Elders Week 7 – Drawing weaving with Simone, the spider story with Sue

A glorious summers day, with Ian visiting. Ian comes from Connected Communities, and is one of our sponsors. A horticulturist by training, he was at home in the woods. Sadly no more funding from them, but we are looking around for more funding to continue this successful project. Hooray, they said!

We were welcomed by Lemon Balm tea gathered by Chris. In the go round a few were tired, and some ‘not tired’, String Theory mentioned, before we played our warm up game of CONSEQUENCES – the drawing version as we heard there was a writing version (next week)

What delight to find mythical creatures, cats head, many hands and knobbly knees.

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Back to under the hornbeam for Tai Chi or rather Chi Gong/Kong with Naomi, we began separating heaven and earth with a beautiful demonstration from M.

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Staying by the hornbeam, Simone arrived, a descendant – so she said – from the artist Pi-cas-o, and she invited us to draw, not like her ancestor, but for 3 minutes, a gong all change, 3 minutes, a gong and all change. Like consequences we did this 3 times, then pooled our joint sketches of the woods: a wheel barrow that grew flowers, a pond, a leaf, a spiral, the sinewy Hornbeams. What silence emerged as we all concentrated, awaking the left side of the brain, the seeing side.

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Back at camp Sue wove us a story of the spider who retrieved the fire…..

Naomi introduced us to two books:

Bubble wrap by Dean, with a poem about trees in it (Leaf me alone!)

A book of meridians – which we photographed and show here to introduce this concept to some of us who are not savvy with it.

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The afternoon passed far too quickly. We had no time for weaving (oh no) or journaling, or catching some feed back from you, although in the closing circle we did hear a few ideas.

The end circle was far more awake! Uplifted, alert, awake, calm, present, vibrant, positive, stress free. (Rachel found her lost phone – hooray!) Peggy and Naomi had an exchange:

‘How different you look from the first time you came.
‘Yes, that’s right’
‘You were grumpy…
‘Yes, I was skeptical about coming here, you are right, and now full of smiles’
‘Yes now you are full of smiles’.