May 2026 Newsletter
Last chance to join the June UK Midsummer ceremony, pre-order the Second Renaissance Magazine now, and updates from Over The Mountains and our residency journey.
Last chance to join the UK Midsummer 2026 Ceremony & Gathering
Depth and connection are calling you!
Don’t miss the Midsummer celebration on June 20th at the Kelston Hilltop to share discussions, food, and live music together. Everyone is welcome.
Deep conversation, connection with the land, and open exploration, if this sounds like you, then we are waiting to see you there for the full Midsummer gathering from Friday 19th to Sunday 21st of June.
Members from all parts of the Life Itself ecosystem are coming together to explore what it means to cultivate a radically wiser world through walking, talking, and cooking together.
Saturday 20th June — Midsummer Celebration - Celebrate the Solstice with us!
If you can’t be with us for the whole gathering, you are welcome to celebrate the solstice with us on Saturday, with a ceilidh with live band in the evening!
🏡 Roundhill Barn, Kelston, Bath
Optional early arrival Thursday 18th & departure Sunday 21st June
Summer solstice ceremony and live music on Saturday, open to all.
Rates : from £75 (pay-what-you-can options available on request)
Pre-order the Second Renaissance Magazine now!
The clock is ticking before MYTHOS Magazine’s official release. We are proud to present our independent publication, a rich tapestry of essays, visual art, and poetry, weaving past and future into dialogue.
Featured contributors include contemporary artists such as Ronja Røvardotter, Vladyslav Chabanenko, Jack Tazem, and Guillaume Pascale, alongside thinkers including Jim Palmer, Rupert Read, and Schuyler Brown.
In an age of paradigm shift, myths are never neutral. They shape what we keep, what we remember, and what we call sacred.
MYTHOS invites you to slow down and reflect on the narratives that form our lives—and the stories we are now ready to reclaim, renew, or leave behind.
Pre-order the single issue for €45
Subscribe for the yearly Second Renaissance Magazine for €40
(prices include shipping)
Over The Mountains Podcast
This month, Rufus spoke to Dougald Hine, writer, social thinker, and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, about acknowledging that which is ending and regrowing a living culture.
Sylvie met up with Xavier Snelgrove, AI expert and co-creator of Orbital Studies, to discuss thoughtful approaches to technology and writing our own stories about the future of AI. Listen to them here:
Meeting those hosting the transition
Valérie Duvauchelle shares about the first gathering for people hosting retreats, hubs, and co-living spaces for social change.
It is in Spain, near Barcelona, that Sylvie, co-founder of Life Itself, and I, conscious co-living residency host and designer, attended the first El Camino gathering.
The idea came from Richard D. Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo, co-founders of Microsolidarity and the Hum, to welcome us in their new venue, together with 11 spaces that host people working in the field of social change.
The purpose was simple: how can we share and support each other’s path in the often exciting, yet also challenging, enterprise of hosting retreats, workshops, and residencies?
Present were people from Liminal Village, Emerge Lakefront, Feytopia, among others — some we already knew as they had come through the hub, and some we discovered for the first time: Maysou co-living, Traditional Dream Factory, and people from all over the world.
While the main prompt was how to support collective communication, it quickly became clear that what we all needed most was a support network — a place to share our sweat and tears, and above all, a place to recharge. It turned out that we simply found friends, with little energy left to talk about marketing — which was brilliant. We all benefited so much from this time of regeneration among like-minded people that an obvious decision was made: we will do it again in 6 months!
The questions that arose during the collective intelligence circle — proposed by our hosts — turned, in my perception, well beyond the pragmatics of running a space, toward the blind spots related to inclusivity. We all began our journey of hosting people with the belief that if we articulated clearly what our space was about, the right people would come. Well, at Life Itself we know that is not true — some people are willing to come without truly being ready for community, or simply for the wrong reasons. And if we don’t skillfully identify them beforehand, or don’t plan for the possibility of saying goodbye to them with kindness, it can jeopardize the entire group experience. The “equality complex” is definitely a real subject, and one we know well at Life Itself.
Overall, this experience was truly encouraging. We found that we had already moved past many of those blind spots — for instance, not asking too much of people when we ourselves cannot yet sustain ourselves properly — and that was deeply reassuring, affirming our direction of praxis ecology and a secular monastic mindset for our residencies, alongside shorter formats where the human factor is less of a concern.
We left so happy, feeling that we had found new friends who share both our values and have gained tremendous experience in different ways of doing things (including around food for shorter gatherings).
And moreover, we felt so excited at the prospect that every six months we could visit all those wonderful places around the world. Our wonderful host Richard D Bartlett wrote about the themes that struck him the most during the gathering, check it out here:
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