The Kindling Songs
A Participatory Song Cycle for Troubling Times
How it works ▾
The Kindling Songs is a live event that you can bring to your community, festival, venue or home. It’s also an app you can work through at home for a deeper dive. It’s not just a gig.
The songs began as authentic and hopeful responses to chaotic and troubling times. Gathered together, and inspired by Joanna Macy’s Spiral of the Work that Reconnects, the musical journey becomes an invitation to let some of that trouble in and metabolise it together.
This app is like an album, but it offers you so much more. You’ll find suggested activities along the way and the chance to reflect, alone or together. Those reflections will be gathered up, the key themes surfaced and used to gift you with bespoke kindling for your own fires — resources to inspire and nourish you through times of rapid change.
- Move at your own pace.
- Drop in or out any time.
- All activities and songs are optional.
- If you accumulate reflections, you'll receive kindling for your own fire.
- Go alone, or host an evening and go together.
▶ Watch: an introduction to The Kindling Songs ▾
🌀 The Spiral of the Work That Reconnects ▾
We are living through an age of profound social and ecological upheaval. When we turn our minds to it, we can easily get stuck in feelings of anxiety, grief, frustration, sadness, anger. When we gather in community and open our hearts to it, those feelings can be metabolised into a shared momentum to go together into the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
1st Movement · Coming from Gratitude
The spiral begins in appreciation — for the living world, for each other, for simply being here. Gratitude steadies us and opens the heart, so that what comes next can be met rather than avoided.
2nd Movement · Honouring the Pain for the World
We let ourselves feel what’s genuinely hard — grief, fear, anger, despair — without rushing past it. Joanna Macy’s insight is that this pain is evidence of love and connection, not a private failing, and that it moves through us more easily when it’s witnessed by others.
3rd Movement · Seeing with New Eyes
Having metabolised the pain rather than pushed it down, perception shifts. We start to notice we’re part of something larger than the isolated self — a web of relationship and support that was there all along.
4th Movement · Going Forth
The final turn, back out into the world. Not with answers, necessarily, but with renewed energy and a clearer sense of what’s ours to do next.
Developed by Joanna Macy over five decades · workthatreconnects.org
Part 1 · Coming from Gratitude
Grounding & Active Listening Meditation for grounding and presence ▾
Open Sentences on Gratitude — a WTR practice ▾
A practice from the Work That Reconnects · Joanna Macy & Molly Brown, Coming Back to Life (2014) · p.47 Active Hope
We begin with gratitude, for grounding and presence — not because everything is fine in the world, but because gratitude can quiet the frantic mind and remind us of our innate belonging in the world.
How it works
Do this in a group, in pairs — up to you. Maybe write things down if you're doing this solo. Read the sentence stems. Complete them in your own words. Keep talking spontaneously for 2–3 minutes — time it. Listen attentively to one another. No verbal responses required. Listening without comment is as important as speaking. Feel free to drop a bit of silence between the sentences, between the sharings.
The sentence stems
- Some things I love about being alive right now are...
- A place that was magical to me as a child was...
- A person who helped me believe in myself is or was...
- A moment recently when I felt genuinely present was...
- Some things I love doing and making are...
- Some things I really appreciate about myself are...
The last stem — appreciating ourselves — always comes last, so people can work up to it. No large-group sharing is needed afterwards. Three rounds of 2–3 minutes each is enough. · workthatreconnects.org