It sometimes happens on night four, like this, at dinner. The circling birds all land at once. Bodies unwrapped like shrouds, inner wounds dabbed, sometimes ripped open. Tired. Missing something, someone.

Dying for a drink.

I look upon them from the corner of the long table, both our positions privileged: mine as observer, theirs as women who can afford to spend five days caring only for themselves.

They’d hiked a mountain (a hill, really, but that doesn’t work for the website), breathed through old traumas, found new ones behind the sternum, rubbed rocks and stepped on stones. They’d been massaged, twisted, assaulted by vibrations, brushed, hushed and massaged again.

They’d painted, mostly badly, and some had cried with the release of it all. By night four, it’s usually time to find most of this at least a bit funny.

I like this group, and not just because there have been minimal complaints: requests for softer pillows, longer massages, for less
birdsong in the surrounding trees, none of these. Just one woman, Helen, had suggested the floorboards in the yoga room were a little creaky and I agreed. ‘Creakier than my own bones,’ I’d replied, later realising I should have said joints, and that these aren’t creaky yet anyway.

Tonight they’ll want to laugh and be laughed at. To sigh and cry.

To connect after so much wilful disconnection. They’ll want to share their stories of workaholic partners and sociopathic supervisors and infertility and high-school reunions and #MeToo moments and dry vaginas. The things that had brought them here: addictions, affairs, anxiety, apathy. Boredom and bitterness and milestone birthday presents. They’ll want this, but it doesn’t always happen. Every group is its own constellation.

‘Maybe you can share with each other what brought you here,’ I say, hoping it’s all I’ll need to do, that the kindling will ignite.

At the very first retreat four years ago, I’d tried initiating this conversation on night one, but the answers were perfunctory and no one was ready to talk. Tonight there’s a small pause, just long enough for my mind to hurtle through the movie montage of everything it’s taken to create this place – a bush haven for strangers – and how brittle it all still feels…

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