Naked pagan hippies, dancing in the moonlight. Maybe a mudbath or two. That's what I told the winemakers we'd be doing at the women's retreat last weekend. Writing in our journals and sitting in a circle listening to each other cry doesn't sound so glamorous.
Ok, so we did some of the first - but clothed. Modesty and mosquitos are powerful incentives. We camped next to a pond and they were on the buzz for blood to lay more eggs. I've got bites on my legs and my hands, but none on my eyelids. That's the worst place for a mosquito bite because the skin is so thin and it swells up like an apricot.
I'm a huge believer in women pampering themselves, in whatever ways we can. I'm cast in the supporting role at home, as mom and cook and household visionary, and I need outside air. This one, at the Ecological Center, had plenty.
We cooked a meal on the first night from food raised at the center, on its farm. Goat milk ice-cream with apple crumble, the goat milk not goaty at all, but a nice undertone like a ripe cheese. Stuffed green peppers, a salad with flowers from the herb garden including orange nasturtiums and yellow citrus marigolds, herby purple potatos, and good bread.
At 7am we got up to feed and milk the goats, cut sunflowers for the farmer Laura Ann to sell in the town market who also led us in stretching exercises. As well as a farmer, she's a polarity therapist & mom. Then off to an incredible breakfast including fresh-baked bread, blackberry muffins, eggs from the chickens and sausages from the pigs.
As well as cooking and eating, we also played bubbles, jumprope, kicked a medicine ball, walked in the woods, and meditated. I felt like my feet chewed on the gravel, and when I closed my eyes I saw indigo and green, orange and violet.
In the forest we tried to feel the woods observing us. I felt a tree's energy field expand to encompass me as if the tree's field took a cast of my body as it wrapped around me. The tree sensed how far my roots grew, and knew I was a thing that travels on top of the soil. It knew I don't fly. Then it communicated this to other trees through its trunk, branches and leaves.
Whether these impressions are flights of fancy or the way a tree truly senses, doesn't matter to me. What I treasure is a brief, possible perspective of another living being.
