Intermission

During intermission, we acquire food, chat with our friends, process what we saw in the first segment of the performance and get ready for the next segment.  I’m in intermission right now, and I’m thankful for warm fire and the time to reflect and process while I'm in between things.

Getting food is pretty important during this season. We gather all the components of whatever our traditional seasonal meals require… I’ll be making lefse soon and preparing a variety of desserts and turkey-based meals. But I’m also stuck in my “hunter-gatherer” mode. I’ve finished making elderberry syrup, dehydrated mushrooms, acorn flour and crabapple jelly, but I still have buckets of various seeds to process into mustards and various other uses and gallons of black walnuts to crack. We hope to add more venison to the freezer before long. I’m thankful for the wild abundance, and also thankful for convenient access to grocery stores for the many things I can’t collect myself!

We’ve had the opportunity for some lovely gatherings in the Gathering Room in the past few weeks. I continue to truly enjoy the flow of people through this space. As I reflect on the first year here, we hosted 5 full-day workshops, 3 mini-workshops, 7 “women’s walk in the woods” hikes, a weekend church retreat, and several other private overnight guests and gatherings. Everyone seems to love the spaces here, the woods, and the experts we have come in to teach. Many say they’ll be back, and I believe them. I’m starting to fill in spots on the 2025 calendar. I expect more private use of accommodations spaces (especially the cabin) in between workshop weekends. I also have a million ideas chasing each other around in my head about what workshops we should offer in 2025 and how they should be structured. I’m glad for a bit of intermission to work on these ideas!

Keep watching the Iowisota website and Facebook page for opportunities and events at Iowisota. If there’s nothing eminent coming up and you want to schedule a visit or activity, shoot us an email!

I hope you too are getting a bit of an intermission… time to enjoy good food, visit with friends and family, take a break from the normal schedule, and reflect on the blessings of the year.  It sounds a bit like Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving!