Mela Rosa Retreat Instagram — Fiona Melrose

Teaching & Mentoring

Mela Rosa Retreat

Mela Rosa Retreat Instagram

I got myself into a spiritual panic very early this morning about Gaza and A.I. and the factory farming of animals and all those things that upset me, but as I watched the day begin, this happened. And last night a hedgehog came to call under the so

🧹🪣 21.30h, 4.5 hours, 2 spider bites, endless barbed wire cuts and the horrors of endless rats nests and waste and I’ve finally finish clearing and cleaning the outhouse/ chicken house that will be the potting shed for the farm and garden. Th

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After floods and cold and then heat and hail there is so much joy and love for a little brace of hard green tomatoes nubbing their way into life.

It was every last moment of fire and bruise across the sky this evening. These things usually don’t last very long but this extraordinary light is lingering and it feels like a portend of glories to come 🧡

I spent the day in the orto as the irrigation system goes in over the next few weeks. It’s been a fairly brutal few weeks as temperatures nudged 40C and my little heritage variety saplings showed signs of stress. The cherries in particular stru

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Pisanello, 1435. Surely the only hat appropriate to the heat as temperatures consistently nudge 40C. I always love Pisanello’s depictions of animals and the natural world in general. 🖤

This is the annesso/ annex here at Mela Rosa Retreats. It is absolutely beautiful. The process of fixing up that VERY precarious roof and tidying things up inside has begun. Obviously we want to keep the lovely forno/ wood fire oven / pizza oven and

The past couple of weeks have been incredibly hard on many levels, not least the physicality of living here. The bleaching heat of summer came a month early and this means that beyond 10.30am I find it very hard to work outside lifting soil, plants a

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🍒This deserves a grid post 🍒Where I grew up cherries 🍒 were always a treat, the season so short and the rest of the year they were imported and expensive . 🍒The rush and thrill of three trees of cherries waxy and red, warm from the sun and so so

The first rule of writing is to pay attention to the world . And fall in love with it . That obsessive observation of the thing that you adore will be the substance that both fuels and allows your writing. It’s a generous space, conversational

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I think that the case for art as redemption can be overstated. As if in and of itself it is enough. I worry it can act as a comfortable and easy salve, and the usual recourse to “empathy” and “reducing otherness” are repeatedl

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“Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.”

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Powe

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