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.
- Longing and Belonging
Woohoo! On Monday I held the first monthly drop in writing session connected to this blog. I was very delighted to welcome 5 women to write with me around the theme of Longing and Belonging. It was warm and wise and joyful.
We used a poem by David Whyte for inspiration and thought about all the places and ways in which we long and belong.
I’m going to begin today’s blog by sharing his poem. It is one my late husband and I had at our wedding shortly before his death. It spoke to us of our love but I think it can equally be true of love for anywhere we belong.
The True Love
by David Whyte from his collection of poems called The House of Belonging, published by Many Rivers Press. ( You can also follow David and read more of his poems on his Substack here.)
There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.
I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the short of baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,
and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them,
and how we are all
waiting for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love,
so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all the struggle
and all these years,
you don’t want to any more,
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning,
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness,
however fluid and however
dangerous, to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
And what do you do…?
What do you do when the one you waited for, the one who beckoned you, the one you would walk on water to, dies?
How do you reconcile the clocks continuing to move forward, the shops still selling jars of preserves and long life batteries, when your world, your life as you knew it, the love that was a verb in your heart, have all stopped?
How can you long for one who is not just across the water but across the other side of the sky, knowing that your longing cannot be met? Ever.
How can you summon the courage to cook your dinner and feed your body when you barely know yourself as a body alone and untouched?
When you knew belonging so deeply and wholly, how can you find the wish or the will to belong elsewhere? Like a refugee exiled from a home they loved, now wandering the earth looking not only for acceptance but fertile soil in which to grow new roots.
I haven’t found it possible, or even desirable, to expunge the longing for the one I belonged with. The question for me now is, how do I harness that same longing borne of love and then loss, that very bereftness which aches and weeps within me, to create a life where place and community, friendships and family, work and play, reflect back to me the very love awoken through the belonging I once knew?
Sharing
I’d like to share with you a poem writing by one of my Monday collaborators, Amelie Sperl, whose little grandson has pulled her out of the drowning and back into love.
Enough of Drowning
frozen ice on top of me
struggling upwards
drowning again
and again
I realise how much time has passed
It needed my strongest longing
the wind of another inner land
to wake me up to live
owning what is waiting for meLandscape
When we were writing together we were thinking also about belonging to place. I think there is a loneliness at large in our society, a separation from the mater/ial who made us. Sometimes I can feel like an orphan, a waif or stray walking through woodland unable to hear the trees speaking to me, sitting on rocks oblivious to their consciousness. Perhaps a dim and distant music is calling to me and I strain to hear it through an inner cacophony. Or am I ruptured from my homeland, the land which bred and grew my ancestors for generations, which I have left far behind me. I don’t know how it is for you, but I wonder, could I ever be lonely again if I knew myself viscerally, soulfully befriended, beloved and belonging within a landscape?
Here is an extract from a poem by Jacqueline Ogden, another of my Monday wise women, who has found her place of belonging in West Yorkshire.
I used to long for a place of belonging
A mythological home,
the site of an ancient uprootin
after centuries of steady growth.
I found such a place
in an abandoned village on Mull.
After the Clearances,
many generations
witnessed my return to the
familiar doorway,
that view of the sea.
Now I have found another place
to root down
amongst hills that run with water, leaves and
birdsong.Living the longing
I have no answers. Just an inbuilt longing to be known, loved and safe, a longing to be at home inside myself. I need to remind myself that grief and loss did not make the longing. Love filled it but the longing was made by whoever put together my body and soul.
I have to trust – am I “thinking of faith now”?- that the longing itself will lead me home and that perhaps, having felt it once I will recognise its aroma when I’m getting close.
With my love
Nickie
PS I would very much like to know how this blog lands with you. Having written 89 of my 90 blogs alone, it wasn’t entirely obvious to me how to weave in other voices. And I also would like to say I loved the writing session we had together and to thank everyone who came.
NEXT DROP IN SESSION MONDAY 2ND NOVEMBER 12 MIDDAY TO 1PM Do let me know if you’d like to join me. www.nickieaven.com/contact/
NEWS
Into the Dreaming….
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