Weekend at CCMAC: Sessions #5 and Departure

A Tuning the Air Journal

Sunday August 29, 2010 – Weekend at CCMAC: Sessions #5 and Departure

Sunday August 29, 2010
Copper Colored Mountain Arts Center
Ann Arbor, MI

5:00am – Rise
5:30am – 1-hour silent meditation with community
6:30am – Free time/breakfast
9:00am – Community blessing (without doughnuts this time)
9:30am – Free time
1:00pm – Lunch
2:00pm – Session #5
3:30pm – Seminar completion
4:45pm – Departure for Airport

Up again for the 5:30 sitting. Made some minor adjustments, and avoided yesterday’s discomfort in my legs. Back to the house for a bit of breakfast, and then a morning mostly to myself. The community had some community business to attend to. I read, showered, and got myself more or less packed and ready to head for the airport after the afternoon session. Lovely lunch of homemade pesto (basil grown here on the property). Got a tour of the second barn which has a room on the top floor with 4 walls of stunning Tibetan-style paintings of various relevant deities and teachers. My understanding of Buddhist practice and tradition is woefully inadequate, but the shear artistic impact was impressive and wonderful.

Session #5, our final session, began at 2pm. I did not plan on a heavy work session, but primarily aimed to bring the various threads of inquiry from the weekend to a completion. I began with putting the rhythmic figures the team had memorized and practiced, together. Again I was pleased to discover that this had been taken seriously, and so I was able to move the exercise much further along than I had dared to hope or anticipate. More work with boomwhackers, taking the basic circulation exercises we had explored yet another step.

We re-gathered in the circle to share observations before drawing the weekend to a close. Very good insights that indicated to me that what was being presented, beyond the superficial activities, was comprehended and the team seemed to recognize the value of what they had experienced. Ended the meeting and the class with the Tuning the Air hand clap circulation and “let it go” gesture, which brought the weekend to a very powerful completion for me.

A little free time. Got my stuff together and ready for travel. Cleaned out my room. Walked about the property enjoying the heat. Hit the road for the Detroit Airport a little before 5pm. Breezed through security. Had time to grab some functionally adequate food before departure time, since there would be no food on the plane and nothing in my refrigerator when I got home.

Travel was smooth. I even had no one in the seats adjacent to me – almost unheard of these days. The only dark spot on the trip was the brain-dead Delta employee at the gate who saw the duffle bag I was carrying the boomwhackers in and insisted that it would not fit in the overhead. My explanation that on the way out it had fit just fine, taking up the same space as a little wheelie bag, did not sway her. The fact that it fit in the stupid little measuring thing at the gate was not enough to convince her that her estimation of the bags size was possibly in error. Meanwhile, as this conversation was going on, people were passing by us dragging steamer trunks on wheels that were never going to fit in any overhead compartment ever. In the end her idiocy trumped my energy for argument, and the bag was checked. Pea brains rule the world. Not enough to spoil my weekend, though.


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