Shaping Clay, Shaping Life: A Collective Expression of Trauma and Hope

“It’s not pots we are making, it’s ourselves.” –MC Richards

Come to the mountain as life insists and springs from earth and branch. Take some clay in your hands and sit quietly with the grief, loss or trauma in your life.  Sit with the stubborn, tenacious hope as well.  The meditative process of working with clay can help us to heal or more gently hold the broken places in our lives and also encounter the light within that shines in spite of and, so often, even because of our brokenness.

This retreat is based on the work of Corinne D Peterson, a world renown sculptor and Jungian trained psychotherapist who developed the Cairn Project, as a collective expression of trauma and hope.  Beginning in 2014 and over the next five years, The Cairn Project held many Shaping Clay, Shaping Life workshops with immigrants, refugees, LGBTQI+, recovery, school, faith and community groups, nurses, torture, trafficking and domestic abuse survivors, etc. Workshop participants were asked to make two clay forms: a rock from stoneware clay that embodies their inner experience of pain and loss, and a small porcelain token splashed with touch of gold luster.  The pieces were joined in collective public installations whereby the stoneware rocks were piled to form a memorial cairn, with the porcelain tokens of tenacious hope and light hovering above.

This retreat will be the first of many workshops at Kirkridge and surrounding communities that will contribute to a growing Kittatinny Cairn & Cloud installation on the mountain in the woods alongside the Kirkridge Memorial Garden.

No need to worry about being an artist or having any previous experience with clay!  Besides shaping our rocks and tokens, we’ll share poems, songs and stories, have time for silence and writing, praying and playing with clay, wilderness walking and wandering through the standing stones of neighboring Columcille Megalith Park.