Gathering around the Fire

Because telling someone a story connects you to others in so many ways ….

A few years ago I had an idea, or rather I had a phrase that came to my mind and refused to leave. That phrase became the name of my instagram account, then a little time later my blog, further still it became the name I used in my healing work. And now I think of it as a name which somehow encapsulates and includes every thing I do.

Gathering Around the Fire.

At its heart, gathering around the fire, for me is a name that suggests the coming together of people, and the promise of warmth, both physical and emotional to be found thereafter. It whispers of stories told late at night around the flames of a hearth or campfire, and the spiritual sustenance to be gained from doing so.

To me it represents communality and togetherness, kin and friendship. And it makes me think of togetherness, and the gift of a story to unite one person with another. And it reminds me above all else that most of what I love and do, either as work or for my own joy, is all about stories, and the lives we lead which inspire them.

I have always told stories. When I was little I wrote fictitious newspaper articles and fantasy stories, heavily influenced by The Famous Five and Never Ending Story. and a story by Alison Uttley called ‘The traveler in time’ which embedded itself within my imagination like no other book I have ever read.

To this day I still read it. Come Autumn when the leaves turn and the seasons calls for looking inward and getting your hygge on, I turn to that book and its wonderful and evocative tale of family, time travel and the power of old houses to bring the past to life.

Later I wrote poetry and short stories, and children’s tales when I worked as a fairy storyteller at birthday parties and festivals. For quite a few years I wrote book reviews as part of my job as a children’s bookseller. I loved writing about the books that I loved reading, and hopefully passing that love onto someone else to discover for themselves.

And in between those times I wrote secret diaries and letters to friends. I filled notebooks and scraps of paper with scribbles and plans written on long train journeys up and down Wales. I had all these ways of capturing and holding the stories I had experienced and gathered around me. Netting the stories that shaped me in so many different ways.

Studying for my degree ( and gaining a First) in English Literature was one of the most prolific writing times of my life so far, as I got lost in essay writing. Hard as it was, I loved the challenge of honing my thoughts and feelings into something with shape and form; sustaining an argument or a theme, and writing it into a coherent and meaningful piece of writing.

In short, and in some way or another, I have always written. As an old piece of scrap paper I had on my fridge for years reminded me daily whenever I reached for the milk ‘I think therefore I write….’

These days stories play a different part in my life as I raise my twin daughters’. The stories I tell, and the stories I remember, have become their stories. Stories of moments we have shared together will hopefully become core memories, to be shared with their own children and grandchildren years down the line. The ancestral line strengthened by love. This is storytelling for the future that has yet to come.

As a mother my week has a routine to it I never really had before and stories play a part in that. Yes, sometimes, the pattern that informs much of my days has scant reprise from predictability that once would have seen me running to the hills screaming….But now I have a sense of grounded belonging. I have a place to belong, and come back to. A sense of place and home and my world within it.

One of things I love as someone who hangs on every word of a good story, is listening to a podcast as I am cooking dinner, or washing up the breakfast things. I love becoming absorbed in a story that takes you somewhere, sometimes emotionally, sometimes geographically, frequently both. I love a story that teaches you something, or changes you in some subtle or dramatic way. I love getting to know characters who stay with you long after the covers of the book have been closed. Characters becoming old friends, becoming voices of experience.

It was a moment such as this, at home, doing something domestic, when I had this idea to write a series of stories that told the story of different women around the Britain and Ireland. I thought about how each episode would tell the story of one woman. I would tell the story of that woman, rather than explaining their story. I imagined the sort of story I wanted to listen to, and capture the feeling of someone telling me a story. The feel of the storytelling became my starting point, and the atmosphere of the stories I wanted to tell became the texture of the words and images I was forming in my head. A feeling of come closer, let’s gather around the fire and tell each other stories to pass the long winter.

And so I have begun writing a series of small podcast episodes which I plan to record. And I wanted to write about this here because when I have written it down, I tell myself, it will take on the form of a promise, becoming an intention that is being brought into being. Its a kind of declaration. A beautiful idea being called into being.

I have chosen my first episode. It will be about Branwen. She was a a beautiful princess made immortal in the epic storytelling saga that is The Mabinogion. I have loved her and her story since I was a child. She is firmly rooted in Welsh mythology and landscape, which binds me to her even more. And I can’t wait to honour her being and breathe her into life.

So are you read, Let’s gather around the fire and then I will begin ….. ✨✨✨✨✨✨

And what do you do?

ZI very recently needed to put together a C.V and my initial response was to feel the cold steel of panic throughout my body.

The thought of sitting down and ordering my life, and the myriad of experiences gained within it, into a sequential, ordered timeline seemed, impossible. Those linear lines of organised achievement have always seemed to me so unreflective; unreflective of a real life lived. A life that hasn’t necessarily followed conventional pathways, but has gathered wisdom and skills, all of which could be useful, genuine and of real value when applied to different vocational settings.

I tried to remember what year it was I had toured Wales with a travelling Theatre Company called The Shining Wits (1993 ) or when exactly those two years were, in which I had plotted Somerset potholes onto an interactive map for the County Council to investigate and repair as funds allowed. (2009 – 2011 for the record )

*My healing space at The Harlequin Fayre* 2023

I wondered if I should include the time I went for a drunken and surreal dinner with Terry Jones, from Monty Python, as part of my role as children’s bookseller ? Or the time I spent a beautiful, lonely and wild snow-filled winter cooking for a group of whiskey sodden men high up in the mountains of Scotland, in a tiny bothy lit only by gas lamp, and the plumed, orange glow of their expensive cigars.

There have been so many experiences in my life like those. Not exactly the kind that seem impressive on a conventional C.V but nonetheless informed and shaped and changed me in so many positive ways.

By the end of the process when writing that C.V and job application, I found that I was curiously uplifted. I felt a great sense of accomplishment in the way that you do after conquering an irrational fear, but it was also more than that, I was proud.

I was reminded of everything I had done in my life, the small battles and the personal moments of great achievement, and the resilience and empathy I had garnered from harder times. I saw myself as the woman I am now because of all those strange and unconventional experiences and I had a little intake of breath when I remembered, gosh just look at what you have done with your life so far…

I didn’t get the job in the end. And that felt OK. I spent a morning in the healing room in my garden, tidying up and clearing – enjoying this little room of care and nurturing and I felt right about it all. This is where all those experiences have led me to.

To be able to channel my experiences, and in doing so feel those emotions associated with them, welcoming them, perhaps most importantly understanding them; bringing them into my work and in doing so supporting women in their own healing, alongside their own experiences and stories that contribute to who they each are.

In other words and as my creative name Gathering Around the Fire suggests, making real and valuable use of all those stories that have made me me. And inviting other women to do the same. 🍃

*The waterfall at water-breaks-it’s-neck Powys*

Seasons end and seasons change ✨🍃

I was having a conversation with a friend several days ago and she told me something which really got me thinking. Talking about a recent appointment with her acupuncturist, she said that her therapist had told her that it was always around the time of seasons changing, that her bookings increased noticeably.

I found this so interesting. As a farmers daughter I have grown up with an understanding of the seasons rhythms, and the ebb and flow of life around those phases. From Spring through to the following seasons, the turning of the year encompasses everything.

As I have spent more time learning and experiencing our role within that natural cycle, I have been increasingly drawn to the Celtic Wheel, as a way of living authentically in line with this way of being and observing the passing of time. Those festival days, and times of celebration or observation within the wheel, help to align my life and honour the seasonal flow within it.

As it suggests the Celtic Wheel encourages us to see the year as a circle; part of a continuous matrilineal O within which we constantly evolve, revolve and rebirth. And rather than a linear line that suggests a long run, a fixed destination or an end point we must always be striving and pushing for, the pattern of our lives reveals so much more about the part that ebb and flow has to play within it.

The feminine truth in all of this, for me, is the understanding that rest and renew have their place within the cycle of life in flow with both the fertile and the full. A wheel which as it turns, as it waxes and wanes, reflects more accurately the four seasons, the four phases of the moon.

When I think about the seasonality of our lives in this way, that the Celtic Wheel isn’t just something external to ourselves in the nature beyond. It is actually something that lies deep within us as humans, and can define and guide the human experience, if we let it.

When we remind ourselves that we are nature, that as a woman for example, I have my own menstrual cycle, which follows the phases of the moon. The moon herself waxes and wanes, effects tidal sea patterns and so much more, has her own part to play within my own cycle – a waxing and waning of hormones and energy. In this way it becomes clear that as we observe and honour the changing seasons around us, so must we observe and honour those changing seasons within ourselves too.

We are nature all of us. And therefore every part of who we are, whether that be physical or spiritual, is effected by the seasonal flow of ebb and flow, birth rebirth, and the waxing and waning of who are within the own Celtic Wheel of our own lifetimes.

It feels like a relief to me to think of a year, a day, a month, a life as being seasonal. Yes those wondrous full fertile times come in their fabulous blaze of colour and light. But those times do not alone define us, and it is the other times – the times when the wheel is on the descent that the belief in the ebb and flow really can help us. We need those descents and we need the fallow. We need the darkness of winter within ourselves when the matter of our souls lie dormant – just as winter retreats and returns to source.

That is the time for rest, for plans to be made and for the storing of energy for the coming of Spring within us, which will always arrive. Nature is never late and always comes when she is ready to do so. We should see ourselves in just that way too and grace ourselves with the knowledge that no matter how bleak those winter moments are… this too shall pass … and we will rise, just like the sleeping shoots or the resting ferns.

And that’s kind of where I am now. It’s been a busy time of pushing through with plans, bringing them to fruition and finally to blossom. It’s only when I look back I can see how much I have put into it and what I have done to make those plans abundant and come to pass.

And as with anything – I need the time to assimilate the changes I have encountered through the process of learning. Learning is only such if we allow ourselves to be changed and shaped because of them. Otherwise all we have is facts. So this break, this rest, gives me time to see myself in light of these changes and to embed those new parts of me into future plans that I am already beginning to dream. ✨🍃🍃

Time to breathe

It seems that there hasn’t been many times within my life recently, where I have truly felt a sense of pause. Where I can do very little, and for that very little to continue beyond the odd blissful empty Sunday afternoon. Or the couple of hours here and there you can sometimes find, when the children are at school or at a club, and nothing needs doing.

This past several years I have been on a deep learning experience. It has taken the form of an intense period of introspection, whilst simultaneously developing new skills and learning. New ways of being and each informing the other. And as well as a beginning it has also been a completion of a kind. A return to something I began a long time ago, and a braiding together of disparate threads, offering a more embodied future, where all the things I am have a fluid and integrated feel to them.

So what has been going on?

So last year I began a twelve month Shamanic Healing programme. I still catch my breath a little when I say, or write that. It is certainly something I have held back from sharing with people. Not apologetic, but perhaps a little unsure as to how others might perceive it. That it might be seen as something strange, a little too pagan for everyday life.

It certainly wasn’t something I had planned as being on the horizon, or even knew very much about until recently. But as a series of events unfolded, and I met the lady who would go on to become my teacher, one thing led to another and I found myself fully committed to beginning something which would take me deep within myself, and in doing so would change so much about where I was heading going forward.

Part of the shamanic work I have been involved in has been exploring the nature of shadow work – the darker parts of ourselves we often keep hidden and yet can tell us so much about who we truly are if we care to go that deep. It is often the chance to really explore what holds us back. And by bringing those dark shadowy parts of ourselves in to the light, and by doing so accepting them, we can find a kind of release and liberation.

Running alongside the course I decided to decided to train as a Reiki Practitioner. The two worked beautifully together. Learning about some of the hidden aspects of myself informed how I approached Reiki, and how I wanted to use it for the benefit of others.

Another aspect of Reiki is that in your learning preparation, it works to clear you of old energy patterns that lie within you. And so alongside the Shamanic healing work I was exploring, I was also letting go of some very old patterns; stored experiences and old wounds that I had carried around with me for a long, long time. In short so much of the past few years has been about letting go, whilst all the while steadily moving forward with a new and guided intention.

And it has all been welcome. Those changes have been incredible, however hard the process of change and release may be. Some have been subtle, softly embedding themselves within, whilst others have been really quite obvious, a pulling up and a shaking down. A 360 degree tour of my spiritual psyche and a re-examining of changes that have been so impossible to hide from.

Maybe my age too has been a factor in all of this. I am 50 next year and entering the Autumn, menopausal season of my life. Change is happening. And this next phase of my life is important in the sense that it is softening and the accepting stage of who I am. Menstruation and fertility – two parts of a woman’s identity and which have had such big impacts on my life these past twenty years will give way to something else – something slower, deeper. Wisdom of years lived, and the proud experience gained during those times.

For the moment I am taking some well needed rest and pause. The training and the learning will take a little sabbatical for a while as I wait for everything learned to embed, to become part of who I am. Then it is to begin working with these new skills and ways of being. I want my work to start taking in everything I have discovered. And by work I mean all those elements of who I am and what I do. From my writing to my role as a mother, my healing work and the plans I have for that ahead. Being a woman, an older woman, all these changes will influence and shape how I live and what I do within those days of living.

I don’t think I have ever felt so purposeful and sure of what I am doing as here and as now.

But first comes the rest….. 🍃✨

Oooo

Sea Change

All was apples in a bowl

Between the times of knowing

Old slips of paper

Scribbles of somewheres

Sometimes

Soon but never now.

All was watching for the moon

With bowls and cups and spoons

all nestled in their places

Age dusted, cradled, softened for sleep.

All was books and films and pictures

between the times of knowing

A passing glimpse to distant faces.

where all was just the same.

An old familiar game

A softer gentler tune ?

Just apples in a bowl and the changing moon.

This year change has come and shaken her feathers wildly throughout the rooms of my home. She has peeped in through my windowpanes, rattling door handles persistently and raucously, desperate for my attention. She has opened my drawers, rummaging through its contents, picking up items at random. Choosing what to discard with force and what to settle back down in its place, And all the while doing so with a caring and tender sigh.

Her manner has left me, at times, feeling clumsy although eager. As I look for clues, trying to work out, from the flying feathers of her grand clear-out, what she has planned for me and why, I ask myself if I should be participating in this process of change somehow? Should I be helping to direct the form of that change in some way, and if so, how that might I do that ? What does active but peaceful change look like?

For the past several years I have thought, read, dreamt and talked about my call to live authentically. To live alongside my values and to slow down and be the change I want to see around me. Now it feels like that this is the time to begin living those ideas and plans – to emerge from a period of deep reflection and learning, and to explore how those feelings and dreams might look embedded within a daily setting. How they might flow and inform the day to day life of my children and I, and the world we share together. How I might be as a woman who sets an intention to live her thoughts and dreams. To be someone who focuses less on the vision of the future but experiences more the value of the here and now, without feeling the jolt of anxiety that comes from one having perpetually on the road ahead as a way to ward off danger.

Last year I began a writing project with the publishing company Creative Countryside. It was a collaborative project between the Editor Eleanor, and eleven other women writers’, each exploring our own individual responses to a collective brief. A call to response of the relationship between the human and non human world, and what that experience might feel like when captured in language.

It was an amazing experience and one that did not necessarily come easily. It meant going back and going down within myself – exploring those places and what that might have to say about identity and love. It was a love letter but one written tentatively after a broken and only partially healed heart. It was about belonging and absence and the want of connection in all its healing forms.

We wrote the project over the spin of the Celtic Wheel, writing through moon phases and cycles and important dates of the natural year. It was something I gave myself to whole heartedly, feeling more and more sure each time of its importance and meaning. It was a process which revealed itself incrementally. At this point I have to stop and pay my gratitude and awe of Eleanor, our Editor, who showed and demonstrated great grace and wisdom. She continues to inspire me so much. Her trust in the uncertainty of process is one of the great lessons I am learning this year.

During this same period of time I have begun a twelve month long Women’s Shamanic Initiation Course. It is a profound but beautiful exploration of what it means to be ourselves – while being in circle of other glorious women who are doing the same. There is so much beauty in this course – but the work is full and deep. it is something that asks you to heal, to ask questions and to be brave in doing so. It’s the equivalent of as a child dreading the moment before you tear off a plaster – knowing that it might hurt, that it will hurt – not knowing what the wound might look like underneath – but all the while knowing that healing needs light and air in order for it to happen.

Reiki has also entered my life this year and I have begun treating women from the summer house in my garden. I am still in the early processes of learning but the experiences so far have been incredible. They are informing my understanding of so much, not least myself, and I am beginning to explore how these changes and the presence of Reiki within my life, might shape the writing I share, the way I live day to day, and the way I am bringing up my daughters’.

Perhaps the area I am exoeriencing the most change and transformation is my undertsamding of love. The ways in which I give love and the way I experience receiving love in return. Since the birth of my daughters’ six years ago, this has been at the centre and heart of much of what i have been exploring and learning about. My dayghters’ and their future selves the inspiration for it all.

With the Autumn Equinox this year to come I am beginning a creative project with the artist Oliver Jerrold. Having known him when we both young ( he is the unnamed someone I wrote about him in my essay for the book Intrinsic) I have got to know him over the past eighteen months or so as we are now – wiser, kinder,softer,braver, stronger. We are going to be working together to explore our reaponses to the landscape of sacred places, through art and language. It is something I am so excited to begin. He is someone who is full of wonder to me, and whom I care about deeply. I can’t think of anyone I would want to do this kind of work with – and it means I have someone nestled with me as I begin something entirely new.

This is my sea change. 🍃

Sunday Tea Time Tales – part three

Sometimes we all need to fill ourselves up with stories. Sating ourselves with great thirsty, dry-throatedly glorious gulpings of fresh stories and tales. The kind of tales that revive and ignite us; the kind of stories that make their way to our hearts with an unwavering, straight and true line.

I can always tell when I am feeling dull, and in between, lacking in any kind of iridescent lustre. At times like that I don’t really read too much, as though there is nothing new to hear, or say, or think about. And I feel as though I am static like some great lumpen holiday caravan, perched on a cliff, lashed by the prevailing sea and wind to no avail – somehow having lost the ability to be moved, in any way by anything at all.

As awful as those times can be, I have found that there is a weird necessity for that feeling every now and again. A kind of cultural barrenness where all those little things that make us human; our love for art, music, storytelling, cooking, dancing, loving as a way of exploring our own existence and meaning, just aren’t working for us at the present time.

When it does happen, I find that it usually coincides with personal change. Not necessarily the big life-changing moments, but rather just the small yet palpable, though not insignificant, changes in how my life is unfolding. It could be a changing perspective perhaps, even something as simple as a change of season, a change of heart over someone, or something; all of which in their own way have implications for whoever I am at any particular moment.

I have found that the last few months, during the earlier period of lockdown, and quite frankly, throughout this pandemic led year generally, this has been something I have felt as acutely as ever before. As though nothing quite fits as it did before. Not an altogether unsurprising revelation I suppose.

And it appears to be a feeling shared by many others I have spoken to. A feeling that familiar and habitual joys just don’t feel the same. Or, like wearing trainers to church – it didn’t seem quite right, worryingly inappropriate. I felt that reading, just the practice of sitting down to read felt weird. It seemed selfish, or indulgent, to open a book and nuzzle down to read, legs curled up underneath you, when to all intents and purposes a great pandemic was unfolding beyond the kitchen window. As though by sitting down to read I was entirely unaffected by it what was happening all around me.

But slowly that feeling of alienation began to change to change. I felt a rush of hunger for culture again in all its forms, always a good sign for me. It is a way I can tell I am optimistic, engaged, curious, participating. It is a response to feeling alive and looking forward in every way possible.

And perhaps that is needed, in this strange year during a time we are dissociated from so much we are used to, and when we are surrounded by so much fear and loss. Perhaps we need to remember stories and words and ideas as much as ever. Remembering the old stories that comfort us with their eternal truths , listening attentively to the new ones that suggest new pathways ahead. Finding faith and comfort in what they tell us about how to live, and live well in these strange and troubling times.

Recently I had a text message from an old boyfriend who I am planning to meet up with soon ( another story for another time). He asked me how I was, and I told him, quite sincerely, that I was happy because I had a great big pile of books I was looking forward to reading.

And it was true – I was excited about reading all those words stacked up in a lovely long tower of books. And knowing that by opening them I would be lost among other people’s stories, thoughts and ideas. I couldn’t wait to fill up on ideas, and that very specific kind of soul nourishment that reading can give you.

So in lieu of any great little story this week I thought I would just pay homage to the beauty of the concept of a story – and all the forms that a story can come to you – be it from a persons lips, a film, a book, a poem, a photograph, a meal, a painting, the clothes someone wears, anything that speaks of something, no matter what form it takes to do so.

Finally, I just wanted to say that in my twenties I went on a girls holiday to Rhodes. I can remember the two books I took with me to read during that lovely, long uncomplicated week; Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons and a 1970’s bodice ripper that had belonged to my mum called Blake’s Reach. It was all windswept Cornish houses and moody smugglers hiding in caves, while women with flame red hair and emerald green dresses clutched their pearls on cliff tops. It was mesmerising on so many levels!

What I remember from that holiday was how avidly we all read those two novels – passing them along to each other. Blake’s Reach the guilty pleasure of my Mums twenties, had become the guilty pleasure of ours. And proof that a good story is a good story for so many complicated, wonderful unfathomable reasons.

🌿🌿🌿🌿

Sunday Tea Time Tales Part 2

Thank you to everyone that took the time to read my first Sunday Tea Time tales last week. I loved writing it, particularly writing the idea behind it – finding something during the week that had warmed my heart and made me smile.

Without too much unnecessary detail. this week life hasn’t been quite as carefree as the last. As is often the way, quite a few unexpected things have happened all at once. Unsettling news, plans gone awry, decisions to be made and the lurking uneasiness of the pandemic news with that constant very new phenomena of what it feels like trying to balance your life in the midst of one…

Consequently it has been a week where my nights have been heavy with close and uncomfortable dreams; in which houses with many rooms didn’t have enough doors to get out, where unfamiliar surroundings were filled with strange people. All of them followed by mornings where you wake to think, what on Earth was all that about????

With that in mind I felt really insincere almost, writing about something lovely, knowing that my week had largely been anything but. I am no Pollyanna, and nor do I want to tell the kind of stories that suggest I am. I don’t always see the world through a prism of roses and rainbows. My own experiences tells me that sometimes we see rainbows and roses, but in order to see them we need to allow for lots and lots of rain in-between.

But what I do want to praise is the idea of loveliness when it comes along – as fleeting, ephemeral and transitory as it may be. And that it as real as anything else, though our skewed perceptions may often make us think otherwise.

And so with that thought as my inspiration, I began to wonder if writing about good things was a way to make sense of everything else. To actively, however momentarily hold onto the golden threads of those lovely moments, like the strings on a balloon, and really make an effort to take notice of them for what they gave us. What if we are able to remind ourselves that lovely things do and can happen, and that they will always happen. And what we really owe to ourselves is to make the most of them when they do.

Because surely it is these moments that will sustain us through the harder bits that come in between.

So with that in mind when I thought about something to write about that had happened in my week that made me happy, I chose the story below. It isn’t even a story really, just a moment in which the meaning behind it reveals its importance,

Friday afternoons.

So there is something delicious and cosy about the last pick up from school on a Friday afternoon. I love the gathering in of all the book bags and coats and the shredding of school shoes in the porch. I love going inside our home, closing the door with a happy sigh. I love the thought of the weekend stretching ahead like a long yawn. I sleep better on a Friday night than on any other day of week.

Yesterday we picked up my friend Stephen on the way back from school. He is an honouree Grandfather to my daughters’ and a dear friend to me. He is the same age as my Dad ( less than two weeks apart in age) and we have a genuine friendship that defies all logic. It has found common ground across differences of gender, age, culture and religion.

We became friends about ten years ago. I had first moved to Shropshire, having spent over a year living in the wilds of the Scottish borderlands, experiencing a winter like no other. It had been a winter where two foot long icicles hung from doorways and window frames and which never thawed. Where snowdrifts were waist high and not even a bright red lipstick could cheer me up.

The following year, I decided to make the move to Shropshire to take up a job as a housekeeper for a man who lived in a big house. I moved there the following September, into a house that came with the position. I arrived with my two dogs, all my worldly possessions and the deep yearning for a fresh start.

That house I will always remember for it’s small and ineffective fireplace, which smoked continuously, it’s large garden that took me the best part of a Sunday to mow, and mice in the pantry. And it was always very, very cold. Quite often I would wake in the morning to find that the water in my glass had frozen solid during the night.

I was in my thirties during that time and hadn’t yet learnt to drive. I had begun to drive a bit up in Scotland, my then boyfriend hiding his horror, appalled as I crunched the gears on his old Land Rover. I was always terrified, gripping the steering wheel, never moving out of first gear, and never (thankfully) encountering any other vehicles but constantly dodging sheep.

I soon realised having moved into my new home that I really needed to drive. I was in charge of household shopping, and preparing meals in my role as housekeeper, and I lived a fair old way from the shops. My small pedal bike that I cycled everywhere on – comical in its inefficiency, was the only thing I had to get me around at the time. And so, slowly and expensively, I began to learn how to drive properly. The kind of driving that took into account other actual motorists, and changing gear out of first every once in every while.

It was one particular day, when I was feeling really, indulgently sorry for myself, having cycled up a large hill, my bags of shopping clanging ferociously from the handlebars, I found myself telling the lady in the shoe shop all about my troubles. How my driving instructor had told me that I needed more practice hours, and that my parallel parking was shocking. And it was from that conversation that I ended up meeting Stephen And that was how our peculiar but genuine friendship began.

The lady was a friend of Stephen’s and suggested I ring him to ask if he would consider sitting in the car with me as I got in as many practice hours as I could before my instructor put me down for my test. (At that point a prospect so dim it was too depressing to think about). So one cold, snowy winters day, (I had left Scotland and its severe winter to encounter another down in Shropshire no less bleak) I opened the door to a man wearing a thick navy coat, carrying a walking stick, a heavy woolen trilby on his head. He introduced himself, while I shouted at my dog to stop barking (it was very, very unusual for us to have visitors!) and without knowing anything about me, this trusting, slightly bewildered man got into the passenger seat of my first car, and helped me learn to drive through the heart of that winter and well into the following Spring that was yet to come.

Over the last ten years our friendship has stuck and he has become a member of my family. He drives me mad sometimes and he makes me laugh a lot, and he has been there for me in ways that really, truly count. Friends come to you in all kinds of ways and often looking back, at times when you need them most. I think we became friends at a time where individually our lives were making little sense. I see now, looking back, how very, very lonely we both were. And I think it was that shared understanding of being lost, that meant we were able to show compassion towards each other with real and meaningful human warmth. Meeting new friends often brings inevitable personal change; subtle as a leaf but no less important for it, And when they do, the colours they bring to your world can last for a lifetime.

So this Friday, my friend Stephen sat on sofa watching the television with his honouree Granddaughters as I busied myself making tea. The rain began to steadily pour outside and would continue to do so all weekend. But with the fire lit and the curtains closed, and looking at those three humans who I loved, sitting on the sofa eating crisps and watching CBeebies, life felt good.

Sunday Tea Tales

Sunday Tea Tales…. a true story about love, family, community and forgiveness.

🍃On dreaming in a new year. 🍃

It was one of those marvellous half-hours of a lifetime….

This year has arrived amidst incessant rain and some truly horrible news about the many, many ways in which people can truly devastate other human beings. And in that knowledge, I find I can sometimes feel so overwhelmed – trying to acknowledge and understand everything that is going on – but also being aware that sometimes the knowledge of everything that awful can block any capacity for quiet joy that we should all be allowed to experience.

How do I reconcile both?

Last year was a year of endings for me alongside of a growing awareness within me of a desire for change. I spent much of last year quietly folding away the life of my dear friend who had passed away. It was a very new experience for me – as I learnt how to navigate the necessary formality of someone’s death – filling out forms, making telephone calls, scanning documents and sending identification, alongside the delicate process of going through someone’s intimate belongings and deciding what to do with them.

It felt like a year of ghosts and memories; mine and other people’s. And with much of emphasis on the year being about someone passing that it made me take notice of just about everything in my day-to-day life. And what the experience may have shown me about my life in this new year to come.

I thought about friendship, family, home and belonging. I thought about what really matters, and then how to tell that it does when it’s happening to you in that very moment. I thought about courage – and the way you need to be brave to open out your heart and your mind, so that not only do you see what is right for you – but that you are able to embrace it fully, and not let it pass you by.

When I began to write this post earlier, feeling that familiar difficulty in getting started, I felt I needed to find something to pin my feelings to; something that would act as a touchstone for what it was I really wanted to write. I was looking for something that would anchor my feelings into something more resolved. I was looking for guidance.

I had just sat down in my armchair by the fire, and was looking at an old book I have by the Shropshire writer, Mary Webb. She was a writer from this very place I live now, her writing thematically and poetically rooted firmly in the South Shropshire landscape. A place of hills and wildness and an other worldly atmosphere she captures so beautifully.

The book was her posthumously published writings, an incomplete novel and some short stories and I began to read one I hadn’t read before. And suddenly, there it was, the words I had been to describe what I had been looking for.

“It was one of those marvellous half-hours of a lifetime, which blossoms on…”

I wanted to experience half-hours of gentle beauty that softly shone like light bouncing off copper pans, or to feel as warm as the late noon sun on a long, fine day. I want to moments of feeling like I am coming home and that home is a safe and beautiful and sacred thing. I want to find someone who makes me feel like coming home. Safe and warm and right.

And there it is the answer to my question. I don’t strive for a perfect life or want to push away, or be in denial to the harsher and crueller aspects of what it means to be human and to be alive.

Instead I am just shining my light towards those ‘marvellous half-hours of a lifetime’ bringing them towards me and my little family with an open heart and arms.