Solstice Retreat, and other stuff in Roundtrip Ticket to Paradise 2

As I mentioned on June 16, I did attend the Solstice Retreat June 18-21. It was nice to get away, and I suspect it was the first time since I was homeless back in 1997-1998 that I slept in ambient temperatures. There were cabins there, but they were unheated, and one person did bring a tent.

Unfortunately, all of the activities in which I planned to participate for healing/therapeutic work were quite intimate (it was an alternative-lifestyles retreat, after all). As an Aspie (someone who experiences Asperger syndrome), I really didn't have the tools and skills necessary to connect with others on the deeply intimate levels in order to set up scenes to accomplish the healing work I had hoped to do.

After the retreat, I wondered if I had been giving off a stay-away signal, and posted notes both in a public forum as well as private notes to individual members of the alternative-lifestyles website, asking if anyone had noticed such. Fortunately, to a person, they said that they had not noticed any such signal coming off me, although most responding said they had not known that I did indeed want to play.

So, instead of getting work done, I did sit in on three interesting presentations, plus shared some good dining-table conversation, during which I discovered that a number of attendees had Aspie kids themselves. We compared notes on our various Asperger experiences. One such I recall was, in very early childhood, I was quite the escape artist: my parents fenced in a yard in back of the house for me to play in. It was equipped with a sandpit, a swingset, and a tetherball. So, one afternoon my mother put me in the yard to play, while she got work done elsewhere in the house - and didn't have to watch me. So, after a few minutes she happened to look out the window on the opposite side of the house, there she discovered little WP having broken out of the play yard. I also figured out, in separate incidents, how to work my father's homemade locks on a variety of drawers. Turns out one of the attendees had an Aspie son who figured out the locks on several drawers and cabinet doors in her house, at again a very young age. So she took all of the dangerous chemicals that people tend to store down low and put them on a very high shelf. My parents did that too, fortunately without even considering storing poisons down low. I also discovered that a gentleman there, who was in the service, was taking sign language lessons, as he and his wife had one or two hard-of-hearing kids. So he and I signed back and forth for a minute or two, while the rest of the table watched us.

Other than that, been somewhat copascetic... except for a couple of indiscretions between the retreat and now.

Such is life.