The Restory Retreat Centre

  Google ain’t good. Let me rephrase: Google is too good. For someone like me, it is like entering a candy store. So much to discover, to investigate, look at, listen to. I get so absorbed that time and part of life pass me by. I have to be very disciplined in using the good tool.      But think about it: you read a book. Something draws your attention. You Google it. Wholah! A totally new dimension opens up. That’s how I came across the beautiful website/blog of Lori Erickson, Spiritual Travels. Practical advice for soulful journeys. Where she writes:       In the middle of downtown Louisville, Kentucky, there stands a most unusual bronze plaque. Usually such markers commemorate a battle, political figure, or some natural or historical feature, but the one on the street corner in Louisville marks a mystical experience — one that happened to the monk Thomas Merton on March 18, 1958:      “In Louisville, at the corner...

I feel a little bit like Dorothy: on her way with her odd companions (sorry George!), to see the Wizard of Oz, feeling hopeful that at last, someone will be able to help them satisfy their deepest desires and help Dorothy get back home.      Thing is, I am home. And I’m off in little more than a week, together with George, to visit Pieter and Linda in Prague! So what is this that I am feeling?      I sit quietly, waiting for understanding to come. Susan Boyle is singing Daydream believer . Maybe there’s something in the lyrics that can give me a clue. If nothing happens by chance, then sock it to me, Susan!      The lyrics are beautiful, gentle and completely beyond me! Oh, what can it mean To a daydream believer And a  homecoming queen? Indeed!      So maybe insight will flow out my fingers as I write. Let’s see: I feel hopeful, for one, but for what exactly, I don’t know. A sense of anticipation, as...

“ What is Real? ” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick out handle?” “ Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.” “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful, “ When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.” “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby...

We have a beautiful phrase in Afrikaans: om tot verhaal te kom. If you had a very difficult time, or had a crisis or an illness that caught you off guard and disrupted your life and now, gradually, things are returning to normal, that phrase is often used. Someone will ask: “How are you doing?” And you’ll say: “I am not over it yet but at least I’m busy om tot verhaal te kom .(I am busy regaining my strength, I’m busy regaining my balance).” I think that in order to become whole and integrated again, to regain our overall balance in life ( om tot verhaal te kom ) it is important to move in this case from the figure of speech to the literal sense. It is important for us om tot verhaal te kom. It is important to return to stories, to create a space for them and invite them into our lives. Constantly. Stories heal. If there is a people who understand and apply this, it is the Jews. Some of the deepest, most beautiful stories are found in the Jewish tradition. Maybe because they ...

     Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything—only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories.      Stories are embedded with instructions which guide us about the complexities of life. Excerpt from Women who run with the wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Est é s      Even as a little girl, I knew that some stories worked, while other stories tried, but didn’t. Stories that had an obvious lesson to them, like Pinnochio, caused me to feel only guilt.      But stories that leapt off the page and tickled me pink with descriptions of animal antics and beautiful places stayed with me like good friends and somewhere deep inside, they set to work at bringing me to   a higher understanding of things.      I read ferociously all through my growing years. Books exposed me   to things my m...

Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1953 to 1961, died in a plane crash while still in office. Widely praised and respected for the work he had done, h e is the only person to have been awarded a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize. After his death, a journal that he kept was found in his house. He referred to these entries “as a sort of a white book concerning my negotiations with myself – and with God.” The journal was published under the title Markings and in the years that followed became a spiritual classic. A remark by W.H. Auden in his foreword to Markings, haunts me lately. He said that Hammarskjöld’s journal is an account “of the attempt by a professional man of action to unite in one life the via activa and the via contemplativa .” For me, this phrase captures one of the central issues of the spiritual life. The attempt to unite in one life the way of action and the way of contemplation. Experience shows that we often tend to overemphasize one of ...