Into the wild

The words “Wild Writing Retreat” were written in my favourite typeface, as if I needed another reason to want a part of it. It was early December. The retreat was at the end of February - far enough in the distance for me to indulge my fantasies of sneaking away from all my commitments for SEVEN WHOLE DAYS, without having to seriously think about everything that would entail. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even through Christmas and New Year, I wanted it to look forward to. I was due to begin a creative writing PhD on February 1, and such was my desire to be a wild writer that I, somewhat optimistically, asked the university if I could access all my first year’s allotment of research funding to (partly) pay for the retreat. I knew that in the COVID climate I would not have opportunities to travel overseas for a while, even potentially interstate, and equally I believed this retreat, three hours from home, would give me some bearings to follow in the first year of my postgraduate studies.  The university agreed. We did some juggling with the household budget and found the remaining funds to pay for my entry into the wild. And I waited.

I had never been away from my husband, nor any of my three children, for a period as long as seven days. And while the thought sometimes filled me with dread – what if I had a terrible bout of homesickness and couldn’t be consoled by a group of strangers? – it also seemed daring and long overdue. My eldest daughter is capable, dependable, and also 18 so technically an adult. I would miss them, but I knew my family would be okay without me. 

 

As it happened, I’d never experienced being in a place away from home and family the way I did on this retreat. I missed them, enjoyed talking with them most nights to catch up on their days, but it felt like I compartmentalised myself so effectively that I never experienced the slightest sense of homesickness. From arrival at Springfield Farm, I was all in. Over the course of the next seven days, we all experienced deep connection with the land on which we met – a gathering place, described as the centre of a kind of wheel that takes in Dharug, Gundungurra and Dharawal country. We connected to it by writing about it, by meditating on it – led on one clear morning by the glorious Indigenous author and poet Kirli Saunders – by digging in it to plant she-oaks for the Glossy Black Cockatoo to eventually eat, and just by sitting in it, witnessing it, appreciating it. The she-oaks weren’t the only ones opening up to new ground.

 

There were challenges, of course. Challenges to ways of thinking, of being. Some led to change and others to confirmation, but all were ultimately welcome because this experience would not have been the same without them. On the sixth day of the retreat, having not left the property since arriving, I skipped lunch and drove into the nearest town where I found myself in a beautiful bookshop, embracing capitalism and art and, ultimately, that elusive thing social media influencers have defined as self-care. I sat in a café and filled my belly and my soul with comfort, in the form of a large chai latte and a cake made with orange, almond and just a hint of religion. I returned to the farm a changed woman – or maybe just closer to the woman I already am, having given myself permission to partake in some things I really love.

 

On the second-last night of a writing retreat which involved, for me personally, not a lot of writing and very little retreating, there was a last-minute change to the schedule. Post-dinner activities would now involve wine, and music, and dancing. The venue had also changed, from indoors to outdoors. We gathered at the fire pit in the middle of a field, sheltered in a slight dip below the main house, bordered on one side by a stand of birch trees and with views out across the range. The seating was a series of greyed and weathered tree stumps, arranged in a circle around an oversized iron platter of fire. At first we sat on the stumps, which were large enough in diameter to seat two people comfortably, pre-COVID, but as soon as the blip of the Bluetooth speaker sounded, we were on our feet – dancing on plinths, reliving our youths, singing into the dying sunset and hearing a thousand souls – including our own – echo back to us. The night fell and we kept on singing, arguing good-naturedly about song choices and jostling for DJ duties. It might have been any lounge room at any party in any house in Newcastle in the 1990s. It felt familiar, and safe, and celebratory. The opposite word, in the English language, for the verb retreat? Advance.

 

For several days after returning home, I felt myself walking in two worlds. Through our WhatsApp group, set up for the retreat and continuing as a kind of lifeline beyond it, I knew I was not the only one. I had one foot still in Springfield Farm, the other back home, and neither one was willing to concede. It made it difficult to walk and hard to think straight, but I wasn’t in the mood for straight lines anyway. I was still curving my way around unfamiliar roads and dirt tracks, breathing in the mist of waterfalls, marvelling at giant cavernous valleys, missing the company of strangers who had so quickly become friends. So much of life is wanting to be in one place or another and not managing either, but learning to navigate the spaces in between.

 

I will never forget the women I met at Springfield in the dying days of Summer 2021. Something in me wonders if we weren’t all just emerging from our most difficult year, from trauma and separation and isolation and fear, into the arms of one another – the way a newborn child, when delivered by caesarean, raises its shivering arms into the foreign air of an operating theatre, cradled by a gown with a person inside it, in the absence for that single moment of the flesh and blood it has known for the past nine months. I do not really question that we were all doing that, in our own way, and I know there was a reason we were all gathered there together, at that place for those days. We all delivered ourselves to a farm south of Sydney, we all saw the light and we reached for it with our hands and our words. How miraculous it was. How singularly breathtaking to be a part of it.