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.
- “Lighten up, woman!”
As you probably know, over this past month I have been leading a ‘Writing Pilgrimage’; which is an odd kind of concept, since we need not, if we so choose, leave our chairs to walk anywhere. It is with our pens that we ‘walk’ across the landscapes of our souls.
Obstacles
We are coming towards the end of our journeying and I was thinking about whether or not there was anything which might tug at us and be an internal obstacle to living at peace in our lives. In particular, I found myself musing on forgiveness. In my own life I have found it much easier to forgive others than to forgive myself. Once I realise that more often than not, how people behave towards me has very little to do with me and is mostly about themselves, I need not take it – whatever ‘it’ is – personally. This understanding usually takes the heat out of whatever behaviour it is which has distressed me.
When it comes to my behaviour, however, my mother’s standards of impeccability still seem to hold sway. I was once unkind to a friend from school – Mary Bird. The memory of it still plagues me and I’ve tried to find her to say ‘I’m sorry’ – unsuccessfully. I once bent the truth, out of a mix of hurt and desire, with painful consequences for someone I loved dearly. But it is my late son I return to again and again, wishing I could have been a mother who had met him more fully.
Every week day during the pilgrimage, I have offered invitations inspired by poems, spiritual practices or my own thoughts. Sometimes too I have offered deepening exercises. Today I offered the possibility of writing a letter to someone, either to forgive them or to ask them for forgiveness. The deepening practice was to have them write back. I wrote to my son. And then, almost immediately, ‘he’ wrote back to me.
Holy ground
I entered a place which was both imagination and holy ground. By which I mean, yes I was using my imagination to step into his shoes, but also I listened for what he wanted to say to me and when it came he spoke only with love and for the sake of love – in his own mischievious and inimitable way. Here are some extracts:
“Give yourself a break…. you silly old dear!…I’d like to make you laugh not cry as you are now… lighten up woman, there’s nothing wrong with you!….I crashed through life and out the other end… done in 33 years…. Even when I was causing chaos and drama…I knew right from wrong [and] I minded that I wasn’t free of you. Now though, I can see you were my moral compass…. I can’t forgive you because there’s nothing to forgive… Wish I’d been around to be an uncle… Remember me and laugh or at least smile – I like it….”
Connection
As I write this, I am staying with my daughter, her partner and their ‘full on’ little boy. It is wonderful watching how they parent and poignant too, given my own history. I read my son’s letter to my daughter and we both wept. The forgiveness, understanding and self responsibility which I ‘imagined’ I heard from my son, has connected me to him, my daughter to him and she and I to each other. It has lightened my load and soothed my grief. It has, in other words, been a droplet of pure love, rippling outwards into our lives and spreading only more love. This is why I call it holy ground.
When I am dying, I don’t want to be holding either blame or shame. I don’t want to carry heavy loads through whatever life I have left to me. I’d like to be light enough to dance through some of the landscapes I come across – notwithstanding a few creaky bones. I’d like, as my son asks of me, to think of him – and he was the funniest person I’ve ever known – and laugh.
With my love
Nickie
NEWS
Dying Matters Week – 4th to 10th May, nationwide
And suddenly May is round another corner! And with May comes the nationwide Dying Matters Week. We need to talk about death, not to depress ourselves but in fact just the opposite – to heighten our awareness that life is a limited commodity and needs to be valued as such. If we run away from facing up to our own mortality it is likely to be very hard when a loved one dies or our own time is up.
There are events all over the country. I am involved in a few here in the South Devon. You can discuss death over cake at a death café, ask questions about wills, the end of life process and funerals, you can watch the highly acclaimed documentary featuring my choir and my work and you can listen to the soothing songs we sing.
The flyer opposite shows the South Brent event I am hosting on Thursday 7th. I’ll also be in Exeter the day before and in Totnes on Saturday 9th. For a more complete picture in this locality, please go to Dying with Grace’s website here.
If you don’t know what’s happening in your part of the country, go to Hospice UK’s website here.
Please get in touch with me here to reserve yourself a place in South Brent.
In death and in grief – in person retreat
An immersive, residential retreat, with One Spirit Interfaith Foundation, 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. 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, and which include a fire pit.
Here is a link to a Q&A I did with Lauren Mellor. It will give you a flavour of the retreat – and me!!
Come and be nurtured, nourished and resourced.
For more information about the retreat you can write to me here or go to the One Spirit website where you can also book your place.
Creative Pathways for Loss and Life – Sat 18th July 10.30 – 4.30 – booking open soon
At Hallr woods in Charlton Mackrell near Somerton, Somerset, with me and wood custodian Deb Millar.
We always need to be nurtured, but never more so than when we are managing loss of any kind, whether through bereavement, the end of a relationship, loss of health, or the desecration of our beautiful world.
So please come for a nourishing day and find resources to manage and honour your loss. A chance to reflect, draw, write and create, make friends with the trees and be in the moment.
I will hold the day assisted by Deb.
£40 for the day including a vegetarian lunch. Concessions available and also places by donation.
For more information please go to my events page or to register your interest write to me here.
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.