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12/11/2025

Pema Chödrön writes “You are the sky. Everything else — it’s just the weather.”
 I love this metaphor. It captures how Internal Family Systems (IFS) understands what it calls the Self.

In IFS, the weather is our “parts”: the protective responses and patterns that we develop in response to our socialisation, experiences, traumas.

Sometimes the weather is gentle; subtle, familiar, a quiet ally.
 At other times it is intense, noisy, destructive.

And the Self, like the sky, is always there.
 Even when we can’t see it, Self is present: spacious, steady, compassionate, and curious.
 It doesn’t need the weather to clear before it can shine through.
 It’s the larger field that holds everything.

Through meditation, IFS, and other reflective and spiritual practices, we can begin to experience this: that we are not only the sky watching the weather pass, but also the weather itself, and the light that moves through it.

The work isn’t to rise above our experience, but to recognise ourselves as part of all that interconnects: the relationships within us, between us, around and beyond us.

🌤️

10/11/2025

“When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms.” (Francis Weller)
These words are with me as the season turns and wild nature begins her slowing down, her letting go.
So many of us try to keep the same pace all year, even as the light fades and everything around us rests. It’s how we’ve been trained, by school and work and the increasingly frenzied barrage of marketing (“Buy me!” “Eat me!” “Drink me!”).
But outside our windows, wild nature isn’t striving; she’s releasing, and preparing.
This season invites us to do the same: to pause, to notice what’s ending, to share stories of how it has been, and to honour it.
“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning.” Each letting go is done in the presence of love, and each slowing down makes space for renewal.
🍂
Fuller quotes:
“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close. (Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, 2015)
“When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.”(Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow)
🍂

30/10/2025

I spent last Sunday in the garden: seven unhurried hours with the soil.

Something settles in me each time I step out there. Gardening feels to me like a kind of meditation: the slow rhythm of sowing, planting, tending, noticing. It invites presence and offers steadiness.

These plants will feed my body in a later season; this season, they feed me in many other ways.

I think often about how healing happens this way too: not in leaps or great shifts, but through these small, hopeful gestures of care and connection.

🌱🥬🫜🎶

I Worried (by Mary Oliver)

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

19/10/2025

I love these Autumnal colour pops 🍁. Each invites me to pause, draw closer, and really notice the details in these last days before the Winter winds and frosts send them on their way. 🌬️

15/09/2025

Rilke, via Joanna Macy: a piece chosen for today. A match for my reflective mood as I return from the wonderful in Chester, and as World Childless Week 2025 begins.

What I’m drawing from these words is a message about the power of sorrow to remind us of how alive we are.

How trillingly alive I felt amongst so many folk this weekend who have also experienced those deep, dark sorrows of childlessness. And also those glimmers of hope as we, together, uncover (albeit haltingly) non-traditional routes towards happiness.

This weekend I had a sense of the possibilities of this community - not just for now, but for all the future. I felt deep admiration for all the creatrices and activists.

I felt the Creatrix and Activist in me stirring too. They were particularly active as I watched the beautiful short film by : women’s voices raised together, on the edge of the sea, in a song of mourning, defiance, resistance and hope.

“Did you notice me? Did you check on me?” (From Melanie Stidolph’s “The next dawn, the next spring”, 2023)

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (1999)

31/03/2025

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

- Anaïs Nin

31/01/2025

🌱 Here we are once again at the mid point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox: the Celtic festival of Imbolc.

🌒 For those of us emerging from Winter with a fresh new moon this is a time to celebrate the first stirrings of Spring, sensing a time for renewal.

☘️Ask yourself the question “What if it all goes well?”
☘️What does this look like for you?
☘️What would you like to leave behind in your Wintering, and what would you like to carry as you step forward into the Spring?

13/09/2024

Making the most of a sunny morning and a free schedule to take some time for coffee and cake and to finally read Wise Words for Women by ‘elder in training’ Donna Lancaster. It just keeps popping up in conversation: I’m excited to find out why!

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