Do you sometimes feel like you live too much in your head? Are you adept at thinking and analyzing your world but meanwhile you secretly long for more access to the present moment? Do you have a creative spirit (if not a creative practice) that you are trying to make more space for in your life? Do you sometimes wonder if you have a story inside of you that you would like to tell?  Do you love the process of making, and find that you are most alive or yourself when you are making something? Have you ever been curious about bookmaking as an art form?

If you answered yes to ANY of these questions, then this retreat is for you.

Through bypassing the thinking brain, both artmaking and body-based practices can provide portals into our unseen worlds. Traditionally, artmaking, although by its very nature an embodied practice, has not explicitly brought attention to the maker’s felt experience. Similarly, body-based explorations and experiences, although potentially immensely generative, most often do not translate into the creation of a lasting tangible form. In this unique retreat we will use a hybrid of artmaking and embodied practice as vehicles for self-expression and self-discovery.

Books, broadly speaking, are humanity's repository of hope. They hold our stories, our histories, our explanation of the divine, our queries into science, technology and love. Working with a simple yet beautiful book form called a piano hinge binding, we will explore creative awareness practices and experimentation in this 3-day retreat. Participants will journey through experiences of creative becoming that will culminate in the production of a simple yet beautiful take-away art piece.  Together and individually, we will play and explore, learning both about bookmaking, ourselves and each other in the process.