Coracle
On healing cusps
This is a post for my paid community; a taster is given below.
As I move into a new stage of life, my writing will mostly be of a more personal nature and will be behind a paywall. I will continue my occasional free posts but if you’d like to have full access to my writing, please consider a paid subscription— definitely the best way to support my work at the moment.
Tenderness warning: mentions pregnancy.
With love and gratitude to all who read x
Hello beauties, how are you all doing at this somewhat surreal time?
This may well be my final post before I hand over to a host of beautiful, tender mama writers who will share stories of creative mothering with you. Stories of love and loss; tenderness and trampolines; orchards and one-another-ness; grief and gardens. I am so excited to share each and every one.
My final commissioned piece before maternity leave is up online on the Visual Gallery Carlow site.
I adore Visual, and it was an honour to be invited to reflect on their amazing exhibition ‘Hold This’, which is gorgeous, impactful and extremely potent for these times.
I’ve written about holding and being held, and I so much hope you enjoy it.
In the run up to stepping away temporarily from this wee space, and from my work in general, I’ve been thinking an awful lot about thresholds, cusp moments, turning points in our lives. How these come along, often when we are least expecting them to, and how something about the space between what we imagine will happen at a given moment, and what ends up happening, is wildly and incomparably potent.
On my most recent MOSS MOTHER MOON call, there were so many of gathered in circle that we ran out of Lucy Beckley gorgeous SMALL ACTS OF ATTENTION cards and I had to give some of us seed words to reflect/meditate on chosen at random from CACOPHONY OF BONE.
It felt wildly and deeply moving, to turn to that wee book in this way, at this time. A book that was written during a time of such change, begun in the early days of postpartum, written about an arguably even more change filled, strange time: the first year of a global pandemic and the season of becoming pregnant for me. A book that changed my whole life, that continues to, despite how little reach it had; how unsuccessful it was by the standards of the industry it was born into.
A book that taught me that I was worthy, no matter what my experiences in life had previously led me to believe.
A book that reminded me that I was part of a wide, wild web of women, and that we all were part of an even deeper ecology of care.
A book that made me feel I belonged. In that moment, that place, that season, that body.
A book that held me.
A book that healed me.
A book about, in many ways, a small stretch of land.
A small patch of garden, on an old railway line, in the central bog land of Ireland.
A book about sowing seeds; tending to them; about devotion to process and about harvest.
How potent to receive, from the me of those days, the word DESERVE.
Now, at this moment that feels so similar, in many ways; so different in myriad other ways.
And where exactly have I found myself just now? And why does that word land so fully with me?
Never, in my wildest dreams back then, could I have imagined myself six years in the future, about to
