• 13 - 15 Jun 2025
  • Bangor, PA, USA

Friendship, Community, & Resilience: A Circle of Trust Retreat

How do we co-create a future with the Living Earth, where all have dignity, peace, and the ability to live full, meaningful lives? We are calling an intergenerational, diverse group of people, longing to savor such questions to renew hope, heart-strength, and stamina.

“We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth.”

– Parker J. Palmer from Let Your Life Speak

How are we creating friendships and community in a time of division and increasing isolation? How is our friendship with ourselves? How are we navigating the rapid changes and too slow ones in this time of turbulent Earth change? What is breaking our hearts open? What brings hope and inspiration? How does acknowledging and including Mother Earth as our community impact how we listen to our inner teachers and one another? What does Gaia say to us that can flow into our circle? How do we listen to Her? How do we co-create a future with the Living Earth, where all have dignity, peace, and the ability to live full, meaningful lives? If any of these questions live in you, please join us at Kirkridge, where the forest welcomes us into “a vast communion of being.”

We are calling an intergenerational, diverse group of people, longing to savor these questions to renew hope, heart-strength, and stamina. In this retreat, based on the work of Parker J. Palmer and the Center for Courage & Renewal, we will explore how friendship and community grow and become the backbone of resilience in our chaotic, uncertain times. Our community extends to stones, plants, trees, animals; to the spirits of the elements, the warmth and light of fire, the power of wind, the intelligence of water, and the divine living being of Earth. We are part of a tapestry of “interbeing,” as Thich Nhat Hahn named it. This interbeing includes the invisible world of nature as well as the universe where our ancestors and spirit guides are present for us, if we turn to them, with impulses for the evolution of all. The Kirkridge forest and its neighbor Columcille Megalith Park are perfect places to experience the mystery in which we are living.

Guided by the Courage & Renewal® approach, we create a sacred, confidential space in which to do our own inner work in solitude and community. This retreat will include Clearness Committees, a powerful two-hour discernment process from the Quaker tradition, where one person who wishes to think more deeply about an issue has an opportunity to be the “focus person” while a “committee” of four to six others listen and ask open, honest questions. Both focus person and committee members share a profound experience in this unique way of supporting another human being together in community.

If you are seeking rest and restoration, you are welcome. If you long to hear your true inner voice, you are welcome. We will explore the presence and emergence of community as we practice radical hospitality with self, other, and the natural world. Bring a friend or more than one from your own community. Come by yourself. Come.

Kirkridge is a unique, sacred place. Here is a description from the website, kirkridge.org:  “Located on the homelands of the Lenape people, Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center is a refuge for everyone seeking to live humanly in a violent world. It is a place of rest and recovery, an incubator of collective freedom projects, and a wilderness school where we learn to assume our right-sized place in the wild and diverse ecosystems we inhabit, recognizing that some of us have been socialized to play too big and some too small. We are invested in dismantling supremacy of every kind, at every level, and about welcoming people of all races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, ages, religions, and abilities.” There are many trails that meander through the forest, inviting us into communion with our siblings in the Earth community. Bordering Kirkridge is Columcille Megalith Park, which we have access to and where we’ll spend some time as a group.

  • Commuter – $215.00
  • Farmhouse Private Room – $475.00
  • Farmhouse Shared Room – $375.00

 

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