The skies are busy, the water wants to weep, and the land is waiting, and I’m learning more and more that at times, often, it is essential not to fill the space.

I’ve been more attuned to this eclipse season than I might usually be, and that’s curious. There are parallels here, in the patterns, to other times of great changing - including some already experienced in our lifetime (Lehman Bros, and the chaos that followed, anyone?!)

I sense we are deep inside the fall now, and that collectively, in the back end of this year, something big will shift - in a defining and almost certainly irreversible way.

I don’t know what.

Perhaps it’s already here and we can’t yet see it. Perhaps it will arrive quietly, and we’ll never really know.

Life doesn’t offer answers, but demands that the hard edges of those of us brave enough to pay attention become porous to what’s emerging - and ready to meet other worlds beyond the sensible and known.

I talk often of turning and thresholds and the ritual of crossing, and of something strange - ancient or brand new - being summoned.

In these last days of summer, from inside the fresh waning, can you get quiet and still and listen for it?

And rightly so - these ancient, universal, celestial events are indeed worthy of our attention.

But not everything needs to be extracted from, leveraged or explained.

These days, during time of eclipse we’re told to ask ‘What can I manifest, what can I call in, what can I get for myself at this time?’

But before eclipses were seen as portals, they were experienced as something more ancient, unsettling and true.

A moment where the sky tears open.

A moment where the sun is obliterated from the sky.

A time where something comes undone.

A bewilderment and a discombobulation.

And in that interruption, we are simply invited to stay close, pay attention, and bear witness.

We are living through a time of great rupture in the fabric of reality.

Something has eaten the light.

You are still here

We are still here

The light is still here

But we cannot see

So what now?

Before I sign off, I want to acknowledge how savage the weather is this summer, and make space for what that does and doesn’t mean, especially in lands and for people that are already experiencing so much inflicted pain.

So, as I sit still in the dark, and listen, I find myself wanting to offer this blessing to the water - a prayer for rain. Perhaps over the coming days, you might make some space to offer it up, and so we might make a collective movement towards soothing and nourishment for all.

‘Water, please remember us, though we have forgotten you.

Come gently now,

in all the ways you know how -

through cloud and root,

stone and river,

breath, skin, tears.

Find the places that have grown hard with heat.

Find the cracked earth,

the scorched plants,

the tired bodies -

the places in the living world that have forgotten how to soften.

May you rise and fall where you are needed,

and rest where you are welcome.

We ask only for enough.

Enough to ease the heat.

Enough to soothe.

Enough to restore.

Enough to let the land breathe again.

Enough to let us breathe again - together.

May what is parched remember its capacity to receive.

May we remember that we are not masters of this earth, but guests, and guardians, and passing kin on it.

And may you teach us, once again, with your unerring patience, how to tend what gives us life.‘

Xx

Amorphous and fleeting, this late summer season isn't something we typically recognise here in the west, but it’s very real, and in the eastern world, particularly through the frame of Traditional Chinese Medicine, it is considered a season in its own right - a distinct window of time, albeit just a few weeks long - or at least a liminal space that deserves and so requires, placing.

Liminality - the space between no longer, and not yet.

A gap. And a bridge.

Most of us have no clue what to do with that - where to put ourselves, how to hold it, where to look.

So much so, we most often pretend it isn’t happening.

But if you listen for it, you’ll feel it. It’s not an event, but a shift we feel inside ourselves - literally and metaphorically too.

This often-overlooked ‘fifth’ season is the season of the mother. Energetically it is tender, the element of earth and a downward movement towards it, groundedness and the reality check that comes with that, a still point, and surrender.

A time for processing and digestion.

A time for activating the necessary separation and breaking down that’s a signature of that.

Gratitude. Empathy. Connection.

And nourishment.

Or lack of.

The pause that precedes the season where we will once again reap what we sowed…

A bountiful harvest.

Or a reckoning.

As in nature, so in the rest of life - personally and collectively.

I’m sure you can see the links with all that’s going on in the bigger arc of life too?

So it feels important to also share that elementally, what follows late summer’s - ‘earth’ is autumn’s ‘metal’ - the energy of eliminating what is unnecessary in order to preserve what is essential to life.

And the energy of alchemy and transformation.

I’ve said it so many times over the last five years that we are living inside of a great turning.

If you haven’t been already, it seems like now might be a good time for readying yourself to begin.

//

((p.s. it’s eclipse season too, so amplify everything I’ve said here over this next month or so, and some)

p.p.s. The Sanctum is back in season from September - you can join us there weekly through until Samhain to do some of this work)).

(Last year, 2025 - The Tower, Page of Pentacles, The Chariot ‘Everyone loves destruction and rebirth, but nobody really likes it when what we know and love gets taken down in the fall.’

2024,  Five of Cups and Five of Pentacles ‘These are tough times. There is more to come. It will get worse before it gets better.’

You cannot tell me the cards don’t see and speak and know…)

So here it is for 2026 - a message for us all for the moment:

The Emperor, Page of Wands, Justice.

We are living in a time when the fiery impulse of domination has crystallised into law, institution and command, until it presents itself simply as ‘the way things are.’

Or so it seems.

Because beneath that hot, overbearing will, there is an older, truer way - a desire, a wildness, and a knowing that it can indeed be different.

And that for the sake of a greater rebalance, it must be.

For reality has, to date, been arranged in a certain way, but what the Emperor demands and enforces, the Page of Wands refuses to kneel before.

This holy spark enters the room, scattering embers, until the collective itself catches flame… and the whole game shifts.

A divine rebalancing is summoned.

Something older, universal, eternal.

The empire doesn’t hold the scales - truth does - and she demands a redistribution of power that answers the harm done.

Justice is the blade that cuts away what is false and overgrown, releasing what has been buried so that right measure may return.

So it seems that we finally stand on the verge of a great, long overdue recalibration - but it will only be realised if right now, we each and all pick up the torch.

For years we’ve come here for our sessions, to the lake. There’s a time for centre and a time for edges, so some days we choose to work deep inside the forest, and other days we choose these steps right at the water, in a place we’ve come to know as our portal. Something special, beyond words, happens every time we sit here.

Whatever we’re working with (today commercial challenges, sustainability, culture and structure, politics, regeneration, death and the afterlife, children and their growing pains) tea and tarot always feature as is the way with my work.

This morning, as we sat, quietly listening, the wind blew the tarot deck, and a card flew right into the lake.

Instinctively, she leant down the steps and plunged her hand into the murkiness to catch it, as it started sinking quickly to the bottom - holding on to me as she did so.

She could’ve easily fallen in but she didn’t.

And then we saw the card…

And realised we were sitting right inside it.

The Moon

The heavenly body that links the human and the divine:

The bridge between what is material and what’s possible

The darkness that must be endured before the light can return.

The black waters below, filled with unseen, fearsome things we’d rather not see or know.

The pillars that surround them.

The chasm, in between.

It is that chasm we have to cross if anything new is to emerge.

And here we find ourselves at the edge of that precipice right now, some of us getting ready to jump, some wanting to but not able, some refusing to, some not even willing to acknowledge or look.

Yet we are already on the steps.

Already leaning forward.

What’s precious is quickly moving out of reach.

Because gravity will always have its way.

It’s dark and might get messy.

You might fall or get dragged under.

But standing still will never stop the pull.

(p.s. I owe you some pieces in the archetype series, but there’s so much to say I don’t know where to begin again… bear with me)

L x

And boy, did they deliver.

They arrived.

They did their thing.

Then they were gone.

Of course Mercury is so many things…

God

Legend

Planet

‘Hermes’

Magician

Wizard

Metal

Conductor

Trickster

Transmuter.

And so, mercurial energy shows up in so many forms, and can’t be defined or contained - that’s the point.

So what of their teachings and guidance for us - changeable, fleeting, but no less important or real?

In archetypal terms, Mercury is a bridge: between here and there; heaven and earth, gods and humans, solid and liquid, intellect and ituition, ether and form.

Mercury it seems, simply wants to move, wants us to move, wants us to make form from that ether, to express, to translate, to change state, to transmute. Mercury wants things to be made real, made known. It wants to flex, respond and shake. It. Up.

Mercury rules ‘thought’ which of course is one of the ways the inner realm of soul makes sense of and connects with the outer world. And Mercury also rules the throat centre’- the place in the energetic body where magic is transformed into the word, for onward transmission.

They ask us to know our true nature, find our voice, claim it, USE IT.

And they remind us that our magic is sourced from the ground of our body. No matter how sky-bound we are, or want to be, if we want to live an attuned life, in congruence, with good impact, we really must start and keep returning there.

I’ve been wanting to write about Medusa for a month now, since she showed up fast and furious as archetype two in this year’s Loom - yet she disappeared as quickly as she’d arrived, and so in many ways, and of course unsurprisingly, made it clear she didn’t want to be defined, and certainly couldn’t be captured.

And yet, her lessons are many. For at least a few years she’d been hovering somewhere in my awareness, just out of view - preceded, and perhaps shielded by Lilith and Kali, her dark sisters. Alice (in Wonderland) then stepped forward - guiding us down the rabbit hole, inviting us to walk the line between reality and illusion, demanding that we begin to question or at least wonder about everything we think we know.

Then, as we stepped back into the world through Alice’s looking glass, staring right back at us through the reflection in the mirror was Medusa, all wide-eyed, snake-haired and stone.

Closer than ever.

As real as they come. As elusive as expected. As forceful as I’ve ever known.

Perhaps that’s always what it’s like to exist inside the shadows.

Perhaps that’s simply how it is to live at the edges of the world.

So there, from that seemingly ugly, fearful place of exile, this priestess, made monster cried out to us. She cried to us of betrayal and desecration. She cried of vows made and taken; boundaries broken and remade; devotion and shame. She cried of surrender - the sweetness, the sorrow.

She cried of rage.

She cried of reclamation.

She asked us to cry back of these things and in doing so, wake up and answer her call.

And then, in the blink of an eye, she was gone.

//

Reflective prompts from Medusa, and the belly of the snake:

What was take from you, and in the taking, what did you become?

What are you too petrified to look at? And what are you worried the looking will turn you, or them, or it, into?

When will you realise your rage is welcome and needed here?

From this place, at the edge of a crumbling world, what do you see and what do you know?

If you ‘chop off your head’ what is might be made possible, and what could be born?

When you occupy the fullness of your body, who are you?

When you slip out of your skin, where do you go?

//

Until next time,

L x

Despite us being in the peak of the ‘summer’ holidays, the Yang energy is waning, and the Yin of autumn is creeping in…but there’s a gap, as it hasn’t quite arrived, yet.

I always know when it comes (it’s getting earlier every year by the way) but I never signal it out loud much these days.

Too pessimistic. Too dramatic. Too dark.

Liminality - the space between no longer, and not yet.

A gap. And a bridge.

Most of us have no clue what to do with that - where to put ourselves, how to hold it, where to look.

So much so, we most often pretend it isn’t happening.

But if you listen for it, you’ll feel it - it’s not an event, but a shift we feel inside ourselves - literally and metaphorically too.

Late summer, the often-overlooked ‘fifth’ season in Eastern medicine, is the season of the mother. Tender, the element of earth and a downward movement towards it, the groundedness and the reality check that come with that, a still point, surrender.

A time for processing and digestion.

A time for activating the necessary separation and breaking down that’s a signature of that.

Gratitude. Empathy.

And nourishment.

Or lack of.

The pause that precedes the season where we will once again reap what we sowed…

A bountiful harvest time.

Or a reckoning.

As in nature, so in the rest of existence - personally and collectively.

I’m sure you can see the connections with all that’s going on in the bigger arc of life too?

So it feels important to share that elementally, what follows late summer’s ‘earth’ is autumn’s ‘metal’ - the eliminating of what is unnecessary in order to preserve what is essential to life.

And the energy of alchemy and transformation.

I’ve said it so many times recently that we are inside of a great turning. Everything is changing, whether we want it to or not.

If you haven’t been doing so already, it seems like now might be a good time to meet that, and to start readying yourself to begin.

(This year in the Loom, we’re working with specific archetypes month by month - each of them guiding us into our deep exploration of consciousness, the unseen world, and our role as medicine people within that.

Though I will of course reserve the deep work and weaving for the group and our travelling together there, I’m sharing some highlights from each archetype here as they show up - so that you can connect with them too - touch in, be inspired, get curious, and maybe have some signposts or wonderings to follow in your own developmental journey).

It’s important for me to be clear that the archetype is not the work, rather it is a window and passageway into it. I hope that by the end of these twelve months you have a library that you can dip in to, to support your ongoing inquiry and adventures in this crazy thing called life.

Because quite frankly, we need all the help we can get 😂.

Today I give you Alice in Wonderland.

At the first glance she’s accessible, fun, maybe childlike and even pedestrian, but when we soften our gaze and step back we can see that Alice is a mythopoetic dream - deep, expansive, quirky, light and dark - both.

Not everything is as it seems.

Alice’s story takes us through fundamental themes of descent, rebirth, transformation, reality and illusion, nonsense and chaos, somatics and the intelligence of the body, the reality and illusion of time, animism - the belief that everything is ‘alive’ and talking to us, tyranny, inclusion, power vs power over and more.

So I offer you her as place to begin, and ask you - if you let yourself fall down the rabbit hole, what might you find?

And not bloody fast enough for my liking.

Last year, at summer solstice, in my reading for the collective, I pulled the Five of Cups and Five of Pentacles:

‘These are tough times. There is more to come. It will get worse before it gets better.’

This year The Tower, Page of Pentacles, The Chariot.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, we are right inside a monumental change of epic proportions. Greater forces at play, trickster energy running the show, complete collapse of both architecture and infrastructure as we know it.

Everyone loves destruction and rebirth, but nobody really likes it when what we know and love gets taken down in the fall.

But that’s the thing we need to agree to here - all or nothing. There. is. no. middle. way.

So this is an incredibly exposing time, and we’re being asked to render ourselves prone to it, to stay vulnerable, to surrender to beginning again, whatever the cost, and to realise that we are indeed the curators of our own destiny, even if we’ve absolutely no clue what to do with that.

We have to carve out the future now - it is literally in our hands, but this is the most important bit - The Chariot is often seen as the go- getting ‘warrior’ make stuff happen card and to an extent it is, but what’s almost always missed is the ‘incubator’ energy of it - The Chariot in many ways represents the womb - that which is safe, protective, nurturing - capable of sustaining and nourishing life whatever the external conditions, because it is both contained and porous - the home inside ourselves where we can source essence, replenish and renew. We must be patient, discerning, tender, attentive - living the realisation that we are of the world, but we are not it - that we are separate and also one and the same.

All that said, I don’t have advice for you, nor do I wish to offer any - other than to say ‘get with it’ because it’ happening, right now, so best you acknowledge that so you can come along for the ride.

These days I think about time a lot.

About the interwoven relationship between the darkness and the light.

About how we as people measure time in such small ways: years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds.

About how in doing so, we miss a bigger something.

Because our human measurement is one thing, but time has another rhythm too - generations, centuries, millennia, eons…

Deep time.

Both rhythms matter and yet we forget to let ourselves connect with the richness and beauty of the longer, slower, truer, more enduring thing.

It is both soothing and enabling when we do.

As we arrive at this weekend of Summer Solstice, precious though it is, there can be a pressure to be with and celebrate the light.

Of course that’s important and needed, but this time signals something else too.

Deep time energy reminds us that the darkness is also needed and that the light can take years, even a lifetime to resurface and show itself fully.

You don’t need to search for or hold onto the light, or the darkness, because you are them.

Your body is the turning of the seasons and the passage of life through them, so you just need to let it be.

If you’re struggling to find or make good contact with the light right now, I hope you can find some comfort in that. We took a long time to get here, through ages in the umbra, but get here we did, and onward we’ll go.

Turn sideways

Move sideways

Press yourself against the in between

Surrender to it

and

b r e a t h e.

What happens?

Maybe something breaks open.

Maybe you do.

Maybe a teeny tiny crevice appears.

Follow the light of it.

Then you’ll find out.

Then you’ll know.

I woke up feeling super rough on Tuesday morning and by Wednesday I felt absolutely dreadful - happy in myself as my mam would say, but physically wrecked.

Once again, I find myself living from a place somewhere between bone deep, ancient, visceral grief and joyful hopeful clarity - and I am somewhat depleted. Strong, and tired, full of momentum and exhausted - both and everything and all, as always.

It’s a wild ride this life, isn’t it? At least for those of us that are paying attention or trying to.

On Monday night I hosted a beautifully tender gathering online, bringing people together from all over the world to hear the voices and music and stories of the Palestinian people - to be alongside them at this terrible time in some minuscule way, in solidarity, and as witness and distant companion.

It’s nowhere near enough, it’s never enough, it cannot be enough, but it did though, feel like a tiny something - to let our hearts break a little, together, to speak to something real and true, and make a little space for the whole of it, briefly.

I simply can’t comprehend how they can bear it - the weight of it, the horror, the terror. And in my own small way it personally costs me a lot to hold and offer up life like I do too, and my energetic body has responded, in part with the heaviness of it all, and in part with relief at the sharing and the (finally) increasingly collective partaking.

So I’m attending to myself and what’s needed - nourishing the layers of me, and resting a little, and I’m good, and I’m still here, and I’ll be back more fully too.

The point of this then, I think, is to remind us all that there is a lot of pain, and that where there is pain, there is possibility.

As Josh Schrei reminds us in the Emerald podcast - all systems, collective and individual, must tend their grief and ritualise their own renewal, otherwise they rot from the inside. When we enshrine upset and disruption and make it sacred, it can begin to come to us in gentler forms.

Don’t we all need a whole lot more of that?

Thank you for the gift of the circle

For arms that hold us

Fires to gather round

Portals to cross through

Worlds to inhabit.

May we do that with awareness, presence, compassion and spirit.

May we include. it. all.

May we embody our full power - softly, move deftly, be sharp where needed, fierce when necessary.

Let our eyes, ears, heads and hearts be clear.

Let our feet stay planted. Chest and arms wide open.

May we continue to hear the call of life’s longing.

May we make it

May we answer.

May we know the medicine

May we be it

May we share it

May we never stop.

Let us remember why we came.

Let us be old.

Let us be old.

There is much to do here.

~ Laura Beckingham

⭕️

Then I realised it’s been newborn life and immediate postpartum and the crazy early years with a young family. Pregnancy, trying to get pregnant, miscarriage, pandemic.

OVERWHELM.

Looking back, I realise I’ve always felt it: growing a business, starting a business, leaving big corporate job, working in big corporate job, maintaining a social life, cultivating connection, marriage, mortgages, travel, technology, getting a grad-job, getting a degree, A-levels, the whole school journey, puberty, childhood…LIFE

Fuck me it’s a lot.

So much noise, so many things, so much to do, SO MUCH TO DO.

Clock-time.

Seemingly, so little space and time, because we fill it and steal it from ourselves and each other. Deeply systemic, collectively perpetuated, continually self-inflicted.

I don’t want to change passwords and confirm terms and conditions and pay money for insurance for things I don’t actually want to happen (what an energetic mess that is) and watch paralysed and dumbfound as a genocide unfolds through my mobile phone.

I WANT TO LIE BY A LAKE AND LOOK AT THE SKY WHILST EATING PEACHES.

And I want us all to be able to do that to, if we want to.

I at least want to sit on the floor of my tea-shed, not caring about appointments or counting down-minutes, drinking tea while the baby sleeps. I want to bathe in the energy of Oak trees, feel their medicine from the inside out and teach her about how they sustain 2,500 other species, and have existed for a million years and are at risk of falling into decline and extinction because we’re looking in the wrong direction, and so, fucking it.

I want her to care, and have the time and space to, too.

What the bloody hell are we doing?

(Inspired by ‘Of the Oak’ at Kew Gardens. So powerful, so beautiful, so necessary).

I’m already making, or at least being shown and handed, magic here. Since we got the shed, all I’ve done inside is simply sit for bowl after bowl of Ripe Puerh every day and let my mind and spirit wander. Cormorants and Seagulls, the Four Queens, the way the light moves and how it calls me, the wind and what it knows.

There are wind chimes here, Kwan Yin’s here, the Magpie that brought me my baby is here, and a Buddha from our Andalucían house that we’re soon saying goodbye to is here - because this really is more than enough, and the most potent medicine is in the mundane. Finally I know that now, thank God.

Tomorrow I’ll take my first ‘meeting’ in here - I’ll sit on the floor and talk with my astrologer via the portal of Zoom. She literally lives on the other side of the world - my morning, her evening - Scorpio full moon watching over - a whole world of pleasure and pain and possibility between us.

All of it here in the palm of my hand.

We met 10 years ago in Bali, deep in the heart of the jungle, on the edge of the Ayung river - come to think of it, snake showed up every day on that trip, showing me for the first time the power of skin and tongues - and as we said hello, she shouted (my energy, not hers) two questions at me that went on the shape and show the next decade of my life.

Tomorrow there will be another turning.

Every minute of every day we’re inside of one and I’m always drawn to the spaces, places that bring them into focus - the people that are willing to look. Those that make me do so.

That’s my offering to the world too.

Today I realised that there are all seeing eyes in the walls here, everywhere. Perhaps they’ve always been watching, from the other side, waiting for me to look back at them. Perhaps all roads lead us back to this, to these moments where everything makes sense and we know absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps that’s the whole point. Perhaps there’s no point at all. Perhaps that all that matters.

Perhaps, this is all that’s ever needed.

(And while we’re on the subject of place, and pain and possibility and enoughness - let me say again as loudly as I can, again and again, forever #freepalestine)

It’s not new news, but life as we know it is changing - and it will never, can never, be the same again.

So inevitably, it’s pretty clear there’s any going back now, for any of us or it. Of course there never was, but really, truly, the only way out is through.

~

I posted this last summer, after pulling the Moon card as a reading for the collective…

‘The Moon, and its message for the moment…

The heavenly body that links the human and the divine - the bridge between what is material and what’s possible.

Ruled by Pisces, it signals the harsh end of winter, the darkness that must be endured before the light can return, and the liminal space - that place between no longer and not yet.

It is considered the ‘gateway to the resurrection’.

Only by passing through the gateway will new life emerge.

Notice the chasm in this visual and the murky waters below, filled with scary, dangerous things. It is that chasm which must be traversed if the new is to be made manifest.

We are there at that chasm right now, most of us - some jumping, some getting ready to, some wanting to but not able, some refusing to, some not even willing to look.

This risky leap of faith is one that requires courage, clarity, fortitude and companionship.

In some way, we must all take it, together, if we are to survive.

Over the last few years you’ve heard me say often that as a species, a people, we are right inside a great turning and things are beginning to reach a crescendo.

Like birth, it is painful and messy, and even dangerous. We have to stick together, stay connected, unified, shine a light for each other and build a bridge as we travel it.

We have to take a deep breath, hold hands and jump.’

Only by passing through the gateway will new life emerge.

I speak of portals all the time - can you feel that we’re right inside one, right now? What’s on the other side is simply yet to be revealed, and we’re travelling to meet it whether we want to or not.

So, I am rooting more than ever in to the old wisdom. Finding ways to connect with what is infinite - both enduring and fleeting. Being in my body, and learning to be totally out of it too. Calling in my circles and companions and guides. Listening in a cleaner, deeper, wider, truer way. Including more than ever and moving in increasingly discerning ways.

It seems to me that this might be the only way to make it through. So, I wonder where you might do your version of something of the same too?

With love as always, L x

‘Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple...when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us.’ ~ Guillermo del Toro

I’m guided by, work with and so talk about archetypal energy a lot, I know. Tarot is just one example of how I do that, I speak of myth and mystery so often I barely know what’s ‘real’ and what isn’t anymore, and I communicate best in embodied expression, ritual and poetic prose. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off, after all.

Working with archetype, I’ve learned, is an invitation to be as crazy as your conscience allows - and as reckless as these times mandate us to be.

~

Crow has actually guided me pretty much my whole adult life, and continues to do so - their wisdom infinite, representative of the ongoing and omnipresent cycle of death/rebirth we all live inside of - a wise and faithful teacher for those who travel frequently between worlds, or long to.

This year, alongside Medusa, there’s Lililth, Baba Yaga, Mary Magdalene, Wolf Woman, Eros, the four Queens of Tarot. All unapologetically here. All crying out for us to know them. All begging us to reclaim our versions of the deep and ageless wisdom they hold.

I want you to know that these ways of seeing the world and meaning making in it are not about escaping modern, ordinary reality - rather, they’re about using age old energies, stories and frames of understanding to make sense of it in ways that get underneath the current, noisy and often obfuscating stories.

Inside the mountain, in the belly of the beast, right now, we have to lean into a deeper, truer, universal and more enduring way.

‘Learn the true topography; the monstrous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not inside your consciousness; you are inside them, trapped and howling to get out.’ ~ R A Lafferty

#oldwisdomnewways

Then I remembered it doesn’t even matter (except, of course it does) because there are no doorways, because there are no walls or ceilings.

No houses.

No homes.

~

I took my little girl into town on the train - she had a haircut, and afterwards we bought fresh croissants and ate them on the grass, in the sun, while she played freely.

On Tuesday I guided a practice of ‘through the portal’ in one of my community spaces, the Loom - it was beautiful, and full on - the doorway to what’s beyond, wide open.

I’m not sure if I’ve returned, or indeed ever will, or even need to.

On Wednesday morning I climbed deep inside the body of the snake, in class with my own tantric/embodied dream-work teacher.

And this afternoon I’ve been cooking, eating sushi and cleaning windows.

Insane.

I’ve had a migraine at the intensity and paradox of it, all day.

It is such a gift to be sensitive to everything. To be attuned, to feel so much, to see, to have some sort of knowing of how to be in relationship to it and some gentle willingness to respond - and it is a hell of a lot too. It’s taken me years to cultivate my energetic body, the shape of my life and my work to a place where I can navigate reasonably smoothly, mostly, without getting overwhelmed or feeling I need to disconnect or separate in some way to stop that from happening.

I guess what I’m saying is that conscious living, and learning how to be here in fullness, and fully, in all aspects of our everyday, distant, parallel and often juxtaposed worlds is an ongoing experiment and always will be.

I know you know something of that.

~

So take good care - it’s wild out there (I know you know a whole lot of something about that, too).

Much love x

‘Having floated through this life and probably all of the others before it, spending most of it in the sky oscillating between bird form and helium balloon, one day, mid 30s, I decided to come to ground…

This is where it all really began.

So this is a story about trusting that you don’t need to give up the sky to stay earthside, about the sad fact that most people never look upwards, about the vortex of trauma, and about the possibility of fully embodied living being the most powerful magnet of all.

This is a story about alchemy, reimagined. About what it’s really like and what it takes to be here as fire and ether and balm’

One day I will (probably not) write my autobiography.

For now, this is pretty much it.

So many of us are understandably chasing magic.

And, stating the obvious, but we are each of us, human beings. Humans with bodies and homes, and people and creatures to care for, gardens to tend, places to go, things to make and see and do. Inside of our innate capacity for numinous living, and our longing to reclaim it and centre somewhat in that place, let us always remember that too.

True alchemy is about moving form into ether, but importantly it’s also about transforming ether into form.

Alchemy is attuning to the unknown, including the seemingly out of reach - in order that we can make it real. It is seeing and making a space for and then reaching into what seems to lie outside our immediate field of vision, gathering it, and bringing it here, so it can be used well in every day life in service of the all.

The doorway to beyond, and access to everything extra-ordinary that resides there, lies just on the other side of fully embracing embodied ordinary living.

If we don’t want to lose ourselves, or disassociate from functional normality, I say we absolutely have to start, and to some extend always stay at least partly, there (here!)