“Sorry!” I say.

“For what?”

I shrug, then point. “My husband. He wasn’t supposed to be here but we had kind of a travel emergency.” Then I whisper, by way of explanation: “He’s not even really a struggling blocked artist.”

She tilts her face at me, bird-on-the-head style. “But he told us on the way in that he’s a musician who doesn’t play anymore,” she says gently. “Being here could be a really transformative thing for him.”

A complete stranger—part of the group of women who taught him how to correctly pronounce a natural sweetener this morning—sees him for who he is: the creative person he once was but stopped being. But making such an obvious connection hadn’t occurred to me. I stare down at my empty pad, blinding in its whiteness from the tiny halogen spotlights high up along the exposed ceiling beams. I pull out a red crayon. What. Is. Wrong. With. Me? Though I hadn’t planned on it, this creativity retreat has suddenly turned into a private hellish marriage workshop, one I’m not quite ready to surrender to. I rip out the page from the sketchbook and fold it up. Then I sit on it.

The first hour is spent doing various ten-minute exercises—using writing and drawing prompts that Sari delivers (“Draw your earliest memory.” “Write ten five-word plotlines for the directions your life has taken.” “What color is your mood right now?”). Then we return to the floor for a longer guided meditation on creativity, and a thirty-minute mini yoga class. While Sari leads us through each activity, Gregory prepares the necessary props and tools: setting out and putting away pillows and mats; replenishing art materials; refilling water bottles and tea mugs with cold and hot water. While I’m coloring or writing, and later when we break for lunch—helping ourselves to plates of vegetarian salads and stews—I can’t help but watch how the two move around the room, silently doing what needs to be done with barely any words. Their communication seems effortless, nonverbal, entirely spiritual. I am both full of disdain for and deeply jealous of their apparent connection. The only person who would understand my feelings is Gary. I long to catch his eye, but he is fully absorbed by the latest activity: creating something—a drawing, a poem, a story, anything—to express one of our biggest frustrations.

I’m still struggling with what I’m working on—a combo-prose-poem-cartoon of me struggling, and failing, to write—what else?—when Sari reappears, calling us all together on the pillows on the floor.

“It’s time to share.”

At first there is nothing but silence. Then shy giggling. Then Gary’s hand shoots up. “I’ll go first.”

“That’s superbrave of you, Gary,” Sari says. “What will you be sharing with us?”

“I wrote a song. Well, part of a song.”

Sari nods, impressed, then puts her hands together under her chin, bows her head slightly, and whispers, “Namaste.” I roll my eyes at Gary—What does namaste have to do with creating and sharing something? (I would later learn, and write about for Well/er, that “ICYMI: namaste directly translates to ‘The divine in me bows to the divine in you.’”) But he is struggling to stand up in the tight space on the floor without losing his balance. The women from his table who are still sitting around him give him a little boosting push on his arm and back, then laugh—but not unkindly. “Go, Gary!” one says, and the others repeat, “Go, Gary!”