I recently attended my first writing retreat.
More like a retreat with like-minded people in the woods to write and reflect and be still and do yoga and eat beautiful, healthy food. To be pensive and drink coffee and have deep conversation.
Place yourself here.
You’re on Whidbey Island, off the coast of northern Washington, in the Puget Sound. The weather is drizzly and in the low 50s most of the weekend. Around you is lush, dense, green, mossy, growing forest. Even rotting trees have new life growing out of them-the decay a fertile soil for new growth.You’re invited to participate in an exercise on sensory exploration.
Your group wanders out into an open space with a walking labyrinth lined by stones. It’s raining. Very lightly, but persistently. You wander a little up a trail, surrounded by deep forest, and sit on a fallen log. You close your eyes and listen. You open your eyes and look. You wander down the trails of connection that happen in your mind: sights and sounds, smells and memories. You see and you hear individual raindrops-landing on leaves and ferns all around you. This ultra-green and thriving. This splattered and yet still successful landscape.
All of us are wet.
What a startling, uncomfortable way to start.
Both this description-
And life itself.
We are born messy. Covered.
When we inhale our first breath
Oxygenated blood stops shunting through our hearts
Stops bypassing lungs and borrowing oxygen
When first we wail-we force closed tiny ducts in our heart,
Force open our own cardiorespiratory systems
Bypassed lungs now in full use-
Life outside the womb
Bright red. Loud. Crying.
When it’s healthy.
Out here– green. So green.
And yet green because drops are falling.
Rain. Wetness.
To the casual visitor: Messy. Covered.
We want clean and orderly and dry
And yet we admire wild and free
Unrestrained growth.
Small children that are entirely unafraid and completely unaware.
They know not strangers or skin colors or allegiances.
Teenage boys that consume 2000 calories. Per meal. And still ask for more.
They know not body image or grocery bills or self-control.
Teenage trees that shoot towards the sky- leaning towards the light.
Their roots know not sidewalks, their leaves know not fences.
And yet they grow-not in spite of the rain
but grow because of it.
As the drops fall-
A staccato of surround sound on upturned faces
The symphony all the more full because no note is quite the same
In quite the same place.
To watch the drip on a small fern face,
The violence of the hit could seem cruel.
The quiver of the impact
The bowing of the branch
The drooping down towards the dirt.
Yet the startling beauty of the painful drops
Dangling off the weighted leaves.
Magnifying small details and bigger beauty
Gleaming prismatic in spare streaks of sun
Rain is falling on different leaves.
In different places
At different times
In short succession
Not all at once, in one place-
It isn’t selective like that.
Life-giving splatters on one leafy face
While another rebounds from the impact.
We- like the leaves
We are all wet.
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