It wasn’t the stunning mountain vistas 9,000 feet up, or the warm 90-degree swimming pool sparkling with joyful sunlight.  It wasn’t the cheery summer wildflowers popping up beside the woodland paths or the rushing waterfalls that met us as we wandered in and out of the nearby forests.

Nope.  It was the people.  And it was the polio. Somehow we had found each other and became freshly entwined. We, with our partially paralyzed post-polio bodies, made friends quickly, as if we had known each other since childhood.  

Tree-top mountain view from the Georgetown Loop Railroad car.

Fifty-three of us attended the Colorado Post-Polio Wellness Retreat from August 17-20, 2014 at Rocky Mountain Village in Empire, Colorado. This experiential holistic wellness program for polio survivors featured guest speakers and planned activities revolving around three major themes: the mind, the body and the spirit. We slept in the Easter Seals camp’s rustic cabins, shared communal bathrooms, ate meals together in the large dining hall and joyfully participated in program sessions that ranged from aerobic exercise to zip lining. Yes…zip lining! We went on bird and wildflower hikes, and a recreational train ride through the mountains. We enjoyed a reflexology treatment, learned about post-polio syndrome, and heard about mindful meditation. Then we tie-dyed t-shirts. And that’s just a sampling of the rich program agenda. The entire retreat cost was $300.00 plus transportation.

At retreats like this I have found that we as participants each learn and grow in different ways, depending on what our life circumstances are at the time. What was going on at home? What new experiences and challenges had we been facing? What kind of people have come in and out of our lives lately? What new awareness about life was waiting to emerge? Mine became clearer and clearer to me each day of the retreat.

It was all about the flow and depths of compassion—that “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.”  I saw it everywhere and was astounded by the amount of compassion these polio survivors had for one another. People connecting…polio survivors who had never met before feeling each other’s pain, need, grief, and joy…holding hands…hugging…crying…carrying cups of coffee for each other…picking each other up in golf carts to ease the daily trek around camp. One woman cried as she described to the group her plight as a young paralyzed Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis during WWII. We wanted to help her let go of her nightmare and replace it with love and optimism. Another woman anguished one morning at the breakfast table, expressing her fears about growing old, infirm and lonesome with a post-polio disability. Her kids don’t want to visit her anymore. She was in pain. We talked about making new and younger friends and transforming our homes into happy places that many will want to visit as we grow into late life.

Reflexology treatments from one camper to another brought comfort and relief.

I have planned and attended nine post-polio wellness retreats since we started them in 2006 and this year the compassion I witnessed and felt was somehow exceptional.  At night in the cabin our group of women shared stories about how they became widows and got through the grief. It takes years and years to reconcile the loss of a true love. We listened and empathetically nodded our heads as one woman described her six-year road to healing from the sudden death of her husband–overcoming the disappearance of insensitive kids, returning to encouraging grief counselors and having many heart-to-heart lunches with friends in her book club. Two young women originally from India discovered they had both been cast off to orphanages there as young girls paralyzed by polio, then luckily adopted by American families. What they were delighted to learn was that now they only live a few miles from each other in Denver and with the help of public transit, can cultivate a warm friendship that may last a lifetime. If they had not attended this retreat, they might never have met.

Perhaps for me the most interesting reflection about compassion came during our large group discussion of spirituality and disability. It was when a lovely polio survivor named Karen told us all about an interlude she and her husband had encountered on a trip to Naples, Italy. They had found a monastery that had, over the years, necessarily evolved into a restaurant. After wandering in, they found a table, sat down and ordered their lunch. As they were waiting, a young priest asked if he might join them. They agreed and engaged in warm lunchtime chatter for quite a while.  Upon leaving, the couple rose and walked away toward the door of the restaurant. It suddenly became obvious to the friendly priest that Karen dragged a heavy brace on her leg and walked with a limp. Stunned with compassion he lovingly called out across the room to them both “Mia spina dulce!” (sometimes said, “il mia dulce spina”) in Italian. Translated, he was saying “my sweet thorn!” They looked back, smiled and never forgot what he had bellowed with affectionate sensitivity.

It was a commentary about the grace it takes to live well with a disability. Having a disability from polio is our thorn. It is the childhood stench of hot wet wool to rejuvenate weakened muscles, the pain of never being asked to a school dance or the terror of crutch-walking on ice and snow. It hurts, is unwanted, and can keep people away. How can this thorn be sweet, as the priest suggests? Therein lies our life challenge. Think of the rose.  At first as only a budding stem, it has ugly thorns, but as it grows and matures it becomes the most adored sweet-smelling bloom on the planet— the ancient symbol of love and beauty, a sign of compassion at funerals and the symbol of religious exemplars including the Virgin Mary.

I reflected that the nasty thorn, our disability, paradoxically supports, protects and raises us up to the grace, which is the rose in us–if we let it. We must accept it, make it work for us, and let the beauty begin. It is only with our thorn that we can ever hope to become a rose– as a rose is meant to be. That rose, that grace, is what I witnessed in Colorado. It was the overflowing of care and compassion these polio survivors had for each other. We deeply understood each other’s sorrows and thorns, softly embraced them together, and peacefully commingled to bless one another in many new ways. Only because we had grasped and accepted our thorn, could we offer each other the very rose we had become.

And…we had one heck of a lot of fun doing it!

Another first-time zip-liner!

Happy New Year!  

What shall we look forward to?

 The next post-polio wellness retreats will be held on the shores of Lake Superior in Big Bay, Michigan in September 2015 and then high in the Rocky Mountains in Empire, Colorado in August 2016. Connect to Post-Polio Health International’s website for updates: http://post-polio.org/