Failing a Psych Test by Lauren Mooney

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Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Growth in Change

Lauren Mooney is a work in progress that definitely won’t be complete this side of heaven. She loves being crafty, seeing the moon in the sky during the day, and smelling the Earth after it rains. And if she’s brave enough, one day she’ll be a full-time novelist. But for now she’s content being people’s friend, Scott’s wife, and God’s daughter.

 

Mackie huffed at me as I handed him my computer on my last day of work. “You’d fail a psych test now if you were enlisting,” he said staring up at me over his wire rim glasses.

A life-long military man, Mackie parlayed his wire-tapping skills into a second career as an IT guy. And from behind his gadget-cluttered desk, he brazenly questioned my sanity. Working with Mackie for four years, I’d come to understand his often gruff, sarcastic approach concealed a fatherly heart. But to tell me I’d fail a psych test? That seemed a bit extreme.

“What are you talking about?” I played off Mackie’s insult. “I could totally pass a psych test. Besides, enlisting in the Air Force is the last thing I’d do.”

“Nah, man,” he laughed. “Do you realize what you’re about to experience? The Air Force would never take you. They’d see all the changes about to happen in your life and they’d say, ‘Nope!’”

Two and a half years later, Mackie’s words resound in my ears more frequently than I ever imagined. I’m definitely not crazy – well, not most days – but I failed to really hear Mackie’s advice at the time. He was trying to tell me extreme change can debilitate someone. Instead I puffed up my chest and told him the changes would be good for me; they were proof of growth, proof of something I’d long desired.

When you’ve been begging God to change something – anything – in your life for several years, here’s what I don’t suggest telling Him you’re capable of handling within 18 months

  • Meeting your future husband
  • Beginning a long-distance relationship with him
  • Asking for your job to be eliminated so you can move from your bachelorette pad into your boyfriend’s parents’ home three states away and live off unemployment
  • Job searching every day in a new city
  • Trying to figure out your role in a new family
  • Getting engaged
  • Planning a wedding
  • Getting married
  • Moving into your new husband’s house
  • Finding a job
  • Learning to be a wife while your husband works full-time and gets his Masters degree
  • Getting a promotion into a totally new job
  • And finding out you’re going to be an aunt for the first time

The majority of these changes created amazing experiences and I have precious memories from those 18 months. But the overall feeling I remember during that time is utter exhaustion.

And if I rewinded my life to re-listen to my prayers back then, I’d predominantly hear petitions for life to change just enough to be better with a few requests sprinkled in for life to stop changing all together. Mackie’s warning had become reality but I wasn’t quite ready to admit it.

The ironic part of praying for things to stop changing is that, well, they usually do, and right when life settled down and I began to find myself again and nothing much was changing, my prayers and conversations switched to ones of discontent.

I was desperate for something – anything – to change. Again. Just like I had been prior to Mackie’s warning. It felt as if I couldn’t breathe if something wasn’t changing.

In my eyes, so much needed changing. Everything was wrong with my job and I wanted a new one. I didn’t like the way I looked and resented the fact that I’d gained weight since our wedding. I wanted to get my Masters. I was beyond impatient waiting for my sweet husband to find a new job now that he had his Masters; I wanted to know for sure if we were moving somewhere or staying in our home.

Oh – and then there was all the anxiety over when and how to start a family. A quick glance at Facebook any day of the week proclaimed news of due dates, teething, and first steps.

When I’d have coffee with girlfriends and they would ask what’s new, I was embarrassed to admit that not a whole lot was new. Life hadn’t changed much and it made me uneasy.

I’m tempted to blame behemoths like Apple, American consumerism and tiger moms for my lack of contentment with life not changing. But the reality is somewhere along the way I mixed up my value and identity with my ability to prove my life was ever changing.

I had put discontentment up on a pedestal and glared down at God, threatening Him with continued tantrums if He didn’t change something soon.

I neglected to consider the fact that I can grow – that God can grow me – even when everything else remains the same around me.

Mackie had called me out on my addiction to change several years prior but I was too wrapped up in change’s whirlwind to see a different path to sanity.

Most days I still fight to stop myself from orchestrating or demanding change, but I’m striving to remember it’s not about thinking growth comes only from change. Growth, improvement, betterment, whatever you want to call it, is not necessarily synonymous with change. Even when everything stays the same, abundant growth is possible.

Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. 2 Corinthians 4:16 (MSG)

The Prompt by Melanie Dosen

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Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Growth in Change

You may remember Melanie from a couple months ago. Now you can see her because the pictures are working again! Her beautiful words from our open mic night inspired me and here she is again sharing her own transition and reflection on her dear grandmother. 

 

“Growth in change” spurns several images in my mind: small green sprouts emerging out of a sea of concrete, flower petals of vibrant hues blooming in the midst of frost, beautiful buildings constructed on devastated land. I saw bright colors contrasting darkness, symbols of hope and future existing in counter-intuitive places. Images of life, even though all things point to death.

Right now, death seems to be pointed to from every direction, particularly in the life of my grandmother, Nani.  Nani is experiencing a pretty significant, harrowing change: her body and mind are breaking down at an ever-increasing rate, and eventually will succumb to that degeneration.  Her body will not know what to do anymore; her mind won’t know what’s going on.  My grandmother has Alzheimer’s Disease—a devastatingly slow change that does not result in growth, but rather, it’s antithesis: in decay.

The funny thing about my relationship with Nani is that I’ve been anticipating her death for decades, as Nani has spent most of my life constantly reminding me of everything I’ll inherit when she and my grandfather pass away.  As children, she would take my sister and I on tours around their house, asking us to point out what we wanted to receive when they were gone.  Nani has gone so far as to write our names on the back of pictures and on the bottom of trinkets in the house.  “Everything, “ she would say proudly, “will be yours.”

Nani’s desire to prematurely delegate her things out to us was silly—a little neurotic, but mostly endearing.  It would be the quip I would use to contribute to the “Grandparents say the darnest things” conversations with friends.  It became rather taxing, however, to hear your still-quite-healthy grandmother constantly talk about the end of her life—focusing on the inevitability of her future death rather than on her present experience as one of the living.  I realized recently that my perception of Nani has not been as a woman who lives, as one who contributes to life or has a story to tell, but as someone who will pass away.

I’ve been carrying this conflict of Nani’s life and coming death around with me for months now, trying to sift through the typical mysteries that one toils with in the face of the death of a loved one.  Questions like, who was Nani?  What’s her history?  How does she know herself, and how does she want to be known?  I find myself wondering if Nani understood herself as someone whose purpose was to give to those who she loved, never to receive.  I felt that I loved Nani by receiving from her, and shamefully realize that I never established a habit of giving, of learning, or of asking.  Now, when I want to drink in every word she says, I feel awkward, bumbling through my questions and comments, trying to break the habit of many years of our relationship being based on shallow exchanges and (at times forced) smiles of gratitude.  My devastation is made even more acute in knowing that as I am trying to change and grow in our relationship, she doesn’t realize it, or can’t.  For the first time, I am the giver, but she cannot receive.

I am not sure what it means to attempt to find growth and life in the ashes of death.  The finality of everything is overwhelming, and I often wondering if I am just grasping for meaning when maybe there just isn’t any there.  In a world that creates meaning out of history and shapes understanding out of stories, it’s tempting to understand Nani’s quieting story as a tragedy—that all of what she is composed of is slowly slipping away, and once she is gone, she will never truly be known.  I really want to believe that all is not lost in the deep, inaccessible crevasses of Nani’s memory, but that her hopes, dreams, and thoughts that constitute the deep fabric of herself are held in the memory of God.  A God that generates life counter-intuitively, and when the creation He set in motion is fulfilled in death, there is still a promise of life.

Death is the changing of something that was once known in one fashion, but now exists in another—body to spirit, consumption to decay, active story to living memory.  In reflecting on her death, I realize that I am Nani’s living memory: her death will just be a change, a transition.  I will carry her life, her pride of her family, her gentle and sweet spirit, her desire to care for all who she loved.  I am her voice that transcends her death, that tells her story, creates meaning of her experience.  My growth emerges from her, and propels who she is into the future; we, everyone who she loved and who loves her, are the life that survives her death.  Which, maybe, is what she wanted in the first place.

The Wisdom of My Ever Changing Good Body by Cissy Brady-Rogers

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Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Growth in Change

Cissy Brady-Rogers is an embodied woman who changed my life.  If you’ve read A Beautiful Mess, then you know her impact is amazing.  Her job title would read marriage and family therapist, eating disorder specialist, spiritual director, yoga instructor, and adjunct psychology faculty at Azusa Pacific Univ. However, she would say, “Personally, I am a woman with a genuine story of growing through my own food and body related challenges. My overweight childhood and puberty, a date rape in my young adult years, and a mastectomy for breast cancer at age thirty have been among my greatest teachers on the journey to loving my body. I have mined the treasures of the dark places in my story and gleaned much wisdom. I look forward to an opportunity to share these riches with you.” (from her website, which you should check out) This story is a precious one full of wisdom once again and I’m honored to share it with you today.

 

I celebrated my fiftieth birthday in March.  Twenty years of healing my own disrupted relationship with my body and accompanying others on similar paths has taught me that wisdom is born amidst both expected and unexpected changes. It comes through accidents, like the one that inspired this post. It comes through diseases, like the cancer that took my right breast twenty years ago. Yet most bodily changes are part of nature’s rhythm.

Our female bodies go through necessary bio-psycho-spiritual cycles that birth and sustain life. Our younger bodies abound in hormonally-driven changes that add fullness to our physiques, draw us to relationships, enable us to bear children and activate our nurturing capacities.  The reduction of those same hormones in our midlife bodies turns our energies to guarding and guiding the future generations in ways we could not if we were busy with our own children.

The world tells me to fear these changes and employ fat-fighting or anti-aging methods to stave off anything that doesn’t conform to current beauty ideals.  I am even told in a thousand different ads to be afraid of my body.  But my midlife wisdom tells me that no matter how much I work out, eat well, and do all the things Dr. Oz says will keep me young and healthy, my body is not what it was ten or twenty years ago.

I’m not the same woman I was in those years, thank God.  At thirty I was busy trying to save the world, or at least some of you, through my good works as a therapist and church worker–and in therapy twice a week trying to heal my inner turmoil.  At forty I was busy writing a book, leading workshops, building a successful private practice–and blaming and resenting my husband for not being the man I wanted him to be.  My body was more toned in those seasons and the skin on my neck didn’t droop, but if decreased muscle mass and sagging skin are the price of compassion, wisdom and joy, so be it.

My latest opportunity for listening to my body came on New Year’s Eve.  I didn’t plan to celebrate in the emergency room after dislocating my shoulder in a favorite yoga pose.  Arthroscopic surgery in early February and months of limited mobility sleep challenges, and dependence on others weren’t on my calendar either. But that is the nature of life. It happens while we are busy making other plans.

I could react to this with fear of my aging muscular-skeletal system that gave way on that fateful Saturday morning.  I could work harder and longer and fight my way back to practicing advanced inversions and backbends. Other fifty year old women do it–why not me?

Yet at this point in my life, working my way back to where I once was doesn’t feel loving or wise. Yes, it might look valiant and noble.  And it would surely satisfy my ego need to be admired for my high level of fitness and flexibility.  But that would be more about returning to my thirty or forty year old self than maturing into my midlife self.

I want to respond to this change with the soulful discernment of a wizened fifty year old, not ego driven reactivity.  My “good choices” to eat well and exercise regularly during my first thirty years were more about controlling my weight than good health.  My breast cancer diagnosis at thirty, along with clinical work with eating disorder patients, shifted the focus of my fear from fat to disease, but I was still more motivated by fear than love.

Over time, my relationship with my body became more compassionate as I walked alongside girls and women who had adopted the fear of fat messages and harsh body control offered by the health, diet and fitness industries and whose lives were being destroyed.  I learned from my clients that fear of fat or disease is never a good motivation for self-care.  It may make our bodies stronger, leaner and even healthier, but it sucks the life out of our souls.

We need to respond to changes in our bodies, whatever their source, with compassionate attention. The monthly upheaval of menses, the challenges of pregnancy, motherhood, (or non-motherhood when others are mothering) and menopause, invite us to reflect on our lives. Along with nature’s cyclical changes, injuries and illnesses also become opportunities to pause and listen more intently than we do during ordinary seasons.

  • What wants to be born in me through this change?
  • What needs to die in order to make more space for the new?
  • What is the hidden treasure in this dark place?
  • What do I sense, feel, need and want?

Part of my current self- conversation with is about honoring the limits of my body.  My midlife body isn’t the same as my young adult body.  My weight and general fitness level have remained steady throughout my adulthood, but hormonal changes, wear and tear from years of an active lifestyle and natural aging processes need to be respected as I consider my mid-life pursuits.  Athletic yoga poses, like the handstand dropback to backbend that injured my shoulder, were safe when I began a serious yoga practice fifteen years ago.  They might not be most advantageous now.  Perhaps the risk of injury outweighs the benefits.

So I choose to take time to see where my yoga practice will go from here. Each day, I choose compassion and curiosity as I recover mobility and strength in my shoulder.  Last week I experimented with downward facing dog at the wall.  It felt good. I tried happy baby pose and decided I wasn’t yet ready.

I choose to be present, vulnerable, and open to what each day, each moment brings on the path of healing. I choose to receive the fullness of life that comes in ways I didn’t ask for and wouldn’t expect. I choose life in my good midlife body, with my good shoulder, just as I am.

Katie in ’08 by Katie Bruce

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Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Growth in Change

Katie loves Belgian waffles and is a connoisseur of lemonade. She adores her husband Nate and her nephews bring her more joy than she ever thought possible. She loves the San Francisco Giants’s, the beach, all things design, writing, and truly finds pleasure in life’s little things. She can be found blogging at Becoming the Bruce’s and is currently launching her own design and home decor business: Volente Deo Designs.

 

I never identified myself as one or the other. From the time I was eighteen I could never check either box with complete conviction. My morals and values aligned with one group and my heart cried out for another. So I never claimed a party line. I gave up my right for the primaries and chose to vote based on which issues were most important to me.

In October of 2007, deep in the heart of grad school and inundated with election propaganda I sat in Russell’s in Pasadena, California and shared breakfast with my life-long friend Katie.  Katie was also in grad school at the time and we talked about our dreams for the future, her marriage, and my struggle with depression, and then we got down to business. We approached our sacred topic. Our health. You see, Katie and I had a bond, a kindred connection that only we could understand. We’d both been diagnosed with debilitating medical conditions. Our conditions, extremely different in nature, hers terminal, mine chronic, was a road we traveled together. It was a journey we encouraged each other on. When I was weak and tired she kept me fighting. When people forgot to ask how she was doing I was there to remind her that I hadn’t forgotten, that I was still praying. For me, knowing she was out there, even if distance separated us greatly, was sometimes all I needed to get me through an appointment or a rough day filled with debilitating pain. Through many, many years we exchanged emails, voicemails, and text messages, and had an understanding that was all our own.

Katie’s condition required a lung transplant in order for her to survive and because there was no cure for her disease, it relied heavily on stem-cell research in order for advancements in her condition. So, in that bustling restaurant after our dishes had been cleared and I still sat sipping on my hot chocolate I leaned across the table and asked my dear friend what I could do for her. And in between labored breaths, that I had become accustomed to because of her illness, in her sweet, sweet voice she asked me to vote for Obama for the soul purpose of stem cell research. With tears streaming down my face, I grabbed her hands and realized that the next year’s election meant nothing to me when it came to republicans or democrats, party lines, the war in Iraq, the mistakes of Bush, or the first African American president. It meant doing anything I could in saving one of my best friends lives.

Katie was the most beautiful of souls, gorgeous in every possible way. She had “touched-by-an-angel hair,” that glowed even when the sun wasn’t shining. We met (if I can recall correctly) at the ripe, wise old age of five, maybe six and I can remember from the moment I met her that I wanted to grow up to be just like her (granted we were exactly one week apart in age.) But we were “the Katie’s” and I knew from that very young age that I was lucky to be her friend. Our fathers both worked for Young Life and so we were fortunate to grow up in similar families with similar experiences. In second grade, Katie and her family moved to Russia. The next summer my family and I visited them there. I have such fond memories of that summer with Katie and our siblings, exploring a foreign country and her introducing me to her new home. Every time her family returned stateside we would reunite and it would be as if no time had passed.

We’d play basketball, go to baseball games, the beach, or just have sleepovers. One of the best summers of college is when Katie and I worked at a Young Life camp together. The 3rd or 4th night of camp Katie got sick with the flu and I remember sitting outside the bathroom stall praying out loud that she would feel better. We dressed up as spider man for no reason on nights that called for no dress up and probably ostracized other college workers because we were so close from being life long childhood friends.  When I was with Katie the world felt lighter.

Katie and I faced the hardest moments of our life together. When I tried to take my life, Katie was there when I felt like I couldn’t pick myself up off the bathroom floor. When Katie suffered the horrible pain of infidelity I stayed on my knees in prayer. On the flip side of the coin, she was the first friend I admitted to that I thought I was going to marry my now husband and she was there to embarrass me at my bachelorette party and shower me with special gifts. And when she found her true prince charming I believe I’ve never been more excited for two people in love than she and him.

My phone rang that Saturday morning and I knew in my heart what it meant. I answered the phone and it was my Dad to deliver the news I had been dreading to hear for over 8 years. Katie had passed away. While waiting for a lung transplant her poor heart gave out. It’s only been about 9 months since we’ve all been without Katie. Growth through change in a way that I wish could be undone. Through our friendship I grew. She taught me about joy in the midst of struggle and peace in the midst of pain. We knew how to laugh and smile in times of uncertainty and she got me like I’m not sure anyone will ever be able to.

But now, in her absence I feel pain. In this change, with her gone, I feel alone. She’s not here to send an S.O.S. text to. I see her in my dreams weekly but I didn’t want this change to come. These are deep growing pains. Life without her is hard and not as sweet. She was an earth angel. I keep fighting in my physical illness because I know it’s what she did and it’s what she’d want but I’ll never not miss her and I believe in our friendship while she was here we grew a lot through all of our seasons and changes together and if I’m brutally honest I wouldn’t wish this season that I’m in right now, of “growth and change” on anyone.

I’m still not one or the other. And come this next fall I don’t have a clue yet which way I’ll sway. But I can guarantee you it won’t matter as much to me as it did 4 years ago, when I sat at Russell’s in Pasadena, and when I asked her what I could do for her it was Obama in ’08 or to me, more like Katie in ‘08. I miss you dearly, sweet angel.

Inheriting home by Tara Owens

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Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Growth in Change

Tara Owens is a beloved granddaughter, daughter, wife, step-mom and soon-to-be grandmother and aunt. A spiritual director who speaks, writes and leads retreats, she’s learning to live into enough and out of productivity and perfectionism. She loves good poetry, the Colorado rockies, watching her husband cook and her rescue dog Baloo. She’s at work on an upcoming book in InterVarsity Press’s Formatio line on spirituality and the body.

Inheritance, obsolescence, growth, change—these ideas have been haunting me over the past few weeks. This haunting—and the slow but difficult revelations that have come with that haunting—started when I was sick with the stomach flu. While struggling to feel even remotely human, I got a phone call from my sister telling me that my maternal grandmother had been found unresponsive in her home. She was in tears and on her way to the hospital, her husband at the wheel. I couldn’t be there, couldn’t even think about being there, and it tore me to pieces. As I lay helpless and wondering if I’d ever hear my grandmother’s voice again, ever feel her hand press against mind or see her smile as she repeated the story of The Two of Us and The Plasticine, I began thinking about the gifts she has given me. My inheritance.

And there it was. Inheritance. It’s not a word that we think about much in modern contexts. No longer obsessed by lineage and taxed deeply on property that moves from one generation to the next, society actively discourages us from passing things on. We’re obsessed by things that don’t last, rather than by things that do. (iPad HD, anyone?) We get our hands on the “latest” technology only long enough for it to become obsolete, and we don’t think about what this is doing to us.

I’m a self-professed technogeek. I’ve always been on the edge of what’s current in communication and its tools. Heck, I was BBSing back in high school, which, for those of you who don’t know, was blogging before blogs existed, Facebook before Zuckerburg imagined it. Raised in an international immigrant family, I’ve never been afraid to get up and move, to try something new, to took toward the horizon.

And move, I have. Southern Ontario, North Carolina, the Greater Toronto area, Washington, DC, Northern Virginia and now Colorado are all places I’ve called home at one point or another. Each has marked me in specific and indelible ways, shaping me. I can’t say that each place engendered growth in me, but I was changed.

To this day, I’ve never lived in one location for more than six years. I like to think that I come by this ability to uproot myself regularly and still survive the transplant honestly. My Granny has lived in more than 10 countries, having given birth in five of them. Uganda, Seychelles, South Africa, England, Tanzania—her list shocked my rooted husband who, until his visit to Canada to meet my family, had never left the United States.

I like the fact that I’ve taken lived out Granny’s inheritance well. I am a woman willing to take risks, to change, to make a place for myself even when one isn’t readily offered to me.

What haunts me now is perhaps what is haunting my entire generation. I don’t have a good grasp on how to grow without change.

When my sister arrived at the hospital, she wasn’t allowed to see Granny. She had to wait, as I did thousands of miles away, until they had figured out what had happened. It was hours before they announced that my vibrant, cheeky 88-year old grandmother suffered a massive stroke. Moyra Eleanor went from living independently, visiting sick members of her congregation in nursing homes to immobility in a hospital bed, unable to communicate or move her left side. As nearby family—all five of her grown children—rushed to her side, I realized I’d only lived half of her legacy, only allowed her to give me half of what I stood to gain from the riches that she so freely lived.

I realized that I’d taken my inheritance and run for a foreign country (both literally and figuratively). It’s a country steeped in fast living, things to which I could easily prostitute my soul. I haven’t been living with the pigs, but I’ve been darn close.

I’ve never thought of myself as the prodigal, although I’m sure my immediate family would disagree. My tendency toward a life of change wasn’t something that I consciously chose, nor is it something that I see as necessarily detrimental. But being unable to talk to or offer anything to grandmother as she (and my family) live into her new, limited reality brought me up short.

Over the past ten years, my whole extended family has been quietly living a life of stability. While I wandered, they put down roots. While I sought change, they experienced growth.

I don’t deny that my years since college have been beneficial. I’ve learned incredible lessons, been given amazing gifts. It wasn’t until after college that I became a Christian, stumbling my way first to a renegade church then to seminary then to a practice as a spiritual director. But, until my marriage three years ago, I’ve been on move.

The year after I moved into our humble house in Colorado Springs, we built raised beds and planted a vegetable garden. I’d always professed to black thumbs, but I found that this new stability brought with it a little bit more patience and self-awareness. I was able to see that I watered a little too often, and then disappeared a little too long thinking that I’d done enough. I learned that uprooting things, even to move them to another area of the garden, leaves them weak and vulnerable to disease. I began to see that change isn’t always the thing that produces growth—sometimes it’s the very thing that stunts it.

The irony of this journey is that I’m beginning to root here, away from the family whose lessons I could have learned so much more quickly had I been willing to stay rather than go my own way. I’ve watched the tree outside my office window for three years now, and I am beginning to see how slow, stable growth produces change. After a lifetime of learning the lessons of change that forced me into growth—learning to make new friends quickly and with candor, choosing for self-confidence in new situations rather than self-doubt, recognizing and making room for the truth that change is first experienced as loss and making a companion my own grief—I’m beginning, oh so tentatively, to accept that there are lessons of growth that will produce change in me. And that’s harder to trust than I would like to think.

In two weeks, I’ll make the journey back to Canada. I hope and pray that I’ll get the opportunity to hold my Granny’s hand one more time. Without words, I’ll tell her that I’m ready to receive, to begin to receive the other part of my inheritance from her. I’ll tell her that I’m learning to settle, to grow where I am planted, even if it is far away from blood family. I’ll tell her that I’m beginning to see that what she’s given me is more than just an adventurous spirit, but a heart in need of the lessons of stability and belovedness. I’ll tell her—slowly, slowly—I’m coming home.

 

Upcoming Events

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Filed under A Beautiful Mess, Workshops/Retreats

Be sure to check out the EVENTS page for the latest information about upcoming workshops. 

May 19th – Contemplative Gardening Workshop

June 22nd – Summer Solstice Open Mic/Art Show

Would love to have you join us!