Bornholm, August 2025
Dear Friends,
This is the sixth year that Yggdrasil Guest Lodge has been welcoming visitors to Bornholm. We are now inching towards the end of the peak season after which the island will return to quieter times. The guest lodge is open all the year round and the summer months are by far the busiest with a constant flow of guests compressed in twelve weeks of full occupancy.
A few days ago, in the midst of a wave of fatigue, I suddenly had the impulse to count how many people I had welcomed since the first covid summer of 2020 when I opened the doors to visitors. I was amazed to discover that more than 750 people have found their way to the guest lodge. That’s a lot of people, since there are only three rooms and five beds, even for me used to teaching big classrooms and addressing large audiences. I wasn’t expecting such a copious yield and it took me slightly by surprise, though it did explain the dip in energy momentarily registered. Nonetheless, the information did not sidetrack me from the urge to sit down, reflect about the past six years and actively listen to the compelling call to transform the guest lodge into a community house.
As I mentioned in the presentation of Yggdrasil Guest Lodge, the first two years were full of trials and tribulations. Like everyone, I faced the steep learning curve of adjusting to the restrictions and limitations of the pandemic whilst working with people in a close environment. I believe that I found the right balance because I was crafting the guest lodge in terms of regenerative tourism and, with this in mind and, more importantly, deeply lodged in my heart, I was reimagining the art of hospitality.
In the difficult moments, particularly when I thought I was failing the more challenging guests or simply feeling completely overwhelmed by the workload, a good friend would prompt me to return to Rumi’s poem The Guest House. More than a poem, it is a Zen koan meant to shake and wake us up from our lethargy. It doesn’t speak of the inner workings of a guest house as such, but begins by stating that each human being is a guest house, visited by a myriad of sensations, feelings and thoughts. The poem is an invitation to mindfully welcome and embrace them all, unconditionally so. This is the passage that always stops me in my tracks and gets me pondering.
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep your house
Empty of its furniture
Still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
For some new delight.
Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rūmī (1207-1273)
Excerpt from The Guest House from Rumi: Selected Poems,
Translation by Coleman Barks with John Moynce, A. J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson (Penguin Books, 2004)
The lines tell me that Yggdrasil Guest lodge is my current wisdom master eager to teach me about the change that comes from articulating the practice of letting go with the art of letting be. The flow of guests has brought many delights: they fill the space with presence and laughter; they shed tears and cast off stones of sorrow; they post glowing recommendations and come back; they leave behind samples of their art work; they bring produces and specialities from their region to be shared around the table. Each gift spontaneously offered joins the invisible stream of generosity that has been growing in strength and vigour over the past six years.
Paradoxically, the art of hospitality is not about accumulating experiences, clutching on to the good moments and pushing back the so-called bad events. It is much more about offering ourselves to the whole-hearted experience of being emptied and letting go of the superfluous and cumbersome: a practice in radical simplification. Rumi’s poem reminds us that in order to ready ourselves for transformation, we need to be sufficiently empty, sufficiently confused and sufficiently hungry for the revolution of the heart to engender a reordering that will take us into new territories of human consciousness.
Therefore, yes, with a smiling heart, I see how each one of the 750+ guests has unwittingly contributed to empty me out and make room for the new, even if this means entering a liminal space where, bewildered, I taste despair; where, dumbfounded, I feel desperately lonely among so many people; where, dazed, I lose track of my destination in the circuitous trails of the odyssey with wholeness.
All gardeners know that, at times, it is necessary to cut back unhealthy plants and trim overgrowth for new life to flourish. An abundant harvest requires that we tend to the soil and abide the seasons, trusting that we cannot ‘over prune’, nor that we will be left bereft or banished forever. Amidst our labours of love, all through the inner and outer voyages of becoming fully human, we learn to trust the seasons of growth and to recognise the timing of death mysteriously returning us to a new life.
Therefore, why should I be surprised by my yearning to let go of the guest lodge with its flow of charming guests, so as to dream, anew, and imagine a community house dedicated to a life of contemplation? Follow me; I am about to lead you into the garden where the tree of life stands. We will admire the relentless urge to grow, whatever the outer circumstances. We will peep into the nursery where the seedlings of the community house are gently germinating. And we will reap in joy.
In joyful anticipation,
Nicola