Touching Grief, Touching Earth – A Solstice Retreat
with Margaret McCallum and Jaime Howell
16 – 21st June 2026
We are entering a time of descent. These are times marked by gravity, extremes, and polarisation. We are being invited into conversations that include loss, grief, death, uncertainty, vulnerability — and possibility. This time on Earth can be understood as an initiation into a more mature way of being human.
Francis Weller, alongside others, names this time the Long Dark. From the perspective of soul, down is holy ground. Down runs counter to the assumptions of progress — getting ahead, climbing ladders, accumulating success. Hidden within those habits is the painful illusion that we are separate from the Earth and from the living systems that sustain us.
So how do we meet these unpredictable times with courage, steadiness, and trust? We enter the still time of the Winter Solstice and slow down together as a community, resting into silence, deep listening, and simple presence.
This five-day retreat is an exploration of the apprenticeship of grief — learning how to turn towards what is difficult, rather than away from it; learning how to be shaped by not-knowing, restraint and humility as acts of reverence.
We will explore the resources and support available to us in Earth, in the Ancestors, and in the Benevolence of Life itself. Through an embodied refuge practice taught by Thich Nhat Hanh, shaped by Tarchin Hearn, and woven into an Open Floor movement practice by Jaime, we will be helped to remember that we are Earth. Body, feelings and mind together assist this ecological awakening.
The role of mature humans — true adults — is to honour our place within the unbroken ecology of life by tending rituals of gratitude and renewal that sustain our relationships with the living, breathing world. This retreat is one such tending.
There will be solo time in the varied natural landscape of the Wangapeka Retreat Centre, alongside shared time for meals, song, movement, silence, conversation, and play.
Your guides for this retreat are
Margaret McCallum — author of books on loss and dying and how to be with it all, and a long-time guide of others through threshold times, and
Jaime Howell — wilderness rites-of-passage guide, meditator, and artist of word, sound, and movement.
Margaret McCallum
Margaret’s life journey has been one of learning to face into the many ‘little deaths’ (not always so little) that have come her way, allowing all the associated emotions and questions their place, and coming to rest in the newness that in time ensues.
This has honed in her a capacity to walk alongside others, whatever their sorrows, calamities or uncertainties, holding a steady and gentle space.
Her books, Hello, Little Death:welcoming ‘dying’ to allow a fuller life, and Soul Midwife’s Journal: stories of honouring death, offer food for thought and new perspectives, and have become the basis of many transformative group explorations.
Margaret thrives in the community-creating and generative environments that retreats and workshops offer.
She finds replenishment in being anywhere nature is found – walking, lying, gardening and swimming.
Jaime Howell
Jaime is moved to be a part of the continuing conversation to help humans reconnect with their belonging and the passion to live connected to their deepest purpose and gift.
The old maps no longer work, and the new ones are not yet formed. Jaime is drawn toward older intelligences — in body, psyche, land, and community — and toward what might be called an instinct for wholeness.
Jaime is the founder and director of the charitable trust, the Centre for the Great Turning. The trust develops nature-based, intergenerational residential immersions that support people in meeting grief, change, and transition with maturity and creativity. The work is shaped by descent, initiation, and the restoration of belonging, and is informed by the work of Bill Plotkin, Francis Weller, Joanna Macy, Open Floor, non-dual contemplative traditions, rites of passage, shadow work, and the creative arts, as a way of asking better questions and widening our collective imagination.
Costs/investment
Room or Hut
Member $560
Non-member $610
Camping
Member $455
Non-member $470
Information and Registration
If you would like further information, please feel welcome to contact the Course Manager: Jaime Howell – jaimeopeningminds@gmail.com
To register please fill out our online registration form
Please consider becoming a Wangapeka member – click here for details.
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