It's been interesting being at Quilt Camp at Lutheridge. Faithful readers may or may not remember that Lutheridge is one of my all-time favorite places, one of the few places on earth where I truly feel at home. I've been coming to this camp since I was a child, and my mom was one of the first camp counselors back when Lutheridge first opened.
It's a different year, this year. It's strange, in some ways, to gather as a group when a highly contagious virus with no vaccine and no cure burns across the planet. But we've all been wearing masks for months, so it's not as strange as I thought it would be.
We're meeting in the dining hall not the Faith Center. The Faith Center is being used by the YMCA, which is running an all-day program for kids whose parents have to report to work away from home. The children are in virtual school, so they spend time "in class" in the Faith Center and take breaks outside. It's interesting to hear children's voices echoing across Lutheridge in a non-summer season.
We are meeting in the dining hall, and for the most part, we stay at our tables. If we leave our tables, we wear our masks. At our tables, some of us continue to wear masks, but most of us don't.
Meals are different these days at camp. The main difference is that we don't serve ourselves, and we take our food back to our work tables, so we're eating socially distanced. I thanked one of the workers and said that I wished she didn't have the extra work to do. She said, "We're just so grateful to have jobs."
I've been thinking about this retreat and whether or not the Create in Me retreat could meet in a similar way, and I have to conclude that we could not. Of course, we could change the retreat radically, and it may be time for some changes that makes the retreat a little easier to plan.
And I'm aware that after almost 20 years, it may be time for that retreat to retire. The camp still hasn't replaced the program directors who announced their retirement a year ago. The new program director may have very different ideas of what should be offered.
I have really enjoyed having huge swaths of unstructured time to work on our own projects. It's still inspiring to see what people are doing. We're still able to learn from each other.
Could the Create in Me retreat work in a similar way? Most everyone who attends does have a creative practice. I'd enjoy that kind of retreat, a chance to bring the projects which are speaking to me most. If I don't get to try out new things, that would be fine with me. There have only been a few practices through the years that I took home with me and was still doing a year or more later. It's been useful to figure out what I didn't want to do because I had a chance to experience them at the retreat.
One difference with this retreat is that we could arrive on Wednesday afternoon, and for just an extra $35, we could get an extra night (some people are sleeping off site and wouldn't need lodging) and have Thursday morning breakfast. I'm so glad that I did this! Several Create in Me friends are at this retreat, and as we've talked about possible changes to that retreat, they've talked of shortening it so that we'd arrive on Friday. But I think expanding it to include an optional Wednesday arrival would be cool, especially for people like me who are coming from far away.
I'm so grateful to have had time away, to have had a chance to create, to have a space to share. And the retreat isn't over yet--we don't leave until late tomorrow morning!
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