Who We Are : Who We Can Be

4 – 11 June 2011

Laurieston Hall, Dumfries and Galloway

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bookings have now closed for this week. Have a look at our other events here.

We invite you to join us at Laurieston and to share in exploring the gifts and potential of men who love men. Join us as we seek to harness the creativity, play and love sometimes left dormant in our busy lives. As we work with our bodies, with different spiritual traditions, and with the intentional community created when we gather.

As organizers we will be offering a structured program of workshops and activities for at least the first three days to help the group gel. We will be asking participants to join in this as much as they feel able. We are working on plans for yoga, massage, heart circles, outdoor workshops, and dancing.

Whilst some parts of the week such as welcoming and arrival will be planned in reasonable detail, others will be left on a more flexible basis so that we can work with the energy of the group and the will of the community. As the week progresses we will be asking participants to share in the responsibility for running workshops and activities. There will be opportunities for base groups to lead a workshop or activity. We will be asking all participants to take part in a base group.

Your Organisers

Ian Johnson was an organiser on various ECC weeks including a series of Easter weeks 1997-2000. After some years of attending occasional ECC weeks he was inspired by last year’s September Laurieston week to help with this week. He is currently grappling with the paradoxes of being an atheist as well as an attendee at the Brighton Quaker meeting.

Chris Rishworth has worked in gay men’s sexual health for ten years. He runs two shared properties; has recently taught cycling in schools and to adults and has just got an allotment in the park he helped to restore in the locality. He is new to organising ECC weeks. After the last September Laurieston week he felt it was his turn to “step up to the plate”. When not tied down to this variety of jobs he is found wandering the planet for at least three months a year looking on the beauty of nature and of human society.

Mike Kaye “Anarchist, iconoclast, psychopath. These are but a few of the labels attached to him of late.”
Mike finally plucked up the courage to attend an ECC even in 2003 at Laurieston, after eighteen years on the mailing list. He fell in love with both ECC and Laurieston and the June week there has become an annual pilgrimage for him. His inspiration is drawn from Buddhism and the Eastern thinkers, the Humanist traditions of western philosophy and psychology, the wonders of Nature, and playing with men. He spends far too much of his time cuddling his cats and poultry and building endless ponds and waterfalls in his garden.

Roger Chapman has been part of seven or eight (he’s lost count) ECC gay men’s weeks at Laurieston Hall, Grasmere, Manorbier and Wasdale. He finds the ECC arena both interesting as well as sometimes personally challenging. He hopes to continue to be involved and play his part within and around the dispersed Community of ECC. He is greatly encouraged by the foundations of ECC organisation and its accompanying community engagement with those involved – particularly by its care and share ethos which seems to work. Roger is keen that these valuable elements of organisation and engagement are suitably and appropriately reinforced and that they long continue. He is a Quaker and takes the liberal approach to life and living, placing value on each individual’s experience of life; no matter what this is. Roger is new to helping organise gay men’s weeks, but nevertheless is keen to make a contribution. Roger sometimes sings and reads poetry. He enjoys the cinema and ‘Spotify’ which was introduced to him for the first time at ECC Wasdale in January ’11 – he has even downloaded gay cliche Judy Garland singing ‘Once in a Lifetime’ (suppose he would).

Cost

Breakeven cost £270
Concessionary rate (for people living at benefit levels) £140
Low income (up to £20,000) £270
Average income (£20,000 – £29,999) £325
High income (£30,000 or more) £375

There is also a bursary rate for those who can’t afford the concessionary rate. Contact Ian Johnson for more information.

Further details

Number of places 30
For further information
Email june2011 [at] btinternet.com
Telephone Ian 07981 339189
Address 97 Bevendean Avenue, Saltdean, Brighton, BN2 8PE

Bookings have now closed for this week. Have a look at our other events here.