The Retreat Newspaper
EDITORIAL
writing • personal essay • storytelling
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Below are excerpts from two essays I wrote for The Retreat – one for their October issue on Beauty and another for their November issues on Dwellings.
The Beauty of Life Force – October 2024
1. “You are not your work. You are the culmination of your life force.” – Sierra McDaniel @subliminal.shift
2. Life force is the energy that animates us, allowing us to move, think, inspire, and create. It is interchangeable with qi, prana, spirit, amongst many others that vary across cultures and it finds different expression in everything––sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic. It gives us vitality and strength, quite literally feeding our soul.
3. I imagine life force to be this honey-like, opalescent substance that gently pulsates around our heart space. We add kindling to our inner fire beneath it and the pulses get stronger, warming up the spirit goo so it begins to flow freely into every cell of our being, illuminating us from within.
4. There is something both invisible yet tangible about life force and its ongoing fluctuations. It is both the way your presence lights up a room and that different type of tired you feel when you haven’t been feeding your soul. It is both the twinkle in your eyes and the rounding in of your shoulders, as if to protect this neglected area that needs loving. We say we can’t ‘see’ it and yet we find ourselves easily noticing those that embody it, feeling their sparkly energy and extending compliments like, “wow, you’re glowing.”
5. “We see only what we look at. To look is an act of choice.” – John Berger, ‘Ways of Seeing’ (1972).
Read the rest in The Retreat – access their older issues here.
The Living Spirit of Home – November 2024
1. I walked in and gasped. Six hours ago I was on a plane and now I had stumbled into the dwelling of all dwellings. It was the Kettle’s Yard house in Cambridge, England and it was a divine accident coming here––one I knew the Gods were involved with the moment I saw the spherical stones organized into a spiral that gradually increased in stone size.
Or maybe it was when I noticed the casual, unlabeled Miró in the sitting room. Or the numerous other artworks hung almost at floor level so that if you were sitting in a chair across the way, you too could have a great view.
2. “…I found myself first dreaming of the idea of somehow creating a living place where works of art could be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting, where young people could be at home unhampered by the greater austerity of the museum or public art gallery and where an informality might infuse an underlying formality. I wanted, in a modest way, to use the inspiration I had had from beautiful interiors, houses of leisured elegance, and to combine it with the all embracing delight I had experienced in nature, in stones, in flowers, in people.” ¹
– Jim Ede, Founder of Kettle’s Yard (1957), but above all, a “friend of artists.”
Read the rest in The Retreat – access their older issues here.