When you can't get enough of a place ...

Ever been somewhere that really STRIKES A CHORD with you? Got a place that you carry in the back of your mind, a place you imagine yourself heading to if your current life doesn't work out?So I went to yoga this morning and had a bit of a REVELATION. We were doing the sitting meditation at the end of class (check me out, actually able to do a bit of meditation, instead of just spending the whole time listening to my tummy rumble, thinking about breakfast) and a picture came into my mind of the sun on the water, up in Pittwater. Well, thought I. Why THE HELL am I cooped up in this stinky inner city room, listening to planes roar overhead, when I could be seeking some peace in a place of great beauty?Here I am at my desk an hour later, asking myself the same question.In the spirit of honouring INSPIRING PLACES, today I want to share a piece that I wrote two years ago, while staying on retreat at stunning Bundanon. The Bundanon property was a given as a generous gift to the nation by painter Arthur and Yvonne Boyd in 1993. It welcomes dozens of artists, writers, musicians and performers every year to take part in its Artists in Residence program. Yvonne Boyd died on 12 November 2013, so it seems fitting that I post this now, with thanks to the Boyd family for sharing such a glorious place with Australia's community of creators.Time on the vine: a Bundanon reflectionThis story begins in a van, because the drive into Bundanon is quite magical and I couldn’t write about my stay there without writing about that; and because when I drive I like to think. Travelling and thinking: they just go together.I’ll admit that I drove out of Sydney just a touch (ahem) above the speed limit. But I’d left home on such a high, I couldn’t bear to chug along in the slow lane. I was elated; my brain was on fire with ideas already.Two weeks without my kids: the idea of it held untold possibilities for my writing. I could be a real writer — one that gets up in the morning, does yoga, gets 'in the zone'. I would be calm. I would have conversations with myself in the voices of my characters. I wouldn’t have to tell anyone to put their shoes on or wash the egg out of their hair. Ah, bliss.The kilometers went spinning by. I covered some ground on that drive, believe me. In two and a half hours, you can think yourself around a lot of stuff. I’ll admit that it yielded some dubious material. A kind of de-tox process, I told myself. I composed the start of a rhyme for a children’s book, which began well enough, although headed quickly towards a sinkhole of relationship doubt:In a rum-tumbled shack by the side of the roadLived Philibert Ogg and Giuseppe the toad,They lived well enough; well as two people canWhen one is a toad and one is a man.You get the picture: it was vexed by existential woe. By the fourth verse, I was questioning the institution of marriage; holding forth on the morality of cats; and asking myself whether one can really rhyme ‘exchange’ with ‘mange’.There were other things to consider on this particular journey, mercifully. My thoughts soon turned to the question of what I hoped to achieve during my residency. I soon realized I had only one reply to that question: I pictured myself, head down, bum up. I intended to go at my novel like the proverbial clappers. I wasn’t going to waste a second. New writing, tidying up the old bits, zooming through it. I felt a bolt of pure anxiety as I drove. My time at Bundanon might be the best chance — or only chance — of my novel’s survival. Every moment counted. Speed and staying power were the key.Following the instructions from the Bundanon website, I turned off the highway before the Nowra bridge and followed the road along the river through north Nowra. Then I turned off the sealed road into the bush  — and I stopped thinking.Just like that.Ask anyone who’s been to Bundanon what they remember and at some point, they’ll mention the drive into the property. The snaking road that curves to reveal the magnificent broad river; the swaying eucalypts above the road that let in a silver light. Then, as you drive through the gates, the fields of the homestead, green as an apple, an undulating suntrap.The drive in acquired a special meaning soon after I arrived. I made friends with another writer who was staying in the lovely 1850s Writers’ Cottage. She gave me an article of hers to read, which had been published in The Age. It described this journey wonderfully and after reading her piece, I imagined that driving the winding road was a rite of entry to a sacred place for artists. All who enter Bundanon are thusly anointed — and any artistic process would be well served by this vigorous, theatrical introduction to the landscape. Good news for me and my languishing novel, I thought.But back to my van: as I rumbled the last few metres to the Bundanon gate, I forgot the landscape for a moment and two quick anxieties sharpened in my mind. What if this whole residency business didn’t live up to my expectations? And worse: what if I failed to live up to them?Of course, things seldom turn out the way you expect. Did I achieve my goals? Yes, and then some. Did it turn out the way I expected? Heck no. That wonderful Bundanon landscape had its way with me: after the drive in, I should have guessed that it would.The first and the most obvious change was that the pace of my writing immediately slowed down. There was to be no zooming through scenes, no galloping through plot points in the way I’d envisaged. My characters started to behave strangely. They stretched, they looked around. They began to take their time over things. Their passages of reflection grew longer. They observed their surroundings with a new eye for detail. They were behaving as I was: putting on the brakes, taking it slow for a change.I began to see new depth emerging in my characters. Allowing them to stretch their minds a little meant that they were becoming more complex. They were able to be contradictory, faceted; they could move through different moods.I had a realisation that now seems obvious. It was simply this: when writing is squeezed into a busy life — between putting the children to bed and dawn; or the duration of a children’s DVD — the phrases of one’s writing are inevitably squeezed too. In many segments, my writing appeared truncated, hopelessly brief. The ideas hadn’t reached maturity. They needed time on the vine.I saw that I would need to take something of the Bundanon adagio writing pace home with me when I leave. Good luck with that, I thought.Bundanon wrought other changes in my writing too, particularly in terms of subject matter. One of my central characters was destined to have a bush journey, in keeping with the novel’s theme that displacement causes a reconstitution of ideas of self. Suddenly, in his second appearance, this character was on the train to Nowra. If my novel ever makes it into print, I apologise for the thinly veiled description of the landscape out my Bundanon studio window. I just couldn’t resist. He made me do it.Since then, I’ve realised that the final change brought about by the residency was, rather inevitably, a personal one. At Bundanon, I was regarded as a writer — not aspiring, not a dreamer but a peer in a community of creators. It mattered to me enormously that I was taken seriously by other more established residents. No-one questioned my goal or my ability to follow it through.So much of my writing time at home is spent in company with the peevish voice that says: you’ll never get this thing published; this is your hobby, it’s not your vocation. At Bundanon, I wasn’t delusional, I was normal. My novel was more than a dream, it was my current work. People at Bundanon talked about their next project and their next after that.I began to see something clearly: that a creative career was a bit like that long snaking Bundanon road. Curved, rutted, dangerous when the lights go out. Full of unexpected turns. Ah, but what a view.Before I left Bundanon, I made a pledge to myself that went something like this: when I drive out of here in a few days’ time I will do so slowly, my internal metronome reset. Adagio largo. Adagio lento. And that’s exactly what I did: I retraced that winding road slowly, through the shedding grey gums, past the river. I drove with a picture in my mind of myself back at Bundanon in a few years’ time, in front of that window in my writing studio, looking up the hill to the cottage.In my daydream, the novel was finished and published. I’d be working on my next project.——————————Share the secret of your special place: where would you go, if you could?