The Power of Retreats: Everyday Magic, Day 1,122

Between the prairie and the lake

I'm just back from Brave Voice, deep in the Flint Hills of Kansas -- here is a piece I wrote there, initially for my Patreon followers. May we all find the retreats we need.

Here is the view from where I am right now at the 20th annual Brave Voice retreat. This retreat, which I lead with singer-songwriter Kelley Hunt, has been a mainstay of creative inspiration, jump-starting many people's writing, music, and other arts over the years. As Dianna, one of our long-time participants says, "It's the start of my creative year each time."

The center of our circle

While I'm working this retreat rather than retreating it as much, I also get so much out of being with the circle we create together, to write, listen, watch the swallows swooping, and even kayak in all-too-exciting waves. Stepping away from the workaday life -- including dishes, laundry, sweeping the floor -- and landing in a special place (not my home but absolutely my home for six days) clears my mind. I drop my shoulders, open my heart, sleep deeply, and marvel at the moon over the prairie.

Our participants get this likely even moreso. Throughout the week, I spied an 8-person pick-up band holding jam sessions in Big Red, the larger of the cabins here. In another cabin, festoon with rugs and scarves one participants always brings to make it even more vibrant, I noticed people reading and writing quietly in the evening. On the perches along the road from cabins to lodge to lake, there's a whole lot of visiting, meandering, guitar-strumming, poetry-writing, and mid-day hugging.

Sharing our writing and discoveries in small groups

We can retreat from things (like the media and social media, our daily life routines, and many manner of impossible problems we can't solve) and retreat into things (like this), but whether we're driving away or toward something, we are landing in a different experience of time and place. On retreat we cannot help but to hear ourselves think, feel, and be. We can create with abandon or at least a little less constriction. We can tune into the call of birds we can or can't yet name, watch how sun and shadow criss-cross the grass, and see what we have to say to ourselves.

Something shifts, relaxes, re-orders itself, lets loose, or otherwise alters. And in returning home after the retreat, we carry that shift in us, even if re-entry mode floods us tasks and troubles. It's like discovering a secret pond in the center of your soul, hanging out on its edges in moonlight, then leaving but now knowing it is always there. We carry that expansive and replenishing energy in and with us.

See more about my coming events here), and maybe I'll see you in the foothills of the Rockies in Colorado or half-way up a mountain in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, or next spring deep in the Flint Hills of Kansas.