Dear Friends

Since December, our Holden community has experienced firsthand something increasingly familiar in our climate-changed world: beloved landscapes can change, sometimes suddenly and profoundly. There is grief in that reality. There is also an invitation to discover how we might faithfully live within this new reality. 

I have been drawn to the work of the BTS Center, an organization exploring spiritual leadership in a climate-changed world, and to Debra Rienstra’s book Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth.

“Refugia” is an ecological term for places where life endures during times of severe disruption—small pockets from which life can eventually regenerate.

I wonder if we are already seeing refugia emerge among us.

Throughout this summer, Holden has appeared in unexpected places: people gathering across the country to worship, sing, break bread, learn, laugh, and practice community. These gatherings cannot replace the Village, nor should they. But perhaps they reveal something important about resilience. Life finds places to continue. New shoots emerge.

Isaiah 58 offers a similar image of a people called to participate in restoration: “You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.” The prophet goes on to describe people who “raise up the foundations of many generations” and become “repairers of the breach.”

Perhaps this is part of our spiritual work in this season—not rushing past our ecological grief or pretending that what has been lost does not matter, but noticing and nurturing the places where life is still emerging.

Holden has long invited us into expansive Christianity, sustainability, community, and practice. Perhaps now we are discovering another dimension of those commitments: how to become communities of resilience in a changing world.  

The gatherings happening around the country may be more than temporary substitutes until we can return. They may be small refugia—pockets of connection, spiritual practice, imagination, and hope from which something new can grow.

What if Holden is teaching us (and the world) something about how communities live faithfully in a climate-changed world.

May we notice them. May we nurture them. And may we become, in Isaiah’s beautiful words, “like a watered garden”—places through which God’s life continues to flow.

Reflection Questions

1. What kind of people are we becoming through this? 
2. Where is life flowing now? What/who are we being called to nurture?

These days, curiosity about Village happenings is perhaps greater than ever. In the summer when the Village population can reach nearly 400 people, what is it like for there to be, at most, fifteen? 

The answer to this question—“What is it like?”—could be easy. In many ways, ongoing activities are “normal.” There is still dish team and an operations crew. There is still a store and a kitchen team. There is music and celebration. There is hiking. There is a craft cave. There is a community. But what is it like?  

The truth is it is impossible to tell one exact, cohesive story of what life looks like in the village this summer. There has never been one single story of Holden Village, or of any other place, for that matter. This place can awaken a rainbow of emotions, perspectives, and adventures within people, each in a distinct way. While one person finds what they have been looking for as they summit Dumbell Mountain, another does so in the quiet of their chalet, with a book to their nose, or in the sauna, sweating. Like anywhere, there are introverts and extroverts, planners and the spontaneous, night owls and early birds, logicians and feelers. Helicopter transport also dramatically shifts the dynamics of Village life every two weeks. Some folks in the village have steadied their roots as part of the core in-village team, while others are in short, two-week terms of service. The experience is versatile and dependent on multitudes of factors—a notable addition being air quality—and, as in many cases, it is exactly what you make of it. 

At any given time, it depends on the 7-15 people in the village to create the conditions they desire in the community. Holden is a place where creativity can abound and where people can practice different ways of being together on this Earth. While the village itself is beautiful and sacred, the place itself cannot force the magic of village life into existence. The villagers must choose what they will create, together, in this place. 

The Holden community inside the village continues to explore what this means, parallel to the explorations of Holden Off the Road staff and participants across the country. 

Understandably, people want to know what Holden Village is right now. But a far better question we can ask in these strange, uncertain times is: “What do we want to create, together?” 

Izzy Delaney

Community Programs Lead

Reference herein to any specific commercial products or services does not necessarily constitute or imply its

endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by Holden Village.

PHOTOS: Carl Norquist, Izzy Delaney, Ingrid Lindgren, Berti Kirkegaard, Abby Russeth Ellen Callender

Newsletter edited by Carl Norquist