Join Bill, Tara, and Connie for four hours of gentle easy movements to release great big thoughts!
Somatic Yoga and Journaling Retreat
Bill Price and Tara Jeffers: Cozmic Water – Yoga and Music
Saturday, June 22, 2024 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.
includes a catered lunch
$40 per person
The Venue on Madison
1905 Madison Avenue, Huntington WV
There is plenty of parking.
From Huntington, take Madison Avenue west to 19th Street West, turn left.
Immediately turn right into the alley. Parking lot is on the right — 2nd building from the corner
Call (304) 634-0580 or email to wvfurandoot@gmail.com for information or to register.
Connie Kinsey: W. Va. Fur and Root – Writer
Participants will need a body, a mind, a yoga mat as well as paper and something to write with. No experience with yoga or journaling is required. This retreat is suitable for the absolute beginner as well as those more experienced with either yoga or writing.
Somatic yoga is radically gentle, powerfully integrating and profoundly introspective – ideal for evoking recollection, reminiscence and retrospection with the mind-body’s eye toward the prospective. Micro Memoir is mining your memories to find the gold in just a few words.
We hope to see you there. Please holler if you have questions.
Dawn is the sacred hour. We move from one world to the next accompanied by a dramatic lighting of this world.
Old Window in Finland by Helena Turpeinen, poster to View From My Window Facebook group
It wasn’t until my late 40s I was able to appreciate or regularly meet the dawn. If my sleep schedule ever regulates, I will miss these holy hours. I wake in the dark and cast off the stories my psyche told me while asleep and head for my beloved roll-top desk.
Dependent on the time of year, it could be some time before the dawning or just minutes.
But as I write the stories and sip coffee in silence, I glance over my shoulder through the atrium doors to look for the first arc of light.
It usually begins as a soft peachy pink rising with the fog over the hills and peeking through the trees. Dependent on weather and time of year, the color will sometimes intensify, sometimes wane, but always is a hearkening.
Here we are again. We made it to another day.
The silence is important.
Soon, the birds will start and the world will begin its hustle, but for a few minutes it’s just light and the creation of a new day, the creation of a new story to be told. Color on the silhouettes of the mountains bring me such contentment.
In twelve days, I will be on the shore of Lake Okeechobee in Florida. I’ve never been there before but I’ve seen sunset photos–another sacred part of the day. I am eager to nestle with my lover before leaving our bed to sit on the dock with my mug of coffee and journal. It won’t be silent – the lapping of the tide should, will, create its own sounds of peace. I am eager to see the Spanish moss hanging from the trees light up as the sun begins it ritual.
I’m sure I will photograph the scene in order to remember it, but I hope it imprints on my heart.
This is the sacred hour. Rejoice in the silence and witness the light. Turn to a new page and tell the story.
Writing Prompt: What’s Your TV ‘Comfort Food’? “Gilmore Girls”? “Friends”? “NCIS”? What show do you turn to when you are stressed, tired or just need a lift? Why?
I don’t watch television or stream shows or movies. I’m not visual and that sort of media doesn’t engage me for long. I might be tempted if there was a Silly Symphony or Looney Tunes channel I could get.
I did go through a spell where I watched Law & Order, usually SVU, for hours at a time. And I have no idea why. But it certainly wasn’t to give me a lift. It was an avoidance tactic. And it left me with disturbing images and cynical thoughts.
I’ve written elsewhere about giving up Law & Order as a New Year’s resolution one year so I won’t bore you with that story again, but I will confess that now and again – many months apart nows and agains mind you – I might turn on Law & Order while housecleaning. I don’t know why I do that either.
I do, however, have comfort music and comfort books.
When people I loved started dropping dead around me like raindrops in the April Appalachian Mountains, I developed what I call the Grief Quartet of CDs. It was actually 5 CDS as one was a double album. These were Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Allison Krauss, The Essential Leonard Cohen, AJ Roach’s Dogwood Winter, and The Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions. These 5 CDs have been in my CD changer of the Big Stereo since several days after Doug died in June of 2013. I managed through trial and error and stupid luck to attach an Echo Dot to the Big Stereo and then network it so that when I fire up the Big Stereo every Echo in the house (and I have one in every room) plays the music.
I crank it up. I pour coffee or wine or champagne. And I wallow on my Beloved Sofa, and I sink intently into listening.
My grief at losing 4 dogs, a father, a best friend, a partner and two co-workers within eight years of one another has morphed into sweet memories of days gone by. I have beatified the dead – forgotten their flaws and celebrate what made me love them.
My time with this music is now enjoyable. Music, for the most part, and this music in particular is never just background music. I listen with intent. One CD after the other. Sometimes I will use the remote to repeat a cut. Sometimes two and three times until I have wrung every drop of comfort out of the lyrics and notes that I can.
I will listen to all five of the albums. Dependent on how I am feeling as I finish the last one, I may fire up Mozart’s Jupiter symphony. I love that piece. I’ve had the CD since CDs first came out. I first listened to it with a Walkman and cheap headphones.
I also have comfort books. There are a few particular books – The Secret Garden. Skinny Legs and All. Time in its Endless Flight. The Princess Bride — That I will flip through. Or my collection of children’s pop-up books.
But every book in my house is a comfort book. I enjoy my walls of books. I like looking at them. Knowing they are there. I inherited many of them from two of the folks who died and they are mostly as of yet still unread. I don’t read like I used to. I hope to get back to it, but writing takes up a lot of my reading time.
My books are legion. I say, and people think I’m joking, that I think the only thing holding up the barn are the bookcases. It’s not a joke. The bookcases reinforced walls and the roof. I have far too many and I can’t part with any of them and I don’t need to. I live alone. There is no one to fuss about the piles of books everywhere.
But mostly I have comfort coffee.
I love sitting in this room on a quiet snowy day listening to the furnace hum as the steam from a hot cup of coffee bathes my face. I hold the cup like it is the Holy Grail. Unlike music and books, I can do other things while I drink coffee. I can think. I can write. I can make a to-do list. I can read. I can listen to music.
But I particularly like silence with the first few cups of the day. My brain is a noisy place and I sometimes can lower the talk radio in my head to a low murmur if I sit with the coffee lot enough. Multiple cups of coffee.
I always come out the other side refreshed and ready to get on with things.
You can have the noise and chaos of a television show. I’ll just be over here, sipping this coffee, letting my mind quiet and my spirit nestle like a dove who has returned home to her nest.
Maisie Anne O’Keefe looked to be Black Irish – that sumptuous result of Spanish DNA and Irish DNA colliding, but in reality she was Scots.
Upon her birth, both parents looked at the other and said, “This wee one does not have red hair.” Both were present at the home birth, or they might have wondered if babies had been confused in the nursery. Maisie Anne was the 7th daughter of a 7th son and and the 7th daughter of a 7th daughter. Gossip had been rife throughout Adelaide’s pregnancy. This child is fae, the village folk whispered.
And indeed, Maisie Anne O’Keefe grew into the reputation the village folk had invoked with their words.
Art by Paula Belle Flores
While still small, she exhibited an affinity for and a bond with birds. Any time she left the cottage, the birds would gather about her. As they grew bolder, they would perch on her shoulders, her hands, her arms, and even her black tresses. As time went by, they began gathering at her doorway each morning eager for her exit.
She kept seeds and whatnot in a pouch tied about her waist and she would feed the birds as she walked to the shoppe in the square where she served tea.
One winter began early and was fierce. The snows came and stayed and she didn’t have enough seed on hand to adequately feed all the birds that waited outside her door. She feared for the birds though she wasn’t usually prone to fear. The birds, the villagers whispered, were her familiars. Maisie Anne thought of them as her children as the years had gone by and would-be suitors were too intimidated to woo her. Her parents had died, and her siblings had scattered. She alone lived in the cottage and had meager means.
That evening she set to with the saw her father had used as well as his hammers and nails. She needed a warmer hat and the birds needed shelter from the cold. When she was almost done, she went outside, perched the ladder to the side of the cottage, climbed up, and grabbed some straw. The cottage had been fresh thatched that autumn and the straw was almost pristine.
When she was done, she had a hat of branches, straw, and wood for the birds to use for warmth. They flocked to her in numbers the villagers had never seen. When they asked Maisie Anne what she had done, she replied that she couldn’t keep them from starving, but she could keep them warm.
The following morning, Maisie Anne left the cottage sporting her hat and discovered that during the night the villagers had left bags and bags of seed for the birds and provisions for Maisie Anne.
She and her hat became a spectacle each and every winter from that time forward. Tourists came from miles around to see the fae0 one feed and shelter the birds. The tea shoppe did very well with the added custom and Maisie Anne’s wages were increased, but still the villagers provided for her and the birds.
W. Va. Fur and Root 