welcome to the grove

six months of collective creative devotion

Happy New Moon, everyone. On this most auspicious day, I’d like to lead us — at long last — into The Grove.

The Grove: 6 Months of Collective Creative Devotion was born out of my partner Meg Jones Wall’s and my desire to offer a space that more explicitly bridges spiritual and creative practices. We both firmly believe that creativity is spirituality is creativity; we also want to, now more than ever, decouple capitalist commitments to “productivity” from our relationship to creative spirit.

If, as Mary Oliver wrote, “attention is the beginning of devotion,” then we start here: taking our first steps into the trees — together.

And so, my friends, if you have been burned out — and burned by traditional artistic spaces. If you haven't been able to find the time in your own calendar for more spiritual rituals, and are craving community support and accountability.If you are curious about introducing more spirituality into your creative work, but aren't sure where to start. If you do better as an artist when you're doing a program. If you are looking for a long-term space in which to build supportive routines and condition your creative muscles.

Then we’d like to invite you into The Grove: a long-term container in which to dedicate yourself to the spiritual practices that support your creative work.

You'll be held by us, by the other participants, by your commitment to doing this for six months. Sounds like a long time, but in my experience, the longer a container or class, the deeper you go, the more life changes you experience. And so we are going to spend half a year together — from late January to late July 2025 — with our activities, lectures, and rituals organized around a gardening, grove-tending theme:

• Before the Container: Stake Your Plot

• Month 1: Examining the Soil

• Month 2: Choosing Our Seeds

• Month 3: Distributing Fertilizer

• Month 4: Time to Water

• Month 5: Assessing Weeds

• Month 6: Harvest

Within the different monthly themes, we will have check-ins that you can opt into every week:

• A live beginning-of-month intention setting ritual & guided meditation

• Two live 2-3 hour accountability art-making/writing sessions a month (akin to Jeanna's Showing Up to the Work containers)

• One recorded lecture/workshop per month, pertaining to the relationship between creativity and an animistic spirituality, which may also include suggested spells or tarot spreads, to be explored on your own time, at your own leisure

• A private Discord community/server, moderated by us, open 24/7

These kind of experiential, experimental containers are powerful, but the outcomes are also so profoundly personal. Some may take away more comfort with ritual spiritual practices that can support their projects. Some may take away the relationships and community born of sharing space with like-hearted folk. Some may find healing from academia and other Enlightenment-inflected institutions in a community of artists and writers that also believe in, or seek, Something More.

On what I mean by “spirituality”

In animistic, New Age, witchcraft, and “woo woo” corners of the internet, what constitutes “spirituality” is very much in the eye of the beholder. I will take the risk in positing that the vast majority of those who consider themselves “spiritual” are interested in, or experience, that which cannot be touched or explained by the five material senses.

But spirituality is not exclusive to those outside of organized religion, either. When I was a Christian, I called myself “spiritual but not religious” — evangelical speak to emphasize that I was into the “personal relationship” side of things more so than the legalese of church theology and doctrine. In hindsight, I was also profoundly religious: I had specific beliefs about deity that were accompanied and deepened by participation in organized individual and collective ritual. I attended church, studied sacred texts, and, as a teenager, engaged in highly ritualized personal prayer at my local graveyard (although I wouldn’t have known to call it “ritualized” at the time).

And so I want to be clear that “spiritual” is a word and an idea that can include many things. Your idea of spirituality might encompass practices like astrology, tarot, and numerology, but maybe it doesn’t. Your idea of spirituality may be born out of your religious faith. Your idea of spirituality may encompass deity relationships. Or perhaps you resonate more with ideas of energy and cycles than you do higher beings. Perhaps you’re more into connecting with your local land and your ancestors than the planets or stars. Maybe you, like Chris Rock’s character in Dogma, are more into ideas than beliefs.

It’s all welcome. To me, spirituality is synonymous with an open-hearted curiosity about the world beyond that which we can materially touch. The Grove is tradition-agnostic and will offer meditations, prayers, tarot spreads, and other supports that can be tailored to your specific beliefs, practices, and spirit relationships (and if you’re wondering “what is a spirit relationship?”... we can get into that in The Grove!).

Because I do believe in offering specifics as to where I’m coming from, I want to offer a brief summary of my own spiritual and faith background:

I grew up in deeply strict, conservative churches within evangelical Christianity, which I wrote about in my memoir Heretic. And so I place a high premium on freewill and am critical of suggestions of “fate” that smack of predestination. I left the church, and my Christian faith, almost 13 years ago. Since then, both tarot and astrology — which I initially approached as mindfulness practices — have led me to a more animistic worldview, one that encompasses ancestor veneration, planetary prayer, relationships with spirits of the land and home, and deity worship (I do not publicly discuss my specific Spirit relationships).

but I do apparently get photographed doing candle rituals for the New York Times

These days, what I practice might be called relational astrology; I’m discussing planetary prayers and offerings with clients as often as I am the technicalities of their chart. I’m of a mind that the everyday mundane can be as magical as ceremonial ritual. In this, my primary teacher has been

Briana Saussy

, although I have also learned so very much from my friends and colleagues Diana Rose Harper, Pallas Augustine, Siri Plouff,

Amaya Rourke

, Mecca Woods,

Maeg Keane

, and Sasha Ravitch as well as the work of Daniel Foor,

Courtney Weber

, Kaitlin Coppock, and Morgan Daimler. And, of course, from my love Meg Jones Wall, who is my creative partner in The Grove itself.

Some of my own personal practices that I will almost certainly be including in The Grove, in tradition-inclusive form, include:

• Ancestor Veneration for those of us with complicated family histories (especially queer folks & those experiencing familial estrangement)

• Altar/Shrine Building & Tending (in particular for our creative projects + the spirits of our projects)

• Planetary devotion (and charity)

• Candle Magic

• Developing your own correspondences & omens

• & more

If you have questions about the spirituality component of The Grove, please do not hesitate to reach out to me over email: jeannakadlecauthor [at] gmail [dot] com. (Note that I have had email responses to Substack newsletters turned off for more than a year, and so any response directly to this email will not reach me.)

The Nitty Gritty Details

Early Bird pricing ($777, or 7 payments of $111) is open until December 31st. We are committed to having a lower price available — with a generous payment plan — for this first session of The Grove both because we're in a recession and because this is our first-ever joint container! As of January 1, pricing will be $999, or 4 payments of $250.

Participants will have access to tarot spreads and preparation resources in mid-January, before The Grove begins, to support your easing into our collective time together. The Discord will also open in mid-January. The last day to sign up is January 28, 2025.

The Grove: 6 Months of Collective Creative Devotion officially opens with our first live meeting on Wednesday, January 29, 2025 with the New Moon in Aquarius.

Since we will be polling participants for preferred days/times, the specific time of the opening live Zoom is TBD!, as are the specific dates/times for the beginning-of-the-month lives and 2x/month work sessions. We will aim to have live sessions that work for the majority of participants, and they will be recorded for accessibility/ participants' edification.

The Grove will close the last week of July 2025 with a live closing ritual.

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I promise I’m not gonna send too many sales emails — but please do be patient with the promotion cycle, as this is my livelihood.

Your regularly scheduled programming will resume shortly.