as remembered by Ida Rotto and Liz Rog
Some of Village Fire’s roots can be found in the early ‘90s, in a small annual gathering of about 30 folks from Northeast Iowa called Musicland. This weekend event was based on community organizer Liz Rog’s happy memories of childhood family camps where people of all ages sang around campfires, played games, and shared meals, common spaces, and slow-time. Musicland was an attempt to create such a memory for the next generation of individuals and families of her neighborhood, a space where folks could step away from the ever-quickening pace of modern life, back into the sense of belonging that is our birthright and can be remembered together. The gathering was a small community’s local response to the ever-increasing surge of media and corporate influence on minds and hearts. It operated on the belief: what we need is here, among us, within us. One of Liz’s daughters, Ida Rotto, was born at about the same time as Musicland and grew up along with it. Ida caught the vision of what a music gathering could mean, and as a teenager, stepped into organizing and song leadership.
In 2012, following the suggestion of their dear friend Aimee Ringle who had moved on from NE Iowa to the Pacific Northwest , Liz and Ida travelled to Oregon to an event called Singing Alive! There they witnessed a much larger gathering, then about 250 people, who were not all from the same geographic community. They decided they would invite Musicland to grow into a larger, Midwest-rooted gathering.
And so, Village Fire launched in the spring of 2013 at a camp in SE Minnesota. 100 people discovered it through posters that Liz sent around the region; through word-of-mouth; and through email. In the following year Brenna Everson and Stephanie Hart stepped in to support essential logistical design realms including registration and volunteer coordination. Ida, living in California and studying collaborative leadership at the Weaving Earth Center For Relational Education, continued to return to Iowa each year to support the gathering.
By the third year, 250 people were attending and more systems were needed in order to hold the many pieces of the gathering, both physical and cultural. It was time to re-imagine the framework of leadership. Using forms and tools from Weaving Earth combined with others, a basket of sorts began to form, a network of people holding important elements of the gathering. The systems and forms that hold the gathering continue to shift and change as we continue to learn, striving to respond to the unique ecology of the people, history, and place of our gathering in support of a strong and resilient community.
Ida and Liz continue to carry the seed of Village Fire throughout the year, listening for what’s needed and staying connected with the dozens of people who have arrived during Village Fire’s seven years and offered a variety of skills, those many things and ways of being that create our gathering: technical work, physical labor, cultural leadership, song leadership, tending to children and teens, and much more. Each year new ideas emerge based on what is being asked for by the times, the land, and the people; in the months before the gathering, we find the ways to bring them to fruit together. Come each January, the lines are abuzz with conversation as the gathering begins to take form again.
Singing together remains the core of what we do at Village Fire. But by now we see clearly that the songs, so relevant and juicy, are an elegant magnet to get us to come together. They are the sweet nectar that we just can’t resist. Then, once landed in this flower that we are calling Village Fire, the cross-pollinating begins. We listen together for what the world is asking of us here, now. Singing together lures us into a place where we can further our various efforts to face, grieve, give thanks for, and begin to heal our relationships with the land, our communities, our past, our selves. We can dare to go there because we’re together, grounded in voice, presence, love.
We look forward to continuing this story with you.
