It has been my remarkable good fortune to have Colette Volkema DeNooyer organize and host the workshops I’ve been running. She puts in extraordinary time and mentally exhausting effort doing all the maddening detail work that enable our get-togethers to happen. And to be able to be with one another at the DeNooyer home along Lake Michigan is a breathtaking bonus. A big sack of gratitude goes to Colette’s husband, Bob, who so generously sends himself into the basement while we take over the rest of the house. Colette and Bob have a way of making you feel as if you are loved family dropping by. They make you feel instantly at home, as if you grew up there, have a favorite chair, can kick off your shoes and ask, “What’s in the fridge?”
This past Saturday we held another intro to poetry writing workshop and what a magical time it was. I don’t know how the participants did it, but within five minutes everyone was a best friend from back in high school. And what sparkling intelligences and warm hearts filled the time. I noticed how gratitude was wandering through me. I’m always apprehensive about leading a new group, but these souls made ME feel welcome. It wasn’t long before my self-consciousness joined the snow melt of this January thaw. We laughed and discovered and chattered away and wrote and cared in the best of ways about things that mattered. And it all happened with a lightness of being that was anything but unbearable. It wasn’t even bearable. It was palpable and a joy.
And that brings me back to Colette and how she creates a place where one is safe to be, one is safe to discover, to succeed, to fail, to falter, to learn, to be enriched, to be oneself in one’s own world. I would urge everyone to register for her retreats. Talk about a place and a way to find renewal without that being the goal. That’s what’s rare–having a retreat where it doesn’t feel like, well, like a “planned retreat.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) We’ve added a link to her site, For Writers & Readers, where the workshops are listed. I wholeheartedly urge you to give yourself the gift of Colette!
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