What is Stone Soup Saturday?
Stone Soup Saturday occurs on the first Saturday of every month — anywhere and everywhere around the world.
Stone Soup Saturday is a by-invitation gathering of neighbors for literally cooking and eating stone soup together, but also for storytelling, imagination sharing, gifting, celebrating, music-making and basically just caring for one another.
Stone Soup Saturday always weaves two themes together. The fist theme is neighborhood. The second theme is ecology — the science (or just plain knowledge) of the interrelatedness of people, plants, animals, mountains, rivers, grasslands, (etc.) and natural systems.
The purpose of Stone Soup Saturdays is to nurture eco-culture at the neighborhood scale — which is generally at walking distance for those living in towns and cities, but which may be a larger scale for those living in remote villages or out in the countryside. Eco-culture is culture which embodies an ethos of caring for people and planet — including ecosystems, waterways, forests, grasslands, plants and animals, etc. Proximity is a fundamental aspect of what it is to be neighbors.
There is always a stone in the soup pot, but it is never served in the soup bowls.
Anyone can invite their neighbors to a Stone Soup Saturday gathering of neighbors. Anyone — or several of them — can design their invitation and plan for the event as they like it, so long as the design embodies the ethos of Stone Soup Saturdays, as described above.
One often hears folks at Stone Soup Saturday gatherings informally talking about things like bioregionalism, permaculture, degrowth … and allied movements for social and cultural transformation. But mostly a Stone Soup Saturday is just a romping good time involving neighbors sharing with and caring for one another.
Stone Soup Saturday events often occur in public parks, or in wild places (or quasi-wild places) outdoors … when weather permits. But you can have such a gathering nearly anywhere! They are often held at neighborhood homes, but the location rotates and moves around a lot. Sometimes they are large gatherings. Sometimes small. Play with it — and have fun!
Stone soup can be served as brunch, lunch or dinner. But usually it is served as a late lunch, to allow plenty of collaborative cooking time. The cooking itself is a sort of reverential ritual, though generally a secular one.