Today, I ran into some parishioners while walking in the woods. “I thought you were going to be in Ireland,” they said. So did I.
For months, October had been blocked out in my calendar as my writing month. The original plan was to travel to Ireland, move from hostel to hostel, walk for hours every day and spend the rest of my time working on my fantasy novel.
Then I looked at the prices.
Travel alone had become expensive, accommodation would add another considerable amount, and suddenly my supposedly simple writing retreat was turning into a trip of several thousand euros.
So I stayed home.
At first that felt a little disappointing. Now, halfway through October, I’m beginning to think it may have been exactly what I needed.
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Walking without going anywhere
One thing I knew I would miss about Ireland was the walking.
When I’m there, I can easily spend most of the day on foot. Walking helps me think. Problems that seem impossible behind a desk often begin to loosen after an hour or two outside.
So I’ve simply kept doing that here.
This week I spent three hours wandering through the woods and the park around a nearby castle. Autumn has arrived properly now. The leaves are changing, the light is getting warmer, and at one point the late-afternoon sun hit the moss on the trees in such a way that I had to stop recording and take a picture.
The strange thing is that I don’t feel as if I’m missing Ireland very much.
I’m spending so much time inside the world of my stories that Ireland seems to be following me around anyway.
A different kind of retreat
What I didn’t expect was how personal the writing would become.
I’m rebuilding the fantasy novel I started last year, and the main characters are young people trying to work out who they are, how much they should conform to what others expect from them, and whether they can trust their own gifts.
The more I develop them, the more memories return from my own twenties.
I spent the first five years of seminary in Louvain-la-Neuve, in the French-speaking part of Belgium. I was incredibly happy there. It was international, exciting, and for a long time it felt as if I had found exactly where I belonged.
Returning to the Netherlands was much harder. Suddenly I felt like the outsider. The culture was different, the expectations were different, and during those early years of priesthood I often struggled with a question that I now recognize much more clearly: can I be myself, or do I have to become the person other people expect a priest to be?
At the time, I didn’t have the language for some of what was happening. Looking back now, I can recognize things like masking and the strain of constantly trying to fit myself into roles that didn’t quite fit me.
Writing fictional characters who wrestle with similar questions has brought all of that back.
Sometimes I go to bed after working on the novel and dream about seminary again.
Seeing the same road differently
Something similar happened earlier this year when I walked the Camino again.
I returned to places I had first visited almost ten years before. The landscape hadn’t changed very much, but I had.
That made it possible to look at old experiences differently. Things that once seemed like failures or difficult detours now belonged to a much larger story.
October is beginning to feel like that too.
I thought I had cleared the month so I could travel somewhere and finish a book. Instead, staying home has given me the space to look backwards, write, walk, sleep properly and take care of things I’ve been postponing for far too long.
Some of those things are extremely ordinary. I’m finally looking into fixing the insulation in my house before another cold winter. I need new glasses; apparently twelve years between eye tests may be pushing it slightly. I’m also taking the first steps towards getting proper professional help with some of the ADHD-related issues I’ve been learning to recognize and manage.
None of this was on my romantic picture of a month-long writing retreat in Ireland.
But perhaps a retreat doesn’t always require going somewhere.
The ideas are coming back
The easiest way for me to tell whether this slower rhythm is working is that ideas have started appearing again.
I’m working on the novel. A little side project about a magical monastery cat has unexpectedly turned into an entire book. Other stories are beginning to connect. I’m walking more, sleeping more and feeling increasingly like myself.
There are still plenty of practical questions waiting for me. My daily saints podcast ends at the end of December, so I have to work out how to replace a substantial part of my income next year without creating another job that consumes all the time I want to spend writing.
But I don’t have to solve all of that this week.
For now, I’m walking through autumn woods, working on stories and slowly sorting out the things that have been waiting for my attention.
Ireland would have been wonderful.
This is pretty good too.
P.S. This article grew out of this week’s episode of The Walk. You can hear the full update via the player at the top of this page.
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