Winter Retreat

So, I've realized that my blogs recently have been more summaries of chunks of time than true expressions of my experiences this year. (i.e. eight photos to convey the entire month of January, what?) Therefore (don't hold me to this but) I'm going to try to start blogging more often when I am in the moment and can more adequately describe my experience.

Exhibit A: Today, we went on our winter retreat. If you recall, in October we went on our fall retreat to a state park in WV for a weekend. Our winter retreat was only a day long, but very productive and a nice get away. While we could have just sat in our living room, we decided it would be a good idea to have a change of scenery. So we traveled about a half hour outside the city to Sister Joan Marie's house. Sister Joan Marie is a member of the Benedictine order and the parish social minister for Catholic Charities of Baltimore. The order owns three houses on a culdesac in Timonium. They live in two of the houses and rent out the third for retreats- which is where we were today.

Similar to our fall retreat, we had sessions on community, service and spirituality under the themes of simplicity and listening. We reflected on the challenges and joys of our individual work places and living in community and of course discussed the necessary household items while we had everyone together.

On a side note, I cut my finger with a bread knife and came the closest I ever had to passing out. Mind you, this was a very very small cut that barely bled, but while I sat there with my head between my knees, I thought to myself- when did I become a wuss?

Moving on, I went for a run today? I know, I still can't quite believe it. And it wasn't so much running as spurts of jogging broken up by walking for a total of um.... a quarter of a mile. Several days ago, my roommate Bethany announced to the rest of us that we would all be running a 5K in the spring. So after I made several excuses, Bethany and Kelly managed to convince me to go with them after we returned from the retreat. I will certainly keep you filled in on the progress of our training. Anything will be better than me "running" the Fourth of July road race cold turkey in high school.