Category: Blog

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.

My healing room in my garden

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…

Me and my daughters’

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. 🍃

gathering together, staying in & letting go.

IMG_1540.JPG

Happy New Year and hello to January of 2018.

I have been quiet for some time on my blog now. I have struggled these past two months or so, with a really difficult feeling of not knowing what to write, feeling awkward writing anything, and just experiencing a disquieting eerieness about the whole situation. I never usually have trouble writing, even if its just lines in my diary. I find the process soothing, and for me, a way of making sense of my days. So to be stuck in the middle of an unwelcome and bewildering silence has made me lose my confidence a little.

To be honest, writing now, feels like that first clumsy and stiff morning on your first day back at school from a long summer holiday; when you find yourself holding a new pencil in your hand, and it feels as though you are holding a plank of wood between your fingers.

The ideas and thoughts for this post, therefore, have come from that sense of alienation and worry I experienced, feeling a little lost without the words to express what I was thinking about, and in truth, not having any clarity of thought anyway. A combination of Christmas, the Winter Solstice, New Year and the enevitable quietness of January have all given me some time for reflection. And perhaps, afterall, that is what I have needed. Perhaps I just need to start from the beginning again.

IMG_1376.JPG

Coincidentally I have also spent most of this new year thinking and reflecting. I have been following a process called the January Book. Devised by the sylist and writer Hannah Bullivant (I found out about it via her amazing instagram account, and her beautiful website, which you can find at http://www.seedsandstitches.com), it is a way of outlining plans for your coming year by focusing on key areas of your life, dividing them into catergories such as family, career, finances and home, and by a process of reflecting on those areas, making a sustainable plan for the year ahead.

And in addition, we have been having a little more renovation to our home (from having a door made for the bathroom, where previously there was none) to having a partition wall put up between the living room and the sunroom (a rather grand term for what really is a little extension with a perspex roof) It has meant a lot of noise, a lot of mud and mess, and a feeling of being completely overwhelmed at having to tidy up ready for the next day, and not knowing where to begin.

But most of all I am really starting to notice a gathering change in my two little girls, as they are growing up from babies to little toddlers, and it is this realisation that has had the biggest emotional effect on me overall. I have loved every moment of them being babies – and the poignant reminder that if my IVF treatment hadn’t been succesful I would never have been able to experience any of it, has made it even more so.

And it is there I suspect all the answers to my wordless stories lie. Being quiet was neccesary for some thinking, and all my thinking was about change – and in reflecting on change, I began to see that it was all about letting go.

IMG_0957

About love and memory….

img_0718.jpg

There is something about glitter on home made Christmas cards that makes me feel safe and warm. Trying to describe it to you now, it feels like this: I catch a half glimpse of a half-memory; the contents of  small tubes of brightly coloured glitter – silver, red, green and gold – pouring out onto a blank piece of paper, to be made into a card, possibly to be given to my Mum and Dad.

I have also woven other elements into this vignette. A window, outside of which leaves of gold swirl in the mist. A warm radiator. An anticipated thought that I will be wearing a woollen scarf later when I go outside. There is also a larger sense of family somewhere. Belonging to people. Home. Whispered children’s breath misting up a window pane. Fingertips making steamy circles on the warmed up glass.

This particular memory comes back to me every year in early Autumn. Its arrival feels like welcoming an old friend, ‘Ah, there you are, come and have a seat at my table.’ I am aware it is nostalgia but it doesn’t really matter. It is a memory.  Through memory and imagining, Autumn has become a falling cascade of glitter and leaves. Who wouldn’t want to remember that?

But It isn’t just the glitter and the leaves that make me feel this way. As I grow older, memories of warmth and safety become infused with ideas of love and morality, decency and goodness. All these truths inform my world, by wrapping themselves around it like a cloak made of velvet. At times when you are faced with uncertainty and unpredictability, these are the beacons that can guide you home to your soul.

So what exactly are these truths? For me, like those small tubes of glitter, they are often little things and in themselves, perhaps nothing much at all.  A line from a book. A poem. A letter weathered from being unfolded and read many times over. Music. A kind gesture from someone that you return to again and again, possibly only realising its significance to you much later on. Kindness. Kindness. Kindness.  These all contribute towards a much greater picture, a living memory that chimes by your side, as a kind of compass reminding you of who you are, or even a guide back towards the person who you want to be.

And perhaps after all – the lessons we should learn about memories and love are really quite simple after all. If we think of them as touchstones and totems by which we can measure our present and future selves. By being grateful for the things that have touched us and by what we choose to remember with love.

Friends, sisters and Social Media

img_3354.jpg

 

I would love to have had a sister….

One of the things I loved most when I discovered I was expecting twin girls, was the thought that they would always have each another. From the very beginning, sharing a womb together, then when they were born, those first few days of being swaddled together in one blanket; their little noses pressed against one another.

When the nurse first came to me after they were born, she asked if I wanted them in separate cots. But I knew I wanted them to be kept together, it didn’t seem right to separate them so quickly and so decisively, with no discernible reason as to why it would need doing. I remember one night when Eliza was crying, I watched as Florence put her hand instinctively into Eliza’s mouth, and let her suck her fingers for comfort. It was the most beautiful thing I had seen and told me so much about how these two girls felt. in separate cots, there would have been little opportunity for them to comfort one another.

A year and a half later and they no longer share a cot, but each have their own, side by side with one another still. . They can see each other, and I often hear them gurgling and cooing to one another, after I have left the room and tiptoed away. On waking, they always give each other a big smile and a kiss. These small gestures fill me with hope for the kind of bond they will have between them. Be loving, I whisper to them. Be loving, and be kind.

 

***

Sisters and friends…

When I was about 10 years old I had a notebook I carried around with me, and I would ask people to write things in it, poems, or doodles, drawings, elaborate signatures… I think I was looking for wisdom, back then, collecting folklore from people, and building up stories that people told me.  It was my Dad, who wrote a little verse that has stuck in my head ever since. This is it

Make new friends but keep the old

Some in silver 

Some in gold

At the time I remember him explaining that as we move through our life we meet, and make friends, with new and different people along the way. Some of them, the silver one’s, burn brightly and stay with us for awhile. Others, those in gold, stay by our sides, golden and eternal. It was something I desperately needed to hear at the time, I was being horribly bullied and desperately lonely at school. I wanted a friend, a best friend. It was something I asked my Mum all the time, when will I have a best friend? Having two daughters now, it breaks my heart a little to think of the little me that felt so lonely and wanted to make friends.

Fast forward a few years to a sixteen year old version of myself, with hennaed hair and Doc Martin boots; wearing White Musk by the Body Shop and obsessed with The Cure. I went to college and met my friend! A tall, graceful, curly haired girl with boots and thick black tights. I remember the toilets being flooded and feet sploshing in half a foot of water, we started talking – discovering in lightning quick time, as you are able to do at that age, that we had both been to Glastonbury and had lots and lots more in common.

That friendship was, and remains, the most important and cherished of my life so far. In my friendship I found all the things I was so desperate to find as a young girl – someone to share my secrets with, someone to laugh with and to talk about make up and boys with. And over the years we did just that. We grew up together, I guess,  and no matter in which direction either of us went, we always managed to stay in the parallel lanes; we could always follow and appreciate each others path.

So when, in our early thirties our friendship came to a startling and bewildering halt, it felt like all the certainties I had carried around with me, in terms of who I was and what I would be, were suddenly all changed. I no longer had my best friend and that isolation felt particularly poignant when I came to be a Mum.

I was very lucky to meet a wonderful circle of women who all had babies at the same time as me. The support I got from these women during those long, but oddly blissful nights of the first few months was fantastic. Late night, what’s app messages, where we shared fears, and questions and asked for advice from one another. Without a partner, it was so important for me to have these women who gave me confidence and encouraged me. And it also occurred to me how these late night messages, shared in real time between women, was a relatively new and hugely meaningful mode of communication. It made me think of the real loneliness I had heard mothers sometimes speak of, feeling unsure, bewildered and having no one to turn to, or to ask for advice and support. We were able to call on each other, and to speak across the silences of our little rooms, nursing our babies, and ask one another ‘am I doing this right?’

Sisters and Social Media

Since then, I have actively sought out on-line support from a circle of on-line women, who I have found, and who I am able to gather experience, advice, inspiration and encouragement from. I have discovered amazingly beautiful blogs, fabulous Instagram accounts with great content, that are both inspiring and creative. These mediums, offer women, who don’t necessarily have that real life sister, best friend, mother or mother-in-law close by, a wonderful circle of sisters to learn from.

And with that, I have to say a big thank you to the following ladies who have been such a support to me over these last few months. Their online presence has meant a lot.

 

Home

(a lovely, genuine kind, funny mum of two – you can find her on her website/blog, Instagram and YouTube)

http://www.seedsandstitches.com/

(A wonderfully creative and inspiring blog and also brilliant Instagram account)

Home

(A thoughtful, inspiring, nurturing and ethical blog and Instagram account lady)

thatyogamum

(A totally amazing, supportive yoga teacher, who believes passionately in supporting mums and women, generally. Great Instagram account too).

 

 

 

 

Rituals, celebrations and every day.

 

13BC20C2-07CE-463F-849D-00C6B20BAC1F

 

We will soon be moving into our new home. The three of us together. These last few months have been a funny time ~ packing up, throwing out, sorting, discovering, discarding and making. Moving home is such a strange and unsettling thing. I have moved house more times than I care to mention. Some have been so unremarkable in their happening that I hardly remember them at all. Others have involved long distances and new countries. Leaving one home tore my heart open and took me a very long time to get over, so much so that I still dream of it. A kind of childhood Manderlay, unchanged and welcoming.

Having experienced moving so many times, it seems from experience and reflection, that the reason it unsettles and bothers us, is because in the packing of our things, it is as if we are literally dissembling our carefully built world we have spent so long spinning and gathering around ourselves. Now it is time we transfer and transform our new worlds into our new homes, and we do so knowing that we cannot help but be changed in the process of it. It is that change which is both unsettling and exciting, New beginnings, but which one? And who will we become because of it?

This move is different in many ways. I am now a home owner, swapping the fluctuating, precariously fragile world of house renting for something more responsible, more stable but daunting nonetheless. Gone are the days of gathering friends, and sometimes strangers to share with, making little families out of people you don’t really know. I know, with a deep sigh, that I will be able to find that sense of rootedness, which I have wanted for so long. To know that I won’t need to be on the move, unless it is of our choosing.

So, with all that in mind, I have been thinking about what kind of family life we will have in the house. what kind of family we will be. How we will we mark our days, how we will carve out the celebrations, occasions and the everyday of our family home. I think it will be about building our identities and weaving our memories. it will be the story of becoming us.