Soft Rebellion
The Need Fire Summer Solstice
~Ancient Fire for Modern Ruptures~
Saturday June 20th, 2026 – 2pm – 3:30 PT
There are seasons when the world itself feels stitched together by grief.
The air that grows thick with the language of war, displacement, economic unraveling, ecological devastation, rising authoritarianism, and the quiet despair carried by millions attempting to survive within systems that consume attention, labor, imagination, and spirit alike, blankets us all.
Many move through their days with nervous systems stretched beyond their natural rhythms, carrying a kind of ancestral fatigue that settles into the bones. Beneath the constant machinery of crisis, I sense that something deeply longs for a slower and more sacred way of inhabiting the Earth.
Our ancestors knew these moments.
Across many old traditions, need fires were kindled during times of plague, famine, drought, fracture, communal upheaval, and spiritual disorientation. The village extinguished every household flame. Darkness entered the hearths together. Communities gathered at the threshold between collapse and renewal while a ceremonial fire was born through ritual effort, prayer, friction, breath, and collective tending. From that singular living flame, embers were carried homeward once more.
Within these rites lived an animistic understanding of reality. Human beings existed within mycelia like relationship to forest, river, weather, spirit, ancestor, animal, season, and unseen worlds moving quietly alongside ordinary life. When rupture entered the human community, the imbalance echoed outward through the larger body of the living world. Need fires emerged as ceremonies of restoration, asking the cosmos itself to participate in the healing of what had been torn.
This Summer Solstice gathering grows from that remembering.
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Please join our Soft Rebellion Summer Solstice gathering, a 90-minute immersion where we will summon our Need Fire, bringing what speaks to both rupture and renewal.
Click the button name your price and register to receive the Zoom link.
A recording will be made available within 48 hours of call completion.
By Donation
What we Will Do
At the height of the long light, we will gather online within a ceremonial field shaped through the spirit of Soft Rebellion, a practice devoted to reclaiming relational, embodied, and soul-rooted ways of being amidst cultures of extraction and fragmentation. Together we will enter a space of mythopoetic reflection, guided ritual, seasonal teaching, embodied meditation, communal witnessing, and sacred listening.
Summer carries its own medicine for such times. The great flowering fields reveal abundance beside uncertainty. The forests continue weaving root into root beneath landscapes shaped by human conflict. Evening light lingers across rivers and rooftops alike, offering a reminder that beauty remains an active force within a wounded world. The season asks what forms of life deserve our devotion as the old structures tremble around us.
Throughout our gathering, we will move through two experiential ceremonies inspired by the ancient spirit of the need fire.
Ceremony of Unraveling
There are inherited stories that settle quietly into the body across generations. Stories shaped by empire, capitalism, colonization, survival, religious fear, silence, scarcity, and the constant demand to prove one’s worth through exhaustion. Over time these stories weave themselves into muscle, breath, relationship, and imagination until many can no longer distinguish their own inner voice from the noise of the world around them.
Within this ceremony, participants will enter the sacred terrain of unraveling through guided meditation, reflection, writing, and symbolic ritual practice. Together we will listen for the patterns, obligations, fears, griefs, and identities that have grown heavy within the spirit. The work of unraveling becomes a form of returning, much like fallen leaves softening into the forest floor where decay feeds future life.
The old need fires carried the understanding that communities required moments of collective release so that life could continue moving through the village with renewed vitality. Ash, smoke, prayer, and ember became part of the healing.
Ceremony of Calling In
Once the new fire had been born, people carried its flame carefully back into their homes, rekindling hearths from a shared source of light. Within this act lived the memory that renewal is participatory and communal, shaped through many small acts of tending carried across ordinary life.
This second ceremony invites participants into deep listening around what seeks to emerge beneath the long light of summer. Through guided visualization, invocation, reflection, and symbolic acts of devotion, we will call forward the ways of being capable of nourishing life during uncertain times.
The wisdom of slowness.
The rebuilding of reciprocal community.
The protection of tenderness.
The restoration of imagination.
The sacredness of grief honestly carried.
The quiet courage required to remain open-hearted within a world moving through profound transformation.
Soft Rebellion lives within these gestures. It moves through the mycelial pathways of relationship, ritual, care, creativity, ecological intimacy, and collective remembrance. It asks how human beings might remain connected to soul, body, Earth, and one another while standing inside the storms of history.
You will want to have with you:
A candle
A journal and pen
A meaningful object for your ritual space
Water
A small item from the natural world that helps you feel connected to the living Earth
This gathering welcomes weary hearts, seekers, caregivers, artists, healers, mourners, dreamers, and those longing for deeper forms of belonging amidst unraveling times.May the long light illuminate the paths asking to be walked.May the ancient fires remind us that renewal has always required community.May we leave carrying embers worthy of tending through the seasons ahead.
Facilitator
Shannon Willis, M.Ed
Shannon will be your guide for this immersive. Her work lives at the wild confluence of dream midwifery, oracular listening, ancestral reverence, and ritual arts. She’s the Ritual Director at Ancestral Medicine, and an initiate in the Òrìṣà tradition of Yoruba-speaking West Africa, she has also apprenticed herself to the dreaming wisdom of her own bloodlines and to teachers of Jhanki Shamanism.
Shannon writes and weaves spiritual accompaniment for emerging leaders and cultural edge-walkers—those drawn to the holy work of remembrance, repair, and rooted resistance. She dwells with her son and their furred companions near the mist-kissed shores of the Salish Sea, on the ancestral and living lands of the Twana-Skokomish people.
