After the heat of Portugal, Gomde felt like stepping into a different climate entirely — which it was, but also the change was bigger than weather. Gomde is a Buddhist retreat center tucked into the Scottish Highlands, and we went from the loose, improvisational rhythm of Four Trees to something much more structured: bells marking the hours, silent meals, a working schedule built around retreats rather than around us.
It took us about a week to stop fighting it.
Learning to work inside a structure
At Four Trees, the day organized itself around whatever the garden needed. At Gomde, the day organized itself around the retreat calendar — kitchen prep for forty people arriving Friday, rooms turned over between programs, grounds kept tidy for guests who'd come a long way for a week of quiet. It was the first time either of us had volunteered somewhere with real operational weight behind it, and it demanded a different kind of attention. Less improvisation, more reliability.
We were on kitchen and grounds rotation most weeks, which meant early starts prepping breakfast for retreatants who were often mid-way through days of silence, and afternoons doing whatever the land needed — clearing paths, splitting wood, tending the small kitchen garden that supplied herbs and salad greens for the dining hall.
Nobody there was performing calm. They were just quiet, and it turned out to be contagious.
What the silence actually taught us
Neither of us went to Gomde looking for anything spiritual — we went because they needed volunteers and the setting looked beautiful, which it was, in a stark, wind-scoured way that Portugal never was. But you can't spend three months next to people doing serious silent retreat without it rubbing off a little.
What we took from it wasn't any particular practice. It was pace. Gomde runs unhurried by design — meals are eaten slowly, tasks are done fully before moving to the next one, and nobody is checking a phone during work hours because there's barely a signal anyway. We came in fast, city-paced people, used to doing three things at once badly. We left doing one thing at a time, properly, and noticing it took roughly the same amount of total time either way.
Bringing it home
We still catch ourselves defaulting back to doing everything at once, especially when the garden and the website and the emails all want attention in the same afternoon. But we have a shorthand now, from Gomde — one of us will just say "one thing," and it's usually enough to slow the other one back down.
It's also where we started properly cooking for a crowd, which came in useful more times than we expected once we started hosting people of our own.