The Auroch Grove

I wasn’t particularly contemplating names, when this one popped out at me. It seems to fit. I admit to having a thing about that which is absent – my previous group was Bards of the Lost Forest, a reference to the departed Forest of Arden mentioned in Shakespeare. Aurochs have long appealed to me – giant hairy cows that became extinct in the 1600s when the last one died in Poland. I feel their absence keenly. Aurochs would have made groves, their feeding and trampling clearing areas inside forests. This is important work, it’s the margins of woodland that support the most diversity of life, so the physical groves made by aurochs would have been ecologically important. When you lose a creature, you lose what it does as well. There’s a species of tree that depended on the dodo for germination. Eventually the last of those trees will disappear too.

Thus far I’ve not done much towards starting the Grove. However, with the name in place I’ve set up a google group which hopefully you can find here https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum/auroch-grove this is just for ease of communication. The only requirement for joining the Grove is that you join the egroup so that I don’t have to run round doing different things to contact different people and getting confused. Not in anyone’s interests, that. I’m very happy to have people along who have kids, and anyone else who is comfortable with there being children about – I have one too, and he’s very good at this sort of thing. People studying courses are entirely welcome, so are people not studying courses. If you’re an old hand at this and just want a group to belong to, do come along, and equally if you know very little but are interested, that’s fine.

I am not asking for commitment to turn up. I’m going to aim for monthly gatherings, maybe more if I feel like it, or someone else does… come as often or as infrequently as you are able/inclined. If you ask me to come out and don’t show up, then I’ll be grumpy.

I know it’s going to be a creative and experimental sort of group. I know that where possible, we’ll be outside, but I’m lining up places to retreat to in cases of weather. I’m interested in connecting with the land, environmental action, bardic arts, and picnics. Also cake in pretty much any and all circumstances. I also won’t be running rituals around the 8 usual points in the wheel of the year – other groups are doing that already, so I’d rather not tread on toes, and prefer to explore different narrative ideas about the seasons. The rest we can probably make up as we go along.

I don’t know when exactly we’ll be starting in terms of real world meet ups – hopefully this summer, but that kind of information will be on the egroup.