A Clearing In The Forest

Photos are of volunteers, Anastasia, Chris and Sue, working together, preparing for our recent Summer Solstice Community Building Event, June 22, 2013.

The title song, “A Clearing in the Forest” was written and sung by Kate Wolfe. It used to be one of the songs we would sing-a-long to, helping us celebrate our “clearing in the forest” at New Horizons’ Harpers Ferry Retreat Center;  a safe, healing space that was a special “place for you and me.” And is now rising again.

In the years before my blindness era, New Horizons’ Harpers Ferry Retreat Center overflowed with the abundance that only personal and collective transformation can generate. Each month for a good many years, New Horizons’ “Truth or Dare” Game Weekends (formerly called the Discount Derby) brought our counterculture community members together, regularly, as these seekers of truth gathered to assist one another  in climbing out of personal and relationship clutter to the higher realms of consciousness.

Anastasia "clean sweeping"
her goddess rock.

They were, trusting me to guide them on a path built on the value that “the truth will set you free.” And, more and more conscious we did grow in ways that only a committed endeavor such as this can foster, not only through these weekend events, but in between through our weekly support groups. Win-win was the essence of our “Game.”

How unique and liberating was all of this. And, how I did hunger for that ambiance in the years since 1998 when it was so out of my reach.

Win-win and the other attributes that made our “Game” what it was for the close to twenty-five years it continued -- and what we each took from it --- became a way of life. Students of mine, to this day, still hold that Game and that New Horizons community of old with reverence; a guiding light of “what not to do” and “what to do” to fill one’s life with meaning, connection and health.

Chris, our on-site handyman
and "supervisor."

Now, with the coming together, bonding and spirit of devotion already sparked by our first community building gathering “since Anastasia lost her eyesight” on June 22, I believe, that what seemed as if lost now appears to be only an arm’s length away; I did not quit before the miracle.

What has brought this about?  Vision, dedication, support and donations of time, talent and treasures – and -- of all things-- the dark side of politics, 2008 –2013. And, trust by some of us in what is not so readily seen by the blind eye.

Who would have thought it? Go figure.

Details are developing, but there is no absence of the principles that make up the practice, if you visit New Horizons’ Small “Zones of Peace” Project blog site. The practice is a way of life; a building small “zones of peace” way of life.



Sue packs a mean arm
for raking