own inner fire quite literally stored sunlight. And when we smell a flower, real molecules of the plant cross into our body, letting something outside us become, for a moment, part of us.
We closed with a guided Four Elements Meditation, moving through earth, water, fire, and air in the body, feeling the floor beneath us, the moisture of breath, and warmth in the skin, before a community blessing sent us into social time together over coffee and conversation.
PERENNIAL WISDOM SOURCES
✧INDIGENOUS
Joy Harjo | Muscogee/Creek Nation, United States Poet Laureate in 2019-2022
Poem "Remember"
✧ CONTEMPLATIVE / ECO-SPIRITUAL
Wendell Berry | Poet, Novelist, and Environmentalist
Poem, "The Peace of Wild Things"
SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
✧ To carry this teaching from the mind into the body, we practiced the Four Elements Meditation, a guided, seated journey through each element. We felt the stability of the earth beneath us and within us as our bones, the water moving through us as our blood, the fire within the warmth in our body, and the air as the very breath of life.
Download the Four Elements Meditation here.
SPIRITUAL INVITATION FOR AUGUST
✧ Get out into nature at least once this week, and once every week this month. Let yourself notice the elements as you go, the ground beneath your feet, the water in the air or underfoot, the warmth of the sun, the breath moving in and out. Revisit the Four Elements Meditation whenever you need to come back to your body, and to remember that you belong to the earth.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
✧ On Remembering: What is one everyday moment, a meal, a breath, a glass of water, where you can notice yourself being part of the natural world rather than standing apart from it?
✧ On Reciprocity: If nature has been giving to you all along, sustaining you breath by breath, meal by meal, drink by drink, what is one way you might give back?
UPCOMING GATHERINGS
✧ Sun. 8/23 | 10 am – Noon: Nature Gathering
~ Location: Gibbs Lake Park | 9103 W Gibbs Lake Rd, Edgerton
~ Map link here
✧ Sun. 9/13 | 10-11:45 am: Sept. Indoor Gathering
~Location: Atria Hall | 14 W Fulton Street, Edgerton
ANNOUNCEMENTS
✧🍂 REGISTRATION IS OPEN!
Our very first Fall Equinox Festival is happening — and tickets are officially ON SALE! 🎉
On Saturday, September 19th, we're gathering in Janesville for an afternoon of harvest, gratitude, connection, creativity, and release.
And we've created something really special for this one.
✨ 8 sacred experiences.
✨ 3 hours to explore them all.
✨ One afternoon to create completely your own.
Move between practitioner-led experiences, creative activities, nature, sound, ritual, and reflection. Follow your curiosity. Try something new. Go deep. Or simply slow down and enjoy being in community.
✧Heart Leaders Wanted: Ancient Hearts is growing, and we're looking for a Music Director and Co-Leaders to help carry gatherings forward. If you're a trained teacher of the world's wisdom traditions, a spiritual director, or a practitioner ready to share your gifts with this community, we want to hear from you. Send an email to contact@ancienthearts.org to inquire.
✧ Founding Members: If this is the community you've been seeking and you want to help sustain us, we invite you to consider becoming a Founding Member in 2026. We hope to welcome 30 Founding Members into our Founding Circle this year. Reach out to contact@ancienthearts.org for more information.
