TRANSCRIPT: Notes From Dunfanaghy: Introduction
Hi, it’s Megan. I wanted to send you this voice note to invite you into conversation with me.
It is summer solstice, it’s the longest day, and I am beginning to prepare for my Dunfanaghy retreat in September, which is happening on the 26th to the 29th of September.
And as I’m preparing for things, as I’m working out ideas and what I think about things in my head, I am often in the habit of sending myself voice notes. It’s just an easy way for me to process things and to gather things.
And I thought it might be interesting to share these voice notes with you as well. So starting next week, I’ll send out a little voice note every day that I’m calling Notes from Dunfanaghy.
And so I’ll be working through lots of different things. I’ll be working through thoughts on what it means to connect with the deepest parts of our story and our work. I’m kind of in an interesting place in my own cycle and relationship with my work and my story.
This is the… I can’t remember now how many retreats I’ve done in Dunfanaghy, but I did the first one in 2018. And really by the time I ran that first retreat, I thought I fully understood my relationship to my story and Dunfanaghy.
And the retreat is really about inviting people to step further into their own story and their own work by giving them the experience of stepping, like literally physically stepping inside of my story, stepping inside this place that formed me.
And I really did think I had kind of gotten to the bottom of that story and I understood what this place meant to me, what it meant for my ancestors to be from this place, to spend so much of my childhood there, to be informed by the landscape, all of that.
And this past year, I have, like, found a trap door at the bottom of all that that I didn’t realise was there and there’s a hole. There’s a whole cavern down there. There are these deeper layers that I’m discovering about my relationship to the landscape and to the place and to my story and what that means for my work.
And so I just got back from Dunfanaghy last week. I’m going again in a few weeks. I’m spending more time in Dunfanaghy and Donegal this year than I have in probably 25 years.
I’m just compelled to go back there again and again and again at the minute. The landscape is, it’s teaching me things, it has things to say to me and there seem to be things that I can only work out when I’m there and so I’m spending a lot of time there at the minute and I’m very excited to see what that does to the retreat and to bring people into that place and into my story as I have kind of excavated deeper parts of it.
And so I’m going to be reflecting on all kinds of things in these voice notes. I don’t know in advance, but I know for sure I will be looking at, like, what does it mean to understand our roots in order to gain more clarity about our future?
What does it mean when the landscape speaks to us?
I’m a big believer that it is helpful wherever you grew up or whatever your experience is of land and your work — I think it is very helpful to imagine what landscape your work has been born out of, the work that only you can do. Like, what landscape have you been born out of? What landscape has your work been born out of? And it’s very different for different people, and it’s just a really useful lens to begin to think about your work.
So I’ll be exploring that. I will be exploring themes around identity. The retreat is a four-day retreat and each day focuses on a different aspect of the landscape, and we go to that part of the landscape and explore it there. And for me, each aspect of the landscape represents a different theme in my work and a different theme that we explore as a group on the retreat.
So the first day is the dunes. So we go to the dunes. And for me, the dunes are all about identity. And I’ll talk more about that probably next week on a voice note. But it’s really a metaphor for how we can understand our own identity, how we can understand the identity of our work.
And then the second day is the mountain. And for me, that signifies context — like, what are these major, almost geological forces that have formed us? What are the forces of family and cultural context in our lives and our work? And how have they shaped us? How do they continue to shape us? How have they shaped the questions that we hold, the questions that define our work?
I will definitely talk a lot more about that in these notes. I’m firmly back in the geological part of my brain this year as I’m returning to Dunfanaghy and the landscape. I’m also returning to the rocks. I’m returning to geology. And there’s just so much there that I just find it really helpful as a way into our work.
The more we understand about the natural world, the more it helps me understand about the natural processes at work in my own creative process and in my own work, and I see it with my clients as well.
So that’s the second day of the retreat, where we go up the mountain, we go and stand at the clifftop and stare out at the sea, and it feels like you’re at the end of the world and the beginning of everything.
And then the third day is the sea. And on that day of the retreat, we hike across a mature set of dunes to get to this unbelievable beach that is not accessible by road and is also not safe to swim in. The waters there are — you know, they talk about the wild Atlantic. This is the wild Atlantic. They are ferocious.
And for me, the sea represents our real work — like this kind of amazing, terrifying, powerful, wondrous, unpredictable force that is our real work. And so we go there and we think about what is our real work? What does it mean to engage with our real work? What’s involved in that? How do we take an artistic approach to our work, to our business, to whatever it is we’re engaged in? How do we build resilience and sit in the midst of the uncertainty and the risk that’s inherent in all of that?
So I will talk more about that in the upcoming voice notes as well.
And then the fourth day of the retreat is the ground, where, you know, we have been and explored the landscape and all of these kind of dramatic places, and on the fourth day we go to a very humble place that has a lot of meaning for me.
And the focus in that place is quite literally grounding — like grounding ourselves, grounding our work, so that we are able to hold this paradox of nothing matters and so everything matters. Like, kind of holding this paradox of — we, on a geological timescale, as an individual human being, we are so insignificant, but also at the same time there is such significance and meaning to be found in the work that we do and the impact that we can have.
And how do we kind of hold the paradox of both of these things, and how do we ground ourselves so that we can actually go and slowly, bit by bit, incrementally, in a very embodied way, do our work and mind our own business.
I don’t know what else I’ll explore in these voice notes over the next month, but I will definitely explore those themes and whatever tangents come up along the way. So I would love it if you would join me.
Pardon me. So I’ll send a voice note every weekday for the next month, starting on Monday. And I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear your reflections or your questions. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
And I should probably also say that you don’t need to do anything to get these notes. If you receive this via an email, you’re on my email list. And so you will receive it in your email inbox each day.
Thank you.