Last week, I helped hold a small grief ritual in Transylvania, looking directly at the unpredictability of water and asking the land for help.

Nineteen of us gathered for a stone soup in the village of Cobor. In the last few centuries the village has seen Saxon, Romanian & Hungarian residents, Roma nomadic communities forced to keep to the outskirts, and Ottoman invading forces.

The diversity of lineages and history, the complex interweavings of caste and land ownership, the familiarity people share with one another, it all gave me the feeling of being back in South India.

Nowadays the village hosts a handful of residents - many of them elders whose children have moved away to cities - and the humble retreat center where we met. It is a quiet place surrounded by forested wilderness and a nearby dilapidated fortress, nestled in a blanket of birdsong and chirping critters.

Translated from Hungarian into English, Cobor means wanderer.

Before starting our weekend of play, connection, and co-creativity, we collectively took a moment with the land to ask for permission to be there. The riverbed just behind the village had dried up, and the local watering hole for the beavers, frogs, insects, birds had receded to a small pond.

Meanwhile, I was becoming aware of intense floods in Nepal and Tibet, a type of news that has become routine but no less devastating.

Just two months ago I was still in India, wandering and visiting a few farms, taking in heartbreak that the southwest monsoon came nearly a month late. This year’s crops were unlikely to receive the necessary nourishment to thrive.

Water has really been with me in these travels. Both the excess and the scarcity of water can kill. Water heats and cools easily; it takes the shape of its container; its nature is to move, to flow.

My own grief has been an experience of water’s flow.

For almost two months now I’ve been in Europe, which is a sort of bizarre experience for me; while I have incredible friendships and collaborations on this continent, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling from the land that it’s not my place.

Thanks to Stone Soup, though, I’ve always had pockets where I feel wholly welcome.

When I attended my first soup back in 2021, I was hungry for a new way. I was placed in a cauldron with brilliant, creative people - full-time facilitators, escape room designers, performing artists - and for once, I felt like I belonged there. Today I remember what it felt like to live as a software engineer, longing for a lifeway that I could pour all of myself into, and that longing led me to deeply admire the people I met there.

At stone soup, I felt what it was to create with people who give themselves fully to the world. In no time, I was remembering what it felt to feel alive and natural: shaking off the dust, showing up as the essential Rishi.

More and more of my life has shifted so that the person I discovered, five years ago now, gets to show up every day. I make silly creative experiences with my friends. I run a course on emergence and co-creation. I sing, abundantly, both as a prayer and as pleasure.

So, this time, completely tracks that my grief, my attunement to endings, my heartbreak over humanity’s role in ecocide - all of it would season and ferment in the broth of stone soup.

At stone soup, I get to trust that my distinct perspective is a crucial ingredient of the collective flavor that we’re all partaking in.

That trust has been hard to cultivate, at times. It comes up when preparing this newsletter, for example. One part of me wants to share abundantly about my life and movements. Another part is full with shame - about the way I have lived for the last ten years, about the global privileges I carry, about the sheer amount of support I receive from other people.

After three months of travel in India almost entirely devoted to my spiritual process with my dad, taking care of logistical needs emerging from his passing, meeting and connecting with family I know through him, I decided to shift focus and take care of myself. I started to have more fun.

Perhaps it’s right to say that I took a vacation from my grief, and in order to do that, it felt right to depart from India.

I have wanted to write more. I want to share about the Sufi whirling gathering in Turkey, where I got to sing in my devotional way every day. I want to invite you to check out the residency space in Estonia that gave me a week of rest and intimacy with the forest.

I have wanted to talk about what it’s like to see myself reflected back through my friendships. To build connection piece by piece. Some of the people I’ve been with in the last month have known me for many years, seen me through different stages of my being. And we’ve only spent maybe 5-6 weeks in physical proximity, total.

It’s bizarre to feel so loved in so many places.

It’s bizarre to try and explain what it feels like to have allegiance to people that you will never meet.

All I know is that my travel, my whirl, feeds me in a distinct way from my dynamic, beautiful life in the Bay. And while I’m loving this chapter, I’m also feeling homesick. I miss you.

Everyone knows what it’s like to be thirsty. So a ritual centering water can be exquisitely simple. We started with acknowledging the dry riverbed, listening together for what’s there beyond the simple presence or absence of water.

Each person carried a dry river stone up a hill, charging it with meaning, asking for the land to hold for us what we no longer can hold in our bodies. We gave water back to the land, letting it know we were paying attention. We practiced letting go.

Then we witnessed each other pouring out grief and heartbreak. Lately, this has been my favorite thing to do with others.

Sometimes, talking openly about the joy I feel in my life - and the privileges I carry that hold it up - feels like wading through mud.

I often have to pause, to savor the sweetness of life as it is. The sweetness of my joy, sense of wonder, grief, shame, all of it. The sweetness of candle-lit moments laughing and crying with loved ones, and moments of solitude, breathing in the elements.

So, for now, I simply want to find a way to say thank you for this life. I’ll be learning to say thank you with every breath, every moment of listening, every action.

There’s relief in admitting that this experience is both my own and entirely, completely supported by others: by my family, by my friends and collaborators, by clients, by the confusing and unfair-feeling twists of fate that brought me into this exact body in this time. By the divine.

The mud clears, becomes still water, and I can walk once more, and I think if this newsletter is a ritual, I hope to give back to the riverbed a stone carrying my shame.

I will be in Europe for another month or so, and then plan to head to India to participate in a march for land rights. A group of organic farmers will walk through villages across the state of Tamil Nadu. The group intends to connect people across my ancestral lands, listening and sharing together. There’s a hope to grow some coalition and advocacy from it, too.

I stumbled into this almost entirely through the grace of Mystery, because of my own listening. It’s the kind of thing I can only take part in when I have the space to move slowly, and I feel immense gratitude about it.

I hope to share more about this initiative, and to inspire you to join in various ways. Maybe you want to walk with us! Maybe you want to spread the word. Let me know if you’d like to hear more.

Just a couple hours after we completed the ritual, it drizzled for a short while. The first rain since we had arrived in Cobor.

There’s a human-centric part of me that wants to draw a connection between the rain and our ritual. One voice says leave it, Rishi. The patterns of rain are far greater than any of us, and another mischievously says there are no coincidences.

Whatever it was, we sat outside and welcomed nature’s caress.