Upon Returning from Paris
poems, photographs, and some ways to retreat right where you are
The muchness of coming home after leading my dream writing retreat
I don’t know how to tell you about my week. It is a non-containable entity, an infinite expanse of time; a lifetime lived and loved. I am finding it impossible to shrink it into language.
I spent most of today weeping and trying to understand this strange convergence of grief and gratefulness; the way we can hold what has been lost and know it, somehow, as gain.
My yard is a feast of greens and my dog leaps with joy to see me. My child, suddenly nearly my height, throws his arms around me in genuine relief to have me home. I wake and make my coffee the way I like it: a full mug of dark roast. I plant the thyme and shishito peppers I bought before leaving for Paris. I spend the morning typing up the words I wrote while I was there. Looking through the photographs. Missing the women I retreated with, the people I met along the way.
In some ways, I think it would be easier to accept this kind of portal-jumping if it took a month on a ship to return home from Europe. But an eight-hour direct flight, an hour in customs, an eighteen-minute taxi ride, and suddenly I am here again. Massachusetts. Mulch. Laundry. My son asking what’s for dinner. The sounds and sights of Paris still ringing in my ears.
I’m not complaining. I just don’t know what to call the ache that has risen like a mountain in my chest. Perhaps it is simply the existential pain of living a singular life. So many paths forking endlessly forward and backward through time, and somehow we only get to inhabit one at once.
Travel always reminds me how many selves exist inside me waiting for their turn at the wheel. The woman wandering through the Latin Quarter with a group of 5 amazing writers. The woman making lunch for her son. The woman teaching poetry in a villa outside Paris. The woman tending tomatoes in Massachusetts. All of them me at once.
I wish I could take you all with me somehow. Pull you through the tunnel of time and space and let you glimpse the vastness inside your own life, too. The thousand possible selves flickering just beyond the visible world. An infinite set of futures unfolding toward the horizon like stalks of wheat.
And that, I think, is why I write. It is an attempt to pull you into my experience with me, to let you see and feel what I see and feel, to bridge the unbearable distance between us.
So here are a few fragments from Paris.
Poems, photographs, evidence of having been changed.
The Writer’s Retreat!
We started each morning with a slow breakfast, followed by a 2-hour generative writing workshop, with sharing and conversation.
Friday, we wandered Montmartre, wrote at the café where Amelie worked in the movie (so fun!).
Saturday we hit all the big landmarks: Arc de Triumph, Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, The Latin Quarter (Shakespeare and Co), and ended our day at Cafe de Flore, where so many literary and artistic minds sat and talked and worked.
The idea behind this retreat was simple: to take in the beauty of Paris, to talk with one another, and to write together. It was everything I could’ve wished for and more.
(written May 13th, in Paris) What do you want at the center of your life? Grace freedom time a sense of belonging a garden to tend. I want travel and new adventure a kind of internal peace with who I am friendships that feel like safety, laughter, intellectual engagement. Pleasure feasts, sleep that fully restores animals poetry, of course. Honesty that opens every door within me and between me in the world I want to make a world I can live inside. I want to see forever: to be able to name the colors and shapes I can see. photography that bends time poetry that shifts space I want to be the ALL creature: that connected consciousness, to know that I am love and that I am loved. We take our time getting there. We are not alone. We are not out of time. We are hopeful and in that hope, whole lives are changed for the better. I take my time I make time I am time.
Prompt for you: What do you want at the center of your life?
I decide Paris will accept me unkempt and worn.
I am tired of perfectly mapped nights anyway.
(excerpt from another new poem)
I am grateful for my calm existence,
my capacity to wake at 5:30 AM
and make breakfast, then the lunch,
to brush my son’s hair and find his shoes
and spend the day feeding various fur creatures
and writing on the Internet.
But still, there is a dark street with my name on it.
A wolf waiting,
a woman in a suit,
smoking a cigarette outside a nudie bar.
There is a secret package,
an unopened box within me
with another kind of life inside.
A life less easy and less comfortable,
but possibly, inescapably mine.
Creating a mini-retreat right where you are
The best part about the retreat for me, was being with some of my favorite people, talking about art and writing, but also our lives, our kids, our fears, our relationships. I spent the week largely off my phone (except to take photos or use the map), and almost entirely away from social media. This kind of presence, refills my poetic well with images and color, with stories I couldn’t come up with all on my own.
Paris helped because it interrupted my routine (and because it is one of the most beautiful places on Earth). But there are smaller ways to step outside ordinary time, too.
A few ideas:
Spend a few hours without your phone. Bring a notebook somewhere beautiful or unfamiliar, even if it’s just a neighboring town or a quiet café. Go with a friend or two if you can, the conversation will become part of the fodder for your work.
Visit a museum, botanical garden, bookstore, or old cemetery slowly. Sketch in a notebook, jot down images, use the names of paintings as poetry prompts.
Wear the outfit you save for special occasions. Buy flowers and fruit for your kitchen table. Eat outside.
Take photographs of your ordinary life as if you were traveling through it for the first time.
Gather with other creative people in person if you can. Read poems aloud. Talk about ideas that matter. Stay at the table longer than necessary.
Let beauty interrupt your daily routine.
"I want to make a world I can live inside."
Oh yes. There is a continual yearning, an unfolding in this line (and in the whole piece). It feels like a kaleidoscope--ever shifting, the light and perspective ever-changing. I feel it in my bones.
Thank you Alix for sharing your words and photos from Paris!
''I spent most of today weeping and trying to understand this strange convergence of grief and gratefulness; the way we can hold what has been lost and know it, somehow, as gain.''
Oh how this resonates! Last September I was in the south of France with a friend; hubby and family stayed home...I was gone for 3 weeks! You've penned it so perfectly Alix! The grief of leaving a place after three weeks, where I felt so inspired and 'free'! And being grateful for the oppurtunity of staying at a friend's home and visiting beautiful places. (I still haven't written any poems about it all yet! I collaged a journal about it though!!)