37days

Retreat to move forward

Sometimes in the madness of our lives what we really need is a quiet space on 63 acres of rolling land in the mountains of North Carolina, a moment to look at our life's stories, to learn from them, and to re-story ourselves.

I'll hold only one public retreat this year, from September 26-28, 2008, near Asheville, North Carolina. I would love for you to be there. It won't be the same without you.

Participants will be the first to receive my new book, LIFE IS A VERB, which won't hit bookstore shelves until October.

We'll explore six conditions for intentional, mindful living as a small learning community in a beautiful space. We'll eat organic vegetarian food cooked on site for us by a Kitchen Goddess. We'll laugh. We'll leave refreshed and connected and more.

Information is here, including details on our 2008 full scholarship for a single parent to attend.

Unfortunately, we are limited to only 20 participants, so early registration is advised as participation is on a first-come, first-reserved, basis.

J is for jijnasu

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan

In 2008, I want to be a jijnasu, a seeker of wisdom, an inquirer.

When I was preparing to talk with Billy Collins the other day (doesn’t that sound casual?), Mr Brilliant was holding the paper bag while I hyperventilated, metaphorically speaking, helping me think about what questions I wanted to ask the dear poet of my dreams.

“Ask him what his favorite word is,” he said, excitedly. Mr Brilliant is a great cataloguer of such information.

I blinked at him.

Tess ran by. “Tess!” he shouted as she sped by. “What’s your favorite word?”

“WHY!” she yelled without stopping, making a tiny circular path from living room to family room to dining room and back. Just as Mr Brilliant started to answer her, she shouted again: “WHY IS MY FAVORITE WORD!”

He beamed.

“What a fantastic favorite word,” he murmured, contentedly. “You should tell Billy Collins that ‘why’ is your four-year-old’s favorite word.”

I blinked at him.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do that right after I pass out when he answers the phone.”

Retreat to move forward

Sometimes we have to retreat to move forward.

The next 37days retreat is scheduled for September 28-30, 2007, and registration has just opened for it. Limited to 14 people, I hope you can be one of them. I'll be joined by my business partner, David Robinson, in facilitating the weekend retreat. He's magical and brings so much to the gathering. Plus, we laugh a lot.

September 28-30, 2007  / MIND THE GAP: The Power of Personal Stories

[A 37days Retreat]

“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” -James M. Barrie

If you had only 37 days to live, would you feel happy with the story you have lived thus far? How would you express that story, learn from it, leave it for others? Those are the fundamental questions behind this blog and the grounding for this unique, experiential weekend gathering focused on unmasking our personal stories to achieve greater creativity, healthier relationships, and fuller engagement in what poet Mary Oliver calls our “one wild and precious life.”

Often, there is a gap between how we wish to be seen and who we really believe ourselves to be, between the story we meant to write and the one we’ve written so far. This gap mutes the colors of our lives and inhibits the quality of our engagements with other people—in our families, our organizations, our communities. Maintaining that gap diminishes our creative impulse and often splits our intentions. Why, then, don’t we do more to shorten that distance and mind that gap?

This unique Gathering will explore these questions:
How do we make meaning of our lives through story? What are the stories we tell ourselves about others? About ourselves? How do those stories reduce us? What learning and significances are right in front of us, in the stories of our days? How can we summon the courage to move beyond the limits of who we think we are into what we were meant to be? How can we relinquish our “role” in order to discover who we might be beneath the mask?  What treasures can be found in the in-between space between me and you, between perception and preconception, between my Self and the Other?

We’ll explore concepts such as:  Life as a finite or an infinite game, intention and direction, wicked problems & tame solutions, and naming our vicious and virtuous circles, those patterns that either reduce us or allow us to live expansively.

Learning Activities / We will: 

• Use improv theatre, ritual, metaphor, mask, story, writing, and other narrative tools
• Explore “role” and other expressive personal and organizational “masks”
• Be 85% experiential--not in the sense of simulations or role plays—but as unmasked engagement with others
• Invite participants to extract meaning from experiences as a collaborative learning community
• Use focused free writes to help participants frame experiences in their own language for deeper exploration
• Experience how changing ourselves can deeply impact our families, communities and organizations.

Here's what people had to say about the last 37days retreat:

“You created a safe environment for valuable learning.”

“I loved the gentle humor that developed in the group, the inclusive quality of the experience, and the practical writing techniques that I’ve probably encoded into my cells.”

“You don’t facilitate as if to say ‘we are the leaders.’ You’re great at taking cues from the group.”

“The story you wove through the whole weekend was masterful and amazing.”

“Your facilitation is beautifully collaborative.”

“Your ability to bring movement and play into the experience, and at the same time, relate that play to deeper concepts, was truly a pleasure to experience and to watch.”

“I appreciate all the thought, caring, and preparation you put into making the retreat weekend transformational for all of us.”

 Cost / To honor the impulse of giving behind 37days, this retreat is offered for a reduced fee of $475-775 inclusive of tuition, materials, housing, and all meals. Please pay what you can in that range.

Location / Our 2007 retreats will be held at the Bend of Ivy Lodge in Asheville, North Carolina. Go here for more information and registration forms for this and other 2007 retreats (PDF).

We'd love to have you join us there. It won't be the same without you.

Draw circles

“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays -"Circles”

Let’s imagine that all learning takes place in a dense, primordial forest, like the one you drive through on the way from Forest Grove, Oregon, to Manzanita on the coast. Get off the highway and into the woods and every once in a blue moon, there is a clearing just big enough for a brilliant blue sky or glowing moon to shine through onto a miniscule circular spot on the forest floor, its translucence revealing flowers working hard to bloom between dark green trees. That tiny shot of light is learning, a double espresso of insight, light, then dark again.

That light has a big job, illuminating the way, one circle at a time.

I am spending a lot of time thinking about dense woods, sun, circles, lines, and infinite games these days.

Mind the gap

“Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.” –Pema Chodron, In the Gap Between Right and Wrong

In late October of 2003, I spent 12 hours a day at Mission Hospital helping my mom and stepfather reconcile in their minds and hearts and guts and bank accounts the unambiguous death sentence he had been handed, rather abruptly, by a doctor with some significant deficit of Marcus Welby, M.D.’s empathy, manners, and comforting good looks.

Study for the essay questions

“It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.” - Alec Bourne, A Doctor's Creed

Way back when I was learning my ABCs, names of state capitals, and the preamble to the U.S. Constitution at happy Hillcrest Elementary School way up there on the crest of that hill, We the People of These United States weren’t offered the chance to take a foreign language. No, I had to wait until the 9^th grade when all those chatty and sparky synapses were concretized, making it almost impossible to create unusual, new sounds and different ways with sentences construct word order to.

Good instructional strategy, that.

In that Dark Insular Age (as opposed to our Transparent Yet Still Insular Age of 2005), the only language offered was French. Mais oui! Given the Massive and Unrelenting immigration of wine-swilling Frenchies to the hills of North Carolina, that monolithic linguistic choice made perfect sense, didn’t it? Mais non!

Examine your car for dents

“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” -Tuli Kupferberg

One interesting thing about life is that at a certain point, it all starts repeating.

Or perhaps it’s been repeating all along and it just takes a certain distance (age?) to begin seeing the patterns that emerge, again and again.

And perhaps those patterns keep emerging because we keep not seeing them, like a looping test, some sort of life exam, a great big sparkly Broadway musical of the Bill Murray film, “Groundhog Day” with all of us playing Bill playing the weatherman searching for Punxsutawney Phil and awakening every morning to the sounds of Sonny and Cher on the radio, finally recognizing with a start that we have, in fact, been here before and that, like Bill, we’ll have to keep on doing it until we get it right—an infinite regress of doing and knowing and recognizing and starting over.

Follow the disturbance

“Put down your clever,
Let your partner affect you:
Tenets of Improv”

-- review of Keith Johnstone’s Impro on HaikuBookReviews

I recently had an interesting experience that revealed to me a big truth, a Big Truth, that is, in capital letters. It was an encounter with a client.

My business partner, David, and I were working with the senior team of an organization and our focus was diversity in their workplace, a conversation I have facilitated many times for other groups. But never in my experience has the dialogue gone so deep and been so real and raw, so honest and so true, so close to a point of real change.

Celebrate every orange flag

“The truth is that everything that can be accomplished by showing a person when he's wrong, ten times as much can be accomplished by showing him where he is right. The reason we don't do it so often is that it's more fun to throw a rock through a window than to put in a pane of glass.” - Robert T. Allen

Three stories, one theme:

The first story

One afternoon a few weeks after my older daughter started first grade, I picked her up from school and drove to my husband’s bookshop to say hi. When we pulled up, John ran out to see us, leaning in the car window to give Emma a kiss. “How was school today, Buddy?” he asked.

“I had my first test today!” she exclaimed brightly. (How wonderful, I thought. A whole lifetime of testing has opened up for you…).

What was our first question to her?  “How’d you do?” (Yes, let’s get straight to the bottom line.)

Embrace your clearness committee

“Whenever I climb, I am followed by a dog named Ego.” –Friedrich Nietzche

I came across a story this week that intrigued me. I could see myself in it, if truth be told, and perhaps if you squint, you can see some tiny part of yourself in it as well.

It’s a story about Parker Palmer, a Quaker educator and author of the book Let Your Life Speak, in which he writes about a time he was offered the presidency of a large educational institution. He was thrilled with the thought of the status, pay raise, and influence he would have with the new position.