Reflections from the Retreat July 2025

I wonder how many of you remember the Wombles, the children’s TV programme in the 1970’s? Their theme song has stayed with me, and they still come to mind occasionally if I think of litter picking and recycling. I wonder how much they helped to lay the foundations in young minds of the importance of being environmentally friendly and encouraging recycling.

Each year SPECTO heads up a beach clean up project and this year I helped to organise this for our local Bathway Beach. SPECTO stands for St. Patrick’s Environmental and Community Tourism Organization and they run the turtle tours and, in the past, have also run birdwatching tours. It is worrying this year that there have been the lowest number of turtles returning to lay eggs and sadly this is a pattern throughout the Caribbean. I have been told that in the past you could see up to twenty turtles at one time on a beach whereas now you are luckily to see one on a tour. I have gradually got more involved with SPECTO, and I am keen to develop an ongoing relationship between Hummingbird HOPE and SPECTO and to see how we can support their work.

There was something quite mindful and contemplative getting to the beach just after dawn and walking slowly along, up and down the sand, looking for litter. By far the most common items were plastic water bottles. It made me realise what a difference it would make if everyone had a reusable bottle and stopped using plastic bottles. Another common item were shoes or parts of shoes – perhaps left on the beach while their owner takes a quick paddle, only to return to find their flip flops gone. The third most common item were pieces of polystyrene, some with rope tied around it, which are used by fishermen as floats. Other items included toothbrushes, combs, empty rum bottles, empty oil canisters and lightbulbs. There was one very impressive silver light bulb the size of a rugby ball and I pictured the luxury yacht it might have come from. Picking up large items like this is easy whereas it is hard work to pick up the small broken pieces of plastic or bottle tops that litter the beach. Yet these are the most dangerous because animals such as turtles mistake them for food and then they block their digestive systems, and they can die.

I have always enjoyed treasure hunts, word search puzzles and things like Finding Wally so it is not such a shift to go hunting for litter. There’s something rewarding about spotting the out of place pieces of litter and knowing that removing it can make a difference. There’s also something very satisfying to look back on a beach and see only natural things: beautiful shells, strangely shaped driftwood, interesting sponges, pieces of coral and fallen coconuts.

The chair of SPECTO has been doing this work for many years and she is a fund of information about the environment and the changes she has seen over the years. It was interesting to hear from her that most of the litter which we find on the beach is actually from inland, brought down by the rivers rather than by people visiting the beaches. This makes sense when you see the small piles of litter that build up at the points along the beach where inland rivers meet the sea. But it is not just inland Grenada that sends litter to the coasts. Over the years they have picked up items with labels or inscriptions to show that they originated from as far away as Guyana in South America and that items have come down the Orinoco River in Venezuela and found the way here. As she spoke about this, I couldn’t help thinking of the river’s namesake, the Womble called Orinoco!

This month has seen the completion of the exterior decorating. This has been a huge job which has taken two months to complete and mainly been done by a couple, Ruth and Mario, who were featured in May’s blog. We discovered a lot of rotten wood that needed replacing and so thankfully Mario’s cousins helped with the repairs, working over a few weekends because they were busy with other jobs midweek, so that we could get the paintwork finished before the rainy season. Mario and Ruth painted all the wooden eaves and resprayed the roof as well as priming all the walls ready for another team to come in and do the ‘trowel on’ paint. This is a hardwearing thick paint that looks a bit like cottage cheese and must be plastered on to get a finished coat that looks a little like pebble dashing. As you can see from the photos below it has made the house look so much better. It reminds me of what I wrote in one of my first blog posts when I came to Grenada and how the house felt like a client that has:

‘lost sight of their strengths, their huge potential and disconnected from the purpose that is unique to them. I sometimes get the sense that this house feels like that. That she has lost that purpose of being a place of hospitality, of welcome and of peace. So, as I look at the house with compassion, I can see what an amazing place she will be, with a little help and a bit of work. The love and life she has known before are still within her walls and in the fruit trees lovingly planted in the garden, in her strong foundations and beautiful design. This house needs reenergizing with fresh vision and hopes, to enliven her again. As a therapist, I’ve learnt to see potential and to be a carrier of vision when the situation holds little hope and this house needs that way of seeing now.’ 

As I look at the house, she is now standing tall and gleaming in the sun. It is only when I look at photos I took just a few months ago that I remember how she looked and I am amazed at the transformation.

Recently I did some teaching for a group of psychologists about spirituality and therapy – one of my favourite topics to teach. I tend to have a few quotes by James Finley who, if you don’t know him, works with Richard Rohr and was a Trappist monk with Thomas Merton and then became a clinical psychologist. He sees a similarity between therapy and meditation which resonates with me a lot. They are both processes of slowing down and going deeper, of listening to what is deepest within ourselves and if we open up to these practices they can lead to self-discovery and healing. In the teaching I offered the following quote from James Finley:

‘How I experienced it is that when the person comes into therapy and they get to the point that they’re willing to share what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade them or abandon them, they unexpectedly come upon within themselves this preciousness…. which manifests itself right in the room. That is, “I’m really here. I really count.” Or “My life is a gift.” Or, “There’s something about me that no matter what happened to me it doesn’t have the power to destroy who I essentially am.”.…And the therapeutic sessions from that point on become a process from which a person learns to reground themselves in that preciousness, and out of that preciousness to keep touching the edges of their suffering, until the suffering little by little dissolves in that preciousness. And so, the person has to learn this art form of staying grounded in the presence of their suffering without being retraumatized by it ….’

I am fascinated by the concept of the human spirit and how we include this in therapy which is what led to my journey of developing Holistic CBT. Whenever I teach on this development of standard CBT I am encouraged by people’s responses to it. Standard cognitive behaviour therapy focuses on reducing symptoms, helping people feel less anxious or depressed. But what I have found is that by focusing on who a person truly is at their heart, ‘their preciousness’, their spirit, then when they know this with their whole being and start to live more from that place, then their depression and anxiety have less of a hold. So, the reduction of symptoms is a side effect of realising who they truly are and starting to value their ‘preciousness.’ This has a more significant shift so that they are more resilient for the future and less at risk of relapsing.

So, whether it is the beach needing a clean-up, a derelict house that needs restoring or a person knocked by life events, we need to see through the litter, the peeling paint or the hopelessness and depression, and to see their preciousness and their potential. If we can’t see their preciousness, then we can’t help them to connect with it. I wonder, who you are being called to come alongside, so that they can see their own preciousness or what part of the earth you are being asked to care for? Perhaps it is first a calling to see our own preciousness because it is hard to see it elsewhere if we are blind to it within ourselves. As witnesses to preciousness and potential and as hope bearers, we can gradually help to make a difference.