Weavers’ Trail Online Workshop Programme

INTRODUCTION TO THE WEAVERS’ TRAIL

The Weavers’ Trail is women’s soul pilgrimage into ritual landscape, wild shrines and sacred hearth. This workshop experience travels through thirteen moon cycles as it unfurls into the three deepening journeys of Daweyo (the Hearth Woman), Lagyâno (the Shrine Guardian) and Soitlâ (the Bone Dreamer). These ancient words come from the 4000-year-old Proto-Celtic mother tongue. The three key elements of sacred hearth, wild land and ancestors that are represented by these three journeys form the primordial granite foundation from which everything else within this body of work is dreamed and created. Daweyo, Lagyâno and Soitlâ are the three ancient grandmothers or wise women archetypes who anchor and accompany these ritual journeys, bearing witness as each travelling sister sets out to kindle the fires within the sacred house, tend the feral prayers of wild shrines or dream without boundaries inside the ancestral cave.

We travel through the landscapes of our lives yearning for, seeking out and gathering together the lost and unremembered parts of ourselves, fragments that we may not have even known were missing, dissolved or torn from the fabric of our being until we glimpse their returning shadows at our heels. These journeys of remembering and mending, reweaving the familiar and newly weaving the unknown, are uniquely healing, revealing, profound and empowering to each one of us. Every traveller follows her own meandering route but there are common elements to be found in our soul pilgrimages, which is why the companionship, compassion and shared wisdom of other travellers can be such a precious resource with which to infuse and enrich our experiences…

This Weavers’ Trail might be entered because you have reached a threshold of change or challenge in your life and are seeking a journey you can use to support or encourage your way forward. This Weavers’ Trail might be threaded into your own deepening, questing, yearning path as a woman of spirit and curiosity and courage. Along this Weavers’ Trail you might find prayer or magic or dream or a myriad of other possibilities; it depends, of course, on what you are seeking. You might encounter answers to your questions or more questions waiting to be revealed; this trail can certainly be a tool for the awakening or strengthening of your own intuitive wisdom. This Weavers’ Trail is in essence a woven vessel of words and images, songs and rhythms, ideas and imaginations, waiting for you to travel here, to shape it anew with each step you make, to thread it into the unique textures and colours of your own journey.

I have created and guided women’s workshop journeys and teachings for more than thirty years, on Dartmoor and throughout the world. This online programme has been created to enable what is shared in this remote wild moorland sanctuary to be explored by a community of women far beyond those who are able to travel to my home. For some years I have circled the question of how to weave deeper digital (or ethereal) connections into my work while preserving the integrity and wonder of what we experience in our physical gatherings and ceremonies. How to infuse an online experience with the raw energy of wild moors, untamed hills and ancient feral dreamscapes? How to anchor the physical dynamic of women gathering together into a non-physical vessel that can be sustaining, inspiring and fully grounded in the integrity of sisterhood? How to bring the wild sanctuary of this ancient ritual landscape and this sacred roundhouse hearth and these tender and fierce sister circles into each woman’s own home? I hope that this Weavers’ Trail, this wegjê kerdâ, goes some way to meeting that question…