Seasons Change
January 17-19, 2025
The Mountain Retreat and Learning Center, Highlands NC
3 Day/2 Night Package (Friday through Sunday)
Lodge or Duplex Cabin (double occupancy) $240.00
Single Occupancy (private room) $380.00
For All Rooms Add Required GSV Program Fee $35.00
Register Now!
Seasons Change
Please join me for Gay Spirit Visions’ Winter Meditation gathering, January 17-19, 2025, at The Mountain Retreat and Learning Center. During our time together, we will consider, meditate on, and share two things – the metaphorical seasons of our lives and the literal seasons of earth – and how they both are changing.
We often view, experience, and frame our lives through the metaphor of the seasons – the spring of youth through the winter of later life. No matter where we are in this progression, we soon come to know, sometimes to our wonderment and joy, often to our bewilderment and dismay, that our personal life seasons inexorably convey us forward. It is a mysterious journey that encompasses the entire universe of experience – yearning, expectation, joyous surprise, and unexpected loss and challenge. While we often feel a sense of certainty when we’re young, this is an illusion that we learn as we age. In fact, living brings with it increasing uncertainty as we move through spring, summer, fall, and into winter.
What was once known becomes unknown. Meeting ourselves in the seasons often requires effort, emotion, and spiritual strength. It is a hero’s journey, really.
As stage and backdrop against which the seasons of our lives play out, the source of our metaphor – the seasons of the earth – have been until recently remarkably stable, predictable, and entirely accommodating of our expectations and trust, affording us a sense of safety, allowing the illusion of unchangeability. The seasons are catalyst, muse, and inspiration, feeding the seasons of our lives a chord with which to tune our personal, even our spiritual, seasons.
Human-influenced climate change has been with us for some time. Does anyone not remember what the seasons were like earlier in our lives and see, feel, and know in our bones how they have changed? What was once known becomes unknown.
Many questions arise along these twining threads.
• How do we perceive the changes in our life’s seasons and in earth’s seasons?
• How do these perceptions and our personal experiences of the changes influence our corporeal, emotional, and spiritual selves?
• How have our senses of safety, trust, and faith been altered?
• Do we mourn the loss of what once was – the wonder, energy, freedom, and opportunity of youth; the deep snow in winter that now rarely visits, the nourishing sun and warmth of summer without withering extremes, or rains and winds gentler than we now know?
• Is there a connection – whether troubling and difficult or energizing and inspiring, or both – between the changes in our bodies and the unexpected changes occurring in the earth’s seasons?
These questions are the heart of this year’s Winter Meditation gathering. It is an invitation to deepen into these questions. We will offer time and space, and meditative, physical, and emotional room for whatever may come rising to the surface. In the dim light of deep winter, amid the warmth of our lodgings, common spaces, and those of us assembled, we will create safety. Come willing to contemplate with courage and share your thoughts, feelings, insights (both beautiful and terrible), fears, and joys, to mix in strange alchemy in the cauldron of Gay Spirit Visions.
Financial assistance in the form of scholarships is available. Our commitment is that anyone who resonates with our mission and community, and who has the desire to attend, can join our gatherings. To that end, we offer scholarships through the Raven Wolfdancer Financial Assistance Fund. Please go to the Financial Assistance page on the Gay Spirit Visions website for more information about scholarships and for a link to the Gay Spirit Visions financial assistance application form. Please note that the financial assistance application submission deadline is Friday, January 10, 2025.
Please also note that Gay Spirit Visions currently plans to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 guidelines in effect at the time of the gathering.
Registration is now open via the Gay Spirit Visions website, so please join us. Register early so that The Mountain will know how many cabins to heat up! Private rooms are available on a limited basis. Please note that the registration deadline for this gathering is Friday, January 10, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. ET.
Karma
John Schendel
GSV 2025 Winter Meditation Convener
