On Casting Away the Skin of the Day

(Note: I sent this out to my newsletter subscribers earlier this fall.)

I recently returned from two solo weeks in this secluded cabin on the Olympic Peninsula. As an artist-in-residence through Hypatia-in-the-Woods, among stands of Douglas firs, birches, and prehistoric ferns, I finished my novel. I lingered for hours on a patio with a glimpse of the Hammersley Inlet through a wooded ravine, letting “the line of thought dip deep into the stream,” as Virginia Woolf put it. It was my first writing retreat since the pandemic and a wonderful reminder of the power of silence, space, and natural beauty to cultivate concentration.

I believe such cyclic withdrawals from the world are essential to nourishing creativity and that every worthwhile pursuit is creative at its core. Here is Thomas Merton’s advice, from the “Learn To Be Alone” chapter of New Seeds of Contemplation:

There should be at least a room, or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you. You should be able to untether yourself from the world and set yourself free, loosing all the fine strings and strands of tension that bind you, by sight, by sound, by thought, to the presence of other men.

Merton’s advice sounds a lot like Woolf’s “room of one’s own.” In the opening chapter of her book of that title, after a day of her signature, acute observation of the world:

I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge.

That “casting into the hedge” is what retreat is to me.

What, of value, is left when we toss the world’s concerns aside? At the end of the book, Woolf returns to that crumpled skin with a deeper statement:

What is meant by “reality”? … It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech…. [It is] what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge.

This, she says, is the real value of a room of our own: the chance to live “in the presence of reality, an invigorating life.”

If you’re drawn to a retreat, I hope you’ll consider joining me at some point on the Monterey Bay for a writing or reading retreat. The Spring Novel Writing Retreat with Mark Sarvas just opened for registration. If you’re a writing teacher (or know one) and would like a private retreat, I’d love to work with you.

If you’re a reader, I’ve begun to plan a weekend retreat for book lovers with the same lively discussions you expect from your book club, intimate conversations with authors, and multiple places, from fireside to beachside, to read. If that sounds good to you, please let me know.

However it looks for you, I hope that you find yourself, sometime soon, in a quiet forgotten corner, untethered from the world and set absolutely free.