BONNIE LOEWEN
Photo by Art Turner
At the beginning, I was on a well-trodden path. A masters of divinity in hand, I was walking towards ordination. Then I encountered a fork in the road and made a turn.
I chose the ways of circle.
Seeking circle’s generative models of leadership and gathering, I found communal places to belong. I also sought out personal practices that awakens “being beloved”.
I share these practices by participating in a weekly community circle, facilitating public retreats and tending to my commitment to reconciliation.
For those wanting to know
a little more…
I live on a Manitoba prairie farm perched on a small hill where
I can see the sunrise and sunset begin and end the day;
I can take that step out my front door and be beneath a night’s sky speckled with billions of stars or the clearest blue of a sun filled day.
In the midst of these gifts, I knit and read and drink latte’s through the cold of our winters and garden and tend to the children and farmers of this yard through the long days of our summers.
I love to gather people together for community events and celebrations in the small rooms of our big house and in the outdoor rooms that surround our home.
I have a thirty plus year love relationship with the game of volleyball. As a player turned coach, these days I work with a delightful group of 15 year old girls who come from 9 different rural towns across south eastern Manitoba.
I can do all of this, daily, alongside my family, including my two grandchildren, who live down the hill of the farm yard.
Photo by Art Turner
My place deepens in relationship to this community, its land and the story it holds.
Mark’s (my husband) great grandparents built the original house and barns. Among many indigenous maple and poplar trees on this yard, Mark’s grandfather planted the willow tree that spans 50 feet across the back yard.
The prairie grasses that grow on the unbroken land, the song of the the owl and the eagles, the howl of the den of foxes remind me that this homeland belongs to the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Anishiniw, Ininiw (Cree) and Dakota as well as the birthplace of the Metis Nation and the Heart of the Métis Homeland, the four and two-legged ones whom we agreed to respect in the agreement of Treaty one.
To be awake with kindness and curiosity about my place in this world, on this farmyard, with my neighbours and Treaty one, I know that harsh limitations and emboldened expectations can batter being beloved. With the experience of rejection and social pressure to be what I am not, I believe and lean into the practices of tending to being beloved and by doing so, invite others to theirs.
Photo by Art Turner