Holiday with a difference

MIND MOVES: My absence from these pages over the past month was due to a break I had in South Africa.

It was a holiday with a difference; it combined a retreat in a mountain hermitage in Hogsback on the Eastern Cape with a visit deep into the Transkei bush country with a friend who teaches sustainable natural farming to indigenous tribes.

My reason for regaling you with my adventures is born of two insights they afforded me in respect of mental health: the value of solitude and the importance of re-discovering our connection with nature. And also because there is an undeniable truth to the adage that "travel broadens the mind but narrows the conversation".

In 1958, Winnicot wrote in his now classic paper, The Capacity to be Alone, that while much had been written on the fear of being alone, "a discussion on the positive aspects of being alone is overdue".

In a culture that tends to idealise relationship and intimacy as the sole means of achieving happiness, little has been written of our human need for solitude. Indeed, we can be somewhat sceptical of the choice a person makes to retreat for a time and be alone, as though this was evidence of a defensive withdrawal from life rather than of a choice to take time to encounter ourselves and to experience directly whatever we may be missing or dodging in the frenetic activity of our daily lives. The mind needs time to settle in order to become integrated and at peace with itself.

My hermitage was situated in a beautiful forest on top of Hogsback Mountain. Surrounded by an incredible variety of wildlife, monkeys and baboons visited me daily, while exotic birds, including luria and starlings, filled the air with their song.

Each morning I woke to the vibrant presence of nature on my doorstep, to creatures who were utterly themselves, who gradually accepted my presence among them and who extended through their curiosity an increasing sense of companionship. The irony was that while I had chosen to be alone, I never felt less alone in my life.

Being alone becomes an interior as well as an exterior adventure. There are moments of great bliss and inevitably moments of grief. Those aspects of ourselves we have suppressed and forgotten invariably arise. The unconscious longs to be integrated and makes its presence felt in vivid dreams, unbidden fragments of memory and realisations of what we hold most dear.

Gradually, the conscious mind becomes aligned with a more rounded sense of one's true nature. The furious stories that ego creates - those over-rehearsed versions of why we feel as we do, what we should do to be loved, how we must behave to protect ourselves from being hurt - begin to fall away and we find again what we thought we had lost, our essential connection with life and a vitality and gratitude for the simple fact of being alive.

After a week of solitude, I rejoined my host, who took me to visit remote tribal communities and townships where few 'whites' go. We drove many hours over the steepest and roughest roads I've yet encountered until I found myself sitting with Xhosa families in rondavels - traditional round mud cottages with thatched roofs. Their faces were radiant and their welcome so warm it melted any sense I harboured of being a stranger. The traditional African welcome, Soubona (I see you), was a felt experience on meeting them. My host, Tim, spoke their 'click' dialect fluently, which was a joy to listen to. But while few of the local people had English, I never found that language was a barrier to communication.

Proudly, they took me through the plots of land they had cultivated naturally. This was organic farming at its finest. Maize and beans grew side by side, each helping sustain the other. The tall maize provided natural scaffolding for bean shoots while the latter impregnated the soil with nitrogen, so essential for maize.

A furrow guided the rainwater from the road to a mud circle where organic waste was composted to nourish a circle of thriving banana trees planted around it. Specific leafy plants produced vegetables and fruit, while also providing feed for cattle in the dry season. No fertilisers, pesticides or animal feed were imported from outside, allowing these families to be entirely independent and yielding them bountiful crops that sustained the entire township.

Their close relationship with their land was reflected in both their physical sense of wellbeing and in their self-esteem at being able to produce these self-sustaining crops so competently. Proudly, they offered me mandarin oranges plucked directly from their source and maize freshly ground and cooked into a wholesome porridge.

We miss out on a lot of life through our reliance on convenience, highly processed foods. We have lost or suppressed our sense of interdependence with the land and with nature. As Wordsworth said, "The world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: little we see in nature that is ours."

To have recovered this connection, even briefly, was a transforming experience I shall cherish.

Dr Tony Bates is principal clinical psychologist in St James's Hospital.