Summer Camp: Participants' Writings
“I’ll use this piece of paper. It has fallen out of my journal. Misplaced, disconnected, and out of step with hit’s world, much like this year feels out of time and step, normal has been misplaced, and everyone feels so disconnect. We have recoiled into ourselves, our pods, our immediate family and households. There is need for touch and for opening and a desire to drop our guards. . This practice has informed so much of my navigation through life. Through it, I have been able to find center and self when my world was fractured, drowning, robbed of connection, home and love. It is through the practice that I have learned to slow down and return to my breath, even when I felt I could not take the next. Being in my body, fully, is the only Truth. It is the one way to make anything real. the best way to process and begin healing. Healing myself, my family, my community and my world. I know that it is hard for many who don’t have the luxury of being. Just being is a luxury. I privilege of time and space from obligations, being needed, or simply surviving. I want it to be easy, easier, for more people to take a breath, look around, and feel compassion for themselves and others, Other. Moving with familiar bodies on a screen does more to allow me to feel connection that many hours of talking. Moving our particles, creating vibrations to the same music across space binds beings together.” – K. S.
“What came up for me today was a subtlety that was almost inexpressible. Deep seated and old grief seeped up from its almost healed puddle in a few tears. Gentleness in body movement fed something needing gentleness. Quiet playfulness and quieter joy at end. I feel more refined inside, that savage in me that knows how to survive stepping back into shadow.” – K.
“My immediate thought was that I am in love with the journey, the getting to the place where there’s just that joyous full expansion. Sometimes I can get to that place more quickly, but it’s when the journey is difficult that it’s just so interesting, almost mysterious. Why is it so hard sometimes? I’m ok continuing to just watch that, to let the answers come in time. Which brings me to the second part of this, and I may have mentioned this before: what a gift it is to realize that when you began these sessions in the spring I could just fall right into trusting the process utterly. As if I had never taken a break, it was waiting for me, like riding a bike. That trust feels like the most amazing and beautiful thing ever, frankly.
I feel that love in the air, as it were, as well. Following everyone today just feels like letting my world expand every time. I’m learning something very deep, something words would never cover, about the person I’m following, about how we are in the world together. It’s my favorite thing. Except maybe for the whirling, though that always feels like some sort of rich dessert. Fabulous.” – K.
“Purity; what I get from your lead in this practice is purity. Purity and focus. When following, one must focus entirely on the movement and the mind body connection. There is not room for other meanderings. When we are given specific exercises, the same applies, to a lesser degree, and once the pattern is established, it is fairly easy for other thoughts and visions to emerge. But when you turn us loose on our own, it becomes a springboard, a jumping off point, into anything, everything, and choices. We follow where we were going and wind up passing thru so many experiences, bodily sensations, images, practices. It ebbs and flows like the tides; taken deep in, swept under and out to sea, than gently washed back upon the shore, to pause, look around, see what’s happening – perhaps to stay up waiting for the next thing, or to simply turn round, and dive back in again. Going deep, quick.”
“I’m feeling the cords, ropes of veils and light and billowing matter, spiraling around me as I pull myself up up up. Sometimes turning, ever angling upward and sometimes just pulling straight to the sky. Up up up, without a turn.
And then it comes to me. An answer. The meaning of my vision of light spirals, ever winding upwards, in the dark blackness of space. The whirling. The practice of whirling; that is how my teacher, my guide, is speaking to me. Through the whirling. Continuing onward, relentlessly through many changes; I am meant to do the whirling.” – Layla C. Ryder:
Waking
by Adele Thompson
Dawn’s subtle warmth edges into my valley
Wooing me out of my sleep
with apricot skies
Breathe in deeply
Exhale completely
I thank the universe for giving me this day
Another day, another chance
To breathe and walk
This Earth
Mist hovers over the creek
Hungry baby birds call to their keepers
Hurry up with breakfast!
Slowly I sit up, mindful not to rush
Remembering the doctor’s warning
Most strokes happen in the early morning
When folks get out of bed too fast
Breathe in deeply
Exhale completely
No one is waiting for me to bring their breakfast
They are all gone now
and I am alone
Alone in the woods
I relish my solitude
An utter indulgence
Time to consider
Time to breathe in
And out