It’s ironic. I’m sitting with my laptop typing these words, occasionally looking outside at the crisp blue sky and leaves just starting to turn. But not for long.

This is a quick post to let you know that I’m tuning out of technology for the weekend, heading to Menla Mountain Retreat in the Catskills for Colleen Saidman Yee’s Joy of The Yogini: Annual Women’s Retreat.

Menla is proud to host its fourth annual all women’s retreat. Participants will spend the weekend unlocking their potential and joy by shedding layers of resistance through pranayama, yoga asanas, meditation, and aromatherapy. In addition to the more structured sessions, we will honor and celebrate our femininity together through meaningful conversations, laughter, dancing, and drumming. To enhance this already potent combination, there will be a sweat lodge, body workers, a gifted astrologer, incredible meals, and more.

This is a rare and unique opportunity to transform your life by cleansing, communing, and practicing together in a very intimate environment, nestled in Menla’s breathtaking landscapes. Go home refreshed, rejuvenated, and relaxed, empowered by your fullest expression as a woman.

Yesterday as I was beginning to prepare for my trip, thinking about shutting down the ever-present iPhone, laptop, Twittering, Instagramming, FBing, checking in, tethering—so often a source of connection to a community of really great people—I smiled inside and out, knowing that this weekend is my call to new, healthier habitual patterns or samskara.

Because this perfect email (irony, again) was sitting in my inbox from elephant journal with a poem from Thoreau’s Walden. Thank you, Waylon Lewis. Thank you, Henry David Thoreau.

And in the words of my children: Thank you for the world so sweet. Thank you for the food we eat. Thank you for the birds that sing. Thank you God for everything.

We need the tonic of wildness:
To wade sometimes in the meadows
where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk,
and hear the booming of the snipe;
To smell the whispering sedge where only
some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest,
and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.
At the same time we are earnest to explore and learn,
we require that all things be mysterious unexplorable,
that land and sea be infinitely wild,
unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

We can never have enough of nature,
We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor,
vast and titanic features:
The sea-coast with its wrecks,
the wilderness with its living and decaying trees,
the thunder cloud, the rain that lasts three weeks
and produces freshets.
We need to witness our own limits transgressed,
and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

~ HDT, Walden.

Have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll be back on Monday. With fresh eyes.