With a love of landscape and geography, Julie enjoys writing about place and its effects − how it shapes people’s lives, their attachments to each other, their sense of self.  She is currently working on Sagelands, a memoir exploring addiction, co-dependency and wellbeing in relation to landscape, specifically wilderness and ecotherapy, with a focus on the desert.

Julie also writes short fiction and is developing a collection of placed-based stories about relationships, trauma and brief encounters.

Her work has been published by Hinterland Magazine and The Mechanics’ Institute Review.

Contact:
@JulieJulesJule
JulieJulesJule (@gmail.com)

_____

 

Casa Verde

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We call to the thing we need until it answers.

I am not quite sure who to expect, as I walk down through the grounds to meet the owner, Hendrik.  I was told to wait at the dojo, the timber-framed hut normally used for yoga and exercise.  I’ve been staying on the retreat side of his estate for the last five days.  It’s all about renewable energy here, seclusion and eco-chic style − futon loungers on the terrace, fountains and sculptures in the gardens, a Buddha included.  There’s an even lower key to the place now, in this lull between seasons.  There have been no retreats for months, no classes, no treatments, just a few stray guests like me; holidaymakers seeking sun and a quiet getaway before autumn turns, winter comes, the virus resurges.  Still, there’s something in the air, an effervescence.  A feeling I’ve had since the first morning I stepped through the veil of sky flower, its blossom and long leaves trailing across the entrance to Casa Verde.

Set in the gardens are the dazzling white shapes of seven guest studios, brilliant in the early afternoon.  Their sharp lines angle into an azure sky, their walls patterned by sun shadows, softened by curves of green, by strawberry trees and oleander.  My studio is called Madeira, for wood − the symbol of strength and growth.  What I needed when I made the booking and chose the room, though being here still feels self-indulgent, like I’m cheating, stealing myself away.

The heat inside the dojo seems intense for September, despite the light relief of a coastal breeze.  The hut is open on one side, facing south towards the ocean.  The cotton panels that screen the opening lift like sails.  Through them, I catch glimpses of Atlantic blue, of the shore far below the estate, beyond carob and olive trees.

This is not the kind of holiday I’ve tried before: travelling solo, the retreat-style, eco hotel thing.  Nor this location, with its reputation for endless sunshine.  On the drive from Faro Airport, the land was baked dry.  ‘It hasn’t rained since May,’ the manager, Sofia, said at breakfast.  Not up here in the foothills of the Algarve.

I wait, pacing in the heat.  There’s nowhere to sit and the timber floor is gritty beneath my sandals.  The dojo echoes in its empty, dormant state.  Outside there are drought-resistant grasses and fan palms, and the green, reedy waters of a small swimming lake.  I’m not filled with tranquillity yet, even after the last few days.  It might take me weeks, months even; it’s not a gear shift I need, it’s a whole life change.  But I am full of questions for the owner, Hendrik Levy: landscape architect, ecotherapist, naturopath, yogi.  The little I know of him, I’ve read on the retreat’s website, or heard Sofia mention at breakfast.  I want to know more − about his projects here, and about him, the man behind all of this.

The name Hendrik means ruler, and I try to imagine him, a lord of all he surveys.  The creator of this twenty-acre Eden fed by its own water supply, through capture and recycling, powered by the sun.  A small kingdom thirty years in the making.  Far from his native Belgium, home is here in the arid limestone hillsides of the Algarve’s Barrocal region, with its thin soil and summer-long wait for rain.  Such faith in this place, in all its elements.  I find myself drawn in, like a desert pilgrim − a recurring, beguiling preoccupation I seem to have with life in dry landscapes.  What was he looking for when he first came? What am I?

Nothing stirs.  The only sounds are the birds and cicadas that sing close by.  Then footsteps on gravel and he’s here, moving with grace towards me, like liquid light across the wooden boards.  All smiles, smooth lines and aquiline features, his bald head shining.

We greet but don’t touch, of course.  Neither of us is wearing a mask and we both apologise for this, as he places yoga mats a couple of metres apart.  He lowers himself effortlessly to the floor and sits cross-legged in pale grey shorts and t-shirt, arms and legs lightly tanned.  Sculpted and toned, lean but powerful: he looks like someone who could defend himself.  While I lumber, stating the obvious, ‘I’m so out of shape,’ knowing he can see for himself the extra weight I’m carrying, the stiffness in my legs.  Although we’re probably the same age, in our mid-fifties, he’s everything I’m not.

 

*

 

I’ve been to Portugal before but not for sixteen years.  I used to organise sales conferences for a living, in major European cities: Rome, Barcelona, Prague, and once in Lisbon in 2004.  I went on site visits to make plans and hire local agents to work with, returning to run the event itself.  I would be gone for a week at a time, leaving my son with my mother.  Good times, big budgets, away with a fun client.  That limbo of travel, the freedom of being far from home.  I was a lone parent, with just the one child.  Mother and son, a relationship with its own peculiar intimacies and intensities.  I revelled in that hotel life, that side of the job at least − I needed the release.  The rest was stress and preoccupation, a thousand details that needle the mind.  Spreadsheets, notebooks, lists, a laptop always open, always warm; I grew part of it, numb with it.  By 2004, I’d become a machine.

 

*

 

We chat at first about the retreat.  I tell Hendrik that I’ve also run my own business and done up places.  ‘But not like this,’ I say. ‘Nothing like this.’

I mention an interest in landscape and its use as a health resource, for wellbeing.  I’ve heard he knows about such things.

‘It’s a long subject,’ he says.  ‘We could speak for the whole day.’

Of course, it is, and we laugh lightly, to acknowledge this − we only have an hour.

He helps people through garden therapy.  He tells me the land can help heal the body, and the body the mind, creating harmony between the physical and mental, the emotional and spiritual self.

I’m nodding along, though it’s nothing I haven’t heard before: the holistic nature of things.  Yet everything he says is like a soothing, philosophical balm.  What I need, all I want right now.

‘Working with eating disorders, this is my focus now.’

He means bulimia and anorexia, mostly.  Sofia told me.

‘Using nature as a cure?’

‘Exactly.  For the cure, the important part is to be in a place, a landscape, with no references, no connection with what you know.  Because then you’re already unloading all the luggage you’ve carried since the beginning of your life.  The moment you arrive for treatment, you’re naked and, this way, you can have a new start.’

‘It’s about control then − losing control?’

It sounds wonderful, terrifying.

‘Exactly what you say.  In therapy, we show the client there’s no hostility in the land, that they can really let go.  There’s cleansing in that − everything coming out instead of being trapped inside.  Because when they arrive, they don’t even have the words to express their feelings, or their needs.’

He says this with urgency, and it speaks to me, of me.  And I think of his clients, those other guests that come – lost in control of their hunger, of life, that kind of emptiness and disconnect.  The clients that stay over at the other Casa, beyond the track that divides the estate, with its separate entrance and grounds.  Not like the guests on this side, though I see myself as somewhere in between − in need of respite and healing therapies, not just holiday accommodation.  Something I’ve realised in the last few days.

The stillness outside is broken by the rev of an engine.  A workman’s rusty truck moves off along the track, trailing dust and diesel, while we wait for the noise to subside.

I sense it’s OK to speak, to say whatever it was I wanted to say when I asked Sofia if I could see Hendrik, meet him.  Safe to tell this man sitting opposite me anything and he would know how to respond.

‘My son’s addicted to cannabis.  Was−is−I don’t know.  I only know what he tells me,’ I say.  Words leaking out, taking their chances.

‘Cannabis addiction?’  Hendrik leans forward, his head tilted to one side.

‘Yes, he smokes cannabis.  A lot, and for a long time now.  The strong stuff – you know, skunk?’

‘Yes, I know.  My brother’s in the same state.  It’s difficult.’

‘It is,’ I say.

The moment passes, and I wonder – did I catch his eye, nod to acknowledge his brother, his own troubles?  It’s more than basic courtesy, there’s also a protocol I’ve become familiar with.  I’ve met counsellors, other parents and carers, people with addiction awareness.  When I’ve shared this fact about my son, they’ve shared straight back, as Hendrik did.  It’s strange how it works: when I happen to mention my son’s addiction, for whatever reason, they have an someone in their lives too.  I find it disconcerting, this quiet confirmatory ‘handshake’ of recognition, like we’re some kind of sect.  Maybe we are.  In that case, Hendrik must have sensed me, known me, when he stepped inside the dojo and looked my way.  As I must have sensed him, days ago, when I arrived at Casa Verde and the gates opened up.

 

*

 

2004. A February afternoon, the pale-yellow light of winter filtered through the bedroom blinds.I was alone that day, between site visits for the Lisbon conference.  My son was at school and I was in his room, looking for something and finding it: small, clear plastic bags among what was left of his Action Man kit.  They were stuffed inside the camouflage-coloured box that had come as part of a set, to store the paraphernalia: flippers and goggles, balaclava and guns, changes of clothes for a soldier, a deep-sea diver, a mountaineer.  The box was scrawled with graffiti tags in black marker pen − stylised versions of names, Eminem, his favourite bands.  He was fourteen, still a boy, though tall for his age.  He hadn’t played with them for years and I’d no reason to look inside the box; I rarely went in his room.  But that day I did, so I must have had a reason.  Knowing but not knowing, hoping against hope.

A pungent smell rose from the open box.  Among the plastic pieces of kit, I found other paraphernalia.  A transparent blue Bic lighter, its chambers half-filled with fuel, long loose Rizla papers scattered like feathers, an old birthday card from my mother torn at the front edges, used to make roach ends.  Strands of tobacco, pilfered no doubt from my packet of Golden Virginia.  I picked up what looked like a yoyo.  It was a cannabis grinder, dusted with moss-green powder on the inside.  It stank.

I would come to know that smell well, after many such finds.  Cannabis strains getting stronger by the year, increasingly psychoactive the more heavily he used, until it was mostly what’s called ‘skunk’ or sinsemilla, Spanish for without seed.  The unfertilised female plant, grown from genetically modified stock, cultivated to bud with no seeds of her own.  Her produce was higher quality, more potent, bigger yielding.  She.  A factory-farmed mutant Eve.  My rival.  I would come to hate and to fear her.

But that afternoon in early 2004, that was the first time, the start of it.  It explained everything that had come before: his failures and scrapes at school, suspensions and threats of exclusion, the police attention.  And much of what came after.  Every time I made a find, I felt the same − the cold, sick shot through the heart and arteries, then the body rush of heat, of anger and shame.  The recurring chest pain of reality, knowing at that moment in his room, at fourteen, I had already lost him.

 

*

 

Hendrik stretches his legs out and changes position.  I shift too, to relieve the pressure, the weight on my hip against the hard boards below the yoga mat.

‘The numbing device of cannabis, eating disorders, whatever, is an escape from processing emotions,’ he says.

I’ve realised this for some time, the fact of my son being present but not present.  It’s what addiction does.  Living with me at home in London, he’s more shadow than man.  But it’s Hendrik’s ‘whatever’ that strikes me.  I would put work on the list: work as an escape, another -holism.

He continues on, in full flow, about recognising emotion as an energy that runs through the body.  Negativity that can take over the mind − from the past, the burden of family.  Letting it all go and creating a new ‘substrate’ within.

‘The mind is the trap.  That’s why we need to wake the body.  Do you understand?’

I know what he’s getting at, keeps getting at.
‘If you’re in touch with your body, and nature, landscape, then you don’t fear it, or your body, the wilderness inside.  Isn’t that it?’

I’m not talking about my body, with its failures, how it ages.  My body the carrier, the transmitter of faulty genes.  I’m afraid of it, of what lies in the desert − the one out there, the one inside.

‘Like you were saying before, we’re holding the mirror up to ourselves.’

‘This is exactly what it is,’ he says, nodding in affirmation.

In the mirror is a woman flushed by too much sun on her skin.  No trace of the girl with the feral heart, running wild across the peninsula of her childhood home.  Nor the reckless young woman she became − the risk-taker.  Only a woman tamed by early motherhood and her son’s wildness, grown old.  I see control, a rigid counterpoint to the chaos of addiction.  Myself, reflected; my own wildness, subjugated.  This is exactly what I see.

 

*

 

That April, in the frantic run-up to the conference, I found it difficult to sit for long.  Mild discomfort in my right hip began to flame and burn.  I’d stand for a while then sit, stand and sit in rotation, just to get through the day.  I blamed myself for bad posture; the contorted way I crossed my legs under the desk, not moving for hours.  The tension I held in my body.

I walked to the corner shop one lunchtime and stopped halfway, unable to go further, my right leg shocked with pain each step I tried to take.  I limped home and booked a local chiropractor.  After a couple of sessions, the pain receded and I carried on.  There was no time to find out what was happening inside.

Two weeks later my laptop was stolen from the house, though there was no sign of a break-in.  On it were all the files for Lisbon, my client’s annual conference with over a thousand delegates registered to attend, and my main source of income.  I challenged my son, accused him, interrogated him.  I tipped off the police and they recovered it from a local dealer − too late, it was wiped clean.  I managed to restore some files, reconstructed others.  I carried on.

The conference came and went.  A seamless success, my contract was renewed for another year.  I used the profit to send my son to a rehab centre for teenagers.  He agreed to go after the police caught him stealing from a neighbour and arrested him, after he’d finally been expelled from school.  He left in July and I waited through the quiet relief of that summer − glad he was gone, impatient for him to come home.

 

*

 

‘It’s like the ark,’ Hendrik says. ‘You know Noah’s ark?’

‘I do,’ I say.  The imprint of a good Catholic school education.  I’ve no idea why he’s brought the Bible into this, but I’m intrigued.

In Hendrik’s version, the ark is a metaphor for the body.  Of course, everything I’ve heard so far seems to spiral around it.  For him, the floodwater is the symbol for emotion: too much and you’re drowned, too little and you’re an Israelite searching for the promised land.  Forty days of obliterating rain; forty years in the desert.

‘From the Hebrew comes its true meaning,’ he says.  ‘Build a strong ark to withstand the floods of life, learn to float, to find yourself, find your own ground.’

Below us, under the ground around the dojo, is the substrate that Hendrik built his life on.  The filtration beds and lake, the underground storage and treatment tanks that keep his Casas going: capturing rain, filtering and recycling grey waste water.  It’s all part of the permaculture ethos, a system where nothing goes to waste.  He’d probably say it’s another metaphor for how to live a sustainable life.  This one I like.  All around me is evidence that it works.

‘But first, you have to cover the ark with tar, inside and out.’

He tells me that Hebrew is a language with no vocals: each word has many meanings, reflects a different layer of consciousness. ‘In Hebrew, tar is kopher.  It means forgiveness.’

It’s the tar that keeps the water out.  To float you need to forgive.

To me, tar means smears of toxic resin, skunk coating lung tissue, sick black smoke that makes you lose your mind.  Tar is shame, stuck with Rizla paper feathers.

‘In that case, my ark is sinking.’

It has been for years.  But now I’ve said it out loud, it sounds like a joke, so I laugh, and Hendrik laughs with me, in his gentle way.

‘And I’ve watched my son’s ark sinking.  Too many times, trying to save him.’

He urges me, hands clasped, to do the impossible, to find the strength it takes.

‘Then, from that place where you’re letting him go,’ he says, ‘It’s important to trust that he’s not going to die.’

Hope then.

‘Or accept that he might,’ I say.

Over experience.

The experience is a downward cycle of rehab and recovery and relapse.  The precarious mental health that comes with heavier cannabis and alcohol use.  Overdose and self-harm.  Nights that end in police custody, A&E, a hospital admission.

How do you accept that?  Forgive?  There are no easy answers to such questions, not for me or any mother, no matter what anyone says.

 

*

 

By early September, my son still in rehab, the pain in my hip resurged.  This time I saw an osteopath.  It turned out a muscle spasm in the joint was holding damaged nerves in check, as best it could.  Hours after treatment, the nerves unleashed, I lost sensation down the back of my right leg, from hip to foot.  Over the following days and weeks, the calf muscle began to waste.  Further down, the Achilles reflex went, the side of my foot turned numb.

I gave up smoking in October, on my son’s fifteenth birthday.  A surprise to take with me on the trip to collect him from the rehab centre, thinking it would help when he came home.  I wanted to show him I could do it, even after twenty years: quitting, committing to staying stopped.  If I could, he could.

In December, I had neurosurgery on my back to reverse the nerve damage.  Despite the promise of recovery, it was unsuccessful.  The scar along my spine was in vain; the damage was permanent.  My son’s treatment also failed, marking the start of our journey − the many attempts at recovery that were to come.

It was not what I thought motherhood would be.  I expected the teenage years to be tough but not in the extreme.  It wasn’t mothering, nurturing, it was containing, managing.  I learned to manage him.  Something I was used to − coping with turbulence, the fronts that blew in.  I was raised on the Wirral, on a peninsula, in a family exposed to the elements.  Bound to stoicism and the Catholic faith, to a church built from the local sandstone, to a people with quartz in their blood.

But new facts had appeared and remained.  For the first time at forty, I realised that I was not a machine.  That sandstone is not a rock that never breaks.

 

*

 

As the breeze picks up, the dojo panels lift higher.  The ripples in the fabric remind me of another Bible story, from Exodus:  Jochebed casting her infant adrift in crocodile-infested waters to save him from the Pharaohs.  Moses in a basket floating on the blue of the Nile, midstream; a picture I recall from a classroom wall.  Hendrik is right − saving is letting go.  But another image comes and I remember: she did not cast him off, release him into the flow.  Jochebed hid her boy in the bulrushes, where he was safe and would be found.  Then I am right − saving is sheltering.

Noah’s dove returned with an olive branch, a sign of vibrant life.  In addiction circles, they say that you’re either a dove or a hawk, a soft or a hard-liner towards the addict – a forgiver or a blamer.  I’ve been both, at one time or another.

Coming to the end of our talk, the hour almost gone, I notice the lines on Hendrik’s face.  Signs of worry, ageing, weathering.  He must have struggled; no doubt he still does, as we all do.  Shifting patterns, climatic change – extreme conditions that test faith, endurance.  But he found his new ground.  He built on it and carried on: building and planting, creating all this.  With enough forgiveness, enough held in reserve, to help others.  I admire him for that.

‘Next time, I’ll show you the other side,’ he says.

He encourages his therapy clients to make their own temporary shelters in part of the estate.  One day he hopes to build an academy.

‘We have an atelier, a studio for the carpentry, vegetables growing over there and all those things.  You’ll see the expression of everything we’re making here.’

‘I will come back,’ I say, and I believe I will.

Hendrik’s surname, Levy, is Hebrew for joining.  If healing is joining, then he has the right skills, the gift − I feel a bond.  If it’s warmth, genuine concern, then yes, I feel those too.

‘Where will you go next?’ he asks as he stands.

‘To Spain.  One more night here then I’m off in the morning.’

I have two dogs in kennels.  My son, about to turn thirty, is home alone.  I’m not sure at this point, as I slowly stand myself, what that will mean.

‘Where will you stay?’

‘In a hacienda on an olive estate, for a few nights − I’m treating myself.  Then at a Parador hotel, on the cliffs, by the ocean.  Do you know it?’

I don’t want to go home, though I don’t say it.  I’ve already said enough, and the time has gone.

‘Mazagon?’

‘That’s it, Mazagon,’ I say. ‘It’s part of a nature reserve. They say it’s quiet there, in the woods.’  Another week alone, among the olives and the pines, by the rocks and the water.

‘Beautiful,’ he says.

 

*

 

I drive east towards Spain, heading for the suspension bridge over the Guadiana.  Glittering, brackish water slips below me, a liquid border that runs south between the two countries, until the river meets the sea.  My thoughts are distracted by the steel cables, reflections on the windscreen like strobes of silver light, following me across the wide span of the bridge. The views open out over the estuary and beyond, to the Gulf of Cádiz.  Other images emerge, from the streamflow of memory, as I realise – I have crossed here before.

The years slide back to 1994, to a yellow VW campervan and a summer trip around the Iberian Peninsula.  To the boyfriend I had at the time, travelling with me and our small son in the opposite direction.  In the moment again, in that other channel of my life, I see the man that I loved in the driving seat, and me, my younger, thirty-year-old self.  There she is, his passenger, passing by on this same bridge; the three of them on their way to Portugal, then north all the way home over land and sea.  I see how she eyes him, admires his dark looks and deep tan, though she already knows, at this crossover, it will be their last holiday together.  And I know how she’ll mourn him for years to come, and the lost chances for more children, a family for her son; things made better for being whole.  He was good to the boy, though not the father he needed − and to her once, but not the one for her.  What she’d wanted was permanence.

I follow her eyes as she turns to check on the boy in the back seat.  There he is, a crown of blond hair, head bent over his lap, model dinosaurs clutched in his hands.  Small bruises on his knees, socks down around the ankles, scuffs on the toes of his shoes.  He speaks, in a play voice, raising the stegosaurus in the air as he asks her again, When are we there?

The rhythm of the car over the bridge, my son, the sunlight, the way he was then, at four, how his legs dangled and swayed.  I keep turning back, checking the rear-view mirror, hoping to catch him again, searching fleeting images.  The only glimpses I get are of the water in the bay, as the bridge meets the bank on the Spanish side.  That boy is long gone, with all that could’ve been.

But she is here with me, my younger self, in the rental car.  The smooth serenity of her face, her unmarked body leaning back in the passenger seat.  I don’t know what I can tell her − about how to live, what to make of life, its consolations.  Only that we are pilgrims, she and I, on the long road home.  I sigh and turn to her, and when she smiles, I smile.  We’ve lost so much time, but still, the day seems to stretch ahead of us.

 

*

 

Weeks after the holiday, in a new lockdown routine, I find my son in the back garden at midnight.  I see him in the corner, through the French doors, in the glow of his phone.  The dogs had woken me, scratching at the kitchen door, fearful of fireworks going off in a nearby park.

I recognise the stink as soon as I step outside.

‘I can smell cannabis,’ I say.

Sharp as the night air.

‘No, you can’t,’ he says.

‘Yes, I fucking can.’

Words shoot through the dark.  Adamant, resentful.  Me catching him unawares, caught out despite his stealth.  It feels like hate.

I close the door and return to the kitchen with the dogs.  I wait for them to stop trembling from the bangs, the crackle of our voices.  I wait for him to come inside.  I wait, then go back up to bed.

Days later, he admits to relapsing, after three months’ clean time, after a stay in a psychiatric hospital.  He’s vague about the date it started.  I suspect it was the week I was away in the Algarve and, working it all out, I’m right.  It hurts to look, to find, to know – and not to know.  The times I’ve asked the same unanswered question, but I ask him anyway.

‘Why?’

He can’t, won’t, ask himself this question.

He says, ‘At least I’m not drinking.’

He says, ‘I’m gonna quit again.’

I say, ‘I can’t do again.’

Or gonna, not after last time.  He knows he can’t stay if he’s smoking skunk − again.  I’d ignored the usual signs, the slow regression to his teenage self.  The late-night gaming, another job falling through, a renewed appetite for sweet things and sleeping in.  I thought maybe he’d stop before I found proof.  By keeping him at home he’d have a better chance of staying clean.  A dove.  But with proof comes the inevitable confrontations, standoff positions.  A hawk.  And, as he begins to disappear into his own shadow, the danger that this time he won’t make it back.

 

*

 

I leave home for a while, taking the dogs with me.  Despite travel restrictions, I go to my father’s house in the West Country − he is elsewhere, sheltering with his wife.  To my mind, it’s essential travel.  It counts as a work trip:  I’m working on my forgiveness, whilst my son works on somewhere else to live.

The days go by.  The winter skies are crisp and clear, good for walking, though the nights are dark and long.  I sign up for tai chi lessons, as Hendrik suggested.  Before the first online session, I light a candle and stretch as the aroma of mandarin and lemon verbena fills my father’s living room.  When I click through to Zoom, the instructor, Miki, appears.  I’d expected a man in a white karategi, broad, square-shouldered.  Instead, a slim, softly-spoken Japanese woman greets me.  She’s an interior designer by day, running sessions in the evenings after work.  I tell her about my leg problem, the numbness down the right side.  She tells me she lost sensation along her right arm after breast cancer.  I wonder if, like me, she’d worked too hard.  We exchange sympathies; two souls recognising each other through a screen.

I’m ready to start.  Ready to awaken my body, use my hands and feet, to make moves.  All of me, the yin and yang.  Tai chi movement have names, like the defensive jin bu ban lan − to step in, block and shift.  Another holds the promise of cathartic release − bai he liang chi, white crane spreads its wings.

Miki steps back from the screen and I mirror her, raising and lowering my arms in a wave-like motion, floating in the softness of her voice:  ‘Breathe in, feel the space around you.  Breathe out, feel grounded.’

In and out.

‘You can close your eyes now,’ she says.  ‘Just enjoy the movement. This one is called heaven and earth.’