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A six-week exploration of the art of living.

 

The Well is a six-week exploration of the art of living. Each week, we gather around one aspect of our lives—Season, Body, Rhythm, Beauty, Voice and Thread. I bring the ideas and the questions; we take them to the page, into conversation, and ultimately back into our own lives.

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I created The Well out of a question that has followed me through much of my life and work:

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How do we live well?

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Not according to someone else's prescription. Not as an abstract idea. But here, in the lives we actually have, in the season we are actually living.

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I have spent more than twenty-five years working with women through movement, writing, retreats, creativity and the many conversations that happen when women have enough room to think and speak freely about their lives.

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Again and again, I find myself returning to the same territory: the body and the shape of our days. Beauty and pleasure. The things we make. What has our attention. What we know because we have lived it. The changing seasons of a woman's life. The questions that continue to follow us.

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The Well grew from it all.

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A woman's life is her primary creative work. There is authorship in the way we inhabit our days—in what we give our attention to, what we cultivate, what we make room for, what we follow, and what we choose to bring more fully into our lives.

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There is a source within all of us, like a wellspring. Deep. Ancient. Life-giving. Continual. Something we can drawn from and returned to again and again to an interior life rich with experience, intelligence, memory, instinct, imagination, desire and knowing. The deeper our relationship with that source, the more there is to draw from.

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We come to The Well with our histories, competence, contradictions, taste and humor. Bodies that have carried us through decades. Things we know because they earned the knowing.

 

And we come because there is still more.

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More discovery. More appetite. More wildness. More curiosity. More reinvention. More pleasure. More intellectual life. More creativity. More friendship. More adventure.

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The Well is a place to draw from all of it—to listen closely, follow what has our attention, and bring what we find more fully into the way we live.

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That is where we begin.

SIX WEEKS AT THE WELL

SEASON

Where am I?

Our lives have seasons, and they are not always the ones we planned for. There are times of building and clearing, solitude and company, ambition and recovery, caregiving, creativity, upheaval and reinvention. Trouble comes when we continue organizing our lives around the requirements of a season that has already passed.

We begin with what is true now. What belongs to this season? What no longer does? What might become possible if we stopped asking this moment to be another one?

BODY

My first home

Everything we know of life reaches us through a body. It carries memory and appetite, fatigue and pleasure, instinct, longing, resistance. It changes with us and sometimes before us.

We turn our attention toward the body not as a problem to solve, but as a source of information. What happens when we become more interested in what we can feel than in what we think we should feel? What brings us into greater contact with being alive?

RHYTHM

The shape of my days

A life is eventually made of days, and days have a composition: pace and pause, repetition and interruption, solitude and company, things we hurry through and things we allow ourselves to linger over.

Rather than treating time as another resource to optimize, we look at the rhythms that shape an ordinary life. Where does my attention actually go? What gets my best hours? What pace allows me to recognize my own life while I am living it?

BEAUTY

What moves me

Beauty is not incidental to a life.

We have always made it, sought it, carried it home and arranged our surroundings with it. A piece of music, something made by hand, the pleasure of a beautifully dressed table, an old tree, a particular blue, good food, the light at four in the afternoon—our attractions tell us something.

This week is an inquiry into taste, pleasure and the sensory life. Not what we have been told is beautiful, but what arrests our own attention. What moves me? What satisfies me? What makes the experience of being here richer?

VOICE

What is mine to say?

Living gives us material. Experience becomes story, opinion, knowledge, humor, conviction, questions—and, eventually, a point of view.

This week we turn toward our own. We write into what we know, what we wonder about, what we cannot quite leave alone, and what we may have been circling for years without giving it language. Not to arrive at the right thing to say, but to become more interested in the particularity of what is ours to say.

THREAD

What keeps returning?

Certain things persist. A place we keep imagining. An idea that appears in different forms. Work we once loved. A question we haven't exhausted. Something set aside years ago that continues to tug at the sleeve.

In our final week, we return to what we've written and noticed over the previous five—not to manufacture a conclusion, but to notice recurrence. What has been quietly gathering? What continues to ask for my attention? And what might happen if I gave it some?

HOW WE GATHER

We meet live once a week for six weeks in a small group of women.

Each gathering begins with an exploration of that week's territory. I draw from my own work and experience as well as literature, art, ideas and the writers and thinkers who have shaped my thinking. From there, we write.

The writing is guided, but never prescriptive. Some weeks we may stay with a single question; others will move through several points of inquiry. There is conversation, room to follow an unexpected thought, and the opportunity to share what we've written when we want to.

You do not need to be a writer.

We use the page because writing asks something different of us than conversation does. It gives a thought somewhere to go. It lets us stay with a question past the obvious answer. And occasionally, there on the page, we meet something we hadn't known we were thinking.

Between gatherings, the inquiry remains open. You'll keep Field Notes from The Well throughout the six weeks—a record of what catches your attention, what follows you home, what changes shape when considered in the context of an ordinary day.

By our final gathering, you will have something more interesting than a set of completed exercises: six weeks of your own attention gathered in one place. We will return to it together and see what has been there, perhaps quietly, all along.

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THE WELL — RETREAT SERIES
Bring the complete arc of The Well into your retreat. Across six gatherings, I guide your group through Season, Body, Rhythm, Beauty, Voice and Thread using teaching, writing, conversation and practices that move with them into the rest of the retreat.
The series can be woven across a weeklong retreat, with one gathering each day, giving the experience a meaningful thread from arrival through closing. I need to build out the page to bring my wellness, art or The well to retreats. I am in a tourist town loaded with retreats.

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