| At about one o’clock on the Wednesday we climbed onto an jagged rock at 1,875 metres and none of us said anything for a long time. I had not expected the view. I knew there was one. I had not expected that.Two lakes below us. Then forest. Then ridge after ridge of blue going back until the blue ran out. |
 |
| And silence. Not quiet — silence. The kind that pierces. I have been leading retreats for twenty years and I am rarely stopped like that. My soul listened. That is the only way I can put it, and I am aware of how it sounds. They call it Orpheus Rocks. The Rhodope Mountains are named after a Thracian queen — Rhodope, rosy-cheeked. The village of Gela, not far along, has a sign at its edge announcing itself as the birthplace of Orpheus. Whether he existed at all is anyone’s guess. But the legend has it that he drew the inspiration for his songs from that rock, and that when he played, the birds fell silent, the wind dropped and the leaves stopped moving. |
 |
| Nobody was playing anything when we were up there. The birds were silent anyway. We were on that rock at all because I had changed the day. Twenty minutes into the morning practice I could see that the day I had planned was not the day that was needed. So I taught something slow instead, cleared what was left of the schedule, and we went up the mountain.I plan retreats loosely on purpose. There is a shape to the week, and the days sit inside it, and the days can move. Because the room in front of you is better information than the plan behind you — and the plan was written before you had met anybody. There is an old framework underneath a week like that. Four keys which, between them, are said to make a fulfilled life. Purpose. The resources to pursue it. Pleasure. And freedom — the quiet, spacious, spiritual part. Everybody arrives asking about the first one. You would. It is the one that feels like the problem. So that is where we began, on the first evening, with a question on the wall. Why is it important for you to be on this retreat — for yourself, for others, and for the world? |
 |
| It looks like an opening exercise. It isn’t. By the time you reach the third part you are no longer talking about yourself, which is the whole of what purpose is — the thing larger than you that has some claim on you. One of them could not answer it for herself at all. Twenty-odd years in which the answer to what do you want had always been whatever her children needed. They are adults now. The question had been sitting there, unasked, for most of two decades. The second key came in behind the first. Resources — not only money, though money counts. Purpose needs something to run on. And then, for five days, we were simply immersed in the third. From the balcony, spruce. Not trees — a sea of them, running out over the ridge and down the far side, until the eye gives up before the forest does. I know that view rather better than the others do, because I got stuck out there with it.I had gone onto the balcony to photograph it for the group. When I stood up to come back in, the door — which had been standing open — jammed slightly open . Fourth floor. Apparently it had never done that to anybody before. So I sat down again and looked at the spruce until a man arrived with a ladder. Better me than one of them. On the Tuesday a handpan player came. A steel shell you strike with your fingers, and the note hangs in the air longer than seems reasonable. She taught us to play. There is no way to play one badly, and no way to play one while thinking about something else — it is meditation in motion.Afterwards the group lay down and she played us down into something deeper than rest. You feel it in the body before you hear it. |
 |
| Two gaida players had come to the welcome dinner on the first night. The kaba gaida is the big, low Rhodope bagpipe, and the sound of it does not ask your permission — it arrives already inside you. In 1977 a Rhodope song, sung by a woman born not far from where we were sitting, was pressed onto a gold-plated record and launched aboard Voyager 1 and 2. Of everything our species chose to send out, one of the things still travelling is that sound.On the Thursday we walked for nearly seven hours. I had said four. At two thousand metres, in all that time, we saw a shepherd and six other people. |
 |
| And the stillness up there does something else entirely. You are very small. The mountains do not care.Which is a relief rather than a diminishment — nobody needs anything from you, there is nothing to decide, and you are entirely present because there is nowhere else to be. |
 |
| The purpose work went on in and around all of this. One-to-ones through the week. Fingerprints, which form in the womb and never change, and which can be read for a person’s purpose and the theme they are here to work with. Alongside that, each person’s natural gift — the way they create value without effort. |
| And then long stretches with nothing in them at all. Read. Journal. Sleep. Here is what I keep noticing, and this week made it plain. They came for the first key. What moved them was the third and the fourth. The person who could not answer the question on the first evening is not going to answer it by thinking harder. She answered it after five days of beauty and silence, and what she came home with was not a plan. It was the intention to put her attention on what she wants, for the first time in twenty years, and to listen to her intuition, because she now knows what being connected to herself actually feels like. She told me she had been awestruck in the presence of that beauty. That she felt it from the tips of her toes to the top of her head. That her thinking has been broadened.A week on, I was sent a note by another participant: I do feel very good since coming back thanks to you. I am making bigger steps to do more of the things I want to do. Awestruck is not a decorative word, as it turns out. In 2012 three researchers ran a set of experiments on awe. People who had experienced it reported feeling they had more time available. They were less impatient. They were more willing to give their time away to help somebody else. And they reported greater satisfaction with their lives. What produced all of that, when the analysis was done, was not the feeling itself. It was what awe does to time. It puts you in the present moment, and from inside the present moment there appears to be more time than there was. Which matters, because I know the objection to everything above. It sounds lovely and it is beside the point, because you have a business, or a department, or a family, and no week to hand to a mountain. But the thing that makes a person feel rich in time is not managing it better.It is standing in front of something vast enough to stop you talking. You do not need a mountain for that, and you certainly do not need a week. You need somewhere the noise stops for long enough that the question can be asked properly. That is what I am putting together for the autumn — six weeks, a few people, inside an ordinary diary. If that is of interest, reply and I will tell you more. On the rock, nobody spoke for what must have been twenty minutes. Nothing was resolved up there.Nothing needed to be.When did you last look at something and forget, for a minute or two, to have an opinion about it? Rosaleen P.S. Four keys — purpose, resources, pleasure, freedom. Give each a mark out of ten for the last month, quickly, without thinking about it. The lowest one is usually the one you have been calling something else. |
 |