5th October 2023 was National Poetry Day. The theme this year was refuge. I wrote in my journal that I have nothing to say on the matter. Then one of the voices that by-passes my thinking-mind reminds me how often I write on those pages about home and belonging and connection. Are these not all the facets of refuge?
A refuge is a place of safety, a place where we can belong no matter what, no matter who. What else, then, would be a home? A home is not that place of bricks and mortar, or wattle and daub, or corrugated iron and cardboard where we sleep at night – though such a place may be ‘home’, it may equally be a place of violence and fear, or of silence and loneliness. Home is not just the place we live, it is the place where we can be truly alive.
However, there is something temporary implicit in the word refuge and something permanent implicit in home. Sailors would speak of any port in a storm, a safe haven to ride it out, but home port was the one they longed for, the one that occupied their becalmed nights under wide empty skies that wouldn’t even breathe for them. So, no. They are not the same thing at all.
I returned to Cley this week for the beginning of the autumn season of writing workshops. The creative wind had been blowing our way for there were many new faces at the taster session. New-to-us voices, with all their different views on the world. Jane spoke of the joy of being in a creative bubble. I think it was Jo who said, “I wanted to be part of a flock today…and found that I was. Thank you”. Tony spoke in his usual sensitive and moving way about how it felt to come back after a while away, back into this group of writers.
We all talk about it as ‘this group’ as if it were a fixed bunch of people, when it is anything but. I love the use of the word ‘flock’. We normally talk about finding our tribe, but flock has more of a fluidity about it. It is a place we belong, but which we can leave and return to. And the interval between the leaving and returning is immaterial, we can come back knowing we will be welcomed home.
A bubble. A flock. A huddle. All are refuges. Safe spaces in which we allow our hearts to open. Places in which we can be who we are and speak our momentary truths which may be as shifting as the tides and as uncertain as the marsh ground, and just as important as those things. To accept our place in nature requires our fluidity, our uncertainty, our growth and decline and rebirth. We should not fear the noise within our minds, because somewhere among the tumult our personal truth is being polished.
Instead, let us find our refuge(s) in the quiet place(s) of the world, our local unbuilt places and those that we deliberately travel to seek out. Let us spend time listening to them as they quieten the internal cacophony, so we can see how that jewel of a soul is shaping up, what colour it is, how it shines…and if we sit long enough, we may begin to hear what it has to say and share.
I know that we need our safe quiet spaces in which our hearts can open.
But then my contrary-Mary-mind would have her say: what if we could allow our hearts to open beyond our comfort zone? If we could learn to be open-hearted always, everywhere, regardless, perhaps more space might become safe. Perhaps it needs to happen in that order, the opening first. The opening of hearts creating safe and sacred spaces. Brené Brown, rather than talking about our creating safe spaces, speaks of creating courageous spaces - the places we might be brave even though they are not necessarily "safe". Perhaps there is an order in that too. Perhaps if create courageous spaces and dare to be brave within them, more and more of us, by those actions they will evolve into safe spaces. Refuges.
And if we continue that work, maybe a refuge can be transformed into a home.
I had only a short experience of the writing group before the world went mad and we were isolated and locked down and frightened (deliberately so, I now feel and maybe more so than was warranted), and spent the silent years dealing with whatever it proved to be for individuals.
To me it felt like a very different group that reconvened when we started opening up again. It felt like a more important 'opening up', as if all our hearts were more willing to be seen more clearly, more deeply. Like flowers blooming on the battlefield, scared and scarred, but willing to be seen – aching to be seen perhaps.
We think of refuges as places where we can hide, but they are the opposite, they are the places where we can be truly visible. They are the places that give us the courage to be more poppy, to bloom and beautify another day on the churned up land. Many poppies bloom only for a day, but are no less glorious for that – and then they seed and rise up in another season.
I found a much-needed refuge up there on the marsh and the shingle bank, on the beach and in the woods with a shifting group of creative spirits and poetic souls. I had no idea at the time that it would become part of my wider ‘home’ – a place that does not hold me, but always welcomes me back, shores me up, and sends me back out to do my work in the world.
Part of all of our work in the world needs to be take the refuges we offer and the ones we find and turn them into homes.
