It’s the end of winter, and out here amid farm and woodland it’s a time of visibility. Not of the animal wildlife perhaps, but of the structure. Manmade or deer trod, run by fox or badger, while there’s few leaves and brambles to cover them up it’s easy to see crumbled stone walls and structures, and maybe even older pathways, that simply disappear in the more verdant months.

This feels like a shared experience. I’ve certainly spent the winter facing my own internal paths and structures. Some of them are worth saving, and some quite interesting to take a look at, but honestly most of them have reached the end of their useful life and fully deserve to be retired off to be quietly consumed by the land. That part - much to my relief - does not feel as if it applies to me.

I’ll be 63 in a few weeks. Sixty. Three. I’m not even a little bit of a fan of generational or age group labels [because they’re absolute nonsense] but according to some I am right on the very edge of “middle aged” or, as it’s been dressed up lately, “midlife”. Personally, I think 60-65 is pushing it as the end of midlife, as none of us will make 130, but I am finally feeling the reality of an era shift.

It’s not that I’ve been clinging to my long lost youth or insisting that 60 is the new 40 (it so isn’t, it’s not even the new 50), I have no interest in that. I think visibly ageing is profoundly beautiful in the true sense of the word, not the Male Gaze interpretation. However, I am seeing that a subconscious part of me had simply not read the memo about acknowledging the imminent life change. On some level I was sorta, kinda expecting just to be exactly the same, with maybe a slightly more demanding maintenance plan. Me, but with added kettle bells. This is most certainly not the case.

Change hits hard when you go through menopause (+/- a few years). I’m about eight years on the other side. That experience of becoming a new version of myself felt gradual. Incredibly difficult, but it happened over time. This move into elderhood (I’m attaching no worldly wisdom to that word) feels abrupt. End of a line. Being me, is suddenly and entirely different.

The thing is, whilst I’m clear on what it no longer is, I have little insight into what it will be. This winter, and its clear views of old structures and pathways, has shown me what needs to be left behind, while what’s to come is still in the mist. The last few weeks have felt like a crash course in What To Expect When You’re [Still] Existing.

Because me, I noticed/invented a pattern. The thoughts I was thoughting all began with the letter C, and awareness of this helped me keep going. And because I feel all this is a common experience and my take might help someone get a few steps ahead, I’ll show you…

Choices
I’m not one for regrets but I get close sometimes. Younger me made some spectacularly bad choices. I understand now that I lacked guidance, support, a neurotypical brain, maturity, and an openness to advice. I also had some lousy luck at times. Mostly I just made poor, short-sighted, dopamine-hunting choices. I understand, I don’t regret, but here come the…

Consequences
For decades life felt like an endless feast of choices, and my little in-the-moment self wasn’t hearing the ticking beneath all of them. I’m aware that I just described youth, not a personality flaw, but - and here’s a complimentary c word - Chickens always come home to roost. At this point, we (because I’m married to someone who had a similar decision-making practice) are living with the consequences. We’ve done okay, and we built a life and family we love, relatively late in life but, for example, we are not on solid financial ground by any means. In our 60s. I am, however, now…

Conscious
The wake-up calls tend to avalanche once they start. If you’re around my age, you’ll have your own organ recital to run through, along with noises about assorted joints and hinges that aren’t what they were. A big milestone for me was losing my father, who was 87. To get to 59 with both parents still alive is a blessing denied to many, and I simply had no concept of either of them not being here. Nor of that cranking up of the conveyor belt where, chronologically, I’m now second in line to the big drop. The eldest child of two eldest children. To become suddenly aware of the fact that not only do you not have forever but you don’t necessarily even have very long - and years seem to be rattling past like a bullet train - is sobering. For me, combined with some “health challenges” as we like to call them, this kicked off extreme anxiety. What I’d found, it took me a while to realise, was…

Constraints
All the “too late”s, and the “not now”s and the “not enough”s. I’ve come across Creative Constraint theory which proposes that (simple version:) limiting choices can kickstart creativity and so be a positive thing. That’s been proven true. But in this context, it seemed like a consolation prize. No thanks. The constraints got me agitated and felt like a straitjacket. The anxiety returned and I had to face that what I was yearning for was…

Certainty
But we can’t know when our time is up, or the shape that the end of this life will take. Personally, I’m a big fan of the Simply Not Waking Up After A Walk On The Beach And A Cracking Good Dinner With My Loved Ones approach. Shocking all who knew me because I was in such great shape and hadn’t had so much as a cold in years. And gosh, look how organised and decluttered my entire life was, making everything exceedingly simple for those who’ll have to tidy up after me.

What???

Fortunately, it hasn’t taken me too long to understand that no amount of, well, anything is going to give me certainty. Nothing I learn, do, eat, lift, earn or believe will give me a time, date and circumstance and for that, I realised, I am grateful. Can you even imagine knowing? I mean, outside the kind of circumstances where a person needs the freedom to decide the moment of their departure. Dunno about you, but I’d lose my tiny, sparkly mind.

Still with me? Good because here’s the happy bit.

I’ve tried to shoehorn in a C word here but it doesn’t work and I don’t care. The sun just came out for the first time in days and it feels like that’s all I need to light the way.

What’s come next, after all that thinking - which may read as depressing but, for me, it actually hasn’t been, is a revelation. Liberation, even. I’d expected to become resigned to some kind of diminished existence that was still nice’n’all, but not the same. As if that’s a bad thing.

Spoiler alert: it’s not.

I’d been prepping myself to surrender, and accept a loss of experiencing Life. To knowing that choices were gone, and only consequences remained. Some bad, some good, oh well. Instead I found that something new was stirring in me. Something unfamiliar. Mentally, I keep spinning around to catch it, this strange new voice at my shoulder, and I’ve still yet to actually see what it is. I just know that it’s there. New. Possibly, dare I say it, exciting?

What I do feel sure of is that unless I truly leave behind “midlife”, I’m going to really miss out. I’m not middle-aged anymore so I can’t have that, and unless I, oh go on then…

Commit
to trusting the next stage, I won’t have that either. If I commit, despite not knowing what it is I’m signing up for, I have the strongest hunch it may be the best bit yet. Sounds ridiculous, I know. Anything could happen! It could all turn to absolute [let’s go with] Crap but for the first time in my life, I’m ready to close my eyes and jump. Heart pounding.

I should perhaps circle back to...

Choices
If we have them, we are exceptionally lucky. I never forget this. To age is a privilege and I will take whatever it wants to give me. I don’t want to be young. Pain-free would be good but I can manage. I don’t want to have to deal with the insanity aimed at women younger than me, I’d rather be a safe place for them to come to. I want to treasure everything and everyone I still have. I want to explore what Spirit means to me without restraint and protect it. I want to be a fierce, hilarious, loving, splendid old lady.

I suspect I may have been born for it.

In the brief, blue-skied and sunny days we had last week, I took myself back to our local woodland. It’s literally just across the lane and through a tiny paddock, a hop over a stream and there you are. Small - probably only five acres or so, and this time of year is one of the only periods when you can walk around freely. There are snowdrops beneath the old, old oaks; almost bluebells and wood anemone, but the brambles and nettles are still only ankle high. If you’re lucky, you’ll walk beneath circling buzzards, and alongside a roe deer. This week there were butterflies too.

There’s been a lot of questions in this eternally hyperactive mind of mine and sometimes the best thing I can do is ask for guidance. This wood has a real personality, and I kept getting the feeling I should go and seek its advice.

I’ve had times when I’ve gone walking in there and felt strongly that I wasn’t welcome. At all. All I could do was turn on my heel and leave without arguing. But at the moment, the atmosphere is airy, clear and if there were doors, they’d be open. The kettle would be on. It feels like there are fairies.

There’s a fallen tree - one of many - to sit on that catches the sun mid-morning. It’s near the far edge, and gives an open view across almost the whole wood while the trees are still leafless. So I sit, close my eyes, tune in, and ask. At first, nothing happens - my connection points maybe got a little damp over winter - but I persevere. Respectfully, I wait. And wait.

As I open my eyes I “see” her. A hare, facing half away from me, her head turned to make eye contact. I can see something sparkling on her forehead; some kind of gemstone...ruby?

This kind of seeing is difficult to explain. My eyes are open and observing the place in front of me - a sunlit patch in spring woodland - but I’m also looking with some other part of me, that sees the hare. Invisible but visible. Not there, but totally there. She’s wise and beautiful and older than old. Ancient in fact, though vital, and part of this piece of land. She’ll simply merge back into it when she’s had enough of me.

I’ve been back and waited for her three times now, and each time she’s shown up and yes, answered my question.

Yesterday morning when I went into the garden with my cat, a group of jackdaws (no doubt of the many who roost in these same woods at night) flew overhead, circled, and I swear made the outline of a hare’s head - the long ears! - for a moment in the sky, before heading off into their day.

There’s a part of me that instantly scoffs at that image but I’m serving it eviction papers. It is no longer welcome. It’s neither truthful or useful, it’s just old programming from people who have never had a conversation with a bejewelled hare.

I have.

Today, in this place, the sun rose at 07:17 and will set at 17:30; a whole 10 hours and 13 minutes of daylight. At last, despite the almost constant rain, it feels as if we’re on our way up.

This winter has not been easy, has it? The global horrors gather weight and pace daily, and the darker months here in northern Europe can lower the resilience of the human heart, be that in matters universal or individual. Personally, I hit emotional black ice at Christmas and took a while to steer clear. Then I got the virus that’s floored a good many of us. Joyful. But today, we have those 10 hours and 13 minutes; snowdrops and crocuses are everywhere; there are glimpses of early blossom on hedgerow trees, and I feel a presence above ground in the garden and surrounding fields, where for a while there was just the silence of sleeping spirits. It’s just a beginning, but a beginning that’s powerfully uplifting.

Time spent indoors, deep in thought, has led me to some decisions and realisations. I’ve felt a strong urge to simplify my approach to everything. Pare it all down to an essence, and then make that beautiful without draping it in figurative bells and whistles. I love words, and can so easily get carried away with them (I see you, my Gemini moon) that I have often fallen into ‘style over substance’ territory. I want to stop that. I want to stop having wonderful ideas that I’m incapable of carrying out. That’s the basic plan for 2026 (alien invasion/Godzilla/comet impact permitting).

I wrote a new About page as I was cutting and editing and refreshing. As ever, I’m attempting to rein in my feral attention, and focus on a few precious things - this is my life’s work!

I hope you’re feeling a little lighter too, whatever that looks like for you. I’ll write again when I have something interesting to say; that may be in a week, maybe two or even three. I know your inbox has more than enough to be getting on with, so I’ll sign off on this brief check-in.

May the path rise up to meet you,

Jo
x

Solstice “hit different” this year. In the past, I’ve acknowledged it, enjoyed its existence, considered it more of an end of year celebration than Christmas (even though I enjoy our secular Christmas a lot), but 2025 feels like the first Solstice I’ve actually experienced.

There was no conscious decision, but as the light hours got shorter, so did our days. We go to bed early anyway by most people’s standards, but at the bottom of the year we’ve been turning in at 8pm, waking at 5-6am and taking the day’s start very slowly.

Of an evening we eat early - again, a habit we hold to all year round - and then it’s been curtains drawn, fire lit, a lamp on low setting, a blanket if needed (our home is very, very old and not made of straight lines and sealed spaces) and we’re settled in for a couple of hours escapism into stories; usually on the television but stories all the same.

We’d been shaking our heads at this. Complaining about old we’re getting; how tiiiiiired we are, and how unproductive our evenings seem to be. It was only yesterday that it occurred to me that actually, we’re doing winter in NE Europe pretty well. Our 20/21 Century conditioning may tell us we’re supposed to be milking every hour for action, production and “results”, but our human bodies want warmth, food, entertainment, red light, close company, and rest. I only hope it’s been an investment in ourselves.

Right now, it’s hard to tell. The “pause of the sun” at Solstice had me stop also. It went on for some days and honestly, I’m still one foot in it. That sneaky little blighter, Grief got me in the back of the knees on Christmas morning. She’s busy around the holidays, right? Before I’d managed to expand around that feeling, world events kicked off again and something changed in me. I’m not trying to be dramatic, I genuinely feel like a line was crossed, a portal was walked through, an era ended - there’s all sorts of analogies to be used. Whichever one I go with, the upshot is that I changed and I can’t change back. The line was swept, the portal was closed, the era is done.

I had words for 2026 before this event (because it has been An Event), but I need to change them. I think now I’m going with Disillusion and Grief. Yep, I’m owning them. I’m welcoming them in. These sisters are grown-ups. Plain-talking, wise and fascinating. They come bearing gifts I never thought I’d receive but as yet we speak different languages. It’s a learning curve that will probably, hopefully, continue to curve forever.

While I pay attention to them and our communication, I temporarily have less energy for other things. 2025-Me had capital P Plans. So do I, but they’re different. Smaller, more precious, even the ones about how I spend my time online. Can we talk social media..?

I want my Instagram back. Our Instagram. Remember that? I understand and respect that for a lot of people, it’s been a brilliant shop window for their businesses. And as long as I’ve chosen to walk past that window, I’ll happily do so on the daily. I’m even open to some suggestions of other people to follow. Some. Not hundreds. Relentlessly. Give me peace. No, the Instagram I want back is the one where the grid came first. I have been - and will probably continue to be, tbh - a serial (ab)user of Stories but I do wish I could turn them off and just have the grid again. With pictures and daily thoughts or updates from my friends and online acquaintances; people whose work I admire; places I’d like to visit. There are new platforms trying to recreate that but unless they can magically lift all my people over there too, I’m not going. I know how ridiculous that is but post-portal me is even more unapologetic than the old version. Sorry not sorry.

You’ll’ve seen news stories about the farmers who refused to sell. While all their neighbours sold up and moved to be nearer the kids, these guys give all offers a hard nope and vow to stay on their land. Fast forward a few months and the drone shot shows an old stone farmhouse, some fields, livestock and crops (y’know…just the stuff of Life, no biggie) surrounded by roads and housing blocks.

That’s going to be me on my Instagram grid. Old skool. Just for a bit, to see how it feels. If you’re there, keep an eye open, drop by, say hello. If you’re also doing a peaceful protest and staying put, I’ll look out for your chimney smoke and make sure we’re in touch.

Joking aside, the small stuff is all I can do right now. You’ve probably been here, because you are also human, alive and aware. When you’re having All The Feelings All The Time but you don’t want to just crash out and escape, I think the only way is to keep the processing small and careful.

While looking for some wisdom that could help me, I was - and continue to be - grateful to Past-Me for her habit of buying books and stashing them for later, like an educated squirrel with a bank card and access to Hazelnut Prime. On my shelf I rediscovered Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Recognising this masterpiece to be just what I need, I went looking for the man himself on a podcast. I found him on [the highly recommended] How to Survive the End of the World (hosted by Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown). On being asked, during his introduction, how he was feeling, Francis replied, “I am upright, and I’m glad to be here.”

Me too, I thought. Me too. And took a small step forward.

I’ve been thinking of spiritual practice less as a calling and more as a craft. Less the gazing into the flame than it is the building of the fire. Something you learn with your hands as much as your heart, through repetition, mistakes, and a fair bit of sanding down rough edges. The places where I ‘practice this practice’ are mostly (not always) outdoors: a quiet walk, whispering to plants, dawn-watching in the garden, sitting under a tree. It’s the small, daily effort to remember I’m part of something that’s bigger, and exquisitely alive. Mostly it’s just showing up with interest, and a willingness to try again. To re-approach an idea, or an inspiration that woke me at three in the morning.

My years as an amateur field researcher in eco-spirituality have shaped me not in any way into an expert, but always a curious participant. I try things, I watch what happens, I keep notes, and I frequently forget something that doesn’t settle in my bones. Whatever happens, I want to write about it, because that’s part of the craft too: experimenting, sharing, and letting go of what doesn’t quite sing.

So I keep turning up to the tools, as it were. Some days practice feels flow-y, other days it’s all splinters and hammered thumbs. Quite often there’s simply no time. But that’s the nature of craft, isn’t it? You keep shaping, sanding, and learning the grain. What I make won’t be perfect, or ancient, or particularly fashionable, but it will eventually work. A piece of lived devotion, shaped by experience, and possessing beauty. Maybe that’s what we’re made to offer: our own small, handmade contribution to the ongoing work of being human in a living world.

Right now, my mood can be tetchy. I’ve just completed a multi-month taper off an anti-anxiety medication that I’d been taking for two years. Even doing it slowly, the side effects are real, both physically and emotionally. I’m feeling everything, everywhere, all at once. I’m deeply frustrated with the human world, including myself. This helps no one, so what do I do?

First, as someone once said, ”Never trust a bad feeling that hits when you’re indoors or sitting down.” It may be clunky but damn if it isn’t the actual truth. So I’ll start there - get outdoors and move.

My second step will be to get near natural water. I’m a couple of hours’ drive from the coast, but the stream below our garden will very much do the job. Right now, there are many local fields that look like small lakes, thanks to the heavy rain.

Third is to breathe. I’m a chronic shallow breather who always scoffed at the idea of breathwork until I tried it. Now I love it, but I forget all about it until my shoulders are up by my ears and my nerves are on fire. That would be now.

So that’s my work for this week. Incredibly simple, undoubtedly life-changing. If you’re feeling similarly twitchy, maybe there’s something in there for you too.

I promised myself that I’d publish a weekly post, for eight consecutive weeks, er…eight weeks ago, and here we are. On the solstice last year, I went with Charlie down to the hospital because he wasn’t feeling quite right (seven months after having a stent fitted). He stayed there and I came home. We cancelled Christmas and New Year because he spent them on a ward, and started 2025 with triple bypass surgery, not coming home until January 9th. This year, I’m/we’re feeling the emotional resonance of that more strongly than I expected (no doubt also contributing to my antsy mood), in a good way. A slightly wobbly good way. It feels like the right time to take a break, take stock, be grateful, happy and celebratory, then come back in the new year. I’ve got lots to talk about and I want to take a moment to organise it all in my head.

Yeah, I know. As if.

However you spend the next couple of weeks, I wish for you peace, presence and love. Be that up close, or at a comfortable distance. You choose.

Today, I sat outside and respectfully asked if anyone had a message for me. Listening for a response is something I do almost automatically now but I thought I’d try putting it in writing. And to rediscover that process is, in itself, useful because I have to slow down, observe, feel, name. For me, it’s a somatic practice.

Smell

This morning, out here among farmed fields and pasture, it’s distinctive. There are ponies in the paddock to my left and - across the gardens to my right - a small stable yard (beyond charming; all cobbles and beams and ancient, cobwebby tack rooms). This morning the air, misty, smells of stables. Although I was never a ‘horse girl’, I did - thanks to my aunt, who was/is - work with horses for a while back in the early ‘80s, and some of my fondest memories are early starts in warm barns on a snowy yard, so this morning’s air lights up something in me that feels how our little christmas tree looks: twinkly. I sit with that past and present. My body smiles and relaxes. These days, my early morning animal interaction consists of sitting out here with the cat, but I’ll take it.

Taste

Forever my coffee. Probably, mostly, the only one I’ll have in a day, in the same cup I’ve used for this very purpose, every day since October 2018. It’s a ritual that awakens me to my day in more ways than just getting caffeinated. Either in my mind, or out loud, I acknowledge the coffee plants; the soya plants; the sun, the soil, the water that grew them; the clay that formed the cup; the power that heated the water; all the humans involved in getting this simple cup of coffee into my body every morning. Gratitude on a global scale and beyond.

Sound

The stream below our garden is flowing fast thanks to recent heavy rain upstream (well hello, Storm Bram). There’s a measuring point just here, where the water is channelled through a narrower space and then falls. Just a couple of feet, but enough to sound impressive, alive, and busy. The corvids are noisy. It’s still too dark for them to set out for the day but they’re warming up in the woods. They always sound like they’re arguing but I doubt they are. That said, I know from personal interaction that crows excel at ‘indignant’.

Should you be thinking that this rural idyll is an easy place to connect with the natural world, let me introduce you to my personal nemesis: the motorbike rider. It’s too early for the hum of distant car traffic to dull other noise, and when people aren’t travelling, sound does. This morning, it’s a lone biker who seems to be riding around in a circle. That damn engine dominated the soundscape for a good 15 minutes. Every time I thought,”Oh good, he’s disappearing into the distance…”, no. No he’s not. He’s revving up and still here. For a while, I played a little game of Guess Where Is He; attempting to match his gear changes and accelerations to the twists and turns in our lanes. That engine never seemed to get quieter. Not for what felt like A Very Long Time. All I could do was bring my focus back to the stream and the birds, and observe - with attempted (and failed) detachment - how bloody angry that engine noise makes me feel. Ironically, it was probably the most effective part of the whole experience! Ultimately, a wren flew up into the elder tree a few feet from me and - as is their way - sang so loudly and beautifully that I forgot all about Motorbike Mike. Oh, and a tawny owl too, across the field.

Vision

Our back garden is dark thanks to hedging and high walls, but above me is a moon that looks as if someone scored it down the middle and snapped it in half; a perfect semi-circle. Then Jupiter, Castor and Pollux. The outline of leafless trees against the soft light - I love how they look. And I’m reminded always of the comparison between the trunk-branch-twig and our pulmonary blood vessel systems. We are all different but the same. Of the same.

Touch

Artemis, my cat, circles this small back garden and checks back in with a rub against my leg, over and over. She’s (at least partially, and probably fully) Arabian Mau, a ‘natural breed’. Among their alleged characteristics is a dog-like tendency to follow their human around and she certainly does that. Like a daemon in Lyra’s world, she is never far from me. Besides her warmth, I feel the damp in the air. We live surrounded by water here, and there’s often a low mist when the temperatures are right. My experience with mist and voices is something I’ve written about in the past and won’t revisit right now, but for me there’s a consciousness in that water. It is numinous. I am aware of the numen and in it, the infinite possibilities.

At this point, a few deeper breaths, nothing dramatic, settle me into where I am, and then I go for that sixth sense. That voice, or knowing, that tells me what I need to hear today.

Knowing

Imagine you’re in a room with a lot of people, all talking at once. Like a party, or a busy restaurant. You’re trying to hear the voice of a particular person. You know them well and you know what you’re listening for. Scanning the sounds around you, you’re filtering out the ones who aren’t that person, and then, there! There they are. Tune your focus and listen to what they’re saying.

That’s what it’s like. My head is full of voices, mostly my own thoughts, and then a lot of nonsense that my ND brain likes to replay on loops, but as I filter, I focus, and eventually there’s the knowing. Like when someone speaks to you and they’re finished, but their words are still resonant in your mind. Fresh. New information, ready to be filed. In a voice that’s not yours, not the podcaster, not the Audible narrator, not your mother. It’s spirit. Or spirits. When you feel it, you know it. You just know.

This morning, that voice reminded me that the numinous quality of the mist, that I feel against my skin, and connect with in my soul, is potential. That the future is all just potential. Building blocks with which we create.

Just as the wren will take old leaves, moss, fur and twigs to build a beautiful nest, so we can take the raw materials of pure potential and possibility and make real a future we’ve imagined. That’s what human animals are really skilled at when they remember how.

Calendars are among our less interesting inventions, I think, but here we are. It’s likely that you and I live by the one that says we’re nearing the end of what we call a year. We’ll move from the period of time we call December, in a bigger chunk we called 2025, into a period called January in a larger bit we refer to as 2026. It’s all fairly meaningless but I appreciate the need to organise, and create common experience. I also think the collective energy around these agreed metrics does make them energetic portals of a kind.

What do I see emerging from the numen for me as I move into 2026? So much. But it’s simplified, streamlined, decluttered if you will. For the first time in ages, I have a word for the year: Presence.

Present in my own life, this place, the possibility. So I must get to building.

How about you?1

My name is Jo and I’m an over-thinker. So naturally, I’ve been getting all twisted up in the details of coming back here. How do I ‘do Substack’ properly? Am I ‘qualified’ to write about this? What even is ‘this’? Should I have a system or a framework? Why would anybody care? The world is on fire and I’m busy. You’re busy. We’re buried under a never-ending avalanche of ‘content’.

Then a few days ago, walking back down the garden from the bins, deep in thought, I was stopped in my slippered tracks. The walnut tree (seriously, it was the tree) asked, ‘What if you just believe in it?’.

Oh.

Good question.

Very good question.

Back inside, I looked up Walnut in my flower essence books. Dr Bach described it as the remedy ‘for those who have definite ideals and ambitions in life and are fulfilling them, but on rare occasions are tempted to be led away from their own ideas, aims and work by the enthusiasm, convictions or strong opinions of others.’

Well, of course. Of course that’s what a walnut tree would have to say to me as I stand in my garden, spiralling about qualifications and frameworks and wondering how someone else, much cleverer than me might do it. The tree basically said, ‘You know what you’re doing. Just get on with it.’

So, what if I just believe…

… in this way of relating to the world - animist, devotional, direct. No intermediaries, no dogma?

… that the Earth loves smart old women who know stuff and are happy to learn more, much more?

… that when we reconnect with the living world - really listen, really relate - we again become part of something alive? Not followers of a path, but co-creators with the land itself.

For me, this looks like stories, handmade things, messy experiments, and simple ceremony with my home, this place. Yours will be entirely different and that, my friend, is The Whole Point.

I’d been catching myself wanting to perfect things before trying them (lifelong issue); wanting to imagine an entire framework before testing a single piece; know all the answers before asking the questions. Round and round and round.

But that’s not how this works. My practice is me out here trying things - talking to trees, making essences, reading signs. Getting it wrong, trying again…

Morën and her fictional world is just one of the ways I’m suited to processing all this. Yes, it’s a blueprint of what devotional living might look like if I really committed to it, but it’s illustration, not instruction. I can tell those stories and you can take what resonates and discard the rest. Or not.

The actual work is simpler: reconnection. Learning to hear the land. Trusting that the Earth speaks and that you’re allowed, even needed to answer back. So much of humanity - my culture for sure - lost the experience of being just one embodiment of spirit amongst all the others. We were taught, and often willingly believed, that we were superior and separate. Luckily for us, the rest of Life just waited for us to remember, knowing that we prodigal children will one day have to come home and speak our mother tongue.

That journey can start with small steps - a moment with morning light; a question from a tree; noticing when the air shifts and feeling its message. And we’re free to travel home any way we like, together or alone.

I’m 62, and not only am I still looking for meaning, I’m finding it at the exact right time. I’m finally old enough. I wasn’t ready before. I didn’t have the space, the audacity, or - frankly - the stillness to do this properly. So, as it turns out the Earth has excellent job opportunities for smart old women (even us slightly prickly, overly independent, eldest daughter types), I’m on the best career ladder ever.

If you’re here too - done with performance - then you know what I mean.

I think we can figure this out together. I’ll keep showing you what I’m trying; you build your own version and tell me about it if you want to.

The Earth is hiring for her A Team, and I love it when a plan comes together.

Do you, like me, remember a time when there were Old People who would show up on television and in newspapers, in full on Cassandra mode? They’d be talking about how video games would make crime and violence acceptable. Or how showing casual sex on television would lead to the downfall of society?

I sometimes wonder if they weren’t at least a little correct. I mean…yeah.

We know all these things existed before television, scriptwriters and computer games. The human species has never been angelic or even, a lot of the time, very nice to each other. Too many abuse power, strength, and those they perceive as weaker. Always have, and probably always will.

Very often this happens because, as the saying goes, “hurt people hurt people”. We understand - because we experience - the impact of nurture in the presence of even the sweetest nature. Throughout time parents have been blamed, and often correctly, for how someone “turns out”.

In this world of 24hr availability, global media you carry wherever you go, we’re also understanding that our children and young people are nurtured by outside influences in a way that, for example, my generation were not. Books and occasional television? Sure. Teachers and friends? Sure. Family? Of course. Maybe a religious community if you belong(ed) to one, but not All The World, All Its Evil, All The Time. I know I’m stating the obvious, but is it any wonder that we’re in a mental health crisis? And it’s not just the young ones; it’s all of us.

The fallout from this normalisation of everything from the horrific to the seriously-not-recommended is a) happening now, and b) only going to get worse as it becomes generational. Already, too many people can look at the most heinous things on a phone screen and not look away. We’re becoming numb.

Just to be clear, I know that humans are also capable of the most wonderful things. We are truly remarkable creatures, and whilst I wouldn’t want to start guessing at ratios, I do believe a very large percentage of us are well-intentioned, kind, generous, loving and desirous of a world where everyone just gets to live with a degree of contentment and peace. Even if it’s just because we can’t be bothered to spend time thinking about what other people are up to and how we should be feeling about it. At this point, disinterest is starting to feel like a virtue.

Humans have a negativity bias: “The propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.” 1 The things that scare us, threaten us, endanger us, sicken us, are likely to have a stronger and more lasting impact on our thinking and behaviour. It’s survival, right? See also: toxic.

I can’t help but think most of those things come wrapped up in a human body. We’ve come a long way in eliminating all the others - for better or worse - and here’s where the oldest dilemma comes in, do we just keep defending and fighting and killing? Or do we attempt to change ourselves so that we’re no longer a threat to each other, even though we may get trampled while we try? Punishment or rehabilitation? Fact is, some people are never going to change, and they thrive by understanding that good, kind people will likely not fight back. It took me far too long to really believe that.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not cynical. I still believe in humans because we are part of something way bigger and way smarter, and ultimately we will be folded back into that and given another chance (I’m talking about the living Earth and the multiverse, by the way). Even the evilest man could one day be part of a beautiful tree. The reverse is also true, but let’s not go there. Not today.

Too much has been normalised, and there’s only so far we can undo it. The worst offenders care nothing for laws and contracts, regulations and agreements. There are brave souls who willingly sacrifice their own peace to man the barricades against these horrors, but while I think most of the able would be prepared to do an occasional short shift on watch, we really just want to go home and be with the beings and things that we love. To be able to ignore the battles and the violence. The freedom to do so is called privilege now, and that’s right. Also a mix of good fortune and choices. A lottery win. That guy who just won £23mill on the Euromillions didn’t knock down an old lady, kick a toddler, and shoot a rhinoceros to do it, he just picked out some birthday dates and paid for a ticket. Life’s like that. What we do with our winnings is what counts.

How can we tip these loaded scales back towards positivity? As someone once said: You can’t be what you can’t see. You can’t do what you can’t view.

Okay, I made up the second bit but it made me laugh. Also, it may be true.

I was going to list some artists and writers whose vision qualifies as Utopian but you can look them up. I had a couple in mind and when I went to find more so you’d think I’m really intelligent, I found that these good folk go back beyond history and well into our present times. Are they, or have they been, what has kept us from destroying each other? I like to believe - and find it easy to do so - that each in their way made a solid contribution. That thanks to them, when someone stepped up to complete another tour of duty on the barricades, or even volunteered to make team sandwiches for an hour, first Saturday of the month, they did so because they’d seen or heard or felt a world where things were better. Kinder. More beautiful. More peaceful.

This post is my story for myself. The one that reminds me that humans are magic because we relate so strongly through words spoken and danced and written and sung. It’s to remind me that my lifelong (and probably even before that, given my mother’s love of reading and my father’s passion for music) love of a good story, is a strength. A resource. An invaluable gift. A lottery win. That if I’m feeling the pull to write about imagined worlds that connect to our own, I should do it. Worldbuilding, for real. Even if only one other person connects with it and carries some back into this layer of reality, there is value in telling a story. In attempting to create a positivity bias through delight, wonder, laughter and deep emotion.

Write your fiction, your music, your comedy, your screenplays and your picture books. Compose music, and poems. Dance, paint, carve, cook, sew, film, create a really restorative home. Share that story over a bowl of soup, and do your best to get a laugh, or gasp in wonder at how it unfolds.

When power is concentrated in the hands of the undeserving few, it can all feel a bit pointless, can’t it? So remember that the most beautiful thinking and enlightened examination of possibility happens first in our imagination. To dream up something better and share it with the people around you, in whatever way feels right, is righteous work, my dude.

What do you think? What story are you telling? How are you telling it? I’d love to know.

Edited to add my reading of this post:

I named my Substack The House of First Light referencing an imagined place. The work I’m creating now is a weaving of three strands - a plait - of this world, the Otherworld I visit in my journeying practice, and an other world that’s a place I see in my imagination; a place where my fiction writing is based. The House of First Light is in that other world.

Recently I’ve been waking in the dark and going outside with my cat, Artemis, who gets to have a supervised roam around our secure back garden, while I drink my coffee and wake up. I realised that for this season, this house is also a House of First Light. Where I sit and listen to the jackdaws and crows in the woodland across the lane, and wait for them to fly over me in their hundreds once it’s light enough. Where I sit in the dark with Jupiter right above my head, disappearing as the sun rises. Where the air is fresh and I remember to breathe deeply.

I’m fascinated by imagined things made real. Everything we ever do starts with the thought, the idea, the vision. If we let our imaginations create beauty, maybe we can bring it into this world. Into reality. This isn’t a new concept obviously, it’s as old as time, but I’m interested in building that bridge between dream and experience. So, noticing that right now I actually live in a house of first light, without even trying...feels like a gift. Feels like,’We’ll give you this one for free, to get you started.’

I’m reading Sam MacLaren’s The Medicine of the Four Directions. I’ve followed Sam on Instagram (@pretaniwisdomtraditions) for a while and value her insight and knowledge on the animism practiced in these isles, long ago in the wayback. She describes how the four directions played a part in our early traditions, in a different way to those seen more frequently in other indigenous relationships with the world.

According to MacLaren and her study of 14th Century Irish texts, which echo far older traditions, we connected the directions (somewhat simplified) in the following ways:

West: Learning, foundation, teaching, wise counsel, histories, judgement and eloquence.

North: Battle, strife, pride, rough places, hardship, assaults, boldness, wars and conflict.

East: Prosperity, hospitality, house-holding, good customs, wealth, beehives, treasures, silks, accoutrements.

South: Music and musicianship, fertility, poetic art, wisdom, fierceness, games, and fairs.

Centre: Sovereignty, dignity, primacy, stewardship, stability and renown.

As I sit on a stool in a dark garden at dawn, surrounded by trees and waking wildlife, and the song of a stream, and planets, I take deep expanding breaths that feel liberatory after a night of shallow breathing (and probably snoring). The air is damp and green, full of life and generous with it. Four slow counts in, four slow counts held. Four slow counts out, four slow counts held.

What if I weave the directions into this? Informed by my ancestors, embodied by me. Here, today, two feet on the ground.

Inhale from the West… wisdom and stories. Hold them; remember them. Exhale.

Inhale from the North… warrior energy and discomfort. Hold them; value them. Exhale.

Inhale from the East… home, pleasure and abundance. Hold them; feel them. Exhale.

Inhale from the South… creativity, joy and Life. Hold them; delight in them. Exhale.

Centre four breath cycles - in, hold, out, hold… wholeness, groundedness, and personal authority. Know them.

As I completed this earlier this morning, two crows - one to my left, one to my right, high up in trees - traded ‘caws’ back and forth five times over me. Three from the South, two from the West. I’ll be watching for those messages in the future.

I’m not one for dwelling in the past, or attempting to recreate it - I don’t believe we can or even need to. But we can take old wisdom and weave it back into the lives we have today. I believe that doing so can stop us becoming untethered from the Earth; a state that would be entirely unnatural for an ensouled animal made of dirt and water; air, light and fire.

I hope that - as I explore and play with what it means to be ‘of the Earth’ in the 21st Century, from a personal, lived and imagined perspective - you’ll choose to come along. This feels like it should be a group effort which, for this deeply introverted woman, is an adventure in itself.

Well hello. How are you? Where are you? Let me explain…

The House of First Light isn’t just another ‘big idea’. It’s what I come back to when everything else crumbles. It’s where my love of nature meets my need for the numinous and the imagined. Where story and spirit come together. I’ve been circling this threshold for years without realising it and now I’m home.

This is my sanctuary for the world-weary Earth lovers. For those of us who believe that the unseen world is just as real as the one we touch and that imagination isn’t escapism, it’s how we bridge between the two and call better things into being. Even just wanting to believe is enough.

I’ll be writing about animist spirituality and nature connection - how they can heal and inspire, and ways to remember our real belonging right here on this living planet. Some of it will come from this world; some from the Otherworld I visit in my journeying practice, and some from an imagined world that’s been creeping into my private writing.

There’s something larger being built down the road from The House of First Light, but I’m not rushing it. I’m following instructions so that it becomes what it needs to be, rooted in what we need to be. It’s the slow work of tending what’s sacred, creating what’s beautiful, and trusting our own connection to the universe.

That’s for later. For now, we’re here and the doors are open. The first light is soft, and hints at potential. Enjoy, you’re always welcome.