taking my retreat home

Aug 6, 2010 | @ home

It’s been a week since I returned home from Taos and Jennifer Louden‘s annual writing retreat.

Her retreat is particularly good because Jen spends a significant amount of time talking about “taking it home”–too often the schedule at a workshop or retreat is so packed that workshop leaders don’t address the issue at all, or only spend a few minutes at the last session talking about it.

One of the gifts of Jen’s retreat is that it does carry outside of the retreat time.

Returning home from a retreat is often a tender experience for me. Of course, it depends on the retreat experience–how deep I’ve gone in, how powerful, or dare I say, transformative it was for me.

Fortunately, my husband is used to this. I’m more quiet and reflective. I’ve learned to re-enter regular life, or “ordinary time” in a slower, deliberate way.

This is not to say that I’m now writing every day for hours on end. I’m kinder in my thoughts as I reintegrate into daily life. This year, I’m choosing to create spaciousness in my schedule,  asking “What do I want?”

I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty darn big for me.