By Jennifer Moragoda Another Stevenson 𓂃🪶
From the Pathfinder Collection:
There is a peculiar pleasure known to book lovers when, every now and then, one instinctively selects the perfect book to accompany a journey.
Before leaving for a ten-day retreat at one of Sri Lanka’s oldest Ayurvedic resorts, I found myself searching for a suitable travelling companion. My choice fell upon Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, a book I had long meant to read ever since it had been enthusiastically recommended by a Brazilian diplomat who was a geographer by training.
I was delighted to discover, while going through our bookshelves, that a copy had been sitting on a high shelf all this time: a thin, weathered little red book that fits in the palm of your hand, perfectly designed to slip into a coat pocket or travel bag.
Our copy is a 1929 Macmillan edition. The title page bears the oval purple impress of W. M. A. Wahid & Bros., Booksellers and Stationers, 87 Main Street, Colombo, recalling the many small bookshops that once occupied the arcades of the old Fort. Affixed to the rear endpaper is a small Stevenson copyright royalty stamp, another vestige of an earlier publishing world. Unlike many books in the family collection, it bears neither penned initials nor a dedication or prize- giving label to identify its original owner, although I suspect it may have belonged to my husband’s paternal grandmother, who excelled in English literature and won numerous school prizes for the subject. After a few minor repairs to its tired spine, it rested for some time atop one of several small piles of books awaiting their turn on my bedside table.
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
introduced me to another Stevenson I did not know: a contemplative soul and open-minded traveller who found wonder in the changing sunlight falling across a hillside, the stars overhead, the moon as “nocturnal sun,” the pleasures of lodging en plein air and the quiet rewards of walking slowly through a landscape. Above all, he possessed the rare gift of drawing the reader into these scenic tableaux.
Published in 1879, the book recounts Stevenson’s twelve-day journey on foot through the rugged Cévennes mountains of southern France. His sole companion was Modestine, a small donkey who carried his sleeping sack and modest belongings from village to village. The book is at once the story of a journey, a meditation on solitude, an account of the people Stevenson encountered and the political and religious divisions that shaped their lives, and a celebration of the restorative pleasures of immersion in the natural world.
In the days that followed, I came to regard Stevenson as both a kindred spirit and the perfect travelling companion.
Arrival
During my ten-day stay at Barberyn Reef, my first experience of an Ayurvedic retreat, I discovered an immediate sense of well-being that quietly deepened over the days that followed. The environment itself seemed carefully orchestrated to encourage relaxation and healing. Moving through the expansive, sunlit reception and dining areas, I found myself drawn to the many paths that wound around the buildings and along the beachfront. Through broad windows, the eye was drawn to the ocean beyond, while the gentle sounds of bubbling ponds and the lapping sea soothed the ear. Water was everywhere: in the rhythmic waves softened by the offshore reef and in the many ponds filled with vermilion koi carp.
The overall layout of the buildings and grounds, planned by architect Turner Wickremasinghe, a friend of the owner Manick Rodrigo, appeared more organic than geometric. Low two-storey buildings were interspersed with old trees and mature plantings that created intimate courtyards and places to linger. Walkways of brick, granite, boralu and bola gal wandered beneath spreading canopies and spectacular pandanus, whose characteristic stilt roots had been allowed ample space to grow freely. Cement stepping stones carried the soft impressions of leaves, recalling a device introduced by Donald Friend in the 1960s and first adopted at Brief and later at Lunuganga.
Walking into Laki’s Landscape
One afternoon, while strolling along the entrance approach, I came upon a long reflecting pond. There was something uncannily familiar about it. Luxuriant vegetation framed a large brick archway, partially concealed beneath foliage. Then it struck me.
Among the Pathfinder Collection are three original landscape blueprints prepared by Laki Senanayake for our Colombo home in 1986. Tucked away in a cupboard for many years before being recently framed, they are works of art in themselves. One depicts a reflecting pond backed by two brick arches with railings, ingeniously designed to create the illusion of a bridge. Mirrors set within the arches were intended to reflect the water, finger palms, areca palms and other greenery planted in the foreground.
Standing before the pond, I realized I was looking at a landscape that echoed what Laki had envisioned for our own garden, albeit on a grander scale. Reflections, framed vistas and luxuriant planting were all elements of his unmistakable visual language. I was told that Laki had designed the pond and had originally proposed incorporating mirrors into the brick archway, but had been unable to persuade Manick Rodrigo to adopt the idea. Our own garden scheme was never realized, largely because the design did not quite suit the proportions of the site. As an architect friend of Laki’s once remarked, he had studied architecture but found it “too confining.”
Ayurveda as a Way of Living
The gardens were not merely beautiful surroundings; they formed part of the treatment itself.
Each meal offered an ever-changing array of local greens, vegetables, grains and curries, alongside herbal teas and imaginative dishes prepared from ingredients long familiar to village kitchens and Ayurvedic practice. The same plants nourished and healed: they were eaten, brewed into infusions, ground into medicines, and blended into oils and herbal pastes carrying the earthy scent of freshly crushed leaves. One consumed them as both food and medicine, inhaled their warm, vegetal scents, and absorbed them through the skin until traces of leaves, roots and flowers seemed to linger long after leaving the treatment room. The garden seemed to accompany one wherever one walked.
The same philosophy found expression in countless quiet details. Stone medicine grinders stood in a courtyard adjoining the treatment centre. The walls of the stairwell and ceiling were covered with relief murals depicting Buddhist monks treating patients, religious ascetics and the preparation of herbal medicines among flowers and trees. Sunlit interiors, simple flower offerings, carefully chosen objects and built-in seating created an atmosphere that felt less like a hotel than a gracious home. Everywhere there were quiet places to pause, reflect and simply be.
Here, Ayurveda revealed itself not simply as a system of medicine, but as a way of living. The medicinal garden, the meals, the herbal oils, the architecture and the surrounding landscape all expressed the same philosophy. Remove any one of those elements and something essential would be diminished.
During one conversation, the resident Ayurvedic physician spoke thoughtfully about the future of the profession. Increasingly, she explained, younger doctors were choosing Western medicine, while traditional Ayurveda demanded not only medical knowledge but an intimate familiarity with medicinal plants and the often painstaking preparation of oils, herbal pastes and remedies. As Sri Lankans became increasingly urbanized, many also became further removed from the natural environment that had always sustained this knowledge.
Listening to the physician, I realized that what was at stake was not simply a medical tradition, but an integrated way of life and a system of knowledge developed over millennia through close observation of the natural world.
Nature’s Hotel
My experience brought to mind one of Stevenson’s most memorable reflections: that there is a difference between knowing about the natural world and knowing it through experience. One may know the names and distances of the stars, he observed, yet never truly know them until one has slept beneath them and felt their influence upon the mind. Elsewhere, camping beneath the open sky, he described the natural landscape simply as “such a great hotel.”
That phrase lingered with me. The garden, the meals, the treatments, the architecture and even the book I happened to be reading all suggested that healing begins not with medicine alone, but with an understanding of the inter-connectedness of all living things. Some forms of knowledge can be grasped only through lived experience.
Perhaps this is one of Sri Lanka’s most distinctive gifts to the world: not Ayurveda reduced to a treatment or fashionable wellness experience, but a living philosophy in which medicine, food, nature and compassionate care are understood as inseparable.