a quiet commons of attention
Tending a terrain. Keeping a fire going in a winter hearth. Gathering for a meal at a shared table.
What are you doing here? is a question that runs through my memoir, At the Heart’s Farthest Edge. A question I’ve carried through phases of life over more than forty years.
There’s a group of us gathered from spaces divided by thousands of miles and a few pixels. It’s evening (at least for those of us in Europe) and some of us have lit candles. A few of us have brought a writing project we want to give time to. Others are experimenting with attention — a prompt from the poem we’ll share, a spark of an idea from the conversation as we settle into this quiet space.
We are all aware of the darkness of this world. How hard it can be in such times to get out of our own way so that we write and create with the ego muted, writing outwards to one another. How easy it can be to be so consumed with rage (oh so justified as it might be) so that we exhaust ourselves in its conflagration.
But this group shares a slow, reflective pace. We’ve listened to Virginia Woolf talk about writing not from rage, but calmly, with wisdom. This is a group looking out to the world with generosity, but without burning ourselves to ashes. We are here at the dark moon, when energy can feel contracted, when the light has waned. But there is something powerful about what germinates in the dark. Calm doesn’t mean weak. Calm doesn’t mean without passion.
From this still place at a dark moment, what grows is as fragile and powerful as a snowdrop pushing its way through hard winter earth.
It’s early April. It might be 2006, though memory is slippery. It’s snowing — in April in North Wales — and I’m at a small literary festival organised by the Tŷ Newydd writing centre at Llanystumdwy, near Criccieth. We’ve just heard Seamus Heaney read and we pile into a local pub, the discussion still buzzing. Someone asks Heaney how he would define a poem. He pauses, smiles and says he wouldn’t know how to define a poem, but he knows one when he sees one.
Communities built around attention and witness are like that. There’s a quality that is hard to define, but we know it when we meet it. There’s a sense of an invitation. It invites participation.
Once upon a dark moon there was a place inviting you in. A place for those exploring their craft, paying attention deep as prayer to the world and one another and the bodies that are our homes. Once upon a cyclic time, this space will be there again next month and next and…
We will share a poem and a prompt that can be used or not. We will write calmly by candlelight for just under an hour. We will share a final poem and a herbal oracle cards, from which we will take a few words, a simple question into the next month…
In a dark world, our creativity is more vital than ever. When we gather, we offer one another the gift of a quiet hour where we have permission to write what is needful. To sit in quiet community, making space for each writer’s attention and practice is extraordinarily powerful.
It’s the summer of 2015 and a group gathers around my table in Tanygrisiau. There are authors and neighbours and family. The conversation shifts from English to Welsh to English… The food is good. And between courses we hear snippets of Adam’s brilliant debut novel, Vitus Dreams. The book is an ever-shifting kaleidoscope—moving and funny, intense and tender. It draws us into a place where our basic assumptions about the real and the concrete are shattered, leaving us to rely on instinct and the people around us… It’s stylistically diverse and experimental and at the end of the reading one of our wonderful neighbours, a man who dreams in Welsh and whose family have farmed the land there for generations said he didn’t think he’d followed much of it, but it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard—the poetry of the language told him everything he needed to know.
I’m fascinated by literary salons, by the inspiration that flows when a space opens to people, when a group is porous to ideas and stories and art. And that evening was exactly that. People permeable to one another discovering something of beauty or truth or hope…
The world has changed a great deal since 2015. And now I live in a forest far from most of the world. But though technology is double-edged, it offers the miracle that you can gather at my table in a hamlet in a forest in Finistère — for a workshop, to explore herbs, to write together calmly by candlelight… It’s a way that together we keep vigil with our creativity and bear witness to the stories that this world aches for.
I’d love you to join me for Alchemical Gatherings. The structure is simple. In this slow space, there’s a quiet intimacy to writing knowing that others are present out there beyond our cameras. We gather quarterly for a writing workshop and monthly to write Calmly by Candlelight. The rhythm is gentle:
- a threshold created by the candlelight and the shared language of a poem.
- time to move inward, writing.
- a return together with a closing poem
- and a parting solace from a herbal oracle card, carrying the thread forward to the next dark moon.
At the end, we often remark on how deeply affective the time is.
The repeated structure creates a ritual — a signal to the nervous system that it can settle and focus.
Writing quietly together without talking about the work or reading it aloud shifts us away from performance. When the cameras turn off and pressure disappears, attention settles into the body — breathing, sensing, noticing the page…
Silence (perhaps counter-intuitively) amplifies community. In many online spaces silence can feel awkward, but when it’s intentional and shared, it becomes connective. We sense that others are present.
And the dark moon fits well with silence and incubation. It’s an ideal moment for reflection and creation.
Tending a terrain. Keeping a fire going in a winter hearth. Gathering for a meal at a shared table. These are my metaphors for the spaces I want to hold for others and want to be part of.