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On a Horse Made of Swans Sept 11-17, 2000 Vermont Writer's Retreat in the Lake Champlain Islands

	On a Horse Made of Swans Vermont Writer's Retreat in the Lake Champlain Islands with Martín Prechtel Location: YMCA camp Abnaki, North Hero, Vermont Contact: Craig Ungerman email: hiddenwine@earthlink.net http://www.hiddenwine.com	Martín Prechtel bio: Martín Prechtel's schedule at floweringmountain.com
	I am not sure when I first realized how each of our lives must be a story sung aloud by subtle and powerful spirit beings inside an invisible layer of existence. It is their telling of our stories that push us into life. The way we dance out the wild song is how we live out our lives. Likewise, when we humans tell our own stories and dedicate them to those unseen singers of life, they in turn are fed by us, their thirst slaked by the water of our emotions, fattened by our sufferings, elated by our durability, these invisible life-giving singers of our stories are kept energized and inspired by our remembering of them and can therefore continue telling us into existence. Their language is life itself. Human language can either feed that life or poison it. For this reason I try to reward those storytelling spirits with the word paintings of my own life where I can love, be loved, fail and feel, grieve and fumble, dancing to their entangled rhythm. Please join me in Vermont, the land of honey and visionaries, rock-hard maple and soft granite hills, a land of milk and maple syrup, tolerant bears, clear rivers and crazy colored leaves, while the last crickets of summer still twitter and creak. Before the Sun rides away on his winter horse of swans lets get together to feast our invisible souls; learning to cook a fine meal of delicious words with our own stories, where human suffering, humor and mystery can flower through inspired diligence into a gift whose unsuspected shine can bless what blesses us all.	Workshop Site  LAKE CHAMPLAIN ISLANDS Like the Great Mother Waters, Lake Champlain holds the Hero Islands in her liquid arms, hiding them from the majestic Adirondack Mountains of New York on one side and Vermont's Green Mountains on the other. Stretching out like a shining womb, she has sustained Indigenous peoples such as the People of the Dawn, the Abnaki, for a great time and later immigrant Europeans who set up here in 1666, building a shrine to their Divine Female, Saint Anne. Directions and Map Also home to some of the oldest fossil formations in the world .
	Workshop Food and Lodging Established in 1901, YMCA Camp Abnaki is a summer camp located on the southern tip of North Hero Island. Surrounded by water, the camp offers spectacular views of the mountains, sunrises and sunsets. Most of the buildings have been recently restored and a new conference center was added on this year. Twenty of the sleeping cabins are enclosed and available for our use, accommodating two to four people per cabin. The bathhouses are centrally located to the cabins. The food will be ‘home-style cooking’ with the freshest ingredients available, organic when possible, with vegetarian options at all meals. For additional information about Camp Abnaki and the Champlain Islands, log onto their website at: www.campabnaki.org.	Workshop Cost: $ 650.00 ($ 625.00 discounted if paid by check $) $150.00 deposit due with registration. Refundable until August 15th less $25 handling fee Space is limited to first 60 participants For more information about Hidden Wine events: Call . E-mail: hiddenwine@earthlink.net On the Web: http://www.hiddenwine.com/ For registration form click here see below...
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	Martín Prechtel, shaman and teacher, was raised in New Mexico on a Pueblo Indian reservation. In 1971 Nicolas Chiviliu, a Mayan shaman from Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala called Martin to become his student and succeed him. Martin lived with Chiviliu for years, was initiated as a shaman and after his teacher’s death, took his place, healing and shamanizing among 30,000 Tzutujil Mayans amidst his new found village. After 1978 Martin became chief initiator and a public leader, guiding the young village men through long ceremonies. Martín resides in New Mexico and works as a painter, musician, storyteller, teacher and always, as a healer. His book Secrets of the Talk ing Jaguar was released in August 1998 by Putnam and the response to the book has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. His second book Long Life Honey in the Heart–Stories of Mayan Initiation will be released in October of 1999. Martín is most extraordinary as a teacher because, with great beauty and articulation, he is able to stand with one foot in the world of Western spiritual traditions and the other foot— and his entire soul— within his own tradition. Teaching internationally through ceremony, lecture and healing work, Martín helps people in many lands reconnect with their own sense of place—their sense of the daily sacred. Robert Bly describes Martín as “A short kind of pony that gallops through the fields of human possibility with flowers dropping out of his mouth...”
	Martín Prechtel's schedule - at floweringmountain.com