‘Go into the calm and luminous silence to renew,

but stay in the soil of your life.’

– From Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood.  Anonymous written during WWII

Our in-person summer retreat facilitated by Tess Ward, author of Celtic Wheel of the Year at Foxhill House in Cheshire. Places for Companions are prioritised but then we open it to others too. NB This retreat, unlike most of our other in-person events, will be mostly silent. The silence is a gift we offer one another – an invitation to journey together into deeper contemplation. There will be opportunities to speak at the start and end of the retreat, however, and during structured, invitational sessions of listening and speaking from the heart.

We will ground our souls in the beautiful Foxhill Retreat House and Woodland.  In quiet, we will have space to welcome all that arises, whatever the season of our hearts. Weaving through our flow of creativity, rest and silence, expect invitations to be outside, offerings of poetry, meditation and body prayer.  We will gather in circle each day, and maybe have a fire and ceremony towards the end.  I will be available for 1-1 sessions for those who would like.  In the silence, hope for conversations with the trees, the land, the creatures, and our journey into the Beloved.  May the retreat be a time to slow down to the rhythm of the earth, to remember the blessing of who we belong to and to tune in to a news cycle of a different kind. In the wide light of this time of year, may we bring all our shadow and all our gold and settle into the place we find ourselves in our own lives, with each other as a community, and at this moment in our world.

Tess Ward was a hospice chaplain and celebrant before going freelance.

She moved to wild and beautiful Northumberland with her husband and now sees people for spiritual accompaniment and leads occasional retreats.

She has written two books of blessings including “The Celtic Wheel of the Year.”  She is finishing a third book “Rewilding the Heart”.  It is a book about how our inner lives and the wider-than-human world entwine.  It is a meditation on how we share the natural seasons of greening and growing, loss and dying and transformation throughout our lives.