Virtual Program
From 7:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.
Gathering Council is a guided exploration of extended cognition and the idea that thinking is not confined to the brain, but emerges through our relationships with body, environment, and community. This program invites participants to reimagine illness, ecological instability, and social upheaval not as isolated crises, but as entangled experiences that can deepen perception and connection. Through reflective dialogue and embodied practices, we will explore how intelligence is distributed across systems, human and more-than-human, and how attuning to these wider networks can offer new pathways for meaning, resilience, and collective care.
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.