Annual Letter from the House

December 2024

Photo by Bodi Hallett

2024 has been an extraordinarily intense year, beginning right at its inception, with my first Three Sundays Series in January and with a New Year resolve out of those three talks to ‘Start Close In’ and bear down on writing more of my ‘Consolations’: those short micro-essays that seemed to have helped so many people around the world.

As is usual for almost all writers, the writing of the new, Consolations II, began achingly slowly over the first two weeks but I was glad to see the process, just as achingly, surely, and day by day, beginning to quicken as the early dark days of January went by, granting me glimmers of insight and possibility while I shook my head at the July deadline I had foolishly set myself with my friend and UK publisher, Jamie Byng. Achingly slowly but even through the slowness, gaining momentum through the slowness of those first two weeks until I left for my annual flight south to teach in Costa Rica in the middle of that first month.

Throughout my life, a litmus test of my commitment to a given cycle of writing has always been whether I can continue to write in my airline seat as I travel, half looking out on the mountains and oceans of the world, and half down at my laptop or note page, thus keeping the necessary momentum and application through my travels that brings any writing to fruition: and indeed the auguries seemed to look good for me as I did write, that January day, all the way south toward the sun, over the gulf of Mexico and over the jungle-clad peninsulas of Central America.

In the midst of those jungles, staying at Blue Spirit in Nosara, Costa Rica, I found myself on stage, speaking out loud about my having begun the essays and finding myself accidentally eliciting many a suggestion for words I should attempt in this new, mostly unwritten collection. These suggestions had me confronting two dynamics that were actually quite fierce invitations - one encouraging and one rather sobering. The first invitation lay in understanding that every one of these people had been touched and consoled by the previous essays and were hungry for more, the second was that I had a formidable task at hand in creating something equal to the power of the first volume.

This second, sobering invitation took a very specific form: strangely and disarmingly, person after person approaching me that week, separately and independently, asked me to write on the theme of ‘shame’, a quality I have never been interested in, not deeming myself a person who, to a fault, felt much shame. By the sixth or seventh personal request, life had me wondering why I was so reluctant to respond to this repeated knocking on my door. Going against myself, I sat down at the desk in my jungle cottage with the tropical light filtering through the leaves and the howler monkeys whoo-wooing above me and wrote for two hours or so expressing every unsurprising cliché anyone had ever written about shame until I had got them all out of my system.

The next day I sat down again, two hours in the morning, two in the afternoon, and in the midst of that immersion, suddenly felt the underlying, almost physical touchability of the word and the way it lives in each of us as the very essence of the way we try to measure up to everything this world demands of us. Shame, I realised, was nothing to be shameful about. At the end of the day, I said to myself, I have worked all day with ‘Shame’. Then I said to myself, I have worked every day of my life with ‘Shame’. It was the experience of writing this intense essay on such a fiercely intense subject that had me swimming once more in the powerful undercurrents that had informed the first cycle of essays. From then on I knew that Consolations II, as I had so unimaginatively named it as a working title, just might be possible.

There was one further lingering impossibility that was to stay with me for months: the sheer number of essays that made up the first volume. That is fifty-two in total. For some reason it seemed necessary to equal that number, and as the weeks went by and I had two essays done, and then three and then seven and then nine and then almost impossibly, nineteen, fifty-two essays seemed more and more outrageous and more and more beyond any reach. But as the hours, days and weeks went by and I kept adding new potential titles to my iPhone notes as I walked or traveled, or cooked or talked with loved ones, I suddenly discovered one March day, that I had at least seventy essays on the go, even if they were made up of just one beginning paragraph.

From then on, my every moment was fixated on adding to these paragraphs, stopping the car on the roadside to add a line, or putting my shopping bags down in the local store to add a few words, to the bemused impatience of someone trying to reach past me for a cabbage; transferring them to my laptop when I reached my study. In parallel, my ears became very sharp as to how people were using words, either against themselves or to help themselves, either against others or to try to help others. I became a serial eavesdropper, listening in and overhearing other people’s conversations: in bars, at the checkout, in the boarding line, noting what words were constant puzzles in a human life and how they were used in defence, or, more rarely, when they provided sudden balm and insight.

This intensely-driven, listening and writing, reached its culmination in Italy immediately prior to my Tuscan walking tour in May. Having spent time in Rome working in the Vatican, listening to the conversations of a very serious group of dedicated religious, I had a full, and very thankful week in the last days of April all to myself before the Tuscan gathering took place and I took the opportunity to book myself into a Medieval Castle, deep in the Umbrian countryside that during the Covid lockdown, I had dreamt often of visiting, a place I had imagined myself writing at, in splendid isolation. The place was rather above what I deserved and could afford, but I said to myself that if I could write an essay a day it would surely pay for itself. The place more than paid for itself. My first three days produced three essays, and I extended my stay to seven nights. The place not only paid for itself in my writing but in the deep calm and the strange kind of concentrated rest that came over me during my intensely quiet days there. I was both freed and absolutely one pointed; straight out of bed every morning to the writing desk with a coffee in my hand, looking out from the perfect writer’s turret in which I stayed, my long hours at the desk punctuated by walks exploring the surrounding paths, taking notes in my phone as I went, and as a further aid to this concentration: all meals were being cooked (and cooked extremely well) by someone else, thus reducing the enormous amount of enjoyable time I spend thinking about, shopping for and cooking meals.

My writing hours reached something like ten or twelve hours a day, and in those seven extraordinary days I was there, I emerged with the necessary seven essays to ease my budgetary conscience. More importantly, I reached a pitch of direct experience in those essays that were the culmination of the entire seven month-long writing experience. The writing of the essay ‘Time’ in that high castle room, was an emblematic and magnified representation of the whole week. In the long hours of intensity of dwelling on ‘Time’, I had a dream-like physical experience of looking back at myself through the eyes of Time itself. “Time is not slipping through our fingers” I said “it is we who are slipping through the fingers of Time.” I began the essay, coffee in hand at seven in the morning and finished it in the bar, red wine in hand, at midnight, listening to a marvelous piano player who seemed to gather all the qualities of ‘Time’ itself, in every way I had been writing about it, in his own brilliant hands.

From then on, I seemed to have an unstoppable momentum behind me. Even in the walking tour that followed my castle sojourn, hosting thirty-five eager pilgrims, I was able to carry on writing. A bad knee which I had nursed since the previous December, and which for the first time in my life prevented me from leading two of the walks only gave me the excuse to stay behind and write the essay ‘Injury’.

By July, sixty essays had emerged from those seven months of literary and psychological delirium, fifty two of which were chosen for Consolations II. It was a delirium that had very strong physical manifestations, I felt a shifting and movable identity emerging from the writing and a radical simplicity and freedom all at the same time, not only informing the Three Sundays Series I gave every second month but every second of my days, traveling or at home. I had written through England, through Wales, through the green fields of Ireland; I had written through Copenhagen and Oslo, Nairobi’s fair breezes and the wilds of Northern Kenya; I had written in Cape Town and Johannesburg and even while witnessing lion kills in the back of a Land Rover in the Sabi Sands of Kruger National park. I was elated and somewhat delirious, I found, and eventually at the end, completely and utterly exhausted, mentally and psychologically. I found my rest and respite once again in the Italian countryside at the home of the music producer, Rick Rubin. We spent three days together, walking the Siennese countryside, often by night, and hour after hour in his studio in conversation; a very natural exchange that resulted in one of the best and most satisfying podcasts I have been a part of. Rick and I were, it seemed, quite the soul mates and had found a new friend in one another.

I spent the last week of July and August at home, only wanting to work in the garden, or fix things around the house: after working with the invisible and the untouchable for so long, the only work I wanted was physical and the only rewards visible and touchable, the turning of earth; the planting of ground cover, the trundle of a wheel barrow, the replacing of an electrical socket.

Once I had recovered, I began to sense the rewards. Once I put my metaphorical pen down at the end of July, reserving it only for the constant necessary edits that bring any book to publication, I found I had a new pair of eyes with which to see and a freeing of my articulation around many qualities of life I had kept at a distance. I also felt edgier, hence my Sex, Shame and Death talks, and a felt ability to address the fiercer dynamics of our existence.

So here we are in December: the book is out, I have signed thousands of copies which are now in many of your hands and I am slowing down for the holiday week when rest, recuperation and a spaciousness that can create a touch of the holy is always a necessity for me. I look forward in anticipation to emerging into the New Year with my annual ‘Start Close In’ Three Sundays Series and live in hope that it will give me and others the same good foundation it gave this last year for yet another year of wonders.

I have many people in my life to be endlessly grateful for: firstly of course, you: my readers and listeners: none of it makes sense without you: a necessary bow toward you all in every corner of this extraordinary world. Secondly to my dedicated and heartfelt team at Many Rivers: none of the above travels, tours, events, nor the eventual publication of the book could have happened without my endlessly patient and (seemingly!) forgiving team at Many Rivers: Pauline Elliot (Totally in Charge), Thomas Crocker (Personal Assistant and all round Platform Tech Expert), Kate Hinton (Tours and Book Sales), Angela Cummings (Substack Curator and Tours), Bodi Hallett (sublime photographer and videographer), and last but not least, my friend and neighbour, Frederick Van Riper who beavers away with incredible ferocity at the bottom of our office building, packaging and sending out my books to all of you around the world. I never went into poetry to create an organisation and thankfully it still does not feel like a mere organisation but a circle of dedicated fellow pilgrims, trying, on a daily basis to get poetry out in the world to as many people as possible, in all its forms, written, spoken and unveiled in all its consoling beauty.