Persephone’s vigil

OPEN LABS // Each week, fellows have the opportunity to initiate OPEN LABS: flexible, participant-led workshops offered to the community. These labs are invitations — not obligations. Each fellow is expected to propose and lead a session approximately every five weeks, but attendance is self-directed, based on relevance to each individual’s practice and rhythm. An OPEN LAB may take many forms; The emphasis is not on mastery, performance, or outcome; it is on the generosity of opening one’s practice/research to others. All labs are documented for sharing. OPEN LABS form the living architecture of the fellowship: a constellation of experiments through which principles, new techniques, questions, and capacities circulate between fellows, building the collective field without imposing a fixed curriculum.

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Open lab : PERSEPHONE’S VIGIL
Duration: 2 hours
Theme: Listening to the voices of the more-than-human world; through stillness, a vigil, and mythic descent.
Mythic Thread: The myth of Persephone’s descent into the underworld - and her eating of six pomegranate seeds - as a portal to embodiment and belonging to the cycles of light and dark.

I. Opening Circle (30 minutes)

Purpose: Frame the experience, prepare for inward reflection, and set the ritual container.

Elements & Facilitator Guidance:

• Setting of intention: We descend into darkness, stepping out during the liminal window where day falls into night. This time of transition heightens our senses beyond sight and opens us to the deeper rhythms of the world, inviting us to attune to what lies beyond visible perception.

• Mythic framing Persephone’s Descent: We turn to the story of Persephone’s descent. Reframed outside the claws of patriarchy : this is not a tale of naive capture, Persephone is not tricked; she chooses. It is about the conscious decision to give up innocence for experience, virginity for the creative, sexual life force, and about the gift of loss; opening the way to initiation into life’s deeper mysteries. She eats the pomegranate seeds as an affirmation of her own will, like Eve biting the apple, not as sin, but as an opening to an embodied, soulful existence, a marriage between the dark and light parts of life. By choosing communion with darkness,Persephone awakens to the depth, complexity, and mystery of life, and to the mythopoetic fabric that threads her being with the soul of the world. Through sitting with the dark, with death and decay, she becomes a bridge between the underworld and the earth; a carrier of wisdom.The seeds are her entry into consciousness. She bites them willingly, stepping across the threshold of innocence into the richness of experience, choosing initiation, awakening, and connection to the unseen, the animate, and the sacred world around her.
  

• Props for your vigil: Six pomegranate seeds, a notebook and pen, outdoor clothing

• Seed explanation: “In myth, Persephone ate six seeds, binding her to the underworld for six months. On this vigil, each seed stands as a doorway, a question, or an offering.”

The six seeds:

1. Descent : What is calling me to the depths?

2. Silence : What if I release the need to control or understand, and simply listen?

3. Death : What in me is ending, composting, decaying?

4. Voices : Which voices around and within me are speaking, what do they say/ask?

5. Presence : How do I belong to this moment, to this land?

6. Return : What gift do I bring back from the dark?

Ritual gesture:

Hold the seeds in silence, sensing what each one stirs within you. While you are out, choose which seed or seeds to sit with. Eat the seed of the question you wish to enter as a symbolic act of descent, an opening to that inquiry.

II. Solitude in Nature (60 minutes)

Purpose: To open a conversation with darkness and the more-than-human world, listening deeply, and allowing the mythic and symbolic seeds to guide reflection and insight.

Instructions:

• Go alone, silently, to a place in nature where you feel called.

• Take your six pomegranate seeds, your notebook and a pen

• Sit or stand in one spot (you may move gently within your immediate space), letting your senses open beyond sight.

Seed Guidance:

For each seed, pause and attune:

• Descent : What is calling me to the depths?

• Silence : What if I release the need to respond, and simply listen?

• Death : What in me is ending, composting, decaying?

• Voices : Which voices around and within me are speaking, and what do say/ask?

• Presence : How do I belong to this moment, to this land?

• Return : What gift do I bring back from the dark?
  

* Eat the seed that corresponds to the question(s) you most wish to explore ( 1 at a time ). This is a symbolic act of descent, opening your attention and intention to that inquiry.

* Use your notebook for reflections, or allow your experience to remain wordless. Let the dark itself, the day ending and the shadowed space around you, become your teacher.

* Remain in your spot for the full hour, moving gently if you need to, or simply sitting and breathing with the natural surroundings.

BEFORE COMING BACK !!

1. Before leaving your spot and returning to the circle, leave an offering ( and your remaining seeds ) as a gesture of gratitude and reciprocity toward the land and the more-than-human world.

2. Bring one physical thing back to the circle. An object, a poem, a drawing,…

Notes / Reminders:

• Silence is essential: no conversation, no phones.

• Pick your spot consciously, and ask permission of the place *remember it is relational.

• There is no “right” way to do this or an expected experience. Trust whatever arises; it is your own process.

III. Return and Closing Vigil (30 minutes)

Purpose: To gather collectively, honor insights and encounters, and close the cycle of descent and return.

1. Gathering

• Participants return to the circle silently.

• As each person arrives, they light their candle to mark the transition from the solo vigil back into the communal space. This creates a growing circle of light and presence.

• Take a few breaths together, grounding in the collective container again.

2. Reflection / Sharing Focus on the sixth seed :
Return / What gift do I bring back from the dark?

• Each participant may offer something tangible they brought back. A written word, poem, song, object…

• There is room for but no expectation/obligation to explain; the circle simply witnesses each person’s emergence from the vigil.

• Once shared, candles or objects can be placed in the center of the circle, forming a symbolic hearth of gifts gathered from the dark. This takes place after each person has offered their insight or object, creating a collective focal point for the closing ritual.
  

3. Closing Ritual

• A collective acknowledgment of the return in song/sound, poetry, movement, or other gesture of gratitude, either facilitated or co-created by the group.

• Take a few final breaths together, honoring the descent, dialogue with darkness, and the gifts each person brought into the collective field.