On 26th April 2007 my beloved mum died and my whole world turned on its axis. This is the moment when grief became my life. When someone we love dies everything changes, we change, our lives change. We are disorientated without this person no longer here. Our physiology changes too - we can’t sleep, we can’t think, we’re restless - as we search for the person who has always been here. There’s a line from the poem called Adrift by Mark Nepo.

It started tentatively in 2024 when, upon completion of a six month training, my teacher and mentor Francis Weller said “take this work, take it and share it with the world.” I responded and simply said “I don’t know what that looks like.” There was no response from Francis, he knows the ways of soul and that this wasn’t something that could be rushed.

Last year when I invited Francis Weller into Life’s Poetry I asked him what had changed since writing about the gates of grief in The Wild Edge of Sorrow. At the time it was 10 years since he’d written the book and formed the gates of grief in this way. His answer was clear. He said that the sorrows of the world had become more magnified, clearer, far more present. Once a quieter sense of grief, now was pivotal.

This weekend I travelled North to the Scottish Boarders for a weekend of retreating. It’s been a while since I’ve been on retreat, for so many different reasons, but this one felt possible - more than that it called my soul deeply - a therapeutic writing retreat. Writing is such a part of who I am.  Writing has carried me through the last 20 years or so - it’s with me constantly, even if it has only been a line as I write my diary.