Welcome to our Field Journal
We’re so glad you’re here.
The Coming to Our Senses Field Journal is a place to pause and listen, to find inspiration and small moments of connection as we move toward our time together in Provence. Here, we share reflections, poems, and glimpses of the spirit that will guide our retreat: deep listening, creative renewal, and a return to the living world through the senses.
You will find reflections from our guides, conversations about attention and imagination, and glimpses into the quiet transformation that can happen when we gather in beauty and simplicity.
As the retreat approaches, this space will hold:
Updates and stories from behind the scenes as we prepare to gather in Arles.
Short writings and meditations from our guides, including David Rothenberg, Rosalind Brackenbury, and Nadine Pinede, each offering their own way of seeing, hearing, and sensing the world.
Interviews and conversations with our guides, along with videos, audio clips, and small things we love such as fragments of poetry, birdsong, music, and inspiration from Provence.
Introductions to the places that will hold us, including the Villa, the Camargue bird sanctuary, and the Rhône, and to the people who will care for us along the way.
Stories and insights from past experiences that remind us what it means to come home to ourselves and to one another.
News and invitations as the retreat draws near.
You can think of this Journal as our shared field of listening, a living space between us where the retreat begins to breathe into being.
Thank you for being part of it.
With warmth,
The Coming to Our Senses Team
Arles, France · May 16–23, 2026
Dear Lover of Light
If you think of painting as a kind of song, he too canticled the sun.
— Abigail Carroll, “Dear Lover of Light”
In her poem “Dear Lover of Light,” Abigail Carroll writes of Vincent van Gogh as a kind of modern saint, a man who, when he could no longer preach, turned to paint and color as his hymn. In the southern light of Arles, he found his gospel not in words but in the radiance of wheat fields, stars, and sunflowers. Each brushstroke became a prayer, each canvas a psalm of light. Carroll’s line reminds us that creativity itself can be a form of praise, that we too might canticle the sun through the work of our hands and hearts.
Van Gogh and the Night in Arles
In September 1888, while living in Arles, Vincent van Gogh painted Café Terrace at Night, a glowing scene of a gas-lit café under a sapphire sky scattered with stars. The work captures his fascination with how color transforms under evening light, and how even the quietest corners of the city could pulse with life after dark. Around the same time, he created The Night Café, an interior view of another tavern where red walls, green lamps, and heavy shadows express the uneasy loneliness that can inhabit such places. Together, these paintings reveal van Gogh’s lifelong search for the spiritual power of color and the emotional music of night.