May 14 2026
Dear all,
I am sitting in my little rented house in Arles, right opposite the Roman arena, on the corner of a winding cobbled street, writing this on the day before my birthday. Our “Coming to our Senses” retreat is due to start on May 16th, so the plans that have been taking shape over the year are about to come to fruition. It feels like a significant moment – a threshold. People are coming from the US, England, France and Australia, coming out of the chaos and noise of the world as it is at present into an ancient city, a quieter place. No doubt when the Romans were here building their indestructible monuments, there was noise and chaos in Arles; certainly, these have always been a part of history, of which conquests, marauding armies and the careless destruction of lives have always been a part.
Will we humans ever change? At least, for a week, we hope that the retreat will give us all a new vision to carry forward, a quietness at the heart and creative insights coming from that place. Some of our participants are my oldest friends; others are new friends, or about-to-be new friends. We are writers, musicians, artists, film-makers. We are coming together with a purpose – not just to retreat, but to forge new bonds and new ideas, to take our passions and creative abilities further, to listen to what our senses, honed over the millennia we have been on this planet, are telling us. To listen to the sounds of nature, to watch the passage of light across the sky and the movements of people in the streets and birds over salt marshes, to taste new foods and smell the plants that grow here, to sharpen our senses and remind ourselves that we humans began life as small sentient beings, feeling and smelling and tasting our way into the world. And, to translate new experience into language, as freshly and accurately as we can.
My first morning in Arles, I walked through the market just outside the gates of the town, looking and tasting, accepting all the morsels offered to me to try: melon from Morocco, orange segments from Spain, Provencal olives and almonds, the unmistakeable taste of North Africa in pastilla, sweetness, pastry and meat. The lemons as big as babies’ heads, the cascades of oranges, new little apricots, the mixture of France, Spain and Morocco that you find in southern French markets: a feast for the nose, eyes and tongue, a taste of the sharp, spicy, sweet and sour such as you never find in the US, at least not in South Florida, where I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sense of taste, as everything I bought seemed to taste of nothing. ( I have to add that I am missing out on mango season now, and that the avocados from my neighbors’ tree have fed us for more than half a year. Fresh-grown things taste good everywhere.)
About the retreat: I think of the French motto “reculer pour mieux sauter” (literally, retreat in order to jump better). We will be drawing in, in order to go out again, drawing back in order to ‘jump’ back into the world we live in daily. Finding, tasting, looking, listening, digesting, changing ourselves just a bit along the way; hoping that what we find informs not just our own continuing lives, but those we touch as we pass.
Affectionately, Ros