Last week I was in Baerenthal, in the Northern Vosges, France for the May Call Day celebration. I have been following these celebrations since 1998, and they are always inspiring highlights. The last years the celebrations in the West were no longer directed by Sri Kumar, and so various groups started organising May Call meetings. The meeting in Baerenthal was an international group living with about 40 members from Belgium, France, Germany and Switzerland.
The organizing committee already met last Tuesday for the last preparations. We had a look at the location and coordinated the activities of the next days. For the group living we had a beautiful gym with a huge window front to a meadow and the forest. And a second hall for slide shows etc. For me, it was also a beautiful occasion for presenting a number of my paintings along the wall of the gym. Preparing the hall demanded some creativity – the goals and the basketball baskets were transformed into parts of the decoration.
Wednesday afternoon I sat in the sun waiting for the group members to arrive and to distribute the room keys. There was a hearty welcome. Later we assembled in the garden of a friend’s house for a small garden party reception, before we started the meeting with the evening meditation.
As the opening of the group living I did an exercise with the group, “Visualisation of the Directions and the Planets” (: PDF) followed by a guided meditative journey in honor of the great teachers of humanity, which I accompanied by the sound of a singing bowl.
In the next days there was a rich program of QiGong sessions, group readings, lectures on spiritual astrology and the energies of time, healing work with the human aura, a sound ritual, musical presentations and slide-shows…, and, of course, beautiful group meditations. 29 May, the May Call Day, started with a fire ritual. Later we did a cake and candlelight ceremony. In the afternoon we saw a video about the energies of synthesis and a new DVD from a lecture of Master Kumar from last year’s conference in Paris, “A Meeting of Solar and Spiritual Astrology of East and West“.
There was a special highlight at the end of the seminar Sunday morning: We went to the European Parliament in Strasbourg and did a meditation on European Unity in the very center of the inner court of the Parliament building, speaking the invocation “We the citizens of Europe strive to stand united” and the Great Invocation. It was a very sublime moment, and then sunlight reflected from the windows into the court. As a close of the group meeting we had lunch outside a restaurant in the old town of Strasbourg.
Here you find some impressions of the meeting.