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Tending the Hearth of the Great Turning
Words by CdV Saizan
Deepen Your Roots 2024 Participant + Founder of Kinward Moves
This is a summary of a conversation on the Kinward podcast with Ben Stopford and Veronica Stanwell.
“It is an illusion that everything is broken”
says Ben, as our rich conversation draws to a close. At any hearth where we gather, Ben reminds us, we can invite one another to turn towards what is deeply beautiful. And we must, because “these things need tending.”
Our thriving, our loving, the “more beautiful world our hearts know is possible” - these are not far-off dreams. They are all around us, waiting to be noticed, nourished and fed. That’s the only way they grow: if we feed them, and joyfully feed ourselves on their fruits.
Yet, as Veronica affirms earlier in our conversation, there are indeed
“Elements of the world that are crumbling. There are systems that are struggling to hold on. A huge repatterning is happening.”
So, what do we let go of and what do we turn towards? How do we orient ourselves amid so much change?
“TOWARD each other, TOWARD deep relationship,” Veronica says. In that reorientation, she tells us, we may “remember, in a bone-deep way, that we are nature. And not in that cliché way - but we are nature! I just revisited an abandoned field that we haven’t been to for three years, and it was a forest of blackthorn and bramble and witch elm, an absolute forest. If we remember that we have that capacity for growth and regeneration, we really can achieve this beautiful homecoming.”
Yes. That’s what I’m longing for. That’s what I’m trying to nourish and relearn in my daily life, imperfectly - and that’s what we’re reaching for at Kinward Moves: toward each other, into that bone-deep remembering.
It’s also what Veronica and Ben are tending in their year-long slow study course, Deepen Your Roots. I took this course with them in 2024, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. That year of coursework and co-witnessing was a grounded, generative spiral through bioregion, body, spirit and calling. Thoughtful seekers from around the world gathered around a virtual hearth to grieve, give thanks, and dream together into the futures we have the power to pattern, right here where we are.
The final council call of the course, in January, took place two days after I gave birth to my daughter. I joined with my tiny baby sleeping beside me, seeing Ben, Roni, and the many faces of our fellow travellers along the 13-moon journey. Held in that collective field, I shared how our work together had helped me to heal from the traumatic birth of my son and to prepare to welcome my daughter.
Birth—like death—is a liminal threshold. You pass through changed. The spiral that Ben and Roni crafted had called forth and deepened those changes in me, preparing me to meet what came with more softness and strength.
One of the things that distinguishes a traumatic experience from an initiatory one, they say, is that in the latter, your community witnesses your return. You come back and tell your story and are held. Your community acknowledges that you are new.
We talk quite a bit about initiation and rites of passage in this episode; it’s one of Ben’s particular longings right now, and an important facet of the work he curates in his home place of North Wales through Conscious Roots.
Who among us, he wonders, came into adulthood with a call to “the hut at the edge of the village,” where a wise elder—someone who has known you all your life—thanks you for who you already are, and helps you see the possibilities of your adult contribution to the community? Invites you into a fuller, deeper expression of your true self?
If you feel a burn in your throat imagining that, as I do, Francis Weller might call that the Fourth Gate of Grief: “grief for what we expected but did not receive.”
How can we help one another receive that initiation into beloved community and true adulthood that so many of us still long for? How might the world be different if our children were witnessed and celebrated as they crossed life’s inevitable thresholds?
As Ben says simply, “That changes everything, for me.”
Early in this conversation, we immerse ourselves in an embodied invocation of that changed world: a world that has successfully made it through the Great Turning. In Veronica’s vision, that world includes sturdier, more beautiful containers of all kinds—much more holding.
Carefully tended relationships with the land and waters. The joy of seasonal food. Folklore remembered and reimagined while gardening and tending to the beings who feed and clothe us. Handiwork with materials our ancestors knew intimately. And more ceremony. More celebration, more time around the fire (and time kindling the fire), more home songs.
Ceremony is Veronica’s special calling, expressed through Rooted Healing—a body of work offering nature-led psilocybin journeys, ancestral immersions (“pop-up mini villages,” as she calls them), pilgrimages across the British Isles, and an evolving library of podcasts.
As we discuss, we share a conviction that the deep work of becoming the world we want - the work of the Great Turning - happens in our actual bodies, and in the vibrant co-learning spaces of our embodied relationships in place.
There is a sporulation whirling, a signal sounding—a calling home that is beginning to resonate at a global scale. Our online spaces, if well tended, can map, echo and amplify this signal. They can point us back to Earth, back to our bodies, back to each other.
As Ben reflects on the tension of tending embodied work in virtual spaces, he calls Deepen Your Roots a “transitory hearth for a time of transition.”
“For now, I’ll be here,” he says. “I want to hear you. I want to know how it’s going, what you’re meeting, what you’re learning. And I will give what support I can when you come to this place to meet with me. But there’s this endgame: you’ll go back to where you are, and you’ll ask for that from your people. … Where is the hearth in your place?”
Where indeed?
What altars hold your offerings? What bulbs are you planting this autumn? What elders are telling you stories of how it used to be, how it could be, how you could be? What are you sipping as you sit and listen? When you feel yourself as a seed, what kinds of holding help you soften toward germination?
Ben Stopford and Veronica Stanwell are companions, thinkers and weavers of the Great Turning, in their own ways and together, in Cornwall and Eryri (North Wales) where they live and work. I feel so grateful for the gift of this spacious conversation with them.
May it feed your soul as deeply as it fed mine.
You can listen to Veronica and guests share on similar themes on the Rooted Healing podcast.
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