The delights of connection

We hosted our third summer gathering at Bore Place last week. This annual creative get-together of Dark Angels has become a highlight of my year. What began as a lightly held experiment in a new venue has blossomed into something quietly magical.

This year, our theme was Only Connect and we explored different ways to connect with ourselves, with each other, and with the space we were in. We looked, too, at the yin of connection's yang – whether that's absence, fear, despair or something else – and wrote from both the lightness and the dark.

When we weren't writing (and some participants were heroically productive), we made chains with sticks and webs with string to explore the strange ways we were connected; drew imaginative maps of the estate to join the land with our memories; listed the delights of living for a few precious days in community; went for late night walks beneath the full buck moon, and saw deer charging through the fields; ate delicious and abundant food; chanted in a cow shed; built and tested the world's first functioning "disconnection-o-meter" – and laughed beyond the edge of reason.

My co-host Andy Milligan and I had made detailed plans, but it's the serendipitous moments, the  unexpected encounters, that often bring the most joy. Every time we go to Bore Place, something new and fruitful emerges.

In previous years I'd noticed that in the flowerbed by the kitchen door there’s a series of connecting concrete dishes. I thought they were an abandoned terrace of brutalist bird baths. This year – thanks to Andy – I discovered that this is actually a fiendishly clever art installation, commissioned in the 1970s, by the founders of the charity that owns Bore Place, Neil and Jenifer Wates.

Water pumps through a series of cascading bowls, sloshing back and forth, mimicking the sound and movement of a beetle’s heart. And it still works! – if you know where the ‘on’ button is, which Andy did, because he'd asked the maintenance staff. So, every time we sat in our circle, we were accompanied by the rhythmic tinkle and splash of water flowing through a beating heart. How delightful is that?

Of course, you probably weren’t at Bore Place. There are a lot of people in the Dark Angels community and we only had room for nine of you. I'm not writing this to make you feel bad about not coming, or to entice you to sign up to next summer's gathering.

Rather, I want to remind you of something you surely already know: the delights of connection that a few of us experienced there are available to all of us everywhere. When we honestly try to connect, we encounter the truth that we are all intimately and unavoidably connected already, with each other and with everything.

A constant invitation at Bore Place was to pay attention to where you are, to notice what you notice, to allow your curiosity to ignite your imagination, and to experience the aliveness that arises when you share your discoveries with others. That's an invitation you can offer yourself, and accept, every single day – whoever and wherever you are.

And thereby, we only connect.