_{The white horse (Poppy and the Horse )}

I’ve never been a particularly ‘horsey’ person, but my eldest daughter Lily was obsessed from a toddler. For her second birthday she received a horse sticker book and the beautiful tale, The Sand Horse illustrated by Micheal Foreman. I baked a horse shaped cake and we visited her two favourite real life ones down the road. She had multiple tiny horses at her bedside that fed and watered on a daily basis.

She longed to ride, or at least have regular close contact with a horse. We had not had the chance to organise either, when she suffered her accident in the woodlands where we lived . She fell from a tree, just metres from our home, and suffered a fatal brain injury. She was just seven.

After a numbing blur of air ambulances, land ambulances and hospital transfers, myself, my then partner and Lily’s dad found ourselves in a small hospital waiting room a couple hundred miles from home while the best paediatric neurologist surgeon in the country did his best to save her life.

At around 4 am, several hours into the surgery. I had a sudden impulse that we should all kneel, hold hands and pray for her. As we did, the image of a beautiful white horse, with Lily on his back, came into my mind. The horse was climbing an immense mountainside, its hooves scrabbling and slipping on the rocky screes as it toiled upwards. Finally, it reached the top and the two of them rolled and galloped in the lush green meadow full of wildflowers.

At that moment I thought it meant that Lily had pulled through surgery, but I now understand that it was the moment her soul passed over. She was kept on life support for 24 more hours but brainstem tests revealed that her body could no longer sustain life.

And I put my experience with the horse to rest for several years.

Early versions of the book

In the week after Lily’s death I wrote and illustrated a crazy raw version of what could have happened to her after she passed over. I have always made stories, for my children, for myself, for others. This time, it was an automatic, reflexive response to the extreme trauma of the sudden loss. I didn’t really think much , I just created some (from memory, fairly bad) illustrations and a narrative, in the snatched hours when a friend or relative minded my other children. The motivation, if there even was any, was to explain to Lily’s siblings (aged 9, 3 and 18 months ) and friends, where she had gone. A kind of illustrated reassurance. A ragged purging of images and words that offered a tenuous balm for my heart. An embodiment of the cathartic capacity of creativity.

The way my daughter repeatedly made us aware of her continued presence (Read more here ) made me realise the need for that experience to be shared

I read the story aloud at the celebration of Lily’s life and everyone asked when I was going to write the final version.

That was in 2009.

_{Lily, a week before her accident on a family walk}

A lot happened between then and now, including a house fire, my relationship ending and another baby (not in that order)

Three years ago I applied to Falmouth University to complete an MA in Authorial Practice. In layman’s terms, that’s illustration with a narrative element. The outline and initial sketches for a book about child death had been sitting in the back drawer for too long and I needed some one to keep me accountable . Deadlines helped. Daily inspiration in the form of lectures and tutorials helped. The amazing camaraderie of my MA colleagues helped ALOT!

The emotional weight of responsibility to produce a perfect book that would honour and do justice to the fleeting years of my daughter’s life had sat heavy on my shoulders over the years. The quest for perfection became an exercise in procrastination so I needed something to break through. The degree was it. It was also people who believed I could do it when I didn’t. People who didn’t think I was crazy for trying and took me seriously, even when I struggled to do so myself.

I am a late starter artist , (that’s a story for another time) and with no previous art training and a slightly irrelevant first degree in French Studies, my imposter syndrome was the glowering hulk muttering on repeat at the margins of my life. The reason I managed to finish the book was because I made a promise to my daughter, and the necessity of fulfilling that was stronger than the fear of failure.

Death and children’s books

I have had five children. I know children’s books. I have bought, borrowed and read hundreds, maybe thousands . Some breathtaking and thought provoking, some banal throwaways. Most in between, Of course I wanted to be in the former camp but I realised that compassion for myself if I didn’t reach that goal was necessary if I was to write the book that didn’t seem to exist yet. The book that didn’t yet seem to exist was the one about death where, firstly, the protagonist is the child who dies. Not the brother or sister or friend, but the one who passes. And secondly, there is explicit reassurance that death is not the black hole of nothing that many fear. That a continued connection with loved ones from beyond is possible.

On the bookshop shelves were books about a beloved pet passing, a grandparent, a parent, very occasionally a sibling. The only books which referenced the continuation of life mainly mentioned Jesus. (And definitely not dissing Jesus, but there seemed to be no non religious references to the afterlife) And so I wrote the one that no one else wanted to , the one about the child who goes to the Beyond…..

Some of the early ideas for the book involved birds and angels but as I researched and sketched and dreamed into the book over the two years of my MA, the white horse from my envisioning on the night of Lily’s passing seemed to be doing more than loitering around the edges. I allowed him into the mix.

And, through research for my book, I discovered psychopomps, which I will write about in more depth in a future post . Psychopomps are entities, animals or deities who accompany the newly dead into the afterlife. Horses were among the top candidates for such a role in many ancient cultures. With my own experience and this new understanding . I wrote and illustrated Poppy and the Horse.

The making process

I have written about my preference for analogue media and creating here and here, and this book project was no different. My class colleagues were a globally and age diverse mix and the vast majority worked at least partly, if not exclusively in digital media. I resisted the pull to created digitally , initially because my ‘older’ brain actually cried every time I tried, but increasingly because I believed so hard in the tactile sweep of a brush on paper and the resolute slice of a scalpel and how that made me feel, that I could do nothing else. It was also a medium that I know my daughter Lily, already an aspiring artist when she was in her body, would have loved. I felt more connected with her as I scribbled with my neocolour Aquarelles and glue, than I would have done on Procreate.

And so I chose collage as a medium, also because it enabled me to keep changing things until the last minute without needing to resort to digital manipulation. I lived in a converted horse lorry for the duration of my degree (money saving tactic as single mama) and the tiny table became a tumbling cascade of paper horses, doves and trees, which fell into our meals and got under the cushions . Somehow, by determination and magic, the 16 A2 illustrations were completed in time for an unavoidable week in the digital suite at Uni to ‘tidy’ the images, and wrestle them into book format along with the text.

On the final day of ‘making’ the book before printing, as I slotted the last elements together, I realised that three young women called Lily had just walked into the digital suite, one from my course, and two unknown visiting students from a local post 16 centre. I wasn’t even surprised; the first hour of my degree two years before had been led by a former student on the MA called Lily, who shared her project about death and grief. It seemed very fitting for my work to find closure in the presence of more Lilies.

Off gridding

When I first told friends and family that I was moving my kids to Cornwall to live in a Horse Lorry and do an MA, I won’t lie, there was considerable concern. Even some of my closest friends, who knew how important it was to me to do this, took me to one side to voice gentle dissuasion.

_{The ‘neat’ version of me assembling a collage in my tiny home. You don’t wanna see the everyday version!!}

It wasn’t easy. Living off grid, working part time and navigating some extremely challenging parenting issues (including brain surgery after my middle son suffered a collision with a moving car) made for two years that I will never forget. I also had to face the bi weekly issue of standing up to present my work to class mates in our regular crits sessions. But sometimes in life, the goal is so necessary, the motivation so fierce and the emotional cost of failing so impossible to face, you just have to get on with it.

And so I did. I wrote and illustrated a book about a child who dies and is guided to the Beyond by a wise white horse.

_{My graduate show 2025 Poppy and the Horse.}

As discussed above, books about death for children, although often beautiful, are often very non committal about what happens afterwards. After my experiences following my daughter’s death, I was not interested in being avoidant, hedging my bets and being neutral. Talking about death, particularly with kids is still fraught with taboos and restrictions in the 21st century West. It’s the awkward and uncomfortable subject that no one really wants to face. And I get it. It’s not easy. But death is something that will happen to all of us and, through losing Lily, I took responsibility for playing a tiny part in the revival of the death dialogue.

My book, Poppy and the Horse has started to spread, and the feedback I hear mostly is,‘reassuring and hopeful’

And that’s what I hoped for .

It’s hard to ask for support but it’s also lovely to receive it. These essays are offered with love for free, but I do consume a lot of , actually Jasmine green tea while I write them so if you enjoyed this or received support from my words….please…

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The Corsican Initiation

My first experience of off grid life was at twenty. It was a tiny wooden cabin in the mountains of Corsica, where I worked as a goat herd and cheesemaker on my summer break from a French degree. There were candles for the short hot nights, spring water from a stone tank strewn frogs, and a compost toilet which sat in the middle of a wood with no hut around it. (You had to sing loudly on the approach to guard against privacy issues) The sight of the goats tumbling down the hills through juniper scrub, to the sound of my call, led by Bergamot and her clanging bell, and the incomparable scents and heat of the Corsican maquis in summer, etched a longing and recognition in my soul.

I helped to milk the forty goats by hand and then, after breakfast of fresh picked berries and soft goats cheese, made more cheese in a tiny stone shed with no hot water, and a gas ring on the floor to heat the milk. Afternoons were for eating, swimming and sleeping, throwing melon rinds to the cats. Evenings for harvesting the branches of basil and lemon verbena and hot sweet tomatoes, ready to sell at market. I was in heaven. I had left the big sprawling Uni campus, and my parents house in a busy village in Wiltshire to come home to me. To where I felt more at peace, connected and in-my-bones-arrived-in-life than I had in the twenty years until that August back in 1993.

It wasn't just the excitement of being in a place where showering was a hosepipe draped over a tree, or where wild boar trampled the meadow around my cabin at night, or even the feeling that I was just an extension of the land around …it was an indescribable and visceral fusion of all of it in my body and soul. I knew I was born for this. I remember the disgust I felt at the lurid blue shower gel I had hastily picked up in Toulon before catching the ferry to Ajaccio. The synthetic concoction had no place in this hot summer meadow where my bare skin smouldered with lust for raw nature. A hand made soap from a farm mate soon stepped in to help.

Of course this Corsican summer so many years ago became distilled in my mind as a peak experience . The life of my dreams. The bunches of hot, fragrant herbs bundled up for market filled my scent memory with a nostalgic longing for an authentic raw life where Nature and I were one. As time passed and I got on with my life back in the UK I realised that even in the Mediterranean, winter comes and rats emerge and goats get sick. Water runs low and farmers get burnt out, firewood gets damp, candles cause fires (I know this one only too well. More in another post.) Point is, the proclivity to idealise a life off grid is one I fell prey to very early in life but somehow…it still didn’t convince me that house living was better!

Outsourcing our needs

A committed stubborn part of me knew that outsourcing happiness, power needs, medical care, hydration and food was not the way we are supposed to do things . It may be easier to flick a switch and pop a pill, adjust the thermostat and flush the toilet, but a whole slew of intimate connection and satisfaction simply evaporates when daily tasks become automatic and easy.

And life is becoming easier by the day . From robotic lawnmowers and hoovers, and complete meals in a bottle, to the sanitised and ready online answers and the outsourcing of our brains to AI . As I wrote these words, my 13 year old came in to have breakfast. He started to soak oats and water and blend them, and when I asked what he was up to he said that he was making more milk as we’d run out of the dairy sort. Without knowing what I was writing about here, he said that the whole ‘bowl of muesli’ scenario had turned into more of a process when he had to make the milk himself, and it was way more satisfying!! Ease and instant gratification may seem appealing and shiny, but the real grit of providing daily needs for oneself, is infinitely more human. We are born to be creators, from oat milk to fire, to houses (I wrote about this a couple weeks ago here )

And living off grid provides grit and opportunities for creativity in abundance. The choice is to go without the things that most of us take for granted, or to find alternatives. Going without brings its own deprivations and adjustments, and also compromises to the standard of life we’ve been persuaded we need. Finding alternatives can involve financial investment, hard work and creative thinking. (Solar panels, firewood and up cycling for example) Cooking over an open fire outside to save gas, or when we’ve run out, merits a post all of its own. It takes energy and time to set up, but the rewards of sitting round a campfire cooking a meal, jam or coffee has rewards that I’m sure you’ll recognise with a primal shiver of your own.

So one of the many reasons I actually love living off grid is that I enjoy a challenge . My personality thrives on solving problems and having adventures, living life in the margins and figuring out how to make it work. I like to prove I can, even when the world thinks I need to knuckle down and watch Netflix

The term off grid implies difference, being outside the norm, out of the conventional web of existence that the majority of us subscribe to. The grid is the structure we are all plugged into, and I don’t particularly want to be plugged into anything but my own soul purpose and the Natural world around me . Because honestly, that’s what we were all born to do. And the further away from that natal expectation we stray, the worse for everything. And for us. I’m also very aware that I am still plugged in. I’m writing this here, I have a heavy online presence . I do blend pesto using an electric mixer, and charge drills.

And I have not always lived without mains supplies. Proportionately I have lived in houses connected to the grid for many more years. But in-between were the off grid cabins my ex and I built, the yurt for a summer on Dartmoor, the ‘semi off grid ‘ caravan in the woods, and more recently, my converted horse lorry and gypsy bow top.

House living to Horsebox

My last ‘house home’ was a bungalow on a city street where I felt as if I was being slowly stifled In the last gasps of. failing relationship, the house was the final straw. On a street of neat lawns and retirement plans, the lockdowns brought new meaning to the term neighbourhood watch and I, despite my actually quite lovely herb and vegetable garden out back, wanted more, actually less. I needed to escape again. We had an efficient central heating system, a piano and beautiful bathroom, but the feeling of being in a box on the side of a concrete ribbon wouldn’t go away. It just wasn’t near enough to Nature. That craving was persistent.

After my ex and I sold and split the house I bought the horse lorry and drove to a friend’s farm on Dartmoor for the summer . With three (sometimes four) of my kids in tow, we cooked outside on a fire in dry weather, swam in the stream, had a tiny solar panel for a mini fridge and some lights. We carried our water from the farm in 5 litre bottles in a wheelbarrow and I mostly washed outside in a tub. Each week we walked to a local veg growing scheme where I received a big box of veg in return for a few hours help. The farm we lived on raised Jersey cows and we had milk, cream and yoghurt in return for a day a week in the dairy. Again, it was the idyllic summer of dreams.

I was looking for land of my own and it was not only the perfect testing ground for me as a newly single mama, but also a way to live economically until the right place appeared.

Winter

Winter is the time when people ask me if I need a rental . Winter is the time when my Why taps me on the shoulder and asks me to run through the checklist again. And so each winter I do, mainly to calm loved ones but also to confirm to myself that I am doing this out of genuine conviction and not entrenched stubbornness.

Waking in a freezing cold dawn, knowing that I have to walk across a field to get water, light the fire to be warm and candles to see, can be one of the most challenging moments. Not to mention having to go out to pee before anything! And yes, water can be already fetched the night before, kindling laid ready to go, but however organised there’s still a lot more work and planning involved than when I rolled out of bed to a warm bathroom and radiators. Winter can be an exercise in survival. Plus most solar power systems, however efficient, tend to fall short in the darker months. So charging power banks anywhere and everywhere is a daily quest. But, and again I come back to the themes of my post about creating, doing these things creates resilience and resourcefulness, and I know that since I have lived off grid I have become so much more able to deal with tough situations, either by finding solutions or accepting them as blessings in disguise.

So my Why deepens beyond the golden hayfields and wildflower meadows of summer to the raw necessity of using my hands and body to get by. To spilt the wood and build the fire, to relinquish 24/7 access to internet and electric light, to spend time fulfilling the basics of life and then sink into the yellow glow of a candlelit evening by the tiny wood burning stove and feel my nervous system recalibrate to the night around me. To stop the relentless churning of a summer to do list in the depths of winter and actually sink into gentle low lit evenings. To feel more connected to the entire galaxy of stars when I have to go out before bed to pee. To hear the owls and foxes screech by and feel the vastness of it all in the sky over me and my body within it. Vast and tiny all wrapped up in awe and gratitude. Because feeling this connected to the night is something I never felt in a house, with electricity. It was too easy to stay in.

And that’s perhaps the biggest why for me.

Connection.

I wouldn’t necessarily boast about my tiny ecological footprint living off grid because I’ve never been a massive consumer, even in a house. I have always bought second hand, grown food and been a fairly low maintenance girl with travel and ‘products’ (my beauty routine is a shampoo bar and a bottle of almond oil ) But I do drive . I do buy coffee and bananas . Etc. I do buy a lot of batteries and candles !

But connection. By living close to and interfacing with my surroundings through being outside, I am more deeply plugged into the web of life and by default to myself . I am often asked if I will move back to a house one day and the honest answer is ‘I don’t know’ For now I’m happy as I am.

And I haven’t even got into self sufficiency and non reliance on external systems that might not have my best interests at heart. I feel like that’s a separate post.

Full disclaimer . I am at the time of writing living in a yurt since May WHICH HAS ELECTRICITY AND RUNNING WATER !! It’s still a yurt and an outdoor kitchen so its kind of…..you know …anyway

Next month I will be moving back into my horse lorry and being more self reliant than I have been up until this point. On some land . Obviously I’ll go into this more at some point.

In the meantime, much love and I’ll write more soon.

Henrietta xx

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Just before she turned eight, she suffered a traumatic brain injury after falling out of a tree in the wood where we lived. She was flown to the local hospital and blue lighted on to a paediatric specialist surgeon, but died in intensive care the next day. We held a memorial for her at the school that she and her siblings attended on a hot June day with piercing blue skies. We borrowed seven of the white doves that she had so loved as her mood barometer, and released them into that endless blue. One for every year of her life. The farmer assured us they would fly straight home.

And most of them did.

One dove remained, and when Lily’s older brothers class performed their summer play the next day, the dove was seen by the whole school community as it tapped repeatedly on the window of the hall trying to get in.

This followed a week of daily close animal encounters, and it came also as a prelude to the continuous stream of meaningful animal and bird connections that peppered the years following Lily’s death. It was one of the first indicators that a world existed beyond the one I’d lived in for 35 years.

Before this I had little experience of spirit, of dimensions beyond my physical day to day life, and, like many in the West, had given it very little thought. I was raised in a loosely believing Church of England household, where my dad served as a church warden but little was discussed in my home about faith, spirit, God or any sort of afterlife. The core belief was that if you can’t prove it, it doesn’t exist.

Confident Animals

If you are loyal to logic, and have a need for scientific back up, you could mutter about coincidence. Or perhaps kindly concede that a desperate mother could ‘find reassurance and meaning’ in occurrences that she believes to have ‘significance’. This belief holds little weight against the sheer onslaught of synchronicities, encounters and events which ensued in our family. My son even coined the term ‘confident animals’ when the twentieth white dove of the week had fluttered in our path.

It didn’t take much to make me realise that, in some form or another, my Lily was very much still among us and involved in our lives. Each of my other four children, including my youngest who was not yet born when his big sister died, have had ‘strange encounters’ where they knew Lily was there. For them it was often when they were distressed or ill, that she appeared for them as an animal or in a subtle, intangible comforting presence. It’s not that she ‘became a dove’ (or fox /hare/ golden lizard) but that the melting pot of energy beyond physicality has no boundaries

And yes, as a ‘desperate mother’ I certainly did find reassurance and meaning in these events and visitations, but what I also found was akin to the experience of opening a walnut and discovering the night sky inside, with shooting stars and the Milky Way.

My life exploded into a thousand fragments of understanding which have been coalescing in my consciousness ever since. Each year that passes compounds and deepens my awareness of the infinite and indefinable layers of reality that exist both in and around us.

At first, my awareness was focussed largely on the continuation of life after death . I read books like Anita Mooranji’s best seller, Dying to be Me which describes the authors NDE (Near Death Experience) and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying which among a thousand gems , introduced me to the concept of a Rainbow death where the body of an advanced practitioner spontaneously dissolves after death. These concepts would have been inconceivable to me before my bereavement, and would have meant nothing if I’d heard about them. I might have been curious but they wouldn’t have landed in my system with the cosmic detonation that they did after I understood.

Understood just how few boundaries there are between us, the dead, our ancestors, the past, the present the future and all the unseen deities and elemental beings which proliferate around us. How our energy, and how it interfaces with those elements, is more important than our physicality and has far more impact on what we can manifest into our lives, and how we show up in the world, than anything else. During Research for my book Poppy and the Horse last year as part of my MA, I came across this quote in Borrowed Time. on death dying and change

‘Doorways and Portals between life and death are extremely culturally widespread. European rationalist claims about the impossibility of connection to the dead is a recent minority cult.’

Mark. D. Price

The Minority cult of logic and becoming the sea

Living, as we do in the ‘minority cult’, we’re not raised to be cosmic these days. Any signs a young child may show that he’s aware of dead people, (it’s not uncommon for very young children to see loved ones who have passed on) or fairies, or past lives; and the dialogue can become uncomfortable or kindly dismissive. Our logical minds have us locked in straitjackets of reason. And anyone past infancy is soon talked or ignored out of any tendency to deviate. It’s cute for a three year old to talk to fairies, at ten its concerning, at twenty its a personality disorder.

A while ago I walked to the beach with my then 12 year old, who was born fully integrated with such things, as most of us are. He has just managed to retain his sense of understanding and awareness which seems to peak when he is ill, He was becoming ill that day, which dissolved some of the barriers which have, despite everything, managed to wrap themselves around him from school, society, day today life in this world. It was a grey blustery on the beach and I was feeling bit morose and poked around for pebbles and scuffed about. My son meanwhile had climbed up on a large rock and was lying very still, looking up at the sky. In normal times I would have joined him or asked if he was ok, but to be honest I was more than happy to have a break from conversation and have some reflection time.

I realised some time had passed and went to check on him. He looked a bit dreamy and told me he could control the waves , whether they would be large or small. Then he paused and said…

’Actually it might be that I managed to connect to the ocean and know what type of wave is coming so I’m not controlling it I’m just part of it’

Then he said nothing else and we walked home and he was quite ill. Similar things happen when he’s really tired.

I don’t relate this to boast about my cosmic son or to persuade you that he’s special , it’s just that he has managed to not lose the connection. The connection, that once, when we were not separate from Nature, would not have been particularly noteworthy. The sort of seamless integration and awareness that, is, when you understand, at your fingertips, even when your logical brain screams its crazy and impossible.

The challenges of awakening in the 21st century.

People can say things like , ‘we are each other,’ and, ‘there is no separation’ and ‘ what happens inside is what happens out’, and it’s easy to hear these words and nod along as if you understand , without really feeling the visceral reality of that. We’re pretty distracted these days. Between work, bills, the million life admin tasks, parenting, scrolling, coping, struggling, spiralling, scrolling, working…there’s no opportunity to connect with the local pigeon community, let alone the ocean, ancestral voices or nature deities.

And this is why, in our strange disembodied, hollowed out version of life, separated from the teeming, pulsating and vibrant tapestry of multidimensional existence, we often need the cosmic boot up the arse to tell us how it is. How many people do you know who have lost a child/partner/house/career/identity or had a diagnosis or accident and then proceeded to wake up to deeper layers of reality. A realisation that, beyond the shallow dross of 21st century life, there are deeper realities that we all used to understand.

I wish that Lily didn’t have to die to show me all this. I wish that I could have been born and raised in another time where there was no separation, duality of thought, or post Enlightenment dominance of reason, and no digitally imposed brain rewiring of our species. I wish that all this awareness and sudden awakening was not necessary, or didn’t have to arrive with such a high cost. I wish that more than anything.

But the fact is that we’ve all been born in these times for a reason, and we are all part of the great re calibration that is happening, and the gift that came from Lily’s early passing was the awakening to all that I have described. And for that I am thankful, despite the depth of loss.

A week after Lily’s funeral, her class took their summer camp trip to Dartmoor. There had obviously been a lot of discussion about whether to cancel it, but Lily loved being on Dartmoor so they decided to go ahead and spend a day there. Several parents went to help, and on their return all of them contacted me to say that for large parts of the trip, a huge white buzzard had circled the air above the camp and everyone had been saying it was Lily.

I wish for everyone to experience their personal white buzzard moment

I don’t wish for everyone to experience such a devastating loss

But I do wish for everyone to have more than a glimpse of the timeless, unbounded vastness of spirit, multi dimensional reality, and the unfettered potential of their own power that comes with awareness.

PS I’m aware that I have just skimmed the surface of this subject, which could fill vast libraries and also that it could be reduced to a single sentence.

Part 2 coming soon when the summer holidays are over!

Much love ,

Henrietta

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But Mrs Ralph was prolific. She knitted every day. Mine was a small straight forward jumper with red and navy stripes, that we had to hang out to air for a week to get rid of the smell of cigarettes.

There’s a reason I remember that very unremarkable striped sweater from when I was five, and that’s because of Mrs Ralph. It carried some of her essence and character with it (although thankfully not the cigarette aroma after the initial airing), an unmistakable patina that was hers alone..my jumper had a story. A personality between the twisting yarn strands. It was unique . Mrs Ralph’s hands and time created it, a couple packs of Benson and Hedges fuelled it, and she kept busy and connected with the village in her declining years, making clothes for the neighbours kids. It was also, crucially, a cheaper option for my mum than buying one in town.

Fast forward to now and we don’t need to do that. Cheap clothes have flooded our stores with a tsunami of fast throwaway fashion, and making a homemade sweater (or being able to afford to buy one) is a mark of affluence, in money, time or both.

But we have lost so much .

Today, I plan to explain what, and why we need to return to our Mrs Ralph era.

Firstly let’s define making things. Making things can mean anything .

Like a cake. A hand picked bunch of flowers. A pancake from scratch. A doodle. A pipe cleaner doll. An origami box. Yes, it can be a whittled spoon or a beautiful drum, but it doesn’t need to be . Just something that your hands have personally shaped or moulded or created by their dexterity and ingenuity. My intention is not for you to stop reading this with an irritated, ‘this isn’t me I can’t make things’

Of course you can. So can I. We all can.

Pre Mrs Ralph we all made things to survive. We had to. We wove our own cloth , we made our own clothes, grew our own food, knitted our own socks, made the butter, cheese, preserves and candles. We made our own medicine, spun our own wool , made lace, horseshoes and pies;

We are no less capable than our ancestors, we have just forgotten the skills in a cultural amnesia born of mass industrialisation. We might fantasise about knitting a sweater but who has the time? Or the money for wool? We could buy four sweaters for half the cost and get next day delivery.

But in that, what did we lose?

Resilience, Resourcefulness, (with Rebellion as a side dish.)

I once attended an evening talk and presentation by two young women recently returned from a six week full Stone Age immersion in the Swedish wilderness. They had spent months prior, in preparation, making rawhide containers and woven bark baskets, drying hunted venison and dehydrating wild berries . They had brain tanned deerskins to sleep under and bow drills to make fire. During the six weeks, they had no contact with the outside world and lived entirely and without exception as a person would have done in that era. After the talk we were able to browse all the artefacts they had made and used during their immersion. It was a seriously impressive display and I wondered aloud at their skill and handiwork and the sheer diversity of skills deployed to produce such an array of equipment.

One of the women happened to be near and said,

‘We are such babies…we know literally nothing. What we did is just a tiny part of what our ancestors made, did and understood. The whole experience made me realise just what we have lost as a species’

And I might add….’and what we are able to relearn.’

So resourcefulness .

When we have the ability to make things with our hands , we can survive. We don’t know yet what’s ahead of us in the world but it’s looking pretty challenging. We hurtle towards an existence where there is less and less physical output needed from us for daily survival. There is increasingly more reliance on external systems, apps, AI support, same day delivery on a whim, disposable commodities, and all our basic needs outsourced to corporations and industrial production lines. We are, with some exceptions of course, passive consumers these days.

If and when that all collapses we have nothing but what our ancestors had. Our hands, and bare materials. And our resourcefulness. As a simple survival tool, learning to make things and to retrain our brains to think creatively and usefully, could be the greatest gift we give ourselves if we want to continue to live sovereign and independent lives. Or just live. depending on what happens.

Resilience.

When we are resourceful and make things , a basket, a pair of socks, a cabin, a knife…we feel more capable, tougher, able to face difficulties . Not just because we have necessary resources for living, but because it retrains our brain to think that we can. The average life in the 21st century West encourages extreme laziness and sloppiness of thought. We barely need to think if we don’t want to. Making something, even as simple as a welly boot rack creates a sense of resilience . If I can make that then I make something else ….snowball effect. One only has to observe the feeling of empowerment that washes over a small child when they have made something ‘all by themselves’ to see it in action. They feel invincible and ambitious, and as if they can conquer the world . And if they can maintain that without interference into adulthood…they probably will. Adults have a harder time feeling invincible, but learning to make things is a good way to start.

We’ll get to Rebellion in a moment but let’s look at the mental health benefits first.

The mental health benefits

I probably don’t even need to tell you that making things with your hands makes you feel better right? If you are anything like me, and your overthinking wears gravelled grooves in your brain; the quietude of making is a panacea worth exploring. With hands busy, the mind calms down, and in its most elevated, or ‘flow state’ one can achieve an almost transcendent peace, where outer and inner reality become fluid and you realise how seamless reality is.

In the book, Making a Life, by Melanie Falkirk, the author describes how, after leaving a job in publishing, she started to make things with her hands. She acknowledges that she didn’t need to make any of them for survival, but,

I needed that bond to feel whole, connected to my heart and soul, to my community, to my ancestors and to the natural world around me.

The disconnection we now experience from the tangible objects in our daily lives is unprecedented. We have lost the relational aspect, the knowledge of who made the spoon, and how, and where. If it was us who made it, we would know the grain of the wood and the grind of the knife, the scent of the shavings and the satin touch of the final oiling. Making something is a journey that carries associations, creates memories and also brings learning from the mistakes that invariably happen.

And that all gives us immense satisfaction. Happiness. Well being. As anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake expresses so succinctly, ‘joie de faire’

The joy of making.

And in our current mental health crisis we all need some of that. I don’t have the stats to hand but we all know that we are more stressed, anxious and under pressure than ever before. We (mostly) have our material needs met but fall short with the emotional and psychological ones. When we make the spoon, we know the wood it’s carved from and learn its properties, we may even have harvested it ourselves, and have a connection with the tree. Perhaps someone sees you carving the spoon and is curious. A conversations starts and before you know it, someone is inspired to try…they start googling spoon knife and asking about techniques. You’ve made a friend and started a revolution.

And so we come to Rebellion.

We could even tone it down a notch and call it resistance. Making things with our hands as a form of radical resistance to the takeover over of passive consumption, rebellion against the calamitous effects of mass production and dumbing down of the human soul. I even feel rebellious when I darn a sock these days, it would be so much easier to just buy another pair and submit to the lure of advertising. We could even go as far as to say that making things by hand is a rebellion against dehumanising. We are human and it’s in our biology to create, to make beautiful and useful things . The urge that our ancient ancestors had to make things is still alive and relevant in our lives today. We are hardwired to create.

Some friends and I are part of an occasional craft group. It’s not revolutionary. Just a bunch of women sitting in someone's sitting room drinking tea and making things. Some of us knit, some draw, some just come for the craic. I often make dolls. The last time we met, someone said, ‘actually this feels revolutionary’. To be together, not isolated online or stressed out alone at home. Doing what women have always done. The no pressure conversation . When making is the focus, talk meanders and fluctuates. Silence and concentration punctuates flow. It’s natural, like the river that winds around uncertain river banks. And we’re making. Creating with our hands.. And somehow the conversation grows deep as we realise how ancient, relevant and necessary this is. Soul work stitch work. Resisting capitalism and consumerism, resisting digital takeover, resisting control.

We started with Mrs Ralph and we’ll end with my mother.

Writing this has made me realise just how much there is to say, so expect a part two at some point . For now though, maternal legacy.

Among a checkered history of mother daughter relations I can say with gratitude that she passed me something of real value by her proclivity for making. It was, as I said, the seventies and eighties, so fast fashion was in its extreme infancy and as a tiny child, most of my clothes were hand made. Although some were not to my taste, (the floor length flannelette nighties caused anxiety on the annual school residential trip) what remains is the memory of the making.

I knew it was possible. It is part of me, that belief that I can just make something. I saw the paper dress patterns pinned out on the floor; the hundreds of tiny patches cut from Liberty and Laura Ashley floral prints, lined up in old ice cream tubs to be sewn into quilts; I saw the home cooked veg from Dad’s allotment cooked for dinner, and freshly made bread and cakes emerging from the oven. Making things mostly kept my mum’s mental health just this side of breaking, and a lot of beauty was created besides.

I know how I feel when I haven’t made anything for a while, and so I do something about it.

A big part of my work going forward with Hearthwing will be to weave the threads of this essay into to my life and what I offer. I am closer to finding a place on the ground to expand Hearthwing into the real world and am excited to be able to share digitally and IRL as time passes.

There will also be snail mail newsletters which I’ll be offering soooo soon: my real time effort to mitigate the digital with the analogue here on Substack.

In the meantime, tell me what your experiences are with making.

Do you make things in your life? For fun, for money or for mental health benefits ?

Is it a necessity for you or is it tough to integrate into daily life?

Much love,

Henrietta

If you enjoyed this, buy me a coffee! This enables me to spend more time bringing words of hope to you… and you’ll have my eternal gratitude

Buy me a coffee

I’ve been finding myself commenting on people’s posts about AI with mutterings about goose feather pens and oak gall ink, whilst drawing my hand woven shawl more closely round my shoulders . I’m only half joking. I just haven’t woven the shawl yet.

I admit to have been being very head in the sand-like about the whole thing because of all the things happening in the world right now this seems the most out of control, the most incomprehensible, and the most unreal.

I avoid thinking about it because I have a less than zero desire to converse or interact with it, which is ironic because as we know every off the cuff internet search now practically opens your throat like a foie gras goose and stuffs AI unwittingly down it. To lodge in your gullet like a sickly synthetic dessert that no one ordered and is gonna make you vomit later.

Or eat your soul.

Or make you crave it again and again because after all its easier to swallow synthetic slop than chew on an organic steak and steamed kale.

So my revolutionary act is to keep chewing the steak. To grow the kale. To keep sharpening my quill. To increase the amount of snuggling in bed with a book…(currently Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places and The Beekeeper of Aleppo) To mend my clothes and embroider flowers over stains and new stitches around old rips. To harvest Wild Mint by the stream and Chamomile along the cliffs and to write letters. Real ones on paper with envelopes and sealing wax.

And of course to weave that shawl….from wool grown down the road, dyed with onionskins and alder bark.

These are things we have always done. Making and mending and writing with ink, growing food and finding medicine . Simple acts of courage and resistance now in our artificial world. They not only have measurable effects on our physical, emotional and mental well being but create a resonance of humanness. Humanness as part of Nature. A vibration that calibrates with other life forms. When harvesting Wood betony to support my health for example, my relationship with the plant deepens . If I pick respectfully, and spend time checking in with it first, my fingertips hum with a deeper understanding of the leaves, petals and life force of the plant. My body floods with a subtle wave of relational euphoria and I feel the ancestral pull of those who came before me, who also spent their lives gathering, touching, brewing and administering . Far from just picking a flower, the whole process becomes an experience in multi dimensional connectivity that spans time and space, a visceral and tactile connection that extends beyond the simple act of gathering.

Back to AI. I also know that I’m avoiding dialogue with the issue out of fear. Fear of what the future is becoming, fear of the sheer magnitude of the problem and fear for the life of my children. And I’m fully aware that fear based avoidance is not a very effective tool for change .

Fear paralyses and crushes, renders me incapable of hope and the ability to be innovative or creative. And eating steak at home alone over my embroidery is lovely but it doesn’t create any outward movement of transformation apart from energetic ripples. (And if you’ve read enough here you’ll know how much I do know these exist)

And of course, I don’t HAVE to create outward movement, but I want to. Don’t you? Isn’t that at least part of the motivation for being here on this more-thoughtful-than most platform? To influence others in a positive way. To inspire, share wisdom, knowledge and experience. To cloak it in beauty and fine words and encouragement . I may never offer advice on how to master the Notes section, or share my rags to riches story of 0-10,000 paid followers in my first year . (Well maybe one day!!) or even give strategic advice about maintaining the three pillars of my niche topic.

But what I can and do offer is my raw, wild foraged experience of life in deeper connection with the layers that dance around everyday life, and beyond the limits of the rational mind. I can share my journey of how losing my daughter opened doors to awareness and connection that life had only hinted at before. I can bring you with me on my daily practices of mindful creativity and simplicity, through homespun crafting round the hearth, and foraging for food and medicine. Deeply connecting with nature through respectful and reciprocal interaction. I can also bring my conviction that, however dystopian things may seem, there are fragments of beauty and shards of tattered hope for a better future.

Humaning on this earth may never have seemed so inhumane , and so removed from everything we expected when we were born, but a return to a more tangible touchable and visceral experiencing of daily life is a thread worth pursuing. A mode of return. A pathway to remembering. A quest I am dedicated to.

And while I take steps towards my journey to find stewardship of land, and the establishment of the bricks and mortar, roots and earth based version of Hearthwing here in West Cornwall, I am here to bring these things to the online version.

Which brings me to my current antidote to AI.

Soon, when my printer has arrived and my crayons are sharpened , my pretty stamps ordered and my cardstock is on my desk, I will be mailing out letters and art in envelopes to you ( if you subscribe)

I was hoping to share beautiful images of these letters but Royal Mail is kicking its heels in the delivery of some key components of this offering, so images will appear in due course…keep your eyes peeled in Notes.

Writing letters was a huge part of my life as a teen in the late eighties to early nineties, to penpals Russia, Zambia, France Germany and South Africa. I was an au pair in Paris for a time after school, a goat herd in Corsica, and a travelling farm worker in British Columbia, all rich fodder for the pages of carefully considered pages I curated for friends and family. And the absolute delight of receiving a letter back, often from a metal mail box at the end of a long farm track. Spotting the raised red flag which indicated mail was the end of a wait of weeks for the slow shipping of letters across the Atlantic and back. The sight of a bunch of fat hand written letters …well if you’re old enough you’ll understand what I'm failing to put into words. I’ll leave you with the nameless thrill of anticipation.

Doesn’t it sound better than an email?

Honestly?

I’m excited, for me and for you and although I usually have disdain for over used quotes, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’ comes to mind here.

If we are currently embroiled in the biggest struggle for humanity that we have ever known, it’s the subtle, creative and loving actions that will save us.

Depth, slowly read letters and a home brewed coffee..or Wood Betony tea .

Until next time ,

Love,

Henrietta

Hello! I’m Henrietta, the face behind Hearthwing, and I’m here to remind you to look through and beyond the mundane moments of your everyday life, to the beauty magic and mystery of what has always been there, around and within. To see what you, in this post enlightenment rationalist paradigm, frequently forget or even disbelieve. To understand the reality of other worlds beyond your tangible, touchable, thought based existence . To discover ways that you can, through simple practices and rituals at your hearths and in your homes, connect with a deeper, more human way of living in this world than you may have thought possible. And to be perhaps inspired by the things I share from my journey. My journey, which aspires to prove that there is hope to be found and tools to be employed in our crazy shit show of a world; and that the hope, and those tools start with you, and with me, and what happens inside us. And then they ripple out …….

First some Things about me

I was a quiet only child, mostly at home with books, art materials and in the green mossy lanes of my Wiltshire home in the UK. Observing and imagining. Often at the edge, dreaming, catching details, watching…

^{A dear friend remarked that ‘I hadn’t changed at all’ when I posted this picture on Instagram a while ago..so maybe I don’t even need to post a current pic..just expand this one to age 53!! For those with limited imagination scroll down for current me.}

As a child I longed to keep goats, live in a cabin and write and illustrate children’s books. (I have now done all three and now attempting to do it all again , the upgraded version) I also wanted to make herbal medicine and heal the world, so that’s pretty much still the same too.

In early adulthood however I did none of those, save some months on Corsican and Canadian goat farms, but I studied French at Uni, married early, had five kids and was a creative, nature based home mama for many years, (There was a divorce, second long term relationship and multiple biz adventures in there too)

My life turned inside out in 2009 when my eldest daughter Lily Rose died suddenly aged seven, following a tree climbing accident. The greatest tragedy imaginable and the point when all the threads of my existence coalesced into a web of radiance that spun itself around and into my life.

I became aware of the magnificence and enormity of the seen and unseen worlds and how they collaborate in our lives when we know enough to ask . The grief walked hand in hand with expansion and revelation.

I allowed myself to do things I had always been told weren’t possible, breaking free from past shackles, and eventually wrote and illustrated a book, ostensibly for children, but really for anyone who knows that all of us will some day die. And who is willing to look for the beauty and possibility among the clouds of sadness .

^{Cornwall open studios in May, where I sold copies of the book , Poppy and the Horse, that I completed during my MA last year..}

My new venture Hearthwing is the synthesis of my many life practices, work and experiences. Currently living on rented land here in Cornwall UK, I am now actively looking for a plot of my own to develop the on the ground version. I will be sharing more about this over the coming weeks and months.

In the Substack version , as I wrote in my first post, I am here to…..

……..stake my claim in the hopeful soil of change and transformation .

To reaffirm the weave of light and dark, to find the balance in the spaces between, and weave magic into them. To remember the possibility of re calibration. To remember how to be human in the remembering of our ancestral legacy.

To explore, with you, reader, ways of interfacing with the world’s apparent disregard for operating in a way that honours us, natural rhythms and even life itself.

To squirrel into the velvet underground of the hidden, the fertile void of silence, dark promise and remember that oftentimes, it’s what lies below the surface that has the most impact on the outside world.

There will be grief, death, love and art, foraging and medicine and sharing with you my life in the green valley in West Cornwall, UK.

There will be prompts and challenges and community forming….so join me for the deep dive and a rise to a new but ancient freedom

So what to expect week to week.

Weekly Wednesday Words.

I will share thoughts, inspiration and tools for living a soulful and connected life in the 21st century see above..

Expect wild medicine, analogue life, creativity and flow state and communication with spirit guides….slow living and ancient crafts

Coming soon….the Monthly Missive…

This will be for paid subscribers only and include a real paper letter from me , sent to your house, addressed by hand, and including a beautiful small art print designed exclusively for the monthly missive crew. I can’t actually tell you how excited about this I am, but I will be updating on progress so click the subscribe button below to be the first to know when it starts . (It’s ok you’re just signing up for free for now!!!)

Community

In time I will develop a Hearthwing community both on the ground and here in the online world . As someone who has a tendency to over commit, I’m taking things one step at a time…I’ll keep you posted !

For now, I so appreciate you being here and do say hello…its so amazing to meet new readers and connect here in this still new to me land of Substack…..have a beautiful day and sending much love ,

Henrietta

Ps please link me with like minded writers in the comments . As a relative newbie I’m really keen to read words that resonate ….

I then lay them out ….

Coast path between Cadgwith and the footpath for Ruan Minor, Cornwall

I love making these flat lays; it’s an ephemeral moment of appreciation and recognition, but also of praise. A bow to the fleeting, fragile beauty of the colour explosion of Spring and Summer and the joy it brings. I label each flower with its name, (see end of post) and each photo feels like a devotional practice to something many people don’t even notice.

I have always learned the names of flowers. Some of my more positive memories from childhood were country walks with my mother, who has a deep and enduring appreciation and love of flowers. She bought me the beautiful Flower Fairy books by Cicely Ann Barker and would often ask my father to stop the car if she spotted a clump of Poppy or Scabious on the verges of the Wiltshire lanes where I grew up. I have continued the tradition of screeching to a halt for a particularly abundant patch of Wood Betony or the intoxicating honey scented Meadowsweet, both of which are everywhere roadside this hot July.

The names of flowers intoxicate me . Restharrow. Milkwort. Harebell . Sweet Woodruff. Travellers Joy and Birdsfoot Trefoil.

Saying them feels like a hymn. Or a poem. Or even a prayer. As I enunciate the syllables, I feel not only more connected to the flower, but to the rolling eons of our life on earth alongside them. They become more alive , the names carry hints of their relationship to the folk who lived alongside them. It makes me want to get to know them more, to learn about the uses of Milkwort, or Eyebright..Lungwort) The clues are in the names!!)

Incidentally the wonderful ‘Modern Herbal’ by Maude Grieve, (pub. 1931) is an absolute treasure trove of this kind of information. I lost my copy and currently have one on order. ‘Flora Britannica’ by Richard Mabey is also very helpful. including the myriad of local names for flowers, reflecting the diverse uses and mythology, pharmacology and folklore of each plant.

I have continued the tradition of passing on the knowledge to my children. They have all read the Flower Fairy books, they have all been rigorously tested on local flora as we walk the lanes, woods and coastline. My 20 year old daughter has the image of the flower she was named after as her phone screen saver. My other daughter astonished her teacher when, at five, on a school nature walk, she confidently identified Fumitory and Scarlet Pimpernel. This is not to boast that my children are some prodigies of the natural world, at one time we would all have known these things. We were all born, I believe, with a natural kinship and connection to every part of the natural world which we breathe alongside, but as we leave infancy, the ways of tech and walls and conformity enclose us like a prison. When the continuum of generational knowledge is broken, the threads of flower names dissipate on the breeze, leaving only a faint trace of pollen like a whisper in the air.

To return to my flat lays. Even I was astonished by the sheer diversity and abundance of wild flora on that walk between my studio and the supermarket on an extremely unprepossessing stretch of road in town. There was incidentally also an abundance of Heineken cans and discarded men’s boxers but they were intermingled with Yarrow, Black Medick and Centaury. A dizzying profusion of butter yellow Lady’s Bedstraw and purple Common Vetch foams over the edges of the pavement outside the Secondary School. I find myself wondering how many children (or teachers ) recognise or even notice the flowers at the gate. And whether or not it matters. If you’re here reading this, by now you’ll know it does.

When my youngest son did an introductory day at our local secondary school, one of the sample lessons was geography. They spent most of the hour learning about climate catastrophe and extinction rates. He came home a bit depressed and like, WTF? (He was 11 so he didn’t actually say it in those exact words)

When I take him out on the cliff paths and show him Wild Chamomile and Wood Betony, and he takes a couple of blooms to press, and a few to brew for an evening calm tea, he remembers. He notices them when he passes them again. He would feel emotion if he returned to a clump of flowers and found them torn up or destroyed. Because he knows them. Their names mean something to him.

The names confer a kinship. His future protective impulses will be born from this relationship, not from horror stories of collapse. Those are far more likely to induce anxiety and freeze, or numbing out.

As Robert Macfarlane writes,

‘We find it hard to love what we cannot give a name to. And what we do not love we will not save.”

Robert Mcfarlane and Jackie Morris collaborated to produce the wondrous book Lost Words, and their intention was simple, to create a work which enchants us back to a world that is slowly being laid to waste by tech domination and disregard of the natural world.

By naming, painting and writing so beautifully about Herons and Kingfishers in a world where knowing the word iPad is genuinely deemed more important, they seek to demonstrate the power, indeed spell like quality of names. And to help us remember them too.

My life work, besides mothering and various side hustles to pay the bills, is to reconnect and remember, and by default and also by design, to inspire reconnection and remembering in others .

Reconnection to a way of life we were born expecting and didn’t get.

Remembering ancient ways of being in the world .

Reconnection to ourselves, our potential and power, and that of others.

Remembering our wordless relationship to the natural world and all that is seen and unseen

Remembering that a way of life more akin to that which our ancestors enjoyed is how we are supposed to exist.

Remembering Life.

Life and its intricately simple, deceivingly complex and breathtakingly deep and multidimensional ways. Life when the rain on our faces was a blessing and the food we ate was a prayer and our gods were sunlight and earth and whispers in the night from our ancestors. Life where the unseen was heard, our voices were sacred and we honoured ourselves and animal kin with parallel love.

Step by step I am navigating ways to return to ways of being where my breath rises with the moon and falls with the tide . Day by day I devote time deepening into existence, month by month I commit to sharing my practices and supporting others to do the same.

But, our 21st century lives in the West have become so incongruent with systems and patterns of harmony. As a species, we have become so distant from the seamless, all pervasive cohesion that once permeated our existence on earth; that the gulf between the way we live now, and the ways of our ancestors is huge . Because of this gap, the methods and tools needed to regain an embodied understanding and lived experience of cohesion , must often be adapted to simpler steps. Simple steps to accommodate our limited depth of understanding. We can’t just go from 7 hours of Tik Tok to a shamanic trance with an Orchid. The jump is too big.

That’s why names are so important .

There is a school of thought that naming things is just another left brained attempt to categorise and delienate, to fix in position and to catalogue what is actually a living cosmology of subtle energy and vibration. That naming things is a rational, scientific and reductive practice designed to display knowledge without demanding closer acquaintance.

It is certainly true that learning flower names by rote as a kind of intellectual practice does bring the risk of precluding a closer understanding of the plant, or openness to sitting with ambiguity and flexibility. It brings the risk of that very common human proclivity to pigeon hole and assume that because we know the name, we know all there is to know, and not question further. It can also reduce that curious impulse to enter into a dialogue and reciprocal relationship with the plant. or to hang out with it and get to know it on a deeper and more multi dimensional level, ask it questions and be open to being surprised by the answers. In indigenous societies this level of communication would have existed between humans and the plants they used, rather than our rather limp explanation that herbal medicine developed ‘by trial and error or accident’.

Nathaniel Hughes at the School of Intuitive Herbalism pioneers this way of working with plants,

‘learning from the plants through felt experience, relationship, and the wisdom of the body.’

Nevertheless, having said all this, I believe , as explained above, that despite these risks, names are a essential step, even a bridge, between the screen numbed folk that we are, and a gradual relearning of ancient ways of existing . Of integrating those ancient ways into our current crazy lives. Better to know the name and nothing else, and to recognise and grow to love the flower, than know nothing at all.

Because names do matter, words matter. They carry love, power, intimacy and a way to remember . It may be true that my end goal is to live in a future where humans again swim in a sea of universal consciousness. A sea where the boundaries between plants, animals and us are as permeable and insubstantial as they were in the far distant past, but we have some work to do first.

And learning the names of those weeds on the pavement is a good step in the right direction.

We must remember to remember .

Between Krowji artist studios Redruth, Cornwall, and Tesco supermarket.

*I obviously observe a respectful foraging code of conduct where I refrain from picking if there are few plants or if it is rare or endangered species

And perhaps, in minute remote pockets of ancient forests far away, a scattering of people still do. In some communities there are tendrils of remembering of the times of matrilineal life, the ways of goddess culture and an era of deep respect for the feminine in all of life.

The giver of life, the sensual, sexual, spiritual, lush abundance of mystery and depth, cyclical necessity and spiralling flow of life and death. Rest, unbridled pleasure and abundance. Fertility as a biological imperative AND an explosion of joy. Necessary death and rebirth. The balance between masculine and feminine principles which is a literal prerequisite to the success of continued life on earth. (Sorry to be literal….)

The separation from Nature

We moved away from that, towards organised agriculture, land ownership and hierarchical power structures. We reduced and separated and categorised and profited, structured and delineated and drove fathom deep, invisible wedges between our birthright of verdant spiralling juiciness …and us.

In a miasma of anaesthesia we got blinkered . An opaque veil of forgetting drifted around us, and the rigidity of dutiful production and guilt based, (also increasingly trauma provoked) behaviour became the societal modus operandi in the 99% patriarchal world. We forgot to simply step into the untamed fecund tangle of the (increasingly isolated) wilderness and do the same as it has always done. The wilderness knows how to proliferate with grace and abundance.

I am not planning to unpick the fall, or the progression of the separation, or any of the myriad proposed hypotheses for why it occurred in the first place. Instead I am offering a simple experiential realisation, a revelation that has emerged like a flowering vine, spiralling around my consciousness over the years. from teachings, from life, from moments similar to that which I am about to share here.

How I reconnected .

Like many, and perhaps like you, I am a product of my life so far and am a contradictory mass of repressed wildness, guilt induced work ethic, lust for beauty and pleasure and an irritating inability to dedicate my life to either without restraint.

And so a week ago I woke in a funk. My planned day of bristling productivity was thwarted at daybreak by a poorly child who was not only home from school, but not well enough to go out. Also not ill enough to sleep . After the necessary tending and caring, I careened around starting ten things and finishing none. I made coffee and the pot got knocked off the stove. Twice. I tried to tidy the kitchen and things broke or needed extra steps that I couldn’t take because of sick child . I tried to write . Obvious fail. Make a reels …my poor son needed my attention. I started to sketch birds for a current body of work. Just no. Can’t remember why, but no. I got some raw wool out to process for a course I’m running this autumn, and it needed washing first, and drying. It was raining and I live an out door life. So no.

Etc.

I hurt myself whanging a hip on a door, stubbed my toe, mopped coffee, nearly cried and tripped over a sleeping kitten on the doormat.

Luckily at that point I managed to bring myself to a halt. In previous years I probably wouldn’t. The grip of my life’s conditioning had been too determined still, to allow me to stop trying to be useful or productive, or working towards something that will earn money. But that day, last week, I did indeed pause for long enough to observe myself with compassion in that jagged splintery morning .

I made a third pot of coffee, this time standing quietly next to the little portable gas ring that loves to play its goblin tricks on my hot drinks. I made a slow delightful cup with all the fun things I add in (butter etc) and asked myself what I actually wanted to do . What would bring me joy, and also be suitable for being a nice kind mama to her poorly son? I’d recently bought a new deck of oracle cards which I had been using every day and loving, but the box was broken, the cards are round slippery little things and I had been wanting for two weeks to make a felted pouch to hold them neatly and with the respect they deserved.

I’ll maybe talk about oracle cards another time, so pause any thoughts until then, for now , the thing is the pouch. Wool. Special. Embroidered.

As I write this, I am indeed incredulous that it was such a thing. That it took me so long, caused me so much pain and irritability and self recrimination to actually allow myself to sit the hell down and do something enjoyable. Not useful. Not for money. Not for someone else . For me.

But I did. By this point my son was actually engaged in making something, so I took my coffee outside and, in the sun… (yes it had been raining and then stopped ) I sat and made my pouch. I cut the shapes from an old merino wool sweater gifted by a friend for crafting, chose some threads, and stitched. First I made even blanket stitches around the outer edges of the pouch, and then turned to sewing little daisies from thread loops fanning from a central point. My focus narrowed from the tumult of my to do list to the silver point of my needle meticulously piercing the wool… green and white stitches, In and out. In and out . Over and over . Over and over The sun warmed my body. The coffee was hot, rich and unctuous. Each sip was a luxury.. Our garden Robin hopped close, and a Jay perched on my garden fork. The Nasturtiums glistened with the recent rainfall and sparkled in the sun. And the texture of the morning around me settled like floating down. It seemed that every cell within me and without was recalibrating from grit to velvet. And fast. But like warm honey not like a hustle.

I knew that what I was doing was right. The morning and I finally understood each other because we had synced our rhythm . We were one . The Robin and I were on the same page. The Jay was still shy but he knew. My son drifted out and snuggled up and considered a craft project he might do. We read a book together . The kittens tumbled nearby. Neuro science data about brain wave patterning and flow state and crafting evaporated into an irrelevant discourse in the face of felt body senses. What use is data when my body is the forest floor?

I remembered, finally, that what I resist 90% of the time because my head tells me is lazy and wrong , is actually right. Pleasure. Fun. Love. Enjoyment. Each time I remember, I get a step closer…. the wilderness of soul is calling me. Dissolving me. Erasing boundaries. Sharpening ancestral memory. Re stitching me to the cosmic web of all that is seen and unseen.

Not bad for a bit of sewing eh?

Stick around if the wilderness is calling you too xx

The Pouch .

One sparkly clothes mix your own margarita let your hair down affair and one a more earthy combo of lentil dhaal and songs round the fire.

At the 11th hour I chose the sparkly one because I know more people there and there was a chicken curry on offer .

And then I actually checked in with how I felt. My lad was revving up to party and I had a headache and a gnawing sense that I was hanging on by a thread. A lethal combination of a long day working, a turbulent week and a cacophony of troublesome life issues on surround sound at 3am was shouting at me to chill at home.

And yet…. it was Summer Solstice and we should have been celebrating . We should be DOING something. I wanted to do something . My son wanted to .

The turning of the year and the high point of light and sun is meaningful to me as it was to my distant ancestors. I wanted to be in community, sitting round a fire as people have always done. I wanted to frolic with flowers and sing and dance.

But. It was the last thing I had energy for. I felt as if I was letting my son down, and being a grumpy Grinch on the brightest day of the year

And here’s the thing .

I knew, that next morning, on opening any social media apps, I would be assailed with a slew of merry making, heartfelt and sincere rituals, ancient ceremony and 21st century overindulgence that I was not part of. And I would feel even worse.

I would learn about the Swedish custom of picking seven flowers on Midsummers Eve and, how putting the blossoms under the pillow would lead to dreams of your future husband .

I would see delightful group photos of my bronzed friends frolicking in sparkles and eating chicken curry without me

I would be shown more than I needed to know about another friends fertility ritual with her partner (I thought that was supposed to be restricted to Beltane… anyway))

I would be reminded that the earthy dhaal and songs round the fire had been just as wholesome and beautiful as early suggestions had led me to believe

I would learn all about Citrine, Carnelian and Bloodstone being laid out to charge in the sun’s rays and writing notes of intention and release for the midsummer fire

I would also be acquainted with, from nowhere in particular, a micro bakery in a small Iranian village and the daily flatbread intake for a typical family there.

I would see exquisite flower mandalas in sacred groves with exquisite women in beautiful linen dresses bedecked in crowns, eating aesthetically arranged fruit bowls in solar colours.

Also from nowhere, I would learn a lot about sleep apnea, microdosing, somatic exercise for trauma, a farmer picking blueberries in the Appalachian mountains , what actually happens in Antarctica (anyone?) and a random clip from ‘Friends’ (which I never used to watch btw) ….and collagen.

Plus more shares about Solstice rituals in stone circles and connecting with the sun’s energy and power.

I was right

I saw all those things the next morning.

And every time I tried to leave there was an insinuating reels about traditional Georgian cheese bread or a Cornish Celtic inspired ritual which pulled my tired brain back to take a better look. For wholesome inspiration right?

Except events invariably take a turn and rapidly descend into skits about how long it takes women to leave the car when they arrive anywhere, and what happens in men’s public toilets (we don’t need to know this )

My son and I had actually got up at dawn to watch the sunrise at the beach and so, through tiredness, my resistance to increasingly banal content was pretty low. And I was susceptible to the allure of fresh baked bread, if not the inner workings of male rest rooms.

All that to say that , as I’m sure you have also experienced, many many times, the ravenous all consuming jaws of Instagram will hijack your brain in its sophisticated tentacles of perfectly curated addiction, all sweetly dressed up as essential/entertaining/dopamine rich/meaningful content.

And dish up a healthy serving of really inspirational connections, which, you know would be super useful to have for the biz/health/hobby/relationship issues.

And there is never an end to it.

Never

Ever.

Until you and I put an end to that sparkling opioid of an abyss and re engage with the raw banality of the everyday. The texture of early morning and the rarified air, and cups of tea and cobwebs in the window, last nights washing up and the robin that eyes you from the garden wall and the dew caught in the bowl of the sweet pea leaf, the tired hug from your son and the squeak from the kitten reminding you of life. The bunch of flowers you picked from a lay-by on a dusty road yesterday and the sweet card through the post from a friend who knows. The satisfaction of job well done and the settled peace of reading a book with someone you love. Hot feet in cool water, the waves on the shore all white and whooshy, and a sweet strawberry ice cream.

Those are the things that live in our body,

Not in the dopamine hungry reachings of our brains .

I like many I am to a degree, addicted to social media , but there was something profound about my Solstice experience.

My son and I had a sweet, low key evening reading stories round our fire pit, and, as mentioned , rose early and watched the sun rise over our local beach. It was simple, loving and we felt that we had marked the occasion and honoured its significance. And that was enough. That was real.

I am not eschewing it completely because….life, emerging business, selling my wares, and the genuinely meaningful connections I’ve made……but a measure of moderation and restriction is occurring.

The strength needed to resist is LARGE, and I ‘ll be sharing soon about what’s working for me.

In the meantime …what works for you ? It’s a huge phenomenon that did not exist a very short time ago, so we are fighting a hydra of unknown proportions but any and all tips and experiences welcome !!

Love,

Henrietta

Ps I did actually try the Swedish flower thing on Solstice eve…and then couldn’t remember my dreams the next day….dammit!!!

I’m a beginner to all this (weaving and Substack) and there were soon tangles of gaping warp threads across my knees and my mind jumped to more productive tasks, that didn’t involve playing with wool in my garden. I was close to losing patience with the whole thing.

My habitual life tempo has been Sempre Presto for years, but age and experience have crept up on me recently with a firm plea to recalibrate to Adagio at the very least. And patience.

Yesterday afternoon in the sun I remembered to listen to those voices and allowed a slowing. I did not run to my emails or the washing up, but, like settling sand I let my jaw and shoulders drop, and forget the obligations of my life

With the settling came a quiet focus, a panacea to the frenzied daily pace of work, parenting and life demands . The warp threads responded to my recalibration and aligned like strands of sunshine on my lap.

As I wound the threads and spun the loom to begin weaving, my regulation and stability (or occasionally lack of it) was mirrored in the weave. The golden threads seemed to distil the summer light of early evening into the cloth. It’s almost impossible to weave stressed and have a good result.

It’s also almost impossible to life stressed and have a good result. Body stability is useful. So is emotional steadiness, mental calm and a steadfastness of soul.

But then, the act of weaving itself is regulating. Repetitive handwork, such as knitting, crochet, spinning and sewing all have a soothing and settling affect on the nervous systems and we don’t need lab results or controlled research on brain patterning to tell us how that feels in our body.

We can back up our own body sensed and intuited experience by reading the science, and justify our actions with stats; but the way the fabric of our selves alchemizes from thorny briar tangle to undulating velvet when we sink into a craft….that’s enough proof for me.

Historically and ancestrally, humanity has always made beauty, created utility, foraged food and moved their bodies in tune with the natural forces around them, working with the tides and cycles of the earth, sky and sea. Community work, making with hearts and hands, the tools and sustenance for life is what made us , and makes us, human.

We are currently in the convulsions of a societal paradigm that is plunging us into a crazy making, brain rotting dystopia of digital takeover. We tap our flattened souls onto the card machine of automated living, to access what we’re told we need.

And so I guess that’s what I’m here for , on this new to me platform, to stake my claim in the hopeful soil of change and transformation .

To reaffirm the weave of light and dark, to find the balance in the spaces between, and weave magic into them. To remember the possibility of re calibration. To remember how to be human in the remembering of our ancestral legacy.

To explore, with you, reader, ways of interfacing with the world’s apparent disregard for operating in a way that honours us, natural rhythms and even life itself.

To squirrel into the velvet underground of the hidden, the fertile void of silence, dark promise and remember that oftentimes, it’s what lies below the surface that has the most impact on the outside world.

There will be grief, death, love and art, foraging and medicine and sharing with you my life in the green valley in West Cornwall, UK.

There will be prompts and challenges and community forming….so join me for the deep dive and a rise to a new but ancient freedom.

Thanks for reading! See you very soon.

Love, Henrietta xx

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