I am halfway through my month-long stay at Launde Abbey. It is Sunday afternoon and cold. The sky is again overcast and we have had snow, which turned to sleet and then to rain. Rain on rain on rain. Yesterday the sun burst through and the sky cleared to that icy blue of early spring. It was as if the sun wanted to remind us and reassure us that it is still there, doing its best.
I ventured out into the wider world yesterday, to enjoy the weather and to re enter the day to day world. I didn’t enjoy it very much. I went to a huge garden centre and found it too overwhelming to engage with. I bought some figs in the farm shop and left for Oakham. The light was low but fierce yesterday and even with my sunglasses I struggled to cope with it. I thought about going to a cafe but decided against it. I had a rummage in the book shop but didn’t buy anything. I wandered around trying to get interested but failing and then I stopped and stood for a moment on the main street and felt overwhelmed by the light and the traffic and the volume of people and I realised I just needed to come back to the peace and quiet of the Abbey.
I have found this past week challenging in unexpected ways, some very unwelcome. The peace and the quiet and the solitude are great gifts and I acknowledge the privilege that has allowed me to come here and I do not regret that decision at all. But solitude in a beautiful place is not as straightforward as I thought it was going to be.
During the first week I grappled with the form and content of the book. It took days to mentally open the space to get into writing and into the flow of work that is essential when you are trying to produce long form work. I got upset because I didn’t feel that it was coming quickly enough and I didn’t feel that I had the right words in the right shape. But that passed and I started to write. That felt great, obviously, but then that thing happens that always happens with long form; you think you know what you are writing about, you know what you want to say but you brain has other ideas and suddenly you are excavating an internal landscape that is is full of surprises – some of them not very pleasant.
And then the dreams started in earnest; visceral, turbulent and frightening. Sleep became difficult and an old, familiar anxiety appeared. It is one thing to spend your days in solitude, wrestling with ideas, writing, having big emotions running through you. When night falls, the character of all that shifts subtly and the dark becomes a strange country. It is pitch dark here when night comes; natural, beautiful, rich dark. And it is quiet. Once the birds have gone to their nests, a hush falls and there is nothing outside to disturb that deep and dark quiet. I do have neighbours, a few feet away and in the Stables next door, others on retreat. But there is a respectful quiet here in the community itself, a sense of delicate engagement with the natural and spiritual environment. Most people here have come for reasons of faith. I have been attending evening prayer most days, sitting quietly in the 900 year old chapel, breathing in the peace and praying in earnest for the first time in many years. I am still a devout sceptic and that won’t change but spiritual life can take many forms and I am an inner explorer and entirely open to the mystery of the Divine.
Yesterday, my main purpose in going out was to buy a bird feeder. There are so many birds here of so many varieties, including a small raven population among the rooks. But the songbirds are plentiful and they are hungry. I put some fruit and nuts out a few days ago and suddenly I had a flock of blue tits, long tits, chaffinches, sparrows, blackbirds, a robin and a wren and briefly a goldfinch.
The birdfeeder will need replenishing later today, it has been depleted by a constant stream of fathered visitors, and a very cheeky squirrel who has spent hours nibbling away today. It is an absolute joy.
Unfortunately last night and today have been overshadowed by a ferocious migraine, which has meant that almost my whole day has been spent watching the birds and the squirrel while sipping tea.
This place, this time is so different from my usual world, my day-to-today reality and it will end in two week’s time. That is fine, that is the arrangement and I will return to my home and all my beloveds and be very pleased to see them again. I want to carry something of the peace of this place with me, like Wordsworth captured in Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey. There is so much resonance in that poem for me right now, and it is too lengthy a work to quote in its entirety, but today it is this passage that seems to be most apt:
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.
From: Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey, William Wordsworth, 1798.
Josie Moon 