Cape Town sits at the tip of a continent that has always known how to grieve collectively, how to sing the world back into wholeness, how to hold loss and love in the same breath. It is here, on the original land of the Khoisan people, that Joanna Tomkins founded Gaia Speaking in 2020 — bringing Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects into the heart of Southern Africa.
Gaia Speaking is the registered Regional Hub for the Work That Reconnects in South Africa. Through workshops and weekend retreats, song circles and wilderness immersions, art-based rituals and online gatherings, it invites people into the four-stage Spiral: beginning with gratitude, moving through the pain of the world, seeing with new and ancient eyes, and going forth. In a country still carrying the weight of apartheid, colonial dispossession, and ecological loss, this work takes on a particular depth — and a particular urgency.
What makes Gaia Speaking distinctive is its rootedness in both the global WTR tradition and the specific soil of Africa. Joanna Tomkins — wilderness guide, ceramicist, documentary maker, singer — does not import a Western framework and overlay it on African reality. She listens for what the land already knows. African rituals of collective mourning, of elder wisdom, of intergenerational healing — these are not additions to the Work That Reconnects. They are, she suggests, what it has always been pointing toward.
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