Words Before All Else
Beginning by naming what is already here
Set a group's attention on the living world before the human agenda begins, so that everything discussed afterwards is discussed in company.
- Duration
- 10–30 min
- Group size
- Any
- Setting
- outdoors
- Energy
- still
Almost every gathering opens with the humans: names, expectations, logistics. This opens with everything else first.
A note on where this comes from, which is part of the method and not a disclaimer. The Thanksgiving Address is a specific, living ceremony of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, with its own words, its own order and its own protocols. It is not a template. What is offered here is the shape of that practice — greeting the world before greeting the agenda — with your own place and your own words. If you are moved by it, the right move is to read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s account of it in Braiding Sweetgrass and to name the source out loud to your group, not to recite a borrowed text.
How it runs
- Stand outside, in the open if you can.
- A facilitator names one presence at a time, slowly, with a sentence of what it gives: the ground under us; the water that came here before we did; the plants growing within sight; the birds; the wind today; the sun; the people who tended this place before us.
- After each, the group answers together with an agreed phrase — the traditional sense is now our minds are one. Agree your own on the first morning.
- Finish. Do not explain it. Go into the day.
Facilitator notes
- Name only what is actually present and visible. Greeting “the ocean” three hundred kilometres inland turns it into performance.
- Five presences done attentively beats fifteen recited.
- On day one, explain the source. From day two, just do it.
- It works as a closing as well as an opening.
