Sojourn

I go away for a couple of days with a group of colleagues. We stay at a retreat centre. The food and the company is good. The world is collapsing but this is a jewel of good fortune.

Over a style and across a field of bone-coloured grass lies a lake. The mountains look down on the lake. The clouds look down on the mountains. The buzzard circles, eyeing our pale flesh as we float in the water.

I crash through the surface of the the lake. I’m sick to death of humans and the mess we’ve made. This is not a pastime, my life depends upon it. I reach for the cold, the wind, the cries of the seagulls, the lapping of the waves between the reeds.

I’m tired. I want the weight of my grief and disbelief, my disappointment to be held. The pieces of my shattered heart float out from under my ribcage, they scatter and glitter on the surface of the water. My skin is porous. I am purified by the peat water, by the black leaves and the cold therms rising from the deep. The body of water takes up the weight of my body. She carries me out under the gaze of the mountains.

We have a plan for the weekend and plenty to discuss, but there is no will to grab the carrot of agenda so soon. We decide not to work straight away. How can we?! So much has happened since the last time we were in the same room together. So much in the world has changed and the speed of events has been so great that I’ve taken refuge in the moment for the sake of sanity. There is so much on a personal and collective level to integrate that it seems just another flag of distress to carry on without letting the body and heart catch up.

We convalesce, eat, sleep, talk, swim. We walk, we pretend we can read maps, we dont find the place we are looking for, we are lost, we roam instead, we put one foot in front of the other. We take off our socks and cross a shallow clear water ford, we stop for a moment together to catch the sun lighting up the hillside, sheets of rain carried across the green face of the earth, the mountain ash berries sparkling gems set in the silence.

Sometimes we sit together quietly, sometimes there are tears about a specific loss, a heart ache, or they come as a release of the tension that has built up over the months deep in the sinews of the muscles. We snooze, we tell stories. We are greedy for laughter. We watch a couple of episodes of White Lotus. We lie on the couch, we lie on the floor, we commandeer the living room and live in it. We make a mess. In our sanctuary we light a fire in the grate every night. We need warmth and the light of the orange flame. We need conditions to heal.

We drink tea, and if there is something sweet we eat it and if there are seconds we take them. It’s enough to practice being with each other again, enough to listen, enough to sit, enough to taste the ripe moments. We sit on a windy hill in the rain as the season slips toward deep rest.

It wasn’t planned this collapse of forward motion, of ambition. The intensity of compassion that saturates the silence gathers momentum and soaks through the faltering resolve for action. Vulnerability works in our favour and the quiet revolution of rest builds.

We are tired but light, as if the bags we’ve been carrying for such a long time have been put down. Our hands are free to fly up and rejoice. We rest, the way you do when finding shelter in a storm, the way loved children can. Priorities change. In space the faithfulness of connection is revealed.