I’ve been on a ten day retreat. A retreat into presence. I retreated into a place of belonging, inclusion: with nature, with other humans, with animals, with water and earth and sky.

I can imagine some of you are rolling your eyes. A retreat into presence. I have rolled my eyes at this sort of sentence before– feeling as if I am being given a headline by a reporter, not the essence from the experiencer. From the reporter’s point of view, a retreat into presence has the sound of too much focus on some strange, intangible, unproductive use of ten days.

From the experiencer’s point of view: a strong desire to play, create, and participate can be made real through experiencing the experience.

I notice my mind creates stories as I go about just noticing and observing my experience as it unfolds. I have a rich imaginal life– perhaps, like a caterpillar in the goo, I have some version of imaginal cells helping to transform my experience from reacting to emotion to experiencing emotion. That seems to be key. If I can feel sadness in my body and relax with it (yes, physically relax), my experience is full, but light. Technicolour and transparent. Descending and ascending. Presence, to me, is a felt sense of all that is happening.

In my ten day retreat into presence, I was not present all the time. The times I was, though, wow! Laughter and joy. Grief and sadness.

The sky told me some stories over the past ten days– I took some photos to capture an essence of experience.

If they speak to you, perhaps you could ask, how can I more fully participate in the experience?