how much care we can bring

This morning I went back to the notebook I kept when I was in my retreat cabin at Dhanakosa in May. As often happens, the words spark memories and I sense what it was like being there – the acrobatic scramble of birds and red squirrels around the birdfeeder (‘a coruscation of wings’), the steady gaze of the deer (‘their long, careful legs’), the drifts of bluebells (‘something of the night about them’), the books I was reading, the poems.

It was my birthday while I was there and I’d asked seven friends if they’d give me a poem in an envelope so I could open and read one every day of my retreat. By some arcane magic, it turned out that every single day that was the very poem I needed to read and carry with me. And even though I was off grid and incommunicado, among the creatures, the flowers, the loch and the sky, and the poems, I never felt alone.

My notebook’s peppered with drawings, odd diagrams, maps, lists, and fragments of lines I can’t remember writing (and remain mysterious), the first three pages of a bizarre, uncategorisable ‘short story’, accounts of dreams (of which there were many), memories stirred up by so much space and silence, on the threshold between spring and summer.

Around the retreat centre, yellow azaleas were in extravagant bloom and the scent was heavy and intense. I tried to find the words to capture it, but ultimately had to concede defeat:

I’ve been visiting Dhanakosa since 1997, when I first went on a Women’s Yoga, Meditation and Massage retreat there. It was summer and we swam in the loch and enjoyed each other’s company – it was thrilling and not at all ascetic. I’ve returned many times since and always slip easily into the simple retreat routines, held in that beautiful, quiet spot in Balquidder Glen, different colours for every season. For the past fifteen years or so, I’ve been part of various teaching teams, offering a ‘writing poetry’ strand on retreats for beginning meditators. My love for the place has only deepened.

Dhanakosa has that effect on people. Lots of folk keep going back, enchanted as much by the atmosphere of the place, its astonishing setting by Loch Voil, cupped in steep, wooded hills, as the Buddhist principles and practices that underpin everything that happens there.

So I was delighted to be invited to help edit an upcoming anthology of poetry, inspired by Dhanakosa, to be published next year, coinciding with its 35th anniversary. Even when poetry isn’t one of the main strands of a retreat, poems are part of this land’s language, read and shared in the shrine room, around the sofas in the lounge, blue-tacked on the walls, recited round bonfires. The place lends itself to poetry – reading and writing it makes sense there, in its natural element, among waterfalls and wildflowers, eagles and hares.

If you’ve ever visited Dhanakosa and have written a poem about/with/to/from/alongside any aspect of your experience, we want to read it. You can see the invitation and guidelines for submission on the website. You have until the end of November to send in your poems. Please spread the word if you know anyone who might like this chance to be part of a what I’m sure will be a very special anthology.

And if you’ve never been before, take a look at what’s coming up in their schedule. It really is the sort of place that, if it touches you, it changes you and stays with you – a place not just for retreating as in ‘stepping back’, but for meeting, stepping forward, closer to what life is asking of you.

Here’s one of my poems, inspired by the garden at Dhanakosa (from Reading the Flowers. Arc 2016).

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