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Strawbale Summer Festival at Rolling Ridge

June 26 - July 17, 2009<br>July 20-31, 2009<br>and the 1st and 3rd Weeks of August
Retreat House


STRAWBALE SUMMER
at Rolling Ridge

June 26 - July 17
July 20-31
and the 1st and 3rd
Weeks of August

Straw bale summer is coming! Woodhaven, the 5th and final house for Rolling Ridge Study Retreat, is shaping up with a beautiful post and beam structure. In the month of June, we will begin cordwood walls and continue with carpentry. Lots of straw bales (660) arrive at the end of June and then we will really build and plaster walls in earnest!

July 10th-12th:
Straw Bale Workshop with Sigi Koko

We’ll learn how to make a curved wall, set windows with angled sides, and hopefully work on a wall with a big arch! Friday evening we will have dinner together, tour the cordwood cottage and the building site, and share natural building experiences and aspirations. Sigi will lead a hands-on workshop all day Saturday and we will continue shaping and laying more bales on Sunday, an opportunity to hone skills and capitalize on the learning curve through practice.

Cost: $75/person for room and board at the Retreat House. Please register early! For more information on Sigi, see her website at www.buildnaturally.com.

June 26 - July 17
and the 1st and 3rd Weeks
of August

The Retreat House is available for medium and long stays while working on the house. Come one, come all! Bring a group of friends! Stay a few days or a week. We offer room and board and training in exchange for hands-on work experience with wonderful companions (a nominal contribution of $15/day toward food is suggested). We'll be doing more carpentry, cordwood and straw bale walls, clay and lime plastering, and lots of other work for both experienced and inexperienced volunteers.

We hope to have local musicians, artists and story tellers visit with us during the summer. During the third week of August, you may choose to participate in daily Taize music and worship with Stefan Waligur.

For more information, to get an update on specific weeks or weekends, and to register, please contact Scot and Linda DeGraf at: scot@rollingridge.net (202-330-6874) or linda@rollingridge.net (301-789-9097).

To see progress on the building of Woodhaven, go to: http://straw-bale.blogspot.com. To view or print a PDF verson of this retreat flyer, click here.

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Quote of the Day

As many of you know, Nan published six books from 1996 - 2009. These are:

Psalms for Praying: An Invitation to Wholeness--1996
Meditations and Mandalas: Simple Songs for the Spiritual Life--1999
Lumen Christi: Journey to Awakening--2002
Journey Into Love: From Fear to Freedom--2007
Walking with Wisdom--2009

These five titles are widely available in bookstores and online. The sixth, Peace Planet: Light for Our World, was self-published and can be ordered from Friends of Silence. Contact Anne (annestrad@sbcglobal.net or 11 Cardiff Lane, Hannibal, MO, 63401) for further information).

Psalms for Praying is perhaps Nan’s best known work. Over a period of years, she reworked the Hebrew Psalms, not, as she writes, "to replace the well-loved . . . Psalms of the Hebrew Scripture" but to "stand as a companion, a dialogue, if you will, of one age speaking with a later age."

Journey Into Love is perhaps the most autobiographical of Nan’s books. It explores the literal, metaphoric, and archetypal concept of the journey in the New Testament. It is the belief in, and discovery of, the story of Jesus as one's own story, a process she describes as reaching toward Love Consciousness.

Walking with Wisdom is "a stunning sequence of twenty meditations for our time. . . . In today's violence-torn world and in our fragmented everyday lives, Wisdom is needed as never before . . . When we seek this Wisdom of the Heart, we leave behind false emotions of guilt and fear, and we enter the Infinite Reality that exists beyond all time."

Both Journey Into Love and Walking with Wisdom were completed and published after Nan became ill. She remained true her Beloved’s call throughout her life.

~ book by Nan Merrill
 

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