The art of the learning village

— A lived inquiry into trust, pace, and remembering our humanity

We opened the year with a Learning Village gathering. Learning - or remembering together - the art of 'learning villag'ing'.

Sixty people came from across the world to Kufunda, into a gathering where we let the land hold us and where we created a simple structure to hold: celebration, space, and an invitation - for each person to bring their gifts, their questions and their longings into the collective.

In that cauldron, the conditions were set for something seemingly very simple, yet surprisingly profound: remembering our humanity. Together.

So simple. And yet, utterly radical.

Before arriving people kept asking, What’s the programme? 

And we kept answering, We make the programme.

That is the art of the Learning Village

What stays with me are moments:

• the 7 am morning dance - so much joy in that togetherness,

• the hosho (shakers) holding the mbira - a primal sounding steady and trustworthy,

• Shelani’s fire dance in the depth of the night - harnessing the beauty of the fire

• Daily time by 'our' tree - in listening and waking to the support of nature

• Daily art making - expressing what is moving Here Now

We stepped into a river of life together.

Delphine Oliver from South Africa reflected afterwards:

“I said yes to a week at the Village Gathering at Kufunda Learning Village without an agenda — only with the wish to lean into community and see what might return.

What I found was simple and profound. Days shaped by shared meals, long conversations, dance, music, time in nature, art, laughter, silence.

No optimisation. No fixing. Just people practising how to be human together.

Slowly, the hum returned.

Not as a rush or a high, but as a quiet settling. A feeling of being more inside my body again. More present. More available to life.”

What made our week together radical was the trust.

Trust that if we created the space for each person to follow a deeper impulse, something of real value could emerge.

Trust that we didn’t have to over-structure and plan every moment, or be guided by predetermined outcomes.

Trust that community, connecting with nature and each other is not only enough, but that opening to that actually allows something miraculous to unfold in the space between us.

And it did.

And it did.

One of our visitors, Martalia Lo, who joined us from Cambodia, wrote afterwards about what she encountered.

She had arrived exhausted, frustrated, disoriented — delayed flights, lost luggage, challenges at the border. And then she wrote, in her own words:

“At Kufunda, I was welcomed with lots of smiles, held by friends, celebrated through the rhythms of mbira, hosho and ngoma, loud and joyful songs; it made me move and dance regardless of how I look. I have arrived not as a guest but officiated as part of a community…It doesn’t take much to feel alive actually; food, laughter, music and dancing, the warm embrace of others.”

What struck Martalia most was the reversal of expectation:

“In the learning gathering at Kufunda, our expert guest speakers were

THE TREE, SOIL, WATER, AIR, FIRE

The rigid construct of planning and structure from what I’ve experienced before in other places

or events, were replaced with offerings, open space, co-creating, breathing, dancing, cooking,

art-ing, massaging, and clay masking using COW DUNG!"

Her reflection ended with remembering - that resonates with me and many others in the gathering:

“I am human, I am nature, I belong to a family, a community"

Another participant, Dion Mukapi, wrote in a poem of how this week of shared offering taught them that:

“We are everything we need.”

Together we discovered what becomes possible when trust and presence are placed at the centre.

This is the lived inquiry we are attending to now at Kufunda. 

Asking, and living, the questions: 

What truly becomes possible when we trust? 

What are the conditions that allow that trust to unfurl in shared community?

We lived it for a week.

What would it mean to live this each day? 

What would it mean to live it in your day?

We are learning something about pace. About pause.

How might we create more moments of stopping together — long enough for tree, wind, water, and rock to be our teachers?

How might we create more openings where each person finds their way to bring their gifts, their resources, their presence fully into offering?

These are simple questions.

And perhaps the answers are simpler than we know. 

Simpler than we know.

Simpler than we know.