Cassandra Louise Ellis is the human behind Be With Cassandra. Check out what Cassandra is up to right now.
Be With Cassandra initiates experiments in change and belonging, held by nature.
Why change?
Transitions fascinate Cassandra.
Whether it's witnessing a child shifting from playing on the playground to getting into the car to go home, experiencing societal upheavals, or pivoting from one career to another, each transitional experience--each change--brings abundant wisdom and knowledge to us.
Living through COVID pandemic was the push Cassandra needed to delve into learning with and about change in all its forms. So much goodness can arise when we stretch and strengthen our muscles to be with change rather than allow habitual patterning and fear to unconsciously guide us to resisting change.
Why belonging?
Often, Cassandra oscillates between the feelings of loneliness and of deep interconnectedness. She wonders why this is so for her--and many others.
Multiple studies have been conducted about the 'loneliness epidemic' taking hold of our current society, particularly in the United States of America. Living within an American perspective, Cassandra witnesses the dismal lack of a social safety net when she drives past encampments of unhoused neighbors in Seattle or walks past stressed out parents stuck in the endless loop of working long hours to pay for expensive childcare.
Belonging comes in many forms--belonging to yourself and your body, belonging to your home and family, belonging to your place, belonging to a community or organization, belonging to our Earth Mother. Cassandra experiments with both the micro (the individual, the family unit) and the macro (the societal, the planetary) of belonging.
We step in and out of groups of all sorts (a class, a grade in school, a learning environment, a friend group, a company, a neighborhood, a city) our entire lives and often move through it quite unconsciously.
Why not become more aware of our movements between and amongst different realms of belonging?
Why nature?
Nature reminds Cassandra of both the concept of change and the concept of belonging--and urges Cassandra to remember that change and belonging are not mere concepts but alive, fecund experiences!
Nature reminds Cassandra that she--and you reading this page right now--are also nature. Cassandra's experiments in change and belonging are nourished by nature in all her forms--by visiting the decomposing owl in the nearby forest, by witnessing the hummingbirds drink flower nectar out beyond her desk window, by moving with the circadian rhythms of the day and the infradian rhythms of the month, and so many more.