Week 14 2024-2025 in Review

Dear TCC Families,

In our final week of the year together, we feasted! We brought together several weeks of planning and preparation to enjoy a multi-faceted meal - C's plans to cook up kimchi, dumplings, and lo mein came together with flourish and fanfare along with many eager helping hands.

Cooking is such a connecting, bustling, busy experience here, rich with so much opportunity for planning, communication, conversation, connection, negotiation, flexibility, clean-up, and more. We cherish these opportunities to create and gather with food at the center!

The forest also brought us together for our annual winter ritual in the glen. Early in the week we prepared by stringing popcorn and cranberries to create edible garlands. Thursday we traveled to the same glen we always do, near our chosen cedar. We shared the story Night Tree by Eve Bunting, about a family's winter ritual with a special chosen forest tree, and talked about the seasonal shifts and symbolism of the upcoming winter solstice. We hung the popcorn and cranberry garlands on our tree, expressing gratitude for what this land offers us and holds for us in our time together here. What might we offer in return? One of our favorite touchpoints is returning to the tree to see which more-than-human-kin may have enjoyed our offerings.

One of the many gifts that makes what we do at TCC so special is the privilege we have to interact with and be held by the land here in so many ways. If we pay attention, it can show us the way. The trees, the creatures, the forest itself remind us: this season is a time for rest, for reflection, for turning inward and moving with introspection, rather than frantic goal-setting, productivity, or performance. 

As we close 2024 and enter into a new calendar year, we're grateful for these experiences and all of the reflection and deep connection they offer us. We are eager to begin anew in January, with plans for ongoing reflection, intention, growth, and expansion. We're humbled every day in this work, and by the gift of practicing futures and building new worlds of possibility together. Thank you for choosing to be here, and for choosing to do something different, with us, and with young people. 

We do this work together.

With gratitude and care,

Emily, Sarah, and Zoey