The Island Time Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Island Time Walk

Hi, I’m Helen Sword. This is Helen’s Word. Welcome to Swordswings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Today I’m going to take you and your writing on a metaphorical walk across an island. And this is based on an actual walk that I take my writing retreaters on every year at my Island Time writing retreat on the real island of Waiheke in the Hauraki Gulf, off the coast of Tamaki Makaurau, Auckland, in Aotearoa, New Zealand, the land of the long white cloud. So it’s an actual walk on an actual island,  but I’m going to talk through this walk with you in four dimensions. I’ll tell you about the real landmarks, the real places that we pass through.

There’s also a version of this walk, this island-time excursion,  on my writing retreat page of my website. So if you go to helensword.com, look under ‘Writing Retreats’ and then ‘Island Time’, you’ll find this virtual walk with photos of the places we went to and writing prompts along the way. It’s a version of the walk that’s meant to be done at your desk or someplace where you can write in a notebook as you watch and listen. So you get the visuals, and then you get the three-minute writing prompts all along the way. You can put your words on the page and see where your mind takes you, where your words and your lines take you.

The third version of the walk is the one that you’re doing right now. I hope that you’re out and about, walking through some kind of landscape as you listen to this. Or maybe you’re just moving around in your own house or apartment, or you’re on a bus or in a car. Either way, you’re moving through space. So, this is not a time or a place that’s conducive to actually stopping to write. It’s more of a listening walk and a thinking walk. So I will be talking to you most of the time during this walk and inviting you to think about the prompts, but not giving you that silence, that blank page to fill in.

My hope is that you might do your own version of this walk some other time. Take the prompts with you on your own and go for an unplugged walk. A walk with no external input. No earphones where you’re listening to a podcast or to music. No television or radio in the background. No screen in front of you because you’re out walking. A real mindfulness walk where you’re letting your brain and your body really pay attention to the surroundings. And that’s a wonderful kind of walk for thinking about your writing. So if you take these prompts with you or create your own version of them, you’ll find yourself crossing your own metaphorical island with a completely different quality of attention than you’ll be giving to any of the other versions.

All right, so now it’s time to start walking. In the real world, ‘in real life’, as we say, as though the virtual world were not real life…In real life, we start this walk on Waiheke Island, a beautiful, really beautiful island. You can see photos of it on my website--gorgeous cliffs, beaches, and many coastal walks.

We will be going on a walk across the island from the southern side to the northern side. But before we start that, I want to give you a moment to imagine your own island. If you were walking across an island that you know, where might it be? If you were walking across a metaphorical island, what or where would it be? If you were considering an island as a metaphor for your writing practice, what kind of island would that be? An arctic island, a tropical island, a river island, a volcanic island?
There are so many different kinds of islands. The reason why you might want to imagine your writing practice as an island—and of course, this is the magic of a writing retreat on an island—is because it allows you to think of a particular writing project or a particular writing session, an island in time,  as something with boundaries. A place that you step onto and leave things behind. Then, you return to those things and go back to the mainland. So, physically, think of a real island you would love to walk across or that means something in your life.

As a writing prompt,  you could spend three minutes describing that island or creating an imaginative island--the perfect place to escape to do your writing. A place where you can find that sense of ‘island time’, of timelessness. And on your own, if you’re doing this just walking, consider what you’re leaving behind, what you’re taking with you, what the boundaries of your island are. This would be a wonderful exercise to do for half an hour in a park, where you just let the park be your island that you don’t leave. You ceremoniously step onto that island and into the park, leave the rest of the world behind, and then really focus on your environment. Clear your mind of your writing, clear your mind of all those things that crowd in when we forget to be mindful of our bodies and our surroundings.

So we’re going to start our walk across this particular island at a place called Rocky Bay, which, as the name suggests, has stones on the beach rather than sand. It’s a tidal kind of beach, so at low tide, it’s basically mud flats with lots of shellfish and feeding birds. So it’s very fertile. And yet, it’s not our classic white sand swimming beach made for people.

It’s made for other kinds of creatures. So, I’d like you to take a moment and think about where you’re starting your island-time journey from. Your journey through or into your writing practice. We’re going to go over the mountain, over the top of the island, and come down to the other side. We want some kind of transformation to take place, and one way to do that is by starting out thinking about what your Rocky Bay of writing looks like or feels like right now. In real life, it just looks rocky. And it’s easy to bend down and pick up a stone and say, “I’m going to take this rock over to the other side of the island.” As a writing prompt, it asks you to spend a few minutes writing about some problem, some issue in your writing, something you’d like to face and change somehow.

A prompt that you might do completely on your own: I would invite you simply to choose an object at the start of your walk, a kind of talisman. It might be something you want to carry across the island and throw away into the sea at the end. Or it might be something that you want to remember when you go home.

So, choose your talisman. And if you’re out on an actual walk, you may want to fine something—a stone, a leaf, a twig, a piece of paper—to physically pick up, put in your pocket, carry with you. Imagine that object as this problem, this issue, this frustration, this thing that you’re going to give yourself some time to think about, but also some time to forget as it settles there deep down.

Now we’re going to leave the rocky beach, and we’re heading into the island, up into the forest and bird reserve, Whakanewha, a series of trails winding up a hill. And we’re going to take a path called the Nikau Track. The Nikau palm is a kind of palm tree indigenous to New Zealand. It’s a bit like a queen palm. It has a long, thin trunk and then branches out with beautiful lacy fronds on all sides like a really gorgeous pinwheel or umbrella high above you. On the Nikau track on Waiheke Island, there are some spots where you walk through and are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of Nikau palms.

You’ve got birdsong, you’ve got cicadas. You’ve got the sound of your own feet moving along the path, and those are pretty much the only sounds you hear. Maybe a bit of wind in those palm fronds. The effect is like a kind of green cathedral. You’re looking up, and light is filtering down through those green fronds. It’s a sacred kind of space, a magical space.

In real life, when I take my writing retreaters through the Nikau Path, along that track, I ask them to be completely silent. I ask them to forget about that stone in their pocket, to forget about their writing, to forget about their problems, whatever it is that they’re carrying with them in their mind, in that monkey mind that’s always leaping around to other things.

See if you can put that monkey to sleep, settle the rock in the pocket. And just focus on what’s around you. Just be mindful of nature, of the sounds. This is a clearing-your-mind exercise. And of course, it’s best done without any input. But here you are with my voice in your ear. And so I’m going to give you some suggestions for how to look around your environment.

Right now, try to empty your mind of all those intellectual concerns and focus on the body moving through space. Focus on your surroundings, whether it’s a forest, a garden, a cityscape, or just around your own kitchen while preparing dinner. So, as you’re moving around, you’re emptying your mind of all those other things, and I’d like you to focus just for a short time on nothing but the colors. (If you can see color, not everyone can. You can look at shades of gray otherwise.) So you’re going to look around and see if you can identify three different colors around you. Maybe expand that to five colors. Three is easy, five is sometimes harder, depending where you are. And then you can keep infinitely expanding those colors.

But you might choose one of them. So, for example, in a natural landscape, you might just look at green. Start to notice all the different shades and nuances of green. If you’re in a cityscape, it might be beiges and browns. Or it might be very brightly colored cars, and you’re actually trying to look at all the different saturated colors that you see.

So give yourself a bit of time to focus on just the colors. Really pay attention to them. Then,  keeping those colors in your mind, open up your gaze to shapes as well. I like to look at straight lines and curved lines and how they interact…at all those different patterns that start to happen when we have fern fronds or palm fronds and trunks that are straight, but they’re not so straight.

Bits of sky coming through that negative space. So many things, so many shapes to look at. I begin to notice that when I’m walking through a cityscape,  I tend to see many, many straight lines. When I’m walking through nature, really, almost everything is curved, even the tree trunks. And so I start to think about or to take on board the difference between our natural and our built environments.

And yet I’m doing this just through attention, without grading them, without putting a judgment on them, without letting my mind go anywhere else. And now that I’ve been looking at colors and shapes and patterns,  I open my ears to listening. And if you’re listening to this with headphones on both your ears, you may just need to take one of them off so that you can hear for a minute or so, even for 30 seconds: what are the other sounds around you?

In nature, it might be birds and insects, but also that airplane going over, for example, or the car in the distance. In a cityscape, maybe the reason you have the headphones on is because you want to drown out all those harsher noises. But there may also be people passing, calmer noises. It’s not all necessarily negative.

 And then, to add to the noises and the sounds: texture. What textures do you see? Is there anything you can touch right now? A leaf, the side of a building, a bit of food that you’re carrying. Just pay attention to the texture on your fingers. I like to find three textures, three different ones to pay attention to.

And then I move to two textures, I guess. We’re down from the five colors, the four shapes and patterns, the three sounds, two textures, and one smell or taste. And by now, we’ve got quite a lot going on, including a lot of things we’ve been trying to pay attention to. I sometimes like to just stop and let it be a sort of symphony of attention, with the sounds and the sights and the texture through my fingers, the smells…all of those things are coming in together, and I’m allowing them to interact. That’s my version of how I switch myself into mindfulness. Paying attention. You may have your own—There are many, many different ways to do this. You can also do this by paying attention not to your environment so much as to your body as it moves through the environment.

Do a body scan, paying attention to different parts as you move along. The main point of this exercise is to empty your mind of everything else but that attention, and to open your mind to the environment, which we often shut out when we’re thinking about other things. You may have that experience of going for a walk, and you’re thinking about your writing, about something you’re working on, and you get to your destination, you don’t particularly remember crossing the street or going up the hill because you were thinking about other things. That’s where our conceptual mind, our thinking mind, gets in the way of what we call mindfulness. All right, so we’ve emptied our minds, and now it’s time we’re prepared for our writing, our thoughts, and all that other stuff to come back in again.

So we’re going to start to climb the hill. And in real life, just as we come through the Nikau track,  we get to a point where we start to go quite steeply uphill through a series of graded tracks and wooden stairways that have been built. As we start to climb, we feel it in our legs and our lungs. We start to sweat and notice that the pace has changed and that it’s harder. We’re having to heave our bodies up the path. This is a good time to think about what challenges you’re bringing with you. What challenges do you face in your current writing practice that you’d like to overcome? What happens when you dwell on those challenges as you walk up a hill? We expect to be challenged on a journey. We expect to be challenged on a hill. And we don’t mind because we know we’ll get a better view at the top. Same thing with writing. The challenge will take us someplace better, even though it’s harder. So can you let that energy of the challenge help you face the frustration or the blank page or the criticism or whatever it is that’s niggling at you.

As we go up and up and up in a writing prompt, you have time to think about that. On an actual walk, you have time to think about that if you’re not chatting to everyone else, or if you are on your own. It’s a great practice to do that head-clearing first, someplace really beautiful preferably, or calm, and then do something a little bit physically challenging, like going up the hill, as you bring your mind to bear on an intellectual cognitive problem.

And then, in real life, there’s a point towards the top of the walk when we suddenly come upon a beautiful cascade. Not quite a waterfall, but a place where the stream that we’ve been following up comes cascading down over some stones into a pool. This is the source of the stream that we’ve been following. There’s a spring here. This is the source of the name Waiheke, this island, meaning ‘falling water’. There’s something so beautiful about that sound, something so fresh about that spring. This is a great moment to stop, especially if you’ve been chewing on that problem or challenge for a while. Just stop, listen, watch that cool, clear cascade of water flowing from the spring at the heart of the island. Ask yourself, what song is that spring singing to you? What music might flow from your heart onto the page? When I did this walk at my Island Time Retreat,  the problem I was thinking about walking up the hill had to do with some challenges in communication that I was facing. And when I got to that spring at the top, suddenly, it was so clear to me what the answer was: Opening my heart to people. I was fretting about the words on the page and the content. And it’s all intended for people at the other end. So, by slowing down and opening up my heart, I realized I had the solution with me all along.

Moving on, we’re nearly at the top of the hill. We come to a clearing, we walk past some vineyards, and now we’re at the restaurant—the highest restaurant on the island, with the highest vineyard, so we were told, which is why they grow a particularly lovely Chardonnay. And the prompt that I give here in the writing exercises is: you’ve reached the vineyard at the top of the island. What sustenance do you need to fuel you on the rest of your journey? Who will accompany you on your way? So we’ve reached a kind of fulcrum. We’ve got that 360 degree view out over the island, the gulf, the surrounding islands. It could be a moment of cresting, of transition to something new, a turning point. It could be a moment when we focus on rest and sustenance. It could be a moment when we really focus on the other people who are with us, if we’ve been walking in silence up till now and we come into a place of community.

So this is a place on your own walk,  particularly if you do this on your own, to think about where the stopping place is going to be. Where’s that cresting moment? The climax, we might say,  but it’s not a difficult climax. It’s just a moment of going off. It’s all downhill from here. And so after that meal, we start heading down the hill.

We can see the beach on the other side. Beautiful Onetangi Beach. A long, long, long, long beach with white sand and blue-green water. Very inviting looking. It’s still a way to go, but gravity’s carrying us down. So my prompt for this one in the writing exercise: Refueled and refreshed, head down the track toward the beach on the other side of the island. What do you hope to find there? This is a looking-forward moment. A moment of hope, but also all downhill from here. It has many different meanings. It could mean it’s easy from now on, but it also could mean there’s a bit of an anti-climax. The energy from having climbed the hill can get lost. How can we make this a rolling-down-the-hill, joyful energy as we head towards whatever it is we’re hoping to find? And when we get to the beach, of course we immerse ourselves in those blue-green waters of the Hauraki Gulf. My writing prompt is: what does that cleansing clarifying ocean swim symbolize for you? What is the ocean for you? What is it that you’ve found your way to? What work is it doing to help you gain, to help you bring with you, that clarity from walking across the island?

As you reflect on where your journey across the island has taken you, you might think about how it has transformed you. What have you discovered along the way? What have you shed? And when you head home from your island, after that immersion in the water, the cleansing, the transformation, maybe even some kind of epiphany, some kind of discovery, what are you going to do with that? That rock, that stone, that talisman, whatever it was that you picked up at the beginning, that niggly thing you’ve carried across the island. Have you resolved the issue that it represents? Can you throw it in the water and say goodbye? Or maybe it’s something you actually want to take home as a souvenir. Maybe the best souvenir, the best memory of your challenging-but-beautiful walk across the island, is, in fact, the stone that you’ve carried in your pocket and that you have brought all this way on your own two feet.

So I’m going to leave you there, hoping that one day you’ll join me in real life at my Island Time Writing Retreat or my Mountain Rise Retreat in Switzerland, where we also do an amazing walk on our excursion day. I hope you’ll check out my videos of both retreats so you can do them, and do a visual version of this journey with writing prompts along the way. You’ll discover things that you don’t discover when you’re just walking and listening. And I especially hope that after today’s walk,  you will take the idea of walking across an island with you. Go on a walk with, as I said, no input--no podcast, no music, nothing but yourself, walking through some kind of space that challenges you, that energizes you, that gives you opportunities for mindfulness and noticing the environment, but also opportunities for dwelling on that stone, dwelling on whatever it is that you’ve carried across the island. I hope you’ll have opportunities for sustenance and community, a cleansing spring calls to your heart and an immersion in something cool and wonderful at the very end.

Thank you for walking with me. I look forward to seeing you next time.

Helen