The CANI-Net Regeneration retreat was held for three days at the end of June 2023 in Monmouthshire, South Wales. Nine people attended the retreat ranging in age from 18-80! We were wonderfully hosted by Ruth at Trealy Farm, cooking us excellent vegetarian meals with local produce. The site had a fresh water swimming pool, sauna and fantastic walks through the impressive local scenery. The retreat centre had a lovely open room for us all to meet in with wide patio doors opening out into the countryside where we could hear the chiff-chaffs chiff-chaffing away and the leaves dancing the breeze. The weather began hot at the end of an extended heat wave and cooled as the days progressed.
Alys and Melissa began planning the retreat in the early Spring and wanted to create a space for CANI-net members to gather in person after so long online, and perhaps to regenerate a feeling for what CANI-net may be, or may be becoming, now that it runs as an independent (of University structures) network.
The daily schedule began at 10am so people had time for themselves and then met ready for the day. We flowed between gathering to write and more relaxed mealtimes and initially planned to have unstructured evenings, but the urgent feelings of the process that took hold didn't seem to allow for that, and evening writing sessions were introduced. Karen brought clay and Alys a mini printing press so we also added art-making into our writing process. Something new that emerged through our regeneration process was the role of the body in collaborative inquiry and participants took turns to lead in dance and movement activities which influenced the ways we found ourselves in relation, marked the flow of the time together, shifting the energy and moving us along.
Since the retreat, the group has continued to meet about monthly online, writing more together and beginning to create a new way to make sense of our words and time together, continuing to deepen our regenerative process, and our understanding of how regeneration works through collaborative processes over time. In the December CANI-net session we shared some of our work so far and Melissa and Mark gave a paper at ECQI in Helsinki in Jan 2024. We are now in the process of pulling the work into a paper to submit to a journal and other creative endeavours including, we hope, a performance of the work in an art space.
February 16, 2024
