Nurturing Retreat Day 2

I woke early and was at Snowden House by 8:45am. Our first class started at 9:00am. Everyone was finishing breakfast and I fixed myself a cup of coffee on the way to the dining room. After saying, "Good Morning!", and chatting a bit, I noticed we were short one participant. "Where's D?" I asked. "She left", Barbara said, "I'm not judging her." Apparently, the younger woman from Manhattan must have decided that either this retreat was not for her, or the house was not what she expected. It was a very rustic, old farm/beach house. Maybe she wanted more modern. She did have the only private bath, but it had a claw-foot tub and no shower. Who knows? We let it go. Now we had two bathrooms to use. The only problem was every time we walked through that bedroom to the downstairs bathroom, we thought of her hasty retreat as we looked at the unmade bed left abandoned. We let it alone.

Our first class was to play with clay. Barbara divided up the huge grey chunk of clay into palm-size pieces and asked us to close our eyes. We imagined what we wanted and were asked to create it without looking. This was our first lesson in trust. We all came up with something different. My husband told my daughter-in-law I was going back to preschool over the weekend. It felt just like that to all of us. We were learning to play like children again with open creativity and no judgement or criticism.It was really fun! What I discovered, and I wasn't the only one, was that what I imagined what exactly what I created: Little Princess Katherine on her ornate throne in the forest of birch, oak and maple trees surrounded by rabbits and a baby dragon. I wrote down the beginning of a children's book idea on the index card Barbara gave us to remember what we were thinking about when we created our pieces.

When we arrived the day before, Barbara gave us all a lovely bag containing our paint set, journal book, a map of Westport and a bottle of water. After our clay play, we took out our journals and Barbara told us to paint anything we wanted on the first page with any color we wished. She demonstrated for us by drawing a line, squiggles and just doodling. That's what we basically did. We doodled in paint and I saw how the first brush could make fat lines and fine lines. It was really fun. Next she demonstrated just making a wandering grey line all over the page until we stopped. "Look and see if you see anything in the shapes of the line, and feel free to expand your vision," she said. I saw a red-winged blackbird with a gold beak, a flower, a mole, and a Venus Fly trap I couldn't quite make look "right". "If you don't see anything," she added, "just play with color." So I did. Her instructions were specific, but loose. She wanted us to remain light and free to explore. It was important not to get caught up in expectations, but to just let whatever wanted to come out of us on the page come out. I felt so free. So did everyone else.

Barbara did all the cooking, hosting and serving. Her partner, Steve, helped by washing all the dishes and fetching what Barbara needed, plus shuttle service to the airport. They made a great, functional and very organized pair. After a lovely lunch, Barbara gave us another chunk of clay. This time we could see what we were creating. She once again gave us instruction but encouraged us to let the clay talk to us instead of forcing a creation. She told us to make a ball, then press our thumb into the center. We pressed against the sides with our thumbs until the hole got bigger and we were making a vessel. My vessel ended up being a nice medicine bowl. We were told we were not going to keep any of the clay creations because they would have to be fired and there were no facilities for doing that. Photographs of our creations had to suffice. We left all our creations displayed on the piano top and on a table in the living room for the entire weekend.

The pies de resistance of the night was creating our mask crysallis. Barbara's theme for the weekend was about planting: seeding, planting and harvesting (I'm sure she used different words, I don't have my syllabus with me right now. Please forgive me, Barbara.) Again, this was an exercise in trust. We could not see or speak, those of us who chose to have our plaster casts over our entire face, except the nostrils in order to breathe.

We covered our faces in Vaseline first after putting on headbands and bobby pins to hold our hair back as needed. Then we covered ourselves, the floor and furniture with plastic sheets.One by one, and sometimes in teams, we started across the forehead and worked our way down each face gently pressing on small precut sheets of plaster covered gauze that we dipped in bowls of water to activate the plaster. We squeezed each pieces of water before placing it on the face. We put at least three coats of plaster sheets over the entire face to make the mask sturdy enough to host paint and adornments. The evening went on and we were all fascinated by this process. We created a nice mess, but as Barbara finished the last woman, she gave me and Dian permission to leave as we were the only two not staying in the house. I was grateful because I was very tired at that point. We let our masks dry and harden over night.