She writes “My sometime co-host, Calvin University biologist David Koetje, reflected on the season with me in the final episode and noted the variety of cultural, spiritual, and ecological refugia my guests had described. Refugia are by definition small, local, and particular to the context. Yet taken together, they start to add up to larger shifts….
Similarly, as we struggle in these “tender times,” we may not perceive right away what new patterns are emerging. Ruth Harvey urged us to be attentive to those patterns as well as to the flashes of insight the Spirit might give. She spoke of the Welsh term cynefin (kin-EV-n), which is a way of describing the habitat created in human cultural systems. What cultural and spiritual habitats are we creating or receiving?...
This reminds me that in the natural world, disturbance is necessary to keep an ecosystem alive and thriving. We seem to be in a period of immense disturbance right now. Much will have to be dismantled and destroyed, including in the church. What will persist? Where are the refugia to be found? What infrastructures can we consciously build?”
I really like those ideas. What new cynefyn are we giving birth to in our own small settings of family and community and how might all these storms, big and small, be creating new conditions for human flourishing?