Next steps

Dear Lynda & Fred,
I woke up thinking about Hope Springs, a retreat center in Adams County. I know the founder, Suzanne Stephens and a board member,but have never been there. It's close to some of the first people sites and I've heard is a nice facility. There is Grailville in Loveland; the Moye Center in N Ky,

Have not posted anything on the Ning site about our intention to follow up my description on Wed night's call, as I 'm uncertain how to proceed without gathering ourselves to share next steps.

If I were doing this alone, I'd want to be very quickly on the task of sketching out place, time and money and putting those things out along with the description of intention so colleagues can attach to something concrete---or not, and then we know this is not what is needed. Also because retreat sites schedule a year in advance at least.

You?

Fred, Lynda, Mary in Yellow Springs, Solstice 2011

In the spirit of connection first, emergence as a consequence, we met over coffee in the __?  cafe.

Some themes of our discussion as I recall them:
(1) The observation that so much of the perceived "expertise" is bi-coastal, which emerged as an intention to recognize and appreciate the conscious peace-builders in the heartland, specifically in our (Fred's, Lynda's, Mary's) places in SW Ohio.

(2) Much sweet discussion about the conscious masculine and the conscious feminine and that eventually connected to Fred's offer to connect Lynda's and Mary's focus on women and peace to that same focus in the Cities of Peace movement, by way of supporting a women and peace retreat Solstice, 2012 (?)

(3) I was much taken with Lynda's insight about coming together around a "big question" and going deep into contemplation, meditation, and relationship(s) around that.

Work Song, part 2,

wendell Berry

A Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides...

The river will run

clear, as we will never know it...

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

the old forest, an old forest will stand,

its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields...

Memory,

native to this valley, will spread over it

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament. The abundance of this place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light. This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its reality.

Peaceinplace: Fred / Lynda/Mary

Dear Companions,

Please post your summaries of the key ideas and images you heard emerging from our conversation on the summer solstice, 2011.

Summer Solstice

BY STACIE CASSARINO

I wanted to see where beauty comes from

without you in the world, hauling my heart

across sixty acres of northeast meadow,

my pockets filling with flowers.

Then I remembered,

it’s you I miss in the brightness

and body of every living name:

rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.

You are the green wonder of June,

root and quasar, the thirst for salt.

When I finally understand that people fail

at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,

the paper wings of the dragonfly

aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?

If I get the story right, desire is continuous,

equatorial. There is still so much

I want to know: what you believe

can never be removed from us,

what you dreamed on Walnut Street

in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,

learning pleasure on your own.

Tell me our story: are we impetuous,

are we kind to each other, do we surrender

to what the mind cannot think past?

Where is the evidence I will learn

to be good at loving?

The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond

for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.

There are violet hills,

there is the covenant of duskbirds.

The moon comes over the mountain

like a big peach, and I want to tell you

what I couldn’t say the night we rushed

North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers

and the way you go into yourself,

calling my half-name like a secret.

I stand between taproot and treespire.

Here is the compass rose

to help me live through this.

Here are twelve ways of knowing

what blooms even in the blindness

of such longing. Yellow oxeye,

viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms

pleading do not forget me.

We hunger for eloquence.

We measure the isopleths.

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.

The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.

Fireflies turn on their electric wills:

an effulgence. Let me come back

whole, let me remember how to touch you

before it is too late.

Stacie Cassarino, “Summer Solstice” from Zero at the Bone. Copyright © 2009 by Stacie Cassarino. Reprinted by permission of New Issues Press.