Updates

Eros is energy.

It is life force, creativity, cathexis to aliveness.

It moves. It demands movement.

It does not have to be sex, though it certainly and delightfully can be!

And when it is sex, it does not have to look any particular way.

Eros is abundant, it lives everywhere.

It is especially alive and fecund in community, in the interplay between we human-apes in the context of our brilliant villages. It is nutritious. It is healing. It is our birthright and strengthens our primate bonds of trust and reciprocal care and connection.

And in our villages and tribes, Eros is especially present in dance; the moments when we shed our linear minds and engage in our bodies’ unquenchable capacity for expression. When we dance we are sending an erotic beacon out to the world…here we are, let’s be alive with each other!

With permission and invitation to dance consciously and intentionally with your full erotic self, what will you do? With invitation to lay bare your desire, your truth, your aliveness how will move?

DanceEros is an erotic inclusive ecstatic dance space where Movement, Eros and Community are invited into the room to play together in safety, consensuality and sanity.

It is a place where Eros is understood as a personal and community resource to be expressed as desired rather than withheld.

It is a place where the agenda of objectification is invited to the back of the room and the awareness of attunement and improvisation are invited up to have their say.

It is a place where we summon Eros through ourselves first as a possible prelude to moving it with others…not missing ourselves in our hurry to get to another.

We invite Eros in through the front door, in the daylight to tea…
rather than sneaking her in on the sly, unowned and unnamed, through the back door.

We invite Eros into the room however she arrives; from the subtle to the overt, from the sexual to the sensual, from the solo to the communal.

So, with permission and invitation to move Eros in community…
what will you do? Shall we find out together?

Applications due at the end of June.

Be-Coming – August 14th through August 18th

Text by Victor Warring
Photo by Bertil Nilsson

One of the few scheduled group activities during Be-Coming is the Bonobo Feast. The feast honors our closest genetic relative in the primate world. Bonobos are an ape with whom we share 98% of our genetic make-up. They are also an inspiration for a type of relating that could be possible among humans.

Bonobos are a peaceful species, ruled by a matriarchy, who engage in a rich suite of non-competitive and shared sexual experiences for bonding, relaxing, and procreating. Bonobos demonstrate it is possible to have a peaceful, sexually liberated, egalitarian society.

To celebrate the possibility these primate cousins open for us, we throw a feast in their honor! Practicing the egalitarian aspects of their society, the feast is designed and created by all of the attendees. While the chef creates the feast, everyone else decides how it unfolds, looks and feels, and how we celebrate.

The first year of the feast, the attendees adorned the room with a majestic mandala created from the flora of the surrounding forest, candles, statues, and pillows. Dinner started with appetizers served off the naked bodies of gracious feminine platters. We hand-fed the next course to each other in pairs and enjoyed an erotically-playful salad. A favorite quote of the evening was: “I’ve never before had to take three showers during a single meal!”

Play, laughter, lightness, and pleasure are important elements of a free and peaceful society. Be-Coming is a container to experiment, practice, and discover. What happens when we re-imagine simple things like how we eat together? What about more complex things, like how we relate with one another? How would you like to create a more beautiful world for all inhabitants on this planet? 

Join us in experimentation and discover your inner Bonobo. 

Applications due at the end of June. 

Be-Coming – August 14th through August 18th

Be-Coming is a love child of ritual, festival, and un-conference.

In ritual, we open and close the container to create a safe, sacred, magical space in which to explore.

As a festival, there are offerings in which you can partake: guided re-wilding, dancing, feasting, and a self-pleasuring ceremony.

Like an un-conference, there are significant portions of unstructured time in which to independently explore, or co-create.

Be-Coming attendees are a curated group of trustworthy and dedicated adventurers. Each aware of their own sovereignty, attempting to honor their “Hell, yes” as much as their felt “no.” Participants bring their unique wild animal body, relationship to the more-than-human world, life experiences, and desires. All share a common love for the world, an interest in exploring and learning, and longing to expand their capacity for connection.

At Be-Coming, we view no one as expert, and no one as lacking – needing to be taught. We are all intimate with our own history and longings. We invite everyone to bring what they have to offer and to dive deep and ask for what they want to experience. This can be a difficult as we have been filled most our lives with “should and shouldn’t,” or subscribe to the cultural definitions of “appropriateness.” Do you believe you can have what you desire without shame?

To support this important relating to self, we encourage everyone to utilize the desires and offerings board. The offerings are things you’d like to contribute, to facilitate, to co-create. The desires are your heart and body’s deepest longings of things to experience, fantasies to fulfill, or adventures to undertake. The edge for many, is sharing those offerings and desires. Whether they are realized is inconsequential to the growth that occurs from exposing our truths.

Prior offerings included a river float, genital gazing, and a group healing session. Multi-handed massage abounded on the desire list, which also included primal sexy wrestling and conscious kink.

What are you feeling called to offer? Can you find your full yes to what you want to contribute? Can you allow yourself the possibility that you don’t have to contribute anything? What makes you the most nervous to offer?

What are you deeply desiring? What might be possible to experience in a container like this? What might you experience on wild land with complete privacy? What makes you the most nervous to ask for? What do you limit yourself from receiving?

How committed are you to your aliveness, expansion, and de-shaming? We have created the ideal container in which to find out.

The application process for this summer’s event is open until the end of June.

What kind of experience will you have?

Be-Coming – August 14th through August 18th, 2021

We have been…

Watching. Waiting. Praying. Unfurling. Flowing. Planning. Scheming. Dreaming. Wondering.

As a result, we are moving forward with our plans to host Be-Coming this summer, Saturday August 14th through Wednesday, August 18th.

The importance of returning to the wild, returning to our animal bodies, returning to connection with humans and more-than-humans feels more vital than ever after the last year. Could your body use time to unwind, to lay upon the soil, to dip in the cold water, and to give and receive human touch?

We are calling in souls who want to be part of this “feel-tank”… a sequestered crucible of curiosity where we encounter the wild, each other, and ourselves naked and alive. Is your soul hearing the call?

The be-coming.org website has been updated with new information on the Liminalia location (same place, new name!), covid discussion, cost, and an application form to express your interest in attending.

We elected to shift the dates as well. By popular request, we added an extra day, we are starting on a Saturday so you don’t have to drive in Friday traffic, and we pushed it to August for warmer weather and no biting flies!

Between now and the application deadline of June 30th, we hope you will hold the dates on your calendar, ask questions, invite guidance from the universe on your attendance, call in abundance, fill out your application form, and start dreaming in to what you will put up on the offerings and desires board.

If you haven’t already done so, please sign up to receive future updates.

We look forward to co-creating with you this summer.

Take off your clothes. Leave them flung about upon the couch that loves to hold souls while they cry.

Bypass the shoes on the threshold, scattered among the pile. We’ll walk barefoot through the shorn grass and manicured paths.

Hold my hand as we walk through the gate. The one that holds the vines and elk out, and the people and pets in.

The wild greets us, recognizing their kin, even if we have forgotten.

Our delight in the beauty of the forest is ringed with fear — of the plants that sting, the insects that bite, the wounds of our hearts that have never quite healed.

A mossy patch invites us to recline. You are enveloped between my body from above and the earth from below.

The sounds of water against rock, wind against leaf, tongue against tongue are indistinguishable to the deer who walks nearby.

You trace the curve of my spine. In our slowness we are surrounded with stories long since told: sawmills and small pox and scorned secrets.

What do we do with these stories? We watch. Listen. Taste the salt on each other’s cheeks. Wonder. Just how far can one break open?

The only thing that doesn’t come are the answers. What does this mean? Where do we go from here?

Our entanglement does not end when one body pulls out of the other. Or when water can no longer hear our cries. Or when moss no longer supports our weight. Where does one end, and the other begin?

We find sanctuary in the forest floor, as we are now fugitives from certainty. We linger.

Too soon, we stumble back upon our shoes and sweaters and the couch to cry upon. We don’t remember returning through the gate that divided the domestic from the wild.

And the parts of us that have been ripped wide open are soft and dark inside, fertile soil for whatever is to be-come.

A few years ago, the medical community made a shift from describing the viruses and bacteria that are shared sexually from STDs (sexually transmitted disease) to STIs (sexually transmitted infections). They made this switch because some of the most common diseases have no signs or symptoms in those who are infected. “So the sexually transmitted viruses or bacteria can be described as creating “infection,” which may or may not result in “disease.”” (American Sexual Health Association).

In this new world of Covid-19, I’d like to offer another shift — from looking at STIs as sexually transmitted infection, to socially transmitted infections. Self-isolation has become the new abstinence. Face masks, the new condom. We now do risk calculations not just when we meet a new lover, but also when we go out to get groceries.

We are not capable of living on Earth without our microbial family living in relationship with us. They digest our food inside of us in our gut, they live on our skin and eyes and they occupy our genitals. Like all creatures, some are more welcome inhabitants than others!

For the 2019 Be-Coming event, we provided all attendees with a “Sacred Scroll” — a template designed to help each person ask the question: “Who am I hosting?” The scroll was designed to inspire attendees to take the powerfully aware step of educating ourselves and our partners about who we’re hosting, without shame, stigma and alarmism. 

In a post-Covid world, we each will need to add to our scrolls our history, exposure, and risk behaviors and tolerance around social infections like Covid. My hope is that by the time of our gathering in mid-July, the U.S. will have more availability for Covid-testing, and that the need to social distance to “flatten the curve” will have decreased dramatically. There are still many unanswered questions, but I trust that answers will unfurl over the next few months.

As I sit in a house practicing physical-isolation, I’m also thinking about socially transmitted infections in a broader view: The laughter that spreads through a cuddle pile, the waves of sounds of a self-pleasure circle, the intimacy that deepens with each successive, vulnerable share in a group. These are also socially transmitted infections I want to contract at Be-Coming.

Covid-19 is giving us the opportunity to look at ourselves, and the billions of bacteria and viruses we host, in a new light. It’s also helped me look at social infections in a way that brings up fewer stories of fear and more feelings of desire. We won’t know whether Be-Coming 2020 will still occur as we envisioned, but we promise to keep you posted. In the meantime, we welcome any thoughts you have on how your thoughts are shifting towards a post-Covid world.

You are invited to join a small group of souls who wish to practice, explore, dance, collaborate, sweat, sing, create and make love in this messy, complex, alive, sacred, weird world. We come together for an erotic exploration of ways to dissolve the illusion of otherness, starting with the story of separation between earth and human, as a path towards a sustainable future for Earth and all of Earth’s inhabitants. Join us as we imagine how to shift from a story of separation to a story of interbeing, and to make the shift irresistible through conscious play, pleasure, joy, safety, purpose, intimacy, sovereignty and interdependence.  

 Our five days together will be loosely structured, lightly facilitated, and lovingly nourished. We will open the container with a re-wilding ritual — an honoring of Earth and a return to our soft animal bodies, where it is easy to remember that we and the Earth are one. Together we will relinquish our masks, calibrate our consent, and blueprint our boundaries. 
  
Several anchor events will occur including a bonobo feast and ecstatic dancing. Everyone is encouraged to co-create…. art, music, learning, ritual, movement, fantasy fulfillment, exploration, lovemaking, self-pleasuring circles, wanderings, or anything else that emerges from wild desire (including the desires and requests from the land, water, flora and fauna of our host place). 

Be-Coming 2020 will take place July 16th – 20th in Vernonia, Oregon. We are bringing together up to 25 people who want to journey and explore with each other and the Earth.

We hope you will browse this website to learn more about the event, the space, the people, and the intention. If you would like to be added to the mailing list to receive the registration materials, please e-mail us at welcome@be-coming.org and subscribe on the website to receive updated blog postings.