This week I am at Kate Cowie’s Life Writing Retreat, held at the magnificent La Garriga de Castelladral, about an hour inland from Girona and Barcelona in Spain. It’s where I began my book, Still Fire Inside, exactly two years ago. The venue – and my bedroom’s terrace – look out towards Montserrat, the extraordinary “serrated mountain” massif, home to a thousand-year-old monastery and the revered Black Madonna. It feels like an appropriate landscape in which to reflect on and write about life, loss and the other stories we carry inside us.

Each day begins with a check-in and an optional activity. Today’s is one of my favourites – an activity so simple and yet so rich that it has resulted in this piece of writing. No doubt a distraction from other writing I had tasked myself with this week, but sometimes priorities shift. Some people follow the money. I follow the energy.

Kate’s activity is called Whispers in the Landscape and with it she invites us not just out of our heads and into our bodies, but out of our little singular bodies and into the bigger, vaster body of Gaia. At least, that is how I experience it.

The instructions are almost ridiculously simple. We are invited to spread out, find a place in the landscape and spend ten minutes simply immersed in it. We are asked to notice the macro and the micro, and simply be with what we can see, hear, smell, touch and sense. No writing. No searching for meaning. Just offering exquisite attention to what is already there.

I knew exactly where I wanted to go, having been to this hotel a couple of times before. I wandered away from the others, past the pool, and slipped down the little path that leads into the pine forest. The ground was soft and thick with dry pine needles, making the descent more slippery than my simple sandals were really suited for. A bird startled as I arrived in its home.

I only walked for a minute or so before settling in a relatively flat spot where logs had been stacked beside a small wooden table. There were no chairs. I leaned against a pine tree, wrapped my arms around it, and first closed my eyes, allowing my nervous system to settle a little. Opening my nose, I could smell the pine resin warming in the air. Opening my ears, I could hear birdsong, insects, cicadas and the breeze moving through the branches, accompanied, somewhat incongruously, by the distant hum of the hotel’s air conditioning. I opened my eyes to see butterflies dancing in and out of shafts of sunlight. As I rested against the tree, tiny pieces of bark loosened beneath my fingers and fell away to nourish the ground. Everything felt alive. In harmony. In relationship.

For ten minutes I allowed the landscape to suffuse me. Or perhaps I suffused the landscape. Same same. Where one ends and the other begins doesn’t seem relevant. Stretching my body and looking upwards, I noticed how the trees, although emerging separately from the earth, seemed to lean towards one another until they formed one single canopy high above my head. Different species. Different bark. Different shades of green and brown. Different ways of growing. One canopy.

Too soon it was time to return to the group for our second instruction. This time Kate invited us back to the same place and asked us to spend five minutes listening, not for an answer, but for a question. A question about our writing, perhaps. Or simply a question.

Once back at my spot, arm wrapped around the peeling pine tree, I caught myself reaching for a question.

Oooh… maybe a question about the launch of my book? Maybe a question about what I might write next? Or perhaps about launching a Substack? Or about how to bring all the strands of my work together?

I chuckled to myself as I recognised my familiar graspiness. Those weren’t really questions. They were goals. Intentions.

Slowly, slowly another question emerged, one that has been accompanying me for years now.

“How do I be with what is?”

I pushed it away at first, mildly irritated that it should present itself yet again. Can’t I have another question please? But the question persisted. I felt its insistence. I felt it enter me. I felt it both lift me and settle me. And as it settled, one small word snuck into the sentence. Fully.

“How do I fully be with all that is?”

Yes. That is the question. The next iteration of the same question I have been living with for years. A question that is, on the one hand, so familiar and, on the other, so fresh that I suspect I will live into it for the rest of my days. Or perhaps the question will live in me.

Again, same same.

As I wandered back up to the group, I realised why that additional word mattered today.

Today is Julia’s deathiversary. Seven years since she took her life.

It’s not that I have forgotten. I always know, not only on the day itself, but in the days leading up to it. My body always knows too. My sleep, forever fragile, has become increasingly fractured over recent weeks. This year, with the sudden deaths of my brother James and my dad John still so painfully present, the nights have become harder still. A good night’s sleep is a rare and precious gift.

One last time, Kate invited us back into the landscape, this time to listen for the answer. Not “an answer”. “The answer”.

Standing again with my tree, I allowed my attention to wander and settle, wander and settle. Each settling offered an insight, a possibility, another way of meeting my question.

Following one pine tree’s trunk upwards from the ground, I noticed that it had grown perhaps thirty metres before producing a single branch. It wasn’t wasting energy branching out in every direction. If, in its youth, it had once had branches lower down, they had long since fallen away. Now, well into its lifetime, fuelled by experience, everything seemed directed upwards, towards the light, towards spaciousness. Its branches, needles and cones were visible only if you looked up. Gifts offered generously to the universe. I found myself wondering where I, too, might become more discerning about where I place my time, energy and creativity, trusting that the branches, leaves and fruit will come in their own time, finding the light, and perhaps the places where they are most needed.

Nearby another tree rested against those around it. Whether it had fallen or whether this was simply how it had found its own way of growing, I couldn’t tell. Either way, it wasn’t standing alone. It was supported by another. I found myself remembering that I, too, can rest a little more, lean a little more, trust others and trust life to hold me when I can no longer hold everything together alone.

Looking further down the hillside I saw the hotel’s three enormous shaggy dogs lolloping gently through the woods without anyone accompanying them, taking themselves out for their own walk, completely at ease in the broader landscape they called home. There was something wonderfully unhurried about them. They were simply exploring, active and restful at the same time, completely at ease with where they were.

Were these answers? Were they wisdom? Was I simply projecting meaning onto the wider landscape of life?

Maybe. Maybe not. No matter.

The trees were not really speaking to me. Or perhaps they were.
The butterflies were not really carrying messages from Julia. Or perhaps they were.
The breeze was not really Mike saying hello. Or perhaps it was.

In the end, I’m not sure it matters.

We have always found our small selves reflected in the wider landscapes of mountains, rivers, forests and skies. When we pause, when we allow ourselves to settle, when we take time to be, to listen for a question first before expecting an answer, we can come back refreshed and renewed.

Perhaps today’s activity didn’t give me new answers. It gave me a question I could keep living into.

As I clambered back up the forest path towards the hotel, I realised once again how life, and emotions of every shade and colour, unfold differently when held within a larger landscape. Nothing about this morning has changed my circumstances. Julia is still dead. My sleep may be better tonight, or it may not. But somehow my little singular body re-remembers that it belongs to an older, wiser body.

That, perhaps, is what a larger landscape offers. Not relief from grief, but a larger place in which to carry it. The grief doesn’t become smaller. The landscape in which it is held becomes bigger. I don’t believe grief ever gets smaller. It’s our capacity to hold it that becomes greater. Perhaps that capacity grows when we place ourselves, as often as we remember to, within landscapes that have witnessed seasons, storms, birth, death and renewal for millennia. Landscapes that remind us that we are part of something far older than our stories, while somehow making space for those stories too.

The forest invited me to ask, How do I fully be with all that is?

As I walked back through the pines, with the breeze moving through the branches, cicadas singing, butterflies circling all around and my heart carrying the familiar ache of missing Julia, forever fifteen rather than twenty-two like all her peers, I realised that the question had answered itself.

How do I fully be with this day? This deathiversary? This life?

By fully being with it.