Dear Creative Friends,

I hope you are filling your days with activities that make you feel hopeful. Our souls need nourishment right now.

I've been learning how to create a watercolor journal from Lynda Fishbourne, a wonderful artist I met at Ghost Ranch a couple of years ago. Her workshop Watercolor Journaling 101 is online through The Paper Seahorse, and included a wonderful kit to get me started. Once I've painted the pages, I plan to add meaningful quotations and poems to the journal, and use it as my morning meditation. I'm trying to get out of the habit of looking at my phone first thing in the morning, and I'm hoping this might do it!

The power of life comes from within;
go there; pray; meditate.
Reach for those luminous places in your self.
Ardis Whitman
Create your own "Doorway to the Unconscious" at the Pathways & Portals Retreat

By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity
we open ourselves to an infinite stream of possibility.
Carl Jung
I've really missed my in-person teaching, and will be offering a small retreat for eleven participants at St Francis Springs Prayer Center in November. I scheduled this retreat and decided on the theme at the end of 2019. Little did I know how appropriate it would be for these times!

Pathways & Portals of Creativity:
Exploring Liminal Space with SoulCollage® and the Labyrinth
November 8th to 12th, 2020
at St Francis Springs Prayer Center, Stoneville, NC

SoulCollage® is a powerful tool for exploring liminal or threshold space, a place of transition, a state of unknowing, a time of waiting. Standing on the threshold of a door or at the entrance to a labyrinth, open to uncertainty and able to “love the questions themselves” can be a doorway to personal transformation.

We live in a world of uncertainty and developing the ability to become comfortable with the unknown in these confusing times can strengthen us on the inside and prepare us to handle whatever arises with compassion, calm and patience.

In this four night, five day retreat we’ll explore the concept of liminal spaces and thresholds using doors and pathways as metaphors and mediums of self-discovery. Both the labyrinth and the SoulCollage® offer us ways to access our own inner resources and intuition. Used together they amplify and deepen each other because they are both languages of the soul. They enable us to access our inner world and deepen our understanding of ourselves as we journey on this path called life.

In addition to creating doorway cards to explore threshold spaces, making SoulCollage® cards, and labyrinth walks, you will receive all the materials needed to make your own seven-circuit classical labyrinth in collage.


At the Pathways & Portals Retreat each participant will create
their own unique seven circuit classical collage labyrinth
I hope you are being kind to yourself. What can you do for yourself today that is life-enhancing? Perhaps read a poem?

I offer this poem called "Let Silence Nestle In" from the book Soul Bird: Poems for Flying by Deborah Anne Quibell. So many of the poems in this book are balm for the soul.

Find a calm corner in your heart.

Take the voices of others
and ask them, politely, to wait outside.

Close the door.

Peel the whispers from the walls
and stack them neatly away.

Sweep aside the dust
and lovingly smash the clock.

Invite the soft grass from the fields
and call, quietly, upon the wind.

When she arrives, smile
and gently blow your confusion,
your frustration, and your ache
to her care.

Lay down.
Relax.
Let silence nestle in.
This is your space
undisturbed and sacred.

After some time here,
the stars will appear
to show you the coordinates
of your next destination.

You don’t have to know the map.


Keep well and be creative.
Stay strong and centered.

With love and light,
Catherine
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