abundant gifts

the beautiful unseen

I woke feeling well-rested for the first time in months and pushed open the heavy mullion window to let in the morning air. My breath caught in my throat: beyond the field behind the granite manor house, white mist was rising up from the River Lynher. Words from Alice Oswald’s ‘Mist’ (a poem I quoted as my book’s epigraph and read out loud at every event on my book tour) rose into my mind: ‘sometimes there’s a second river/ lying asleep along the river’. I will always see a misty morning as a gift from the universe, a beckoning invitation, a message just for me. A late bat darted across the dawn garden as I tiptoed through dewy grass, past the glowing forms of sheep, and a shepherds hut with a single lit window, through the tangled portal of a Cornish hedgerow and out into the fog.

When a writer I hugely admire had unexpectedly invited me to attend a retreat in an ex-monastery on a forgotten Cornish peninsula, I did not know that one short message—which arrived so quietly in my inbox—would change everything. I could not have foreseen how I would later feel on leaving Cornwall, driving back over the Tamar bridge at the end of the week with river water on my skin and pristine air in my lungs: refreshed and renewed, but also forever altered. My stay at Erth—days of mist and sunshine, of silence and laughter—proved to be a time of abundant gifts.

Fingers growing numb, I returned to the house, following the fog as it flowed over the roof. I found my fellow writers beside the 13th century stone chapel, sunlight glinting on window glass, pots of red geraniums on the steps. Together, we watched diffuse colour arc across the sky, but no rain fell—this was not a rainbow but a fogbow, my first. One of the meteorological phenomena I had written about, and dreamed of, but never seen. When the arch faded, we stepped inside for coffee and toast but my new friends understood, I think, that for me the morning had meant something more—the fogbow left an indelible mark.

At home, in my busy, cluttered house, the only peace to be found is a brief middle-of-the-day hush of solitude—snatched hours I must fill with the tapping of laptop keys, but during my week at Erth, silence was frequent, deep and companionable. In the mornings, we climbed the stone steps to the chapel and sat together for an hour without speaking as crows called and pigeons clattered across the roof. Beyond the pink clouds of dawn, in the hazy invisible distance was Dartmoor. Recalling the sense of porousness I once felt there in the fog, I stretched tingling legs across cold chapel floor and tried to regain a sense of openness to the world. In the afternoons, as we gathered by the fire to sip tea, curled in armchairs with books and notebooks, our shared silence vibrated with thoughts. The ideas that came to me in the quiet I recognised as gifts, accepting them with due grace.

On our last night, we stood in the garden, praying for clouds to pass. My phone had lain untouched for much of the week but now I held it in my hand, aurora notifications pinging. The last time the aurora was widely visible, I spent the night in an ambulance with my youngest son, touched by dancing light we did not see. This was a second chance for me and I felt hopeful, but, growing cold, we returned to the fire. Close to midnight, the sky finally cleared and columns of colour rose, muting the brightest stars. At first, the waves of scarlet and green were visible only through the camera lenses of our phones, but eventually we could make out a faint, shifting colour wash by eye. Owls hooted in the velvet dark and a shooting star sparked across the horizon. Like the fog, this undulating light—the final gift—was a reminder of the beautiful unseen.

Back home in my kitchen, socks were drying on the wooden airer that hung from the ceiling. Steam misted the sash window, in the corner of which a spider spun her web. My husband had made daal for supper and we gathered noisily around the table, passing a basket of chapatis. My boys, in the space of a week, were grown somehow taller, up and away from me—their faces strong and angular. Piling plates high, they all spoke at once: telling me about science tests and rugby matches, piano lessons and parties. I listened to their beloved voices, to the clatter of plates and peals of laughter.

Somewhere within me, crystalline and protected, I carried a kernel of silence.