In these times of turbulent upheaval, members of the NCST, Newark Community Street Team, a community group of dedicated trauma, crisis and violence-reducing practitioners, came to Uplands to rest, renew, and fortify inter-departmental connections. Participants represented TRC (Trauma Recovery Center), CCRT (Community Crisis Response Team), Safe Passage, and ORT/HRC (Overdose Response Team / Harm Reduction Center). Each guest held distinctive roles within a shared and unified mission of community care and safety. The apt retreat theme “Rooted in Unity, Growing Together,” captured NCST’s quest for greater unification of mission and growth-aspirations in the face of undermining landscape challenges.
The retreat combined a range of structured, guided and free-ranging group experiences that were designed to be inclusive, accessible, and adaptable to participants with varying levels of familiarity with and interest in the offerings. The retreat began outdoors with an opening circle on the mossy knoll of Cheriklo. Participants created a shared container with music, movement, and intention setting wherein they each offered their personal desires of what they wished most to both receive and to contribute in their weekend retreat.
The first of the weekend meals was savored with gusto as were indeed all the meals. Delectable homemade offerings over the course of the retreat included, fried chicken, homemade sourdough bread with local fresh cheeses, garden-harvested potato salad, homemade pizzas, potato soup with locally foraged ramps, chocolate cake, cheese cake and an abundance of fresh baked cookies and brownies. Guests loved the distinctive Uplands hybrid culinary concoctions that were comfort foods sourced from our garden and local farms, freshly and nutritiously created, and prepared with love. After a sunset gathering around the west patio firepit, Friday ended with a sound bowl session that lulled guests into a pre-sleep state of released relaxation.
Saturday offered sprawling swaths of free time to explore the hiking trails and wellness walk, lounge in the sauna, pool and hot-tub, and enjoy exhilarating rides in the “mule” ATV around, the rolling 300 acre property. The day’s highlight was a team-bonding experience of a creative mask-making workshop. The group was offered reflections and original poetry about the potency and nonverbal expressiveness of mask-making and wearing that has spanned all times and heritages. Participants were invited to consider and create the double-sided mask we each wear: our outward presentations and aspirations of how we show up in the world and the inward complexities of feelings and truths we harbor and cultivate. The retreat theme of “rooted in unity, growing together,” was incorporated with an exploration of how we root our interior selves to our external presentations, as well as how we root to our fellow community team members, with the shared hope that “together we are growing a forest of belongness.”
Dinner was preceded by a garden tour. Guests curious to understand and experience the ways and wonders of growing produce, learned about the gardening processes and delighted in being able to plant beet, sugar snap pea and turnip seeds in the Uplands garden. The evening culminated in a blazing bonfire and a riotous truth-disclosing team-building game. Called “Curious Heart,” the activity had members select a mystery question that probes a personal truth from a heart-shaped box to which they (only voluntarily!) responded with candor. The conversations that unfolded from the honest and amusing sharings forged richer, deeper bonds of mutual understanding.
In Sunday’s closing circle, participants spoke of the healing power of nature, play, creativity and rest, of release from burdens of unspoken traumas, and of fortified bonds of shared mission and community. They returned to their community service work with a sense of clarified peace, re-energized hope, and uplifting connection to themselves and their team members.
