The Woven Hour

A soft murmur rose in the room a sound of feminine recognition. Somewhere deep in our bones, we knew these tales, as though the ancient memory of an archetypal fairy tale lived within us all. Yet beneath the sweetness of romance, something else stirred. I could feel it waiting, almost trembling, the moment when the spell would break. For as the veil of enchantment slips away, the shadows and wounds that have been waiting in silence come alive - tender, raw, painfully real.

This is the crossing point, the beginning of a deeper journey: the call to grow up, to wake up, to turn towards the truth of who I am. And so, in our small circle of women, week by week, we found ourselves moving gently but inevitably toward the shadows. In sharing stories of birthing our children, of loving and losing, of our relationships with their fathers, we came to the threshold where the unspoken waited. Slowly, with courage, we began to give voice to the darker currents - the ache, the loss, the struggle. To speak them aloud, and to have them witnessed, became its own kind of healing.

Council House Life

“Where does the money go, for God’s sake? We can’t pay the rent or the bloody bills.”

Josh looked at me calmly, almost dreamily.
“Oh, I bought a saxophone and a couple of Reggae albums. It’s OK. We can make it up next month.”

My chest tightened. “Yeah, you always say that… but we never do.”

I hated the endless rows, the same weary circle of anger, shame, and exhaustion. I hated how it left me feeling like a bad person – sharp-tongued, critical, full of rage. There was this knot inside me, black and stagnant, just waiting to burst. The smallest thing would set me off, and I’d wonder, Am I going mad?

We weren’t drinking it away, or gambling it, or wasting it on drugs. But still, the money seemed to vanish. And I was the one forever watching, worrying, calculating how to stretch it just enough to pay rent, keep the lights on, and put food on the table. Josh was so laid back, as if life would always catch him gently. Meanwhile, I was wound tight, my face etched with frown lines when I looked in the mirror.

We were such an odd pair. My own childhood, full of shadows and closets and too much pain to face. His, behind the stone walls of a posh boarding school, with all the repression and strange, half-spoken wounds he carried from it. Two broken histories trying to build a life together.

The car was broken down again. Josh had promised he’d fix the brakes while I was working at the café. But when I bumped my moped up onto the kerb that evening and stepped into the kitchen, the light glowing warm against the fading day, the job was still untouched.

I snapped.
He shrugged.
And I retreated into my little room, my sanctuary – the place where scraps of fabric and paints and thread made a sort of breathing space. I slumped in the chair, heavy with frustration, yet softened by the bright yellow frame of the window, by the oak leaves shimmering fresh and green outside. Spring was arriving, whether we were ready or not.

Why is money always the monster in the room? I thought. Maybe if I took his wage packet, I could keep things in balance, keep us afloat. But the truth was, I was already drowning in worry, hating myself for being so sharp, so moody, so relentlessly on edge.

A calling and a forgetting

And then – as life does – it kept circling round. The same conversations, the same fights, the same exhaustion. Until finally, in the fierce fire-sign way of my Aries heart, I walked out. Not with much of a plan. Not really thinking about consequences. Just gone.

Josh didn’t fight it. He drifted into agreement, offering to help with the girls when he could. I found us a council house in York – me, Hannah at eight, and little Magdalene, still only two.

Yorkshire skies stretched wide above me, and I walked the moors with their raw, open beauty. But the land never felt like home. The people spoke straight, blunt words that cut to the quick. I kept trying to find my ground – taking driving lessons, juggling work, raising the girls.

I’ll never forget that first driving instructor, Mr. Hardgrave – his very name sounded like a warning. A hard grave indeed, with his downturned mouth and squinty eyes that refused to meet mine. He tutted and sighed, drumming impatience on the dashboard. A shadow of my stepfather’s sharp disapproval.

One day in Malton, with the car stalled in the middle of a one-way system and his temper spilling out, he shouted at me, smacking the dashboard. Something in me snapped wide open.

I leapt out, ran round to his side, flung open his door.
“Your face makes me want to be sick! Just drive me home. Your sighing and tutting would make anyone fail!”

He was stunned into silence. And for once, I felt a wild freedom in speaking what had always been swallowed down.

Back at home, I slammed the door, burst into tears in the kitchen. And yet – something had shifted.

That story flashed through my mind in a few timeless minutes. I listened to my friends, the other women in our circle who were sharing their stories of a dissatisfaction within their relationships with their partners or husbands – a feeling of not having a life of their own, some sort of separation where they stopped communicating, stopped having sex and eventually wondered who they were with and who they were other than being a mother.

Later, in circle with other women, listening to their stories – how they felt cut off from their partners, lost in motherhood, starved of intimacy and voice – I recognised myself. That ache of disconnection. That longing for a life of my own.

The council house, the broken car, the endless counting of coins – they were part of my story. But beneath them, there was also a calling. A remembering and a forgetting. A slow, stumbling journey back toward myself.

Spirit of Council says – ‘a field of awareness is always here – behind every thinking dualistic mind. The Council form opens a doorway between and within all as a circle where you drop into the group as a wholeness - a Peace that is in all of you behind your conditioning.’