Welcome to my blog – with extras! Extras like courses and events, cup of tea sessions, meditation recordings and podcasts, 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
“[Nickie is] like a magic porridge pot overflowing with love to give”. S.E.
- 6 years and 10 months
“A river is a scripture”, the wise man said. I listened. Since I was a wee thing, I’ve always loved water, especially the sea, but in recent years it has been rivers I’ve been drawn to. Even my name- Aven – means river. In the few years I had with my late husband, whether in Scotland or France or here in Devon, we always lived close by a river. When he died, I asked an amazing willow weaver to weave me a river. It would be the river of our lives together from its source until he merged with the ocean and I….
Willow river
Well, this is the river Emma wove and I have inserted mementoes along its course and woven it through with our handfasting ribbons. In the little hammock, which I think of as the place he rests, are rose petals, and in the pouch beside it is his wedding ring in a bed of feathers.
But yes…what has the river opened into for me? One day, I tell myself, I’ll ask Emma to help me weave a medicine wheel, or I’ll weave a wall hanging in hand dyed wool, or I’ll have a flock of swallows fly over the blank wall. One day… But today, it is still a blank. My life is very full these days and yet, I wonder, am I resisting making a life beyond the river we flowed through together? Am I afraid of overshadowing that time, leaving it behind?
6 years and 10 months
This week it is 6 years and 10 months since my husband died. We lived in the knowledge of our mutual love for 6 years and 10 months. I don’t like it. I don’t want to have lived without him longer than we were together but so it is. We had dreams, hopes, stories we told ourselves, we had work to do, potential to fulfil, love to share with the world. We had a long river of life together. Didn’t we?
Rivers don’t take the course of our wishes. They carve through the landscape as they must. This was ours: for love to bring out anything unlike itself to be loved back into wholeness, so that one of us could die knowing themselves loved and whole and the other had the potential to live knowing themselves loved and whole. It seems it was a holy agreement. It also seems that in some ways I’m struggling to fulfil my side of the agreement: part of me is missing and I am walking bereft through my life, looking for the one with whom I felt whole.
Othering
I knew that one day I would be alone and I knew it would be tough. I also knew that when that time came my focus would be on my relationship with what I might term the Divine. Ever the idealist. Over these 7 years as I have grown familiar with the missing, with aloneness, with a piece of blank wall, I have developed a closer relationship with loneliness and simultaneously a deeper longing for the intimacy of Peace, for belonging here in Life, as a child of Creation. I am also noticing how subtle and pervasive is my habit of ‘othering’: the Divine is other, Peace is not where I am, connection is with something or someone outside of myself. I am like a musk deer searching through the forest for the fragrance which is emanating from its own navel.
I am beginning to understand that (funnily enough!) striving – head forward, breath held, jaw in tension, nervous system on high alert – takes me away from my wished for state, not towards it. In essence what I wish for, is to be present. Simply breathing, at ease, with nowhere to go in search of something that is only ever here or else it is nowhere. It isn’t, as it tuns out, rocket science. It is, however, ridiculously difficult I find, not to be distracted.
A cruel knife
I am currently leading a Writing Pilgrimage – some of you are on it with me, some of you may have seen the flyer. Today’s invitation came from this:
It is said that once a woman asked Hafiz, “What is a sign of someone who knows God?” He replied, “They have dropped the knife, the cruel knife so often used upon their tender selves and others.”
I have been endeavouring to rewrite the cruel script, the self-talk which stabs at me repeatedly. We weren’t born with an inner critic. We didn’t come in with a dodgy sense of self worth. But once embedded, usually at a very young age out of a need to stay safe, it seems to take the rest of our lives to be free of its cruelty. I don’t expect to be rid of it but I would like to give less attention and power to a voice whose demands I can never satisfy, and more to the sweetness and kindness of the loving voice I know is waiting to comfort me.
For 6 years and 10 months I had a kind voice in my ear, I knew a love that didn’t care about my human flaws nor about my achievements, and that gift cannot be taken away. This is Love’s legacy to me. I am learning – very slowly – to embed tenderness and acceptance into my life, to let the clutter and unkind chatter fall away and rest into simplicity. I would love to look into the mirror and see the eyes of Love gazing back at me.
I will let you know when my blank wall is a symphony of colour and movement.
With my love
Nickie
NEWS
IN DEATH AND IN GRIEF
An immersive, residential retreat for all interfaith ministers and students who are engaged in some capacity with the work of dying and grieving.
April 17th – 19th at Poulstone Court near Hereford
Until we take care of our own relationship with death and grief, I think we cannot take care of another’s. So this is an experiential retreat to address both your own vulnerabilities and how to be alongside another in their’s. I don’t intend for this to be a time to learn theories and models or to write notes and read books. Simply come and be.
We will use creativity and ceremony, reflection and sharing, and take advantage of the serene nature around us. We will be fully catered for in a big old house with large and lovely gardens sloping down to the river, which include a fire pit.
Here is a link to a video of a Q&A I did with Lauren Mellor. It’s unedited so it’s a bit rough in places but if you only listen to the first 5 minutes it will give you the flavour of the retreat. https://youtu.be/N5jhiK195ZE?si=5ocb_7vREf5zfMU9
Come and be nurtured, nourished and resourced.
For more information about the retreat content you can write to me here or go to the One Spirit website where you can also book your place.
DYING MATTERS WEEK
May 4th to 10th
Still a little way off, but I have a date for your diaries. If you’re not local to me, look out for what’s on where you are, as Dying Matters Week is a Hospice UK, national initiative.
Where I live in South Brent, we are having a beautiful and gentle evening in the Community Centre on Thursday 7th May.
The first session at 7pm is a Death Cafe hosted by Michael Brown. In the second session at 8.15pm we will be showing the highly acclaimed documentary film Threshold, made by young film maker Florence Browne. After the showing Florence and I will answer questions and then the Threshold Choir I lead will sing songs of kindness and solace. You are welcome to come to just one or both of these sessions.
The event is free but it helps us hugely to have an idea of numbers. Please use the QR code or go the my events page to let me know you intend to come.
There will also be three days of events in Totnes, on Friday 8th, Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th. More information to follow or go to the website of Dying with Grace, who are hosting the events.
Buy Me a Coffee
Some of my work is paid, a good chunk of it – blog, hospice and singing for the dying – is not. I very much appreciate any donations you are able to make which help me to support myself and continue to offer this work. It also warms my heart to know that you want to gift me. You can do so at Buy Me a Coffee here.