It has been an overcast day in Los Angeles, and I’m now sitting at LAX waiting for my flight back to Melbourne to be called. It’s been a week since I left Squam Art Workshops and it’s only now that I’m able to write about the third Squam that I have been fortunate enough to attend. I’ve had to sit with the experience and let it percolate through me before I could even think about finding words to describe those five days in the woods of New Hampshire.
So here it is: Squam has given me the opportunity to create, describe, celebrate and bless the basis of my beginning. Every time I come to Squam I know that I am so, so loved and that I am seen – truly seen for who and what I am. I am embraced for who I am right now, as well as what I might or could be. I am accepted utterly, despite my (at times) apparently incomprehensible Australian accent. Elizabeth’s beautiful “Write Your Own Myth” class resonated so strongly that I found it hard to believe that she hadn’t designed the class specifically for me. I discovered my modern myth – it is yet to be written out properly, but oh so much inspiration to do so! Susa’s gentle and loving class, “This Precious Life”, introduced me to the joy of mixed media art work and brought me closer to understanding the arc of my myth through the prompts and encouragement that Susa provided.
I had no idea that these two classes would mesh so perfectly together for me at this particular time and moment. I truly felt as if both classes were created to help me draw together the threads of my life that until recently have seemed so disparate, and that everything I was learning and experiencing embodied the themes that I inevitably capture with my camera at Squam – the light (oh, the light!) and reflection of the trees, the lake, and the people. The beauty of Squam is that we all take something different from it, and that it inevitably meets a need deep within us, even if we have been previously unaware of it. Love, place, creativity, joy, writing, art, friendship, spirituality, light, reflection, home – Squam is all this and more – the basis of my beginning and the catalyst for so much more to come.
When Ideas Fail 