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Our retreat's exploration of creative mythology takes May Day and the coming of new Summer as its theme. We will explore and experience the motifs of arriving summer and its associations with young adulthood, fertility, love, women's power and regeneration through an imagined future festival, the "Floralia." The forms and traditions of our Floralia are yet to be discovered, a new festival for a new people, to taste tomorrow today.

There actually was a Roman festival called the Floralia, held at this time of year. It was a ten day festival in honor of Flora, the Sabine goddess of flowers, to bless the land and new blossoms. Its associations with women's mysteries were celebrated with flowers and greenery, erotic games and performances, stripteases, the scattering of lentils and beans, and the release of goats and hares, symbols of male and female fertility.

The forms and expressions of our Floralia will be explored and enacted by the participants themselves - in all the forms participation may take. These range from imagined rites in spectacles and performances, to spontanteous kindnesses exchanged among participants, and anything that can be imagined in between. This festival will flower from the ground of the participants' own lives, authentic to their experience and aspiration.

Amidst the landscape of Madre Grande Monastery, Participants will imagine themselves inhabiting a future paradise, celebrating again the coming of a new summer. In costume and encampment style, and through hospitality, art and personal interaction, participants will share the experience of imagined rites in an idealized future.

All are invited to join in the performances, art and workshops and all are encouraged to present their own for fellow Participants to experience. We particularly invite Participants to reflect on their relationship to nature, AS nature, and answer the song of Madre Grande's meadows and lakes and oaks and stones.

The cycles of nature and the cycles of life have always been an occasion to reflect on our relationship to these mysteries. These themes were recognized in rites practiced before our species was even fully human. They continue in every civilization today, from the most primitive societies to the highest culture-complexes. We imagine they will continue in the future, whatever else the future may bring.

All the historical rites and traditions of May Day, Beltane, Walpugisnacht, and the Roman Floralia, celebrated in all their forms and times and places, are fertile inspiration. All their associated symbols still glow with primordial power. And our future Xara is an entirely blank canvas upon which the visions of groups and individuals are free to be painted.

We ask only a sincere spirit to affirm life, deepen its experience, and recognize its joy; the new forms invited by this retreat are free to be as individual as dreams.