The Gift that Keeps on Giving: Weekend Retreats

In our fast-paced whirlwind lives of work and home responsibilities, not to mention the added pressures of the holiday season, getting away from it all is a wonderful gift. It's one way to achieve balance and to get back into the flurry of life again with renewed energy and a better attitude.

I just spent a weekend in a cedar cottage on 40 acres in rural Carroll County with two good friends. Roberta, Gloria, and I have been spending renewal weekends in Lakeside every year with a group of forty or so women for the Artist's Way Retreat based on Julia Cameron's book about opening up to creative and spiritual forces and the power of possibility.

While we love walking the cottage-lined roads and being close to Lake Erie and participating in the spirit-filled self discovery and sense of possibility workshops in Lakeside, we needed a weekend that went deeper. We needed a weekend with no schedules or social obligations and plenty of time to do our own thing.

Gloria and Gary Miller built their home-away-from-home twenty years ago. It's a cell-phoneless place off some dirt roads outside Mechanicstown, a place remote enough that we saw only a couple of hunters, some cows, a goat, and some ducks the whole weekend. It's remote enough that it was surprising we saw no bear or deer. Phone service was mysteriously down, and Gloria cheerfully told us there is no 9-1-1 service anyway.

I tried not to let that bother me. When was the last time I've been totally inaccessible to the whole world?

Once we unpacked our bags of groceries and set up our weekend home, we went for a walk to explore the area. Half a mile down the road on the right was an interesting wire-fence lined property with a large pond filled with quacking ducks and a broken-down rusty old school bus sunken into the ground. Above the scene was a vintage 1950s mobile home, a chicken coop with chickens, and barking dogs. Old rusty appliances dotted the landscape through which wandered a cow and goats. Yes, we were in rural Carroll County.

Back at the cabin, we opened a bottle of wine and toasted the weekend, then ate cheese and crackers and caught up on our lives. We read questions to each other from thought-provoking note cards to expand our way of looking at things, like "If you could have anything in the world for your birthday, what would it be?" Questions like that moved our focus from our lives as they are to what our lives could be. We embarked on the Artist's Way. The retreat had begun.

Dinner of shrimp cocktails, salad, and lasagna and eggplant strudel and garlic bread from Trader Joe's was Roberta's gift to us. After dinner, Gloria brought copied color-maze sheets and markers, and I brought my idea of putting different shaped rectangles and colors on paper with affirmations or words of encouragement written on them. We started exploring these projects in between reading Oprah and talking about favorite recipes. We finished one bottle of wine and started another of the successful reds I bought at Trader Joe's: Argentine Amaicha Bonarda and Napa River Cabernet. The art projects kept me mindlessly occupied the rest of the evening, and I completely forgot about work and home and family responsibilities.

We were fast asleep as soon as we lied down in our sleeping bags on the floor.

Saturday and Sunday brought crisp mornings and star-filled nights. The trees wore leaves in peak colors. The blue sky with the yellow, red, and orange-colored leaves against it was breathtaking. We sat on the porch with our coffee, ate more good food, drank more wine, went for walks with our cameras, journaled, and did yoga on the front porch. Time went quickly on Saturday before we built our campfire. It seemed the weekend was coming to an end when we felt like we were just beginning it.

Hot dogs roasted over an open fire for dinner were followed by s'mores. Night descended quickly and darkness closed in around us. We were three women on an island, in the middle of nowhere. Above us, the stars were bright and we felt small amongst the multitude of milky-way-like clouds of light, all those stars we cannot see at home in the suburbs. The last time I saw stars like that was at the Grand Canyon.

Sunday, a week later, I'm still in retreat mode. Whether it's ten in the morning or two in the afternoon, I can't really say. I'm writing letters, journaling, reading the newspaper and looking through catalogues, savoring another chapter in The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, and planning the framed collages I plan to give my daughters for Christmas.

The whirlwind of my workweek is much further away than tomorrow morning. I'm totally schedule-less. The retreat in the country gave me the freedom to live another weekend without worries, a retreat of my own creation.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Claudia J. Taller ctallerwritesATwowway.com
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