Tallgrass Spiritual Retreat Center

Come to the Table: Gathering the Whole

Gather the Women

May 21, 2008

Wed 9:30am-3:30pm

Fee: $36, includes lunch

Facilitator: Rev. Billie Blair

How do I achieve wholeness, integration, and reconciliation of my thousand selves? My journey moves inward, deep into myself, into soul, the glue that binds body and mind together. . . I must learn to recognize the strangers within, to greet and welcome selves I do not love, to feed and water each part of myself. Yet my interior hospitality is often shallow; I am shy and frightened of so many of my selves. I learn that nourishing each part of myself is hard work, counterintuitive to my comforting image of nurture.

--Mary Wheat in Rattle Those Dry Bones

This retreat will offer an opportunity to slow down and gather all the parts of you - mother, daughter, life partner, employee, cook, maid, child, teen, the lost, the forgotten, the loved, and the ignored. As these parts of the whole are gathered at the table, there will be opportunities to interact with these selves in meaningful, loving ways. Allow the shy one a voice. Love the unlovable. Tend to the wounded and lost. Cuddle the child. Encourage the warrior within.

Please bring along pictures of yourself at various ages

and stages in your life.

Bring the beautiful photos, as well as though you tuck in the back of the photo album. Bring a baby picture or your high school yearbook. Wedding pictures, gangly teenage pictures. find you in all sorts of poses and places.

For I am the first and the last

I am the honored one and the scorned one.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin.

I am the mother and the daughter.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I an the silence that is incomprehensible

and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.

I am the voice whose sound is manifold

and the word whose appearance is multiple.

I am the utterance of my name.

The Thunder, Perfect Mind,