Welcome to my blog – with extras! Extras like online circles, cup of tea sessions, guest bloggers, poetry and stories.
I am an elder woman: I’ve seen a lot of life and a lot of death, navigated many transitions and passed through numerous thresholds. I have worked in many different capacities but all of them are simply vehicles for my particular shape of love. This website is one way of offering my love and my gifts to you.
Please do feel invited to write to me, send poems, images and so on – I would love to hear from you.
I hope you will leave my site feeling warmer, comforted, smiling on the inside and in some way accompanied.
With love,
Nickie
- These are the times…
These are the times, when, just a few short months before I can – finally – draw my state pension, I have set up a social enterprise company. When I could sell my skills for an excellent hourly rate and sensibly should, and instead find myself working my socks off, much of the time for nothing. When I am looking down the road into old age and find myself deeply impassioned. Why?
Wrinkles and relevance
Because as my skin wrinkles and everything (everything) sags, I am growing into myself like never before. In the map of my face you will see not only disappointment but love, not only worry but laughter. My crinkled eyes shine with light despite, or maybe because of, so much grief. And in the set of my jaw there is not only gentleness but a fierceness I no longer care to hide. I am not a victim of life. I am of no less value (or more) than anyone else, nor, invisible as society may think me, am I irrelevant, in fact I am more relevant now than I have ever been. I have a voice and I intend to use it – to speak, to sing, to notice and to call. Many people will not listen, a few will. For some it will be balm or medicine; for others a mirror. What others hear or see is not my business, to speak my truth is.
Since I have a voice and I live inside my skin, the embodied writing techniques of Mirabai Starr – bereaved mother, writer and translator of mystic texts – appeal to me. She teaches a technique I have used for decades and share in the creative writing groups I hold. Simply put, to write without stopping for anything, not to censor or criticise, nor to correct or cogitate. Prepare your space (or often in my case, get comfy on a tree stump), empty out with a few breaths, decide how long you are going to write for and away you go. Mirabai often uses poetry for inspiration and an opening phrase as a prompt.
I did a class with her today, using ‘Poet’ by Prof Alexis Pauline Gumbs and the prompt was “These are the times..” I am posting what I wrote here, almost entirely unedited. Because although it feels exposing and risky, it tells you why I do what I do: because I believe, as Charles Eisenstein says, in:
“The more beautiful world your heart knows is possible.”
These are the times when moulds can be broken, when heart break means gold can pour through and song birds fly to the top of trees and soar their voices through and over dark forests, rippling the rivers and frenzying leaves on the wing.
These are the times when mud is the soil of beginning, when the sludge of drudgery and habit becomes the clay of new life, when god rethinks the human race and braces herself as she makes kindness and love a necessity of breath.
These are the times when grief becomes precious as jewels mined from the deepest pits of lostness, loneliness and isolation, when we meet shadows and wraiths, ghosts and demons and say, “Hello.. I love you.. please forgive me”.
These are the times when giving is for the wealthy in spirit to those poor and wretched, depleted in all resources that matter, when shattered hearts get held and melded and life is blown with love like blowing glass, colour blooming, beauty emerging from the shards of bitterness.
These are the times when the meek grow wild and the poor have gold dust showering from their finger tips, when the banker weeps and the homeless man sleeps in his castle, when children listen to grandmothers and grandmothers cackle with the wild geese flying homewards.
I am alive in these times, grandmother, goose whisperer, befriender of death and mender of bird wing. I sing from tree tops and see the beauty emerge from bitter voices. I am alive not because I am good but because I am brave, facing gravestones and singing, winging, soaring and pouring liquid gold into molten mud, remoulding what once I was told into life fit for living.
Dear Mother, hear me: when my backbone bends and my breast are flat sacks, when my neck creaks and my bladder leaks and age has wrinkled my face like a demented river, then hold me like a baby, suckle me until I rehydrate and cackle back to life and love. And when my time is done in a body past its sell by date, when dust smells like home and fire draws me to its flame, when waves beckon and the shore looks likes the terminus of departure, then Mother, take me dancing, take me crawling, singing or silent, I don’t care, but take me home. And if you send my man to hold my hand and my child to make me laugh, I should be grateful for eternity.
These are the times for which I say, thank you.
An invitation
I encourage you to breathe out and to write – with this prompt or another – and if you would be willing to share some or all of your writing with me, I should be honoured to read it. You can write to me here.
With my love
Nickie
NEWS
I shot my bolt last time and sent you all of my news in one big dollop! So, first, I’ve put a new meditation on the For Peace page. Just 5 minutes to take a breather – here
And a few reminders:
Dying Matters Week, wherever you are in the UK 5th to 12th May. If you’re interested in the creative writing and ‘befriending a griever’ workshops I’m doing in Totnes, please contact me here.
A Day to Tend to Grief – Saturday June 15th in South Devon. Click here for more details.
A Day of Song and Silence for Peace – Saturday July 13th in South Devon. Click here.
Cup of tea sessions for a donation, support or spiritual accompaniment sessions, prepare your own funeral (individual or group) sessions – more information here or contact me here.
And finally a huge thank you to the very many of you who wrote to me after last week’s blog or responded to my facebook post. I am very grateful.
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