Nature, awe and solitude

And the woman in the cafe who left her life

I’m sitting in a stilt house overlooking spindly gums. There is a stream below. I can hear its soft, inevitable babble. Birdcall pierces the silence. The silence is green. Everything in shades of khaki, moss and leaf tea. The sky is a blue that is almost transparent so late in the day.

I’m on a writing retreat with a friend and we are not getting much writing done. But our conversation weaves and tangles like the branches out the window. Over the lives we live and have lived and might have lived. Sometimes we talk about vast things – where the world is at (we lament), other times whether we should eat crackers for dinner or make pasta.

Morning pages with tea.

Yesterday, we met a woman in a cafe. My friend is the type of person who people, strangers, talk to. I am not this kind of person. I wish I were, but I’m not open in the way I seem to be able to be on the page (usually with the protective coating of my characters). And this lovely woman who was probably in her 60s, stopped at our table and told us that one day, when her children had moved out of home, she left her life. She walked out of it for six months and went north. She just needed to be by herself. She walked on the beach and did yoga. Her husband and friends called and asked her when she would come back and she told them she didn’t know, until one day she did, and she eventually went back.

But she needed to tend to her own needs, and she never forgot the part of herself that she found in that time and honours it by going away by herself for a while every year. When we told her that we had this time away from our lives and young families to be creative and in nature she was genuinely happy for us. She said that we were doing the thing that she didn’t do, and should have done, all those years ago to sustain herself when her children were still needy, and she felt like she was running through her life.

The perfect meal with no cooking: fruit and crackers, cheese and wine.

Which got me thinking about the solitary life and how it’s important for mental health and creativity. And that when you’re a creative person, this is bound up somehow in your happiness and your ability to be a functioning human.

I realised, speaking to this woman, that she was the living embodiment of several characters I’ve written who have walked out of their lives. That this is actually a recurring theme in my books. It made me realise this connection fully and interrogate it further. Why do I write about women abandoning their lives?

Is it because this is a secret (not so secret) and somewhat shameful desire I harbour? Yes, and no. I think it’s because I, like this woman and so many other women, shoulder the mental load of day-to-day life and we get exhausted by it.

Also, solitude is bound up with my creative self. It’s about the quiet and stillness that I need to be able to create and to feel fully alive. And so often, that is stifled by everyday life and mental loads.

The thing I’m able to tap into in these few days of quiet and nature, is awe. The awe that I connect to by being in nature alone is the same awe that I access in my writing. I don’t really know how to explain it or how it works. I would have thought that starting to think about the possibility of my seventh novel I would have a better grasp on the process of story creation. But I don’t. I am at the same place I was at the start of the last book and the one before that. I sit down and I write whatever comes into my mind and marvel that I will ever be able to go from ‘what should I write next?’ to saying goodbye to characters and sending them out into the real world to exist in other people’s minds.

Visit from a fox. We named him Albert.

But this morning I woke up early with the light leaking in through the gaps in the blinds and I sat in bed and wrote what might be the first few pages of my next book. Where did it come from? The trees, the stream, the light blue of the sky? The moon, which rose over the ridge last night as we drank red wine in the dark?

I’m not sure, all I’m sure of is how right that woman was, and that she took away some of the guilt that I feel in abandoning my responsibilities to listen to something that feels like it’s greater than me. I hope that in writing this, I can pass on her sentiment.