September 14 2025
Dear All,
I first came here to our family’s Paris apartment in the 5th arrondissement in 2008, and stayed for most of the summer, writing a novel. I’ve sat at this round table beside the window for so many summers, working on fiction and poetry, then clearing the table to have dinner with friends. Now, these years later, I’m packing it all up, preparing to sell. In between, books and poems, dinners and lunches, meetings with new and old friends, family visits, and most importantly, time alone. The place fits me like a glove, as someone once said, creating a useful cliché in the days when everyone wore gloves. And now I’m peeling it off, or peeling myself off: I’m sending packages, taking piles of books to give to the local library, sorting CD’s, emptying cupboards and closets. I’ve done this before in life, emptied my own house in Edinburgh, helped to empty my mother’s house after her death, and here I am doing it again. It’s never easy, for someone who likes to create an ambiance, rather than take one apart. Nostalgia can stop me in my tracks. Rereading everyone’s entries in the visitors’ book we’ve kept for friends who have come here. Remembering that restaurant, that exhibition, the time the vacuum cleaner broke, the noise the old washer used to make; the men in the courtyard down below who used to take sausages and cheese out at 8 am with a trundling sound, to drive it all over Paris. The way the poplar in the courtyard has grown. The geraniums in the window box and how I’m always exhorting people to water them. The view of the Paris sky over the rooftops at dawn, the water running down gutters, the clang of the downstairs door. Memories crowd in, and it feels hard. I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem about loss “The art of losing isn’t hard to master…” I think, yes it is, and know that she felt that too.
Then a friend reminds me that behind every loss, there is something new waiting. Sadness is only half the story; you let go, and happiness of a different sort may come, another point of view, another place, another opportunity. A poet friend gave me his new book of poems this week, “Un Pas De Coté” – a step aside – and in it I find his theme, that one step to the side can give you a new view, shed a new light, make you notice something you haven’t seen before, glimpse a way through.
Emptying out – a suitable activity perhaps for this time of life. (How many of us dread the idea that someone younger will find after our death, a meaningless pile of clutter?) I play Rachmaninov at full volume and cry as I work; then I laugh at the drama, and move on. The sky of September is blue and wild with white puffy clouds that scoot before the wind, and the leaves are beginning to fall, and chestnuts litter the pavements. The markets are full of mushrooms and nuts and carts full of different sorts of apples. I love it all, and yet am leaving it. I’ll be back – but not here, not in this place where so much life has been lived, where I have been so consistently happy. I’ll be a visitor, not a semi-resident. Change happens, and more change. The moon eclipsed last week, after turning red above the street, I’ll be back in the US next week, and as another French friend wrote: “quant à l'avenir – qui sait?” Who knows what the future will bring?
Meanwhile, our plans for the Coming to Our Senses Retreat in Arles, May 16–23, 2026, are moving ahead, and we’re putting the final touches in place. I’ll be joined by David Rothenberg and Nadine Pinede for a week of deep listening, mindful reconnection, and creative renewal. You can sign up on our landing page now to be added to the list, and we’ll be updating the site soon with full registration and details: comingtooursensesretreat.com
It’s going to be such a treat, and I’m looking forward to it already.
Affectionately, Ros
