Nic, a Volunteer Retreat Coordinator at The Barn, writes:
When I moved to The Barn to commence a year of facilitating retreats, it was in the bleakest reaches of January.
During my first week, I stayed in a cabin in the woods called the Goose House. Uninterrupted views over the valley; the hooting of owls ricocheting back and forth; no electricity, and a woodburner for warmth…
It felt like the perfect arrival into the wild - idyllic, even - clutching all that remained of the worldly possessions I had brought with me from my East London postcode.
When I sat down to light a fire that evening, it felt like an initiation of some kind: a signal that I belonged here and that the wild would accept me… Except, as the hours passed by and the fire refused to catch light, my anticipation gave way to despair. Not only was I shivering with desperation, I was determined to prove that I truly was at one with nature.
I began throwing firelighters at the woodburner as if my life depended on it until, out of what was surely pity for me, the kindling ignited. Yet the chill that I felt inside did not thaw: for in the thick of the dark and the meeting of my breath with the misty night, I truly had been one with the wild. And it was a deep and an unsettling discovery.
Since then, the unmistakeable signs of sweetness of the Spring have emerged: blue skies shedding their cold grey palor and snowdrops bobbing their heads in the breeze.
I have had many a conversation with people about how hopeful a time of year this is, literally budding with promise: the wild begins to issue a rousing call for us to make our way out of our winter dormancy, shed our coats and rejoin it.
A sense of connection with the more-than-human world was part of what first brought me to The Barn on retreat last year.
My meditation practice was transformed in the outdoors. No longer confined within four walls, I found that other walls, including the ones I had built within myself, began to crumble too. It was as if I was remembering something long forgotten, perhaps like that part of myself that might once have intuitively have known how to start a fire.
These walls did not always exist. I may feel like I am one and whole and safe within them and believe they offer me refuge but I had actually constructed my own prison.
In the spaciousness offered to me by this land, I felt more firmly rooted, more securely held, more at ease in myself than I had felt before. In that act of remembering, I found a distant, long-forgotten sense of home. How curious that the way to find that place within was from without.
And so just as nature holds ups a mirror to our own natures, we experience both the relentless darkness of Winter and the gentle pink glow of Spring. Our lives, like the seasons, tumble from one weather system to the next, the blissful alongside the troublesome.
Last Summer, whilst basking in the glorious July sunshine on retreat, I was plagued by horseflies (one in particular, it seemed, wished to pay me frequent visits). One bite on my arm swelled up so much that it looked like I had an extra elbow.
I remembered thinking at the time: I do need all the help I can get to reach into the trickiest of those places inside - the ones hiding behind walls yet to be taken down. And so thank you to the darkness and the horseflies and the snowdrops and the sun for acting as our teachers on this journey; for, as Sharon Blackie writes in The Enchanted Life, constantly reminding us what the world is to us and what we are to the world.
We meet ourselves in our relationships with others: both the human and the more-than-human. So the next time you go outside, what does the wild have to reveal to you about who you truly are and about the way home?
At the heart of the Sharpham Trust ethos is our desire to build a more mindful, compassionate and environmentally sustainable world.
We connect people with nature and foster mindfulness and well-being through our programme of retreats, mindfulness courses, outdoor learning and the arts.
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