The Lake District hike, Cumbria
The narrator recalls having met Irish poet David Whyte several times through podcasts and a live reading in Australia, where his work taught her to “open the heart in the gaps between the words.” After a dinner with Gayle, who mentions a poetry‑infused hike in England’s Lake District, the narrator procrastinates but eventually books the trip at the last minute, leaving the decision to “the universe.” The organizers squeeze her into an “embarrassingly small room” and warn that “you have to have the cupboard and drawers shut to open the door,” a metaphor she finds amusing.
The retreat group consists of about thirty participants from around the world, mainly the United States, drawn by David Whyte’s fan base. Each morning they awaken in farm‑stay lodgings, eat a “big British breakfast,” and gather in the stables to discuss poetry. After lunch, Whyte leads them on hikes over tarns, crags, and peat bogs around Grasmere, invoking the footsteps of William and Dorothy Wordsworth and the Romantic era’s turn toward nature as a moral teacher. He cites Wordsworth’s verses about solitude and nature’s instruction.
On day two, en route to a crag near Coniston Water, the narrator and a few “meaning‑yearners” converse about cultural despair, moral code erosion, and the search for direction. Andy, a father from South Carolina, asks what the path forward might be; the narrator answers with the question of “just beyond yourself,” a theme Whyte expands on in a poem that uses two converging stone walls as a visual metaphor for the road one must follow. Andy responds, “maybe we don’t need new leaders, maybe we can go straight to our collective deep knowing… with poetry and hiking together.”
While the rest of the group spends a day shopping for Beatrix Potter souvenirs in nearby villages, the narrator takes a solo lift to Ambleside and embarks on a strenuous climb. She describes a manic episode that she uses the mountain to ground, scrambling up ridgelines, viewing Ullswater, meeting a couple who inform her she is attempting a seven‑hour hike in three hours, and realizing she is heading toward Kirkstone Pass, the highest pass in the Lake District. The physical strain forces her body into “mitochondric energy,” and the landscape’s “hermetic completeness” gives her a sense of everything being as it should be.
During a quiet moment, she recalls buying The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd in a London bookshop; the memoir‑like meditation on mountains becomes a lens through which she interprets her own ascent. Shepherd’s philosophy—living with the mountain as a friend, allowing fear to enlarge rather than constrict the spirit—is echoed in the narrator’s experience of the pass.
Back at the farm‑stay, the narrator shifts to discussing deep reading. She reflects on recent revivals of dystopian classics like Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and Animal Farm, noting how they warn against societies that suppress knowledge. She connects this to the concept of bibliotherapy, tracing its roots to ancient Greek inscriptions and Freud’s use of literature in therapy. She argues that modern skim reading weakens neural circuits for empathy and critical thought, citing research that links shallow reading to societal susceptibility to misinformation. She then outlines a personal ritual for “long reading”: setting aside a Sunday hour, turning off devices, brewing tea, and immersively reading long articles from curated sources, treating the page like a meditation mantra. She emphasizes note‑taking and allowing the mind to formulate a moral “home base,” suggesting that such practices can counter the moral loneliness described earlier.
The chapter ends with the narrator feeling a renewed, though tentative, confidence that poetry, wilderness, and disciplined reading can together provide the “just beyond yourself” space needed to confront collective disconnection.