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Annually the residential Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Community and the Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Board comes together for a time of building relationships, connecting, looking down the path ahead, and fun. This was the opening reflection for our weekend:

I am writing this on the eve of the Rolling Ridge residential community and board retreat. We are mid-month, the night of what some would call a new moon and others the dark of the moon.

After a soaked summer, we've made it to the middle of August. The greens in the forest are tinting toward dark jade. Here and there, leaves are kissed with russet and gold. The light is beginning to slant. Walking home from community supper, we remark at the lengthening shadows, the nearness of nightfall. Soon we'll have to remember to bring flashlights.

On a night two weeks ago, 15 women walked single file through the woods singing softly on their way from the Retreat House to the Meditation Shelter. The clouds played tag with the waxing moon, but still it shone like silver through the dark trees. As the group approached the Shelter, they saw candlelight glowing through the windows and heard the pensive cadence of a Native American flute. At the door, each was asked, "Are you willing to enter the door that leads to the realm of heart and soul and mystery?"

The fields of our residential community: the little one behind Pinestone, and the larger one that embraces the garden and often hosts the sheep, are awash in shades of green. The grasses are growing, it seems, more than an inch every day. The hummingbirds are back, dancing in the azaleas; the whippoorwill sings like a fool in love outside our windows and doors every night. Rabbits and squirrels hop and scamper. In the garden, radishes are busting out of the earth, lettuce and kale and an array of other growing things make a thick green blanket from fence to fence. Insects buzz and hum and chirp and whirr. The wood frogs trill and the air is thick with pollen dust and the smell of warm earth. The rain and chill of only a couple weeks ago is another world.

Once, around this time of year, I walked alone into the creek valley behind Foxfire, where Bob had made a small pool in a bend of Deer Spring Creek. I was headed past this, on my way to the Meditation Shelter, when I heard an eerie racket, like banshees in an argument, or ravens in battle. A few yards away from the pool, I stopped in my tracks. The usually still water was rolling and frothing, embroiled in a mini-tempest, a witch's cauldron. I took a step or two closer and then, as if an invisible hand had abruptly dropped a veil over the scene, all was still. The pool returned to its looking glass state and was profoundly quiet. I waited. Nothing moved except the occasional water skimmer. Then I glimpsed a small brown back just under the water surface; then another. I slowly backed off and went on my way.

Today the air is raw again. Bare-branched trees sketch tangled patterns in a leaden sky. The forest scene is painted in straw and pewter. The spring equinox was a week ago, and I am trying to have a right relationship with the bitter breezes and hard-scrabble ground.

On an intensely cold and sunny day, in a lovely old church in Rhinebeck, (in the Hudson River Valley north of New York City), Scot and Linda watched their son Galen marry a vibrant, intelligent, and beautiful woman. A few days later, as snow fell here at Rolling Ridge, we received an email from Mary Ann about the death of five-year-old Jacii, the nephew of Mary Ann's foster daughter, Karen. He had that morning lost a long battle with leukemia. Mary Ann wrote how Jacii had loved snowmen, and the movie Frozen, and that the family had gathered at his bedside, singing a song from that movie, as he died. Later that day, Josh, Kate, Emma, Wren, and Ana made a snowman for Jacii, rolling and rolling the powdery and sparkling snow. Then they took a picture and sent it to Karen.

It is cold. The mud on the path to the Meditation Shelter has frozen up in small bubbles and lumps. It crunches and crackles underfoot. The tree trunks and tangled branches are etched crisply against a pale sky, the high contour of the ridge clearly visible through the dry air. There are long pauses in the conversations of the forest creatures: a woodpecker's thunk-thunk, silence, a blackbird's caw, silence. The water in Deer Spring creek has stopped in icy patterns against the stones. I am reminded of the phrase we use when calling on the directions at the beginning of restorying retreats: "let us turn to the North, place of frozen stillness and quiet waiting, home of wolf and the season of winter..."

The shadows of the trees in the creek valley behind Foxfire and Pinestone in mid-afternoon are long and slender strips. The sun's rays slant almost horizontal and deeply gold through the forest. It is nearly the winter solstice, and the dark comes early in this third week of Advent. It is a thin time, perhaps the thinnest of all: a threshold time of waiting and expectancy.

This excerpt from the Saturday morning teaching left us all breathless. The Saturday teaching continued an exposition of the mystical insights of Jacob Boehme, that Love and Light emerge from striking the fiery ingredients of Desire, Agitation, and Anguish. Cynthia is also referencing the fourth "striving" mentioned by Gurdjieff in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: "The striving from the beginning of their existence to pay for their arising and their individuality as quickly possible, in order afterwards to be free to lighten as much as possible the Sorrow of our Common Father."