Sunrise on the Beach

By Daniel, Ashley, and Jim

Peaceful breaking waves

Pawprints and footprints in sand

Sunrise comes again

It was Friday night, and we had checked in our participants for the Adult Men’s Independent Living Retreat at Virginia Beach, settled in, prepared dinner, eaten dinner, cleaned up from dinner, had our first group meeting, and were approaching “lights out”. This was my third retreat to serve as men’s counselor and teacher — an assignment I had come to look forward to with delight and expectation. I had wondered: “Will the men this time be different from those we’ve had before?” … “Will they establish the same brand of community as before?” … “Will they accept and settle into a routine which they will have helped determine?” … “Will they accept and perform all of the tasks necessary to make this an independent living and learning experience?”  

Well, it was Friday night and all of this was to be experienced in the next 48 hours. Meanwhile, I set a sunrise alarm so that I could be on the beach when it rose over the Eastern Atlantic Ocean and shed its light on our Retreat! And so it was that when the participants came into the kitchen for breakfast on Saturday morning, I told them about my solo trip to the beach to see the sunrise! I showed them the beautiful pictures I had taken. And immediately the request came from Daniel (one of our participants) and Ashley (our first Peer Mentor) — “We want to go with you tomorrow morning!” (By the way, I had not planned to get up early again on Sunday and go see the sunrise again! Nonetheless … I did!) It was another glorious sunrise, and it was a wonderful moment of community with these two participants. As we stood together for one last moment before returning to the house, I asked the two of them to share some one-word or one-phrase descriptives about our experience. Out of that conversation came the haiku poem above — an unplanned, off-agenda, totally spontaneous retreat moment!

And that’s what D&S Retreats mean to me. They follow a very tightly organized plan for adults with intellectual disabilities to expand their independent living skills … yet they can yield at a moment’s notice to a newly-recognized teachable moment in the schedule. And then we leaders turn over all of our leadership skills to allow this “moment” to have full sway with our retreat agenda! It is in these moments that all of our love for our participants (as a group and as individuals) and our commitment to expand their abilities are sharpened, tuned, and refocused on this particular group of participants at this moment in their lives! And, hopefully, they will return home on Sunday with a new skill or experience — one totally unplanned at the beginning of the retreat — along with all of the agenda-ordered ones!

With gratitude,

Jim

Jim Freedman

Dash and Scout Teacher