Loving the world back to life

This is a newsletter for my paid supporters with a preview for all my subscribers. If you enjoy my writing please consider upgrading your subscription for £4/month or £40/year. You can cancel at any time though I always appreciate your commitment over time, as I offer mine to you. I offer a blend of creative reflection and contemplation, solace, mindful travel inspiration, rune and card readings, and occasional flash fiction and poems. My most recent book is Weathering on geology and therapy. My first book Grounded is an illustrated guide to nature connectedness. I also have a new multi-disciplinary art chapbook called CONDUIT available now in hardcopy and digital version. Thank you for your continued support.

COMING UP THIS MONTH: HEAVY BODY GONG

For anyone local-ish to Derbyshire, I am doing an in-person creative movement-sound session on Saturday 13th June 6.30-8pm at Florence Nightingale Memorial Hall nr Matlock, where we will be exploring our ‘heavy bodies’ (gravity and bones and all that good stuff!) before letting them get super heavy against the ground as you’re carried off to the heavy sound of the gong! A sound immersion with a gravitational twist and pull. Think geological sound with a bit of deep time embodiment. Booking now.

This weekend just gone, I attended a movement intensive with Linda Hartley exploring EarthBody Dreaming; a process through which we can come to embody more deeply our relationship to the Earth, and to explore what is needed for the healing and restoration of both our own body and that of our home planet. The workshop was in her small garden studio, and I stayed nearby on a tiny patch of family land along a quiet stretch of the north Norfolk coast. This allowed me to extend the embodied research we were doing in the daytime as an intimate group of 5, into a series of early morning and late evening ‘solitudes’ that gave me space to integrate what I was learning. Every day I woke for sunrise, had a swim, and then spent the first few hours of the day in quietness before the workshop began. Every evening I returned to swim again as the moon got fuller and the tide higher before sleeping with the van windows and side door open so that I could feel the breeze and hear the sea. I call it swimming, but it was dancing. Fluid body meeting fluid body.

I had a revelatory time on the workshop. While the type of work we did intensively from 10 till 6 every day was very familiar to me, this time and with this group I was able to slip into a deeper and more trusting presence with the others, that I would ordinarily find quite hard. This time I yielded to the process and let my vulnerabilities be felt. Indeed, as we named the personal bodily symptoms we wanted to research over the weekend, as well as those planetary issues pressing on us, I found myself crying easily with others, ‘strangers’, for the first time in a very long while. No coincidence perhaps that the 20 year anniversary of Dad’s sudden death and the workshop were in the same week. My much younger self was present all weekend.

If the easy presence and vulnerability I shared with others in the small group was itself somewhat revelatory, then so too was the pace and nature of the whole weekend which from beginning to end, unrolled in such an attentive and intentional way that as soon as I got home I felt its invigorating power manifest in all of my one-to-one work this week, helping me listen better, attune better, and reconnect with my embodied capacity for the deep relational work. There was no ‘new’ magic to any of the weekend of course – mainly it was a lot of moving into different systems of the body, Authentic Movement (AM), witnessing and reflective dialogue in pairs and as a group – and yet put together in such a peaceful and respectful way, combined with my daily sea dances and meditation and lengthy lunch breaks listening to the garden bees and birds, all of it was magic. It was a necessary answer too, to one of the questions I took into the weekend: what has happened to sacredness in the world?