Reflecting on Four Years at RCC
This week I’m stepping down from my cherished role as program director at the Retreat Center Collaboration. It’s tough to let go. It’s strange to watch something I’ve worked on and cared for begin to grow beyond me, and to find myself needing to say goodbye.
Building community among retreat center leaders has been deeply fulfilling work, and as often as I’ve invited folks into the circle to participate, I have also been invited into my own healing, growth, and transformation, and found myself held by the circle as well.
I came to this work with an abiding fascination for “sacred spaces,” and had just completed a college degree where I studied how different groups create and maintain sacred space. These liminal spaces of transformation – spaces that some would call sacred – spring up like wildflowers both inside and outside of religious communities and traditions.
They use many different names, and come from many different lineages, but however they are called – retreat centers, spirituality centers, meditation centers, community centers, holistic centers, hush harbors, ashrams, abbeys and monasteries, hermitages, residency programs, immersive experiential learning programs, and so on – they all carry something special, a medicine for our times.
Retreat centers are spaces of reconnection – to ourselves, to our sense of purpose and our stories, to each other, to the land, and to the more-than-human world – which means they are spaces where healing happens.
The medicine of retreat centers has been such a gift to me. Although I am stepping down from my role, my care for these spaces has only expanded during my time here. What used to be an intellectual and vaguely spiritual connection to retreat centers has become a relational and heart-centered connection for me, and this heart connection has grown to include the land and the more-than-human world that makes everything possible.
From this place of grounding and reconnection, I’ve been able to join others in catching glimpses of a bigger picture that includes all of us. We have much in common across our various identities and programs, and it’s clear that our specialties and differences can inform and teach each other. Our healing and liberation are interdependent, too. Our relationships matter, and the ways we practice showing up, sharing our stories, and being accountable also matter, even when we can only connect over Zoom. When we’re quiet together, I also sense how this work of connection is deeply supported and encouraged in unseen ways.
What started as an idea has grown into something very real and meaningful to a broad community. And it’s not done blooming! In some ways, the Retreat Center Collaboration is still a young shrub, still developing good roots, stretching itself up to the sun and down into the earth. But we can see how many buds are developing, and catch a little whiff of the fragrant sweetness they contain.
When planting a formal flower garden, we choose all the ingredients and order them to create the desired effect. Harmony and balance, contrast and texture.
But sometimes it’s not what we’ve planted that really touches us. A field of wildflowers creates its own effect, regardless of what we desire, and holds us in its beauty.
That’s how I feel as I step back now. Held. And grateful.
Ben Scott-Brandt
