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I am here at my desk because I need to be. Beyond the window before my desk the treetops of the surrounding gardens sway in accord with the wind. A light rain has fallen overnight. Below me the damp road hisses with the occasional passing car. This is where I come to reconnect with what matters, to reconnect with the essential space for healing. I have not been here a while, and I have suffered for it.

I have learned that writing returns me to my body and guides me the pathway through grief and past trauma. When I ignore this commitment, my body starts to lose sense of itself, panic rises and with it a compulsion to strive frantically toward some undefinable destination where safety ostensibly lies. And yet, when I return here to the desk and to my body, I find the safety I’m looking for, even here amidst the chaos.

Since childhood I had dreamed of becoming a writer, inspired by Jo in Little Women and Judy Davis (playing Sybylla) in the film adaptation of My Brilliant Career. In my late teens my dreams transitioned to ambitions to become a music writer and poet. I was making my sporadic way there through a radio show I hosted for a local community broadcaster (3RRR) and the poetry I wrote under the influence of early morning light. But when my parents and brother died, the writing stopped. I wrote one solitary poem a year after their deaths.

Waiting

I was waiting…
Endless, fallen hours drawn out,
The nervous sound of the C.B. radio
Keeping my mind alert.
We clung to those early hours
As though our lives depended on them
…and they did.

In the uneasy crispness of morning,
As pink tipped clouds smouldered
And awakened the new day
I felt a knowing, a tender awareness, yet I
Clung still to time.

It was the final three calls in three hours
that shadowed the waiting.

And when the news arrived—
Six thousand trains of thought,
My blood pulsed,
Pooled in my heart.
And as I walked down the stairs,
To call friends and pass on the news,
Sergeant Nicholls held my weight,
As my legs gave under me.

And one year on today, having
Travelled lonely days, riding
Seas of grief and loss, I see myself
Still composed on an isolated chair,
In a busy police station
Waiting... waiting... waiting
To hear the news...

(R L Berg 27 October 1986)

I was unable to write again. Loss took with it the capacity to sit quietly and allow words to come. Poet and Essayist, Mark Tredinnick, in his essay Temple of the Word wrote of ‘The shattering of the self. Loss of life’s lyric. A self and a world evacuated of all meaning...’ I believe he writes here of both the shattered self following loss, and the loss of the personal lyric—the capacity to write—when acute grief is tearing through the body.

Nick Cave echoed this, speaking of ‘a kind of incapacitation’ following the death of his teenage son Arthur. In his conversation with music journalist Sean O’Hagan (compiled into the book Faith, Hope and Carnage), he said ‘It’s not so much that I had to learn how to write a song again: it was more I had to learn how to pick up a pen. …[I]t’s almost impossible to describe the terrible intensity of that experience. Words just fall away.’

In the immediate aftermath of grief, meaning is lost, our bodies and nervous systems are seized by overwhelm or terror. Our body’s only purpose is to process the devastation. Words are not possible. And while some of us eventually return to the lyric, others take time. It took me nearly three decades to return to my desk, albeit there were plenty of failed attempts culminating in strips of paper and part-filled notepads at the bottom of a bedroom drawer.

I blamed my failure to write on my failure to develop a practice of writing. But that implies it was just about commitment. The true reason I didn’t write was because the space I needed to enter—the unsayable space deep in my body—was inaccessible to me. I could only write from my head rendering everything I wrote ostensibly elegant, but without heart or truth.

Virginia Woolf wrote in a letter (to Vita Sacksville-West), “It is all rhythm… here am I … crammed with ideas… and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm… A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.”

Rhythm comes from the body. But any attempt to come into my body, whether to write or anything else would prickle it with terror. For it was in my body that the terror lay; the years of unresolved grief and trauma. I lived in my head for survival, unaware that the years of chronic illness were my body crying to be heard. A body that felt too unsafe to be inhabited. But aching to be heard and held.

It wasn’t until my early 50s that I was compelled to the page to survive the loss of a friendship. This seemingly unrelated loss unleashed, without warning, decades of suppressed grief and exposed a life based on pretensions and false ambitions. Everything I had fashioned to hide from myself and meet the expectations laid out by social norms were seen for what they were—the inadequate mask of a grieving woman. Mai-Britt Guildin and Carlo Leget, in their book Loss, Grief and Existential Awareness refer to this experience as existential regrieving. They explain it as a ‘painful and overwhelming struggle… and invitation to deepen our understanding of an old loss and help us into a deeper understanding of our lives.’

Writing was the only true thing I had available to work my way through resurfaced sorrow. And it changed my life.

In the early days of writing my book about grief, my mentor, Mark Tredinnick, on reading a chapter said, ‘Enough of the philosophising, where are you in this story?’ ‘But that’s exactly what I don’t want to do’ I retorted. ‘But Robynne’ he counselled, ‘that’s where the heart of your story lies’. I wrestled with this for weeks because it was antithetical to every principle I had lived by to that point. But I trusted Mark, and I knew he was right, and over the following months I allowed him to he quietly guide me into my body to write.

It was from this hidden, unexplored, unsayable domain within myself, I finally found the words. Or perhaps I should say, I found my internal rhythm from which the words then flowed. And so, what I had feared most over those long decades, now guided me and my writing.

Rilke writes of this experience as one of disorientation. He urges us to stay the course… ‘If it holds terrors, they are our terrors, if it has its abysses these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers then me must try to love them.’ For, if we can ‘hold on to what is difficult then what now appears most foreign will become our most intimate and most reliable experience.’

With Mark’s mentorship and supported by the works of other writers, poets and philosophers who had suffered, I was able to access my own suffering. And to learn that my suffering was part of a human suffering. When I paid witness to the suffering of others while holding my own it opened me to our shared humanity, our shared suffering.

‘We feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home’ wrote African-American writer and poet Maya Angelous. When I find the words through my inner world, I transform the unsayable into healing that transcends my grief and brings new meaning to my life. And as early light blushes the clouds, beyond the trees, beyond the window, beyond my desk, something beautiful enters into me.

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The Wild Edge of Sorrow

Francis Weller

In the Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller invites the reader into an exploration of how ritual can facilitate access to the secreted aspects of ourselves and reconnect us with our unspoken sorrow. It’s less a book about recovering from grief as it is about recovering our banished sorrows and reincorporating them back into ourselves through ritual. He believes the social expectation of ‘getting over’ loss, separates us from our true natures and prevents us from being fully present with ourselves and with the world.

The early part of the book focuses on what Weller calls the Five Gates of Grief—the domains where grief is present—including losing what we love, the unloved parts of ourselves that we’ve repressed, the communal losses such as ecological grief, violence and injustice, our untended needs and childhood wounds, and ancestral grief. Modern society has largely expunged the ritual practice, once so central to our private and communal lives. He acknowledges the lasting harm caused by a Western society demand that we keep our grief private and unacknowledged.

In the latter half of the book Weller discusses how ritual practice can support both the embodiment and release of grief. He doesn’t extol ritual as a catharsis as much as a means of enabling a deeper existential enquiry into our internal selves and our communal lives. His discussions around ritual are anchored in stories of practice—of doing the work—without getting esoterical or arcane.

Weller suggests we must create space for silence and solitude, an archetypal idea I find analogous with Jewish mourning rituals and Rilke’s meditations on sorrow. The idea of emptying ourselves of noise and activity to listen deeply and deferentially to our suffering; remaining open to what emerges and allowing the unfurling of wisdom. He addresses our commonly held fear that should we enter the depths of our sorrow we may never return, suggesting that it is only through entering our grief that we can return to ourselves. When do so, we enter the sacred grounds of sorrow, where love, beauty, meaning, longing and awe coalesce to create the conditions for healing. Throughout he extols our need for company, telling us grief is ‘the solitary journey, we cannot do alone.’ It is ritual that offers us the means of reconnection to ourselves and each other.

This is not a manual of ritual practices, rather it’s a discussion about the importance of ritual—and its practice—in our lives. While he occasionally describes rituals performed in his retreats, they’re not central to the book. At times, I felt resistant to his ritual approaches, but each time he anchored them in accounts that I ultimately found edifying. My only criticism is that Weller frequently employs overly figurative and sentimental language, which feels superfluous given the quiet weight and beauty of his argument.

This is an illuminating and important book. It helped me better understand why my grief had felt so lonely, how damaging the modern concept of ‘self-improvement’ can be, and how ritual can guide us into a deeper exploration of sorrow and into closer connection with our true humanity. It is a book that will continue to guide me in both my personal and professional grief practice.

Community Question on Writing Grief

Have you ever written about a loss or felt the need to do so? What has that experience meant for you? I would love to hear your story.

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Stillness Grief Writing Retreat

Late 2026 Retreat dates to be released soon

The Stillness Grief Writing Retreat is for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.

The Retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.

The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.

Registration for late 2026 will open soon. Please excuse the late start this year, on account of completing my Masters of Counselling studies. Send an EOI now so you’re first to hear about the next retreat.

Learn more & EOI for future retreats

Sign up for paid subscription and you’ll receive a 20% discount to all retreats.

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The Stillness Room

The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.

I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.

Buy me a coffee

If it’s too early to contemplate paid subscription, you may like to spot me a coffee. Every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space. And please share this post or the grief writing retreat with anyone you feel may need it.

Thank you for being here. And welcome.

Robynne x

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P.S. Posts and essays are written entirely in my own voice, without generative AI.

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The Lovely Bones by Alice Seabold, is the story of a family’s slow disintegration following the disappearance and murder of 14-year-old Suzie. As the reality of Suzie’s death comes to light each of the family enter their own private horror, consumed by a grief too vast for sound. Her father’s grief is intense, focused, consumed with finding justice for his daughter, while desperately trying to keep the threads of his old life together. Her mother’s grief is remote, hollowed out and empty. She is repulsed by her husband’s search for intimacy, unable to engage with her remaining children or the running of the house. Suzie’s younger sister Lindsey manages to contain and adapt her grief around her parent’s silent demise, while navigating the thrills and anxieties of adolescence alone.

Reading this book, I felt I could finally see the narrative of my family following the deaths of my parents and brother—the heavy blanket of silence, the hollow pleasantries, the dark inner rage within each of us that there was no-one to acknowledge our suffering. This silent fury eventually tore at the inner fabric of my family and tore it apart. It has never mended.

My family’s story was for decades too painful and complex to communicate. On the few occasions I spoke to others of my family’s disintegration, I was, more often than not, quietly reprimanded for my attitude, for not doing more, for not trying harder. After all she’s your sister, after all they’re your family.

It was The Lovely Bones that forgave me the fracture of my family. We didn’t fall apart because of anything inherently wrong in me, or in us. We fell apart because this is how trauma works, and without social support—so critical for healing—there was no foundation upon which to rebuild. The Lovely Bones spoke a hard truth; our demise was almost inevitable. At the time this was difficult to assimilate, yet it eventually enabled me to hold the memory of my estranged family with compassion. And through it—eventually—healing. Because for the first time, through an exceptional work of fiction, I heard my own story.

Poet Gregory Orr wrote of this in his book Poetry as Survival, where he explores the healing power of poetry to support us in grief. At age 12 Gregory accidentally shot and killed his younger brother. His family fell into silence. No-one was present to comfort him or assuage his guilt. Two years later his mother died suddenly. And still no-one spoke. A young boy was left to grieve alone. He was in his late teens when a teacher, Mrs Irving, first introduced him to poetry. It was within the rhythm and language of poetry he found a voice for his suffering and a pathway to healing. He writes, ‘Through these [words], we are brought to the thresholds inside us we might never approach without their help… Because I am hearing another version of my experience spoken by an authentic voice within that experience.’

I too have found poetry’s form opens a gateway to the layered nuances and intricacies of my story and grants a particular understanding that fosters solace and healing.

Years ago, I read Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H—a poem he wrote over a period of 18 years as he mourned the loss of his closest friend and future brother-in-law from a brain haemorrhage at nineteen. The poem, written in quatrains of iambic tetrameter with an ABBA rhyme scheme, holds the rhythm of mourning; a rhythm that builds upon itself as you read. Through this work I recognised particularities of my grief I had never quite grasped. Like the vague sense of betrayal we feel when we speak of our loss, as though words somehow sully the beloved and the depth of our sorrow.

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

[…]

In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

In an entirely different poem, by Ellen Bass, you can feel the unbearable weight of grief in the body as it intermingles with our love for life.

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Australian poet Mark Tredinnick, in his essay The Temple of the Word—about poetry, language and grief—wrote ‘Poems make places out of emotions and earth. […] a poem is an architecture, and it will hold you. A poem is a garden that will tend you.’

Poetry and prose tend to us by releasing us from our isolation, from the fear that by grieving, or continuing to grieve, we are somehow living wrongly. In our modern Western world with its preoccupation with progress, continuous self-improvement and the ludicrous concept of ‘finding closure’, poetry and the written form grant us space. We are free to sit quietly with our grief, to walk with it, to give it room to evolve. In its own unique way it grants us witness, the essential condition for healing. And it returns us home, transformed. Not through helping us move beyond our grief but by allowing us to bring our grief with us, to weave it into the fabric of our future selves, knowing that our loss, our sorrow, is a part of what makes us whole, and grants our life its meaning. Just as this stunning untitled poem by Gegory Orr does, a tribute to the beloved.

This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.
No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.
No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.
No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.
That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.

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Following are a series of books that have brought me insight and solace over the years. Many of these I will review in future posts.

Memoir/Biography

• Poetry as Survival — Gregory Orr

• The Blessing — Gregory Orr

• M-Train — Patti Smith

• A Grief Observed — C.S. Lewis

• The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan Didion

• Blue Nights — Joan Didion

• Ferryman — Katia Ariel

• A Very Easy Death — Simone de Beauvoir

• Found, Wanting — Natasha Sholl

Poetry/Letters/Collections

• The Gathered Distance — Mark Tredinnick

• To Bless the Space Between Us — John O’Donohue

• The Dark Interval, Letters for the Grieving Heart — Rainer Maria Rilke

• Whisper Songs — Tony Birch

• Inside the Wave — Helen Dunmore

• Steep Curve — Robyn Rowland

• In Memoriam, A.H.H — Alfred Lord Tennyson

• Consolations — David Whyte

Fiction

• The Lovely Bones — Alice Seabold

• The Transit of Venus — Shirley Huzzard

• Oh William! — Elizabeth Strout

• When We Were Orphans — Kazuo Ishiguro

• Grief is the Thing with Feathers — Max Porter

Community Question on Books

Has there been a book that brought insight, solace or healing at a time of grief or suffering? I would love to hear your story.

Leave a comment

Stillness Grief Writing Retreat

2026 Dates to be Released Soon

The Stillness Grief Writing Retreat is for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.

The Retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.

The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.

Registration for 2026 will open soon. Send an EOI now so you’re first to hear about the next retreat.

Learn more & EOI for future retreats

Sign up for paid subscription and you’ll receive a 20% discount.

Subscribe now

The Stillness Room

The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.

I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.

Buy me a coffee

If it’s too early to contemplate paid subscription, you may like to spot me a coffee. Every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space. And please share this post or the grief writing retreat with anyone you feel may need it.

Thank you for being here. And welcome.

Robynne x

Give a gift subscription

Share The Stillness Room

P.S. Posts and essays are written entirely in my own voice, without generative AI.

Grief ritual for the festive season

Whether you’re religious or not the festive season—Christmas, Hanukkah, Bohdi Day, Yule, and others—is when grief can feel both very prevalent and very personal. It’s a time when we feel most conscious of—and vulnerable to—what has been lost, whether a loved one, our health, our homeland or sense of safety. We often feel conflicted.

Earlier this week, I was in conversation with a young man who spoke of fearing attending Christmas Day, just months after his mother died. He feared the intensity of the occasion, the raw intimacy of it and everyone’s private grief, the ‘trying’ to celebrate when everyone felt the void created by his mother’s absence. First years are always the hardest, trying to find our way in a world that still feels fresh with our loved-one’s absence.

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Showing up on Christmas Day (or whichever festival you celebrate) can be difficult in the years after a loss; and there is no right answer as to whether you attend or not. For each of us it depends on the context and how safe we feel in the company of others.

My only suggestion is not to avoid the intimacy of grief; it can feel very confronting being in the presence of others also working through grief or with people who will ask you about yours’. But that experience can also be affirming and healing and instrumental in creating bonds across our sorrow; it can seed the rituals of future years.

For others, family or friendship groups may not feel safe. In which case you may decide not to attend your usual celebration. I almost fell off my chair when a couple of decades ago, a wonderful psychologist told me I could choose not to attend what would be a gruelling and injurious Christmas Day. It had never occurred to me I had the option. Though it took me years to act on her counsel, I did eventually liberate myself from the distressing experience of Christmas Days.

If you feel conflicted about whether to show up, you may wish to speak it over with a trusted friend, or even better spend some time (even just 15 minutes) contemplating what you fear or dread and writing it down. Doing so can help you to clarify what is at the heart of the dread and guide you to an answer.

Ritual ideas

Even after death, we continue our relationship with the loved one (or circumstance) we have lost. Who they were, what they taught us and how we were in relationship with them will continue to inform and shape us.

To acknowledge this, and create some healing ritual around this time, here’s some ways you could honour a loved one or loss during the festive season.

• Light a candle (placed in a jar) and leave it in a window or on a mantel. Candles are important symbols across many religions and in secular life. They can be lit to guide the departed’s soul, pay tribute to their life, bring wisdom and peace, or symbolise eternal love and our ongoing relationship with the departed.

• Write an anecdote, poem or journal entry that honours your loss. You could write about a past memory, explore your sense of loss, pen a letter to the departed.

• Read poetry. Tennyson’s In Memoriam, from which I quoted a stanza in last week’s post (and a verse which I’ve posted below), is a stunning poem with specific reference to grief at Christmas, especially the first Christmas.

• Walk in nature. Whether alongside the sea, a public garden or a hiking trail, nature brings us into rhythm with ourselves and our grief. There is something about looking out to the horizon - it expands us and our understanding of loss. It connects us to a larger experience that is beyond us. And sometimes it seems to connect us with those we have lost. Many indigenous peoples speak of hearing their ancestors walking the land. I think we would too, if we could just learn how to listen.

• Listen to music, whether the favourite music of your loved-one or music that brings comfort. For more you could read my recent post about music and grief.

• Create something with your hands—whether with pencil or clay, paints or paper, thread or wood. Our heart meridian passes down our arm, forearm and into the palm of our hands. Which may explain why love is so intimately expressed through touch. Holding a loved-one in mind and creating something with our hands allows us to access feelings and memories we cannot articulate with words. You may also like to read my post on art and grief.

• Offer comfort to someone else suffering isolation at Christmas. Whether incarcerated members of our community, new migrants or asylum seekers who’ve escaped horror in their homeland, or our local homeless people, there are so many who need to feel seen at this time of year. Especially for those of us who’ve travelled with our grief for a while, there is extraordinary healing that comes from reaching out to someone else who is suffering. I learned recently of this group sending cards to incarcerated women in South Australia. Such a beautiful initiative.

Whatever you choose, make it something that is meaningful for you.

In Memoriam A.H.H. – Verse XXX

With trembling fingers did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
A rainy cloud possess’d the earth,
And sadly fell our Christmas-eve.

At our old pastimes in the hall
We gambol’d, making vain pretence
Of gladness, with an awful sense
Of one mute Shadow watching all.

We paused: the winds were in the beech;
We heard them sweep the winter land;
And in a circle hand-in-hand
Sat silent, looking each at each.

Then echo-like our voices rang;
We sang, tho’ every eye was dim,
A merry song we sang with him
Last year: impetuously we sang.

We ceased: a gentler feeling crept
Upon us: surely rest is meet:
‘They rest,’ we said, ‘their sleep is sweet,’
And silence follow’d, and we wept.

---

(Final stanza)

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Tennyson wrote the poem In Memoriam A.H.H. over seventeen years (1833—1850), lamenting the death of his closest friend and future brother-in-law, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died of a cerebral haemorrhage at 22. The poem runs over 90 pages, and is written in quatrains of iambic tetrameter, with an ABBA rhyme scheme. While it feels formal and remote at first, after a few stanzas you slip into its rhythm. Tennyson allows you acknowledge grief is the consequence of love, the impossibility of speaking of our loss—the sense we betray its significance when we do—and the very particular pain of the first Christmas after bereavement.

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Acknowledgement

This has been a particularly difficult week for the Jewish community in Australia and across the world. Words are inadequate. I simply wish to acknowledge the profound suffering and grief and to hold in my thoughts all those who are affected. You a not alone.

Community Question on Festive Rituals

If you have a story about how you honour a loss or maintain a ritual during the festive season, please let me know. I’d like to create community here, and so any contribution is deeply appreciated, not just by me but others who read this publication.
(NB: when submitting, let me know if you’d like your name published or anonymous.)

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The Stillness Writers Room is a retreat for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.

The Stillness Writers Room retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.

The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.

Expressions of interest are currently open for 2026.

(NB: discounts for paid subscribers).

Register EOI for 2026

The Stillness Room

The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.

I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.

Buy me a coffee

If it’s too early to contemplate paid subscription, you may like to spot me a coffee. Every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space. And please share this post or the grief writing retreat with anyone you feel may need it.

Thank you for being here. And welcome.

Robynne x

PS. If you enjoyed this post, it would mean a great deal to me if you could like it, as it helps me to expand this community. And feel welcome to share with anyone you think may benefit from the discussion I’m trying to create here.

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Towards Christmas each year, starting around the end of October, as the tinsel, carols and families start flooding the shopping strips, many of us feel the looming dread of Christmas. The TV news, the radio, music in grocery stores, streetscapes, shop assistant greetings and casual conversations all converge around one singular symbol of our isolation. There is no escape; it is impossible to ignore; it is everywhere. Grief is often lonely, but during the festive season the isolation can feel brutal. Whether a loss is recent or decades old, whether we grieve one loss or many, this can be a particularly difficult time of year when many of us feel taunted by rituals that were once—or for some, never—rich with familial belonging and connection.

On numerous occasions people have told me they envy me not having to endure the family on Christmas Day. And in some respects, I get it—I too have waded through some awful family Christmases. What they don’t see is the feeling of being shunned from a season of ritual that requires us to belong. Most people don’t see the desperate loneliness, the effort it takes to stretch on a smile and enter into the spirit, to show up for the parties and festive drinks.

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to have friends welcome me into their homes and families for Christmas Day. I’ve spent many times in good company, where the food is wonderful and the wine plentiful. We’ve cracked open bon-bons, donned paper Christmas hats and rated the enclosed riddles. We’ve gathered in living rooms and opened kris kringle gifts. I am grateful to all my friends who’ve opened—and continue to open—their homes and their families to me over the past decades. Yet I yearn for the day when I arrive at Christmas Day not because I’m invited, but because I am expected.

In the meantime, I seek ways to ritualise this festive period while holding space for those whose presence I still miss and allowing myself to feel the sorrow along with the joy. Perhaps this post is my finding new ways to ritualise this time, to connect with others who are also travelling this road. I guess it’s why I’m here. And so in keeping with my recent posts, I continue my exploration of ritual. First is a piece I wrote a few years ago about finding ritual and remembrance, followed by a few ideas for how you might create rituals that encompass your grief and bring meaning to this time of year.

Christmas Pudding

Christmas was so intensely steeped in my memories of family and belonging, that for many years I avoided getting too close to its rituals. They were too painful. As Tennyson wrote in “In Memoriam”:

With such compelling cause to grieve
          As daily vexes household peace,
          And chains regret to this decease,
How dare we keep our Christmas-eve.

Over the years the fear of ritual has attenuated, but the memories of family Christmases remain close. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the flutter of anticipation on Christmas Eve, as my family came together to dress the Christmas tree: my siblings and I threaded baubles and angels onto the branches, before Mum scattered the tinsel, and Dad positioned the star on top.

Once the tree was dressed, we gathered around the television to watch Carols by Candlelight. Dad leaned back in his green leather reclining chair, Bill sank into a yellow beanbag—his head at the same height as his knees— and my sisters scattered across the sofa or chairs. I wrapped myself into an armchair, tucking my feet under me.

Mum would then move to the kitchen to prepare our supper. I could hear the clank of the glass jars and crystal bowls. A soft light cast a glow over the living room as we drifted into a collective reverie.

We cooed quietly when Mum entered the living room and placed a silver platter—holding a collection of seven treat-filled crystal dishes—on the coffee table. Dried apricots and figs and muscatels. Almonds and brazil nuts and macadamias. In the centre bowl, peppermints. Strong ones, that made your mouth blow out.

Mum settled back on the sofa, one of us snuggling up to her, as she softly threaded her fingers through our hair. Our evening drifted into quiet enjoyment. Moments bathed in nostalgia even as they were lived.

Even today, Christmas connects me to a place where grief, loneliness, and reminiscent joy flow into each other. It’s a time when ritual beckons me. I search for simple rituals that will ground me, like spending a day at home boiling a pudding.

Over recent years I’ve started making Christmas pudding, usually six weeks before Christmas. It alleviates the dread, just a little. Even if I don’t know where I’m spending Christmas Day, I have found a certain peace ordering the mince fruit from a fruit and nut stall at Prahran Market, purchasing suet from the butcher, and blocking six hours in my calendar to stay at home and top up the pudding saucepan with boiling water every half-hour.

Since I’ve taken up this ritual—over the past four or five years—I’ve been left with surplus pudding mixture that I’m sorry to throw out. So this year, instead of wasting it, I decided to make a second pudding. I searched my cupboards for a pot or tin I could substitute for a pudding bowl. I looked through a clutter of salad, mixing and storage bowls—glass, porcelain, plastic—in the lower kitchen cupboard under the kettle.

There appeared to be nothing appropriate, and I was about to give up, when an old ceramic bowl caught my eye. It was old and nondescript. A sort of putty colour. Solid and boring. Occasionally I’ve pulled it out fulfil a task like whisking eggs or collecting food scraps. I’ve only kept it over the years because it’s so mundanely familiar I don’t see it. And so, I almost overlooked it again until I realised it was about the right size for a small pudding. Perhaps it would do. I pulled it out to look at it.

It was only then I noticed the pronounced rim—about an inch wide—at the top, and the slight curve of the bowl. It wasn’t a solid, boring bowl, it was my mother’s pudding bowl. The bowl that had held the most loved of traditions in our family for nearly two decades. A neglected treasure in my cupboards for 35 years.

So this year I cooked my two puddings, paying special attention to a bowl that my mother had pulled from her cupboards about this time, every year. As I ladened the bowl with pudding mixture, covered the mixture with baking paper and foil, and tied it with a pink ribbon, and as I spent the next six hours tending to it, I held my mother close. A tradition—and a cherished memory of my mother, and my family—restored.

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And now, with shopping list in hand I’m heading off to buy the ingredients for my Christmas Pudding. I’m making two again this year. I’ll take one to my friend Ashlee’s home for Christmas Eve and the other—from my mother’s pudding bowl— I hope to share with the man I love.

In next weeks post I’ll discuss ways to navigate the festive season when you’re carrying loss or grief. We’ll explore different ways you can create rituals during the festive season that acknowledge your grief and the time of year.

If you’re struggling this festive season, know there are others who are here. Reach out, get in touch. You are not alone.

With love,

Robynne x

P.S. I cook Stephanie Alexander’s grandmother Emily Bell’s Christmas pudding. (Stephanie Alexander is a treasured Australian cook, restauranteur and food writer.)

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Community Question on Festive Rituals

If you have a story about how you honour a loss or maintain a ritual during the festive season, please let me know. I’d like to create community here, and so any contribution is deeply appreciated, not just by me but others who read this publication.
(NB: when submitting, let me know if you’d like your name published or anonymous.)

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The Stillness Writers Room is a retreat for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.

The Stillness Writers Room retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.

The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.

Expressions of interest are currently open for 2026.

(NB: discounts for paid subscribers).

Register EOI for 2026

The Stillness Room

The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.

I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.

Buy me a coffee

If it’s too early to contemplate paid subscription, you may like to spot me a coffee. Every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space. And please share this post or the grief writing retreat with anyone you feel may need it.

Thank you for being here. And welcome.

PS. If you enjoyed this post, it would mean a great deal to me if you could like it, as it helps me to expand this community. And feel welcome to share with anyone you think may benefit from the discussion I’m trying to create here.

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In my last post on remembrance, I wrote of the impending 40th anniversary of my parents and brother’s deaths. I wrote of my plan to visit the remote inlet on the Mornington Peninsula where my family launched our boat for their fateful trip, and then the police station where my sister and I had spent the night following the search mission. As it happened, on the day of the anniversary, I awoke too fragile to travel the long distance and chose to postpone the trip to a less auspicious day. Patti Smith shared in her recent post - on the anniversary of her husband’s death - how some anniversaries pass graciously with our loved ones gently in our minds, others may slip by such that we nearly forget, while yet others are difficult. Often we don’t know how we feel until the day, as it was for me this year.

My planned post reflecting on my planned trip will now come at a later date, but I still wish to explore ritual, because it’s an essential part of healing grief, and yet is largely dismissed in Western societies. I am only now learning about ritual and finding ways to bring ritual into my life as part of connecting with deep and untended parts of me that call for connection, honouring and healing. And so this post is the beginning of an exploration into ritual, and how we can each bring it meaningfully into our lives as part of a grieving process.

In the Jewish tradition of mourning, the bereaved follow five ordained periods of grief that closely correspond with the grieving experience. These deeply ritualised periods based on ancient wisdom, support grievers to fully experience their evolving grief without repression or isolation. In the period between the death and burial—aninut— when the bereaved experience intense disbelief and distress, they remain alone in their homes. This is a time when the bereaved are incapable of words, when company or movement could cause further injury, and silence is required for the body to adjust the loss.

Following the burial the mourners will return home, where their first meal—the meal of condolence—is prepared by neighbours. They remain for three days in a state of weeping and lamentation, avelut. A candle is lit representing the body and soul of the person who has died and the bereaved enter shiva—a 7-day mourning period in the home of the deceased. They accept visitors during this time, which opens the way for them to express their loss and accept support. Mirrors in the home are covered; mourners wear a rent garment; they do not wear shoes and they refrain from personal grooming. It is to remind them to stay present with their grief. After shiva they enter sheloshim, a 30 day period where they slowly return to the world, still wearing their mourning garments and not yet fully participating in society.

They then enter the fifth and final period when they slowly return to work and society, but where their mourning is still acknowledged and entertainment and enjoyment are avoided. After they twelve months they are expected return to normal life.

Ritualised mourning practice, where the grieving process is honoured, seems incompatible with our modern society where even the tradition funeral has been replaced by a celebration of life. And while these celebrations should be lauded for their personal and unique qualities, it nonetheless feels like mourning has become something we must keep private, hidden from the prevailing culture and its pursuit of positivity and ‘rising above’ our sorrows. Francis Weller, author of the superb book The Wild Edge of Sorrow referred to it as ‘our one-dimensional obsession with emotional progress’. It is a culture that relegates the griever even deeper into isolation and the shameful sense they are grieving wrongly. When grievers believe there is no safe place to express their grief they will withdraw into themselves and bury it. But grief festers in the dark and if left untended, it will instead express itself through symptoms—depression, anxiety, attachment issues, autoimmune disease, addiction, violence.

I held my grief buried for decades, unaware that my struggles with depression, chronic illnesses, pain, relationship avoidance, even being the victim of workplace bullying were symptoms of untended grief. It wasn’t until in the midst of heartbreak in my early 50s I was forced to face my buried sorrow and enter—more out of desperation than design—the sacred place of grief ritual. It changed my life.

Humans are innately ritualistic. Ritual ceremony was practiced by our forebears for tens of thousands of years, relinquished only in modern times as the cultures of western science and capitalism took precedence. We learned to shun the practice of many of our grief rituals, viewing them with a certain scepticism or derision. It was something I deigned to avoid for many years. In truth, and perhaps only with retrospect can I now see I avoided ritual because it would bring me too close to my deep sorrow. I feared if I were to approach ritual, enter into it, it would cast me into a darkness from which I would not return.

I am learning, through the wisdom of others and my own slow entry into its practice, that ritual allows me to come fully into myself and into the world. Ritual invites me into a space where my grief can be present and the weight of it could be felt, honoured and released. It allows everything to soften. Sorrow acknowledged and honoured becomes a sacred place rather than a vestige of terror. Entering into my untended grief the first time felt like falling from a precipice. Today I can still experience trepidation, particularly when exploring new territory, but I know the sense of peace and quiet wonder I’ll experience once I enter.

For me ritual remains a deeply personal practice, not a communal one. I write, I read, I contemplate, I swim the bay near my home at dawn, I walk along the beach and meditate while looking out to the waves at dusk. These are my practices of healing.

I have twice participated in a memorial swim-out following the death of an iceberger friend. In a swim-out we swim to a chosen spot ~200 metres from shore, where we form a circle. A member of the group will say a few words to honour our friend before we throw flowers into the centre and enter a moment’s silence. It is a stunningly beautiful tribute, it connects us with the person we’re mourning, the ever-turning cycle of life and reinforces our gratitude for our community.

Yet beyond this discrete community I’ve not participated in any form of group ritual. It’s not part of my formative culture. There remains a deep cultural discomfort among white-Anglo Australians toward any deliberate, shared displays of emotion. I read of our indigenous community and yearn for their capacity for embodied collective mourning. Discovering and observing their ritual practices and philosophies of grieving, the deep connection to Country, fills me with wonder. Yet I’m uncertain how I could enter such ritual authentically. Weller suggests we have much to learn from indigenous culture, but we can’t simply adopt rituals formed in community over thousands of years and supplant it on our culture and psyche. It’s important we learn to listen to the earth, to nature and ourselves and find our own authentic way there.

What I’ve learned through writing and contemplation, and being present with nature, is that my grief—for decades buried under shame and disdain—housed my most authentic self, my vulnerable self. When fully acknowledged and brought into the open, my vulnerability assumes a new light, a graciousness, a beauty. This part of me that I had long maligned, is worthy of love. I have learned it’s from this place I make my greatest contribution to others; it is here I find meaning. And it is joyful. As Kahlil Gibran said, ‘The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. This joy opens me to the world, an expansiveness and wonder that is hard to fully describe.

In The Wild Edge of Sorrow—a book I’ll review in coming weeks—Francis Weller describes ritual as an ‘embodied process’, an intentional act where emotions are summoned, to connect either an individual or a community with the sacred for the purpose of healing and transformation. He quotes Z. Budapest, a ritual facilitator and author saying, ‘The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind in us and put it to work.’ Ritual allows us to re-establish our own inner rhythm, to connect with our community and restore our affinity with nature. Through opening to the sacred, we can enter the centre of our sorrow with reverence. Reverence allows us to hold grief gently, so as we are not swept away by overwhelm or distress.

When we create a regular practice of ritual—whether through writing, dancing, music, being in nature—we strengthen our interior capacity to hold our grief and subsequently come into right relationship with it.

I will continue to explore ritual over coming weeks and months. I invite you to share with me any rituals you practice—whether on your own or as part of your community—to support mourning or to observe important days. I’ll compile some ritual ideas to share with you here.

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Grief ritual ideas and practices.

Francis Weller writes of grief work being about learning to carry both grief and gratitude, allowing ourselves to ‘be stretched large by them.’ ‘How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give’, he writes in The Wild Edge of Sorrow.

Weller writes directly of the importance of ritual and grief practice and how we can hold both sorrow and gratitude when honouring our losses.

With this in mind, here’s some suggested practices:

• Write a journal piece about your loss, writing first of your sorrow—what you miss and how your loved one’s absence feels—followed by writing about what you’re grateful for. How has your loved one change your life? What have you learned from losing them? How has your life expanded and grown since the loss? How has love changed you?

• Writer and creative coach Meg Dunley maintains a ritual of telling stories of her loved ones on their birthday and the anniversaries of their deaths in order to keep them present. What stories would you share? Write them down or share them with a friend.

• Light a candle while holding your loved one in your mind and place it in a window. You may like to place a photo of your loved one or one of their favourite books or possessions alongside. Spend a few moments looking to the candle in silence and reflecting on your time with them. What of them remains present? Can you sit with presence and absence at the same time.

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Community Question on Ritual

Do you have a special ritual or activity that helps you to remember a loved-one? I would be honoured if you shared it with me. I’ll compile a list to share in future posts. (Please advise if you wish to remain anonymous).

Leave a comment

The Stillness Writers Room is a retreat for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.

The Stillness Writers Room retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.

The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.

Expressions of interest are currently open for 2026.

(NB: discounts for paid subscribers).

Register EOI for 2026

The Stillness Room

The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.

I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.

Buy me a coffee

If it’s too early to contemplate paid subscription, you may like to spot me a coffee. Every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space. And please share this post or the grief writing retreat with anyone you feel may need it.

Thank you for being here. And welcome.

Robynne x

PS. If you enjoyed this post, it would mean a great deal to me if you could like it, as it helps me to expand this community. And feel welcome to share with anyone you think may benefit from the discussion I’m trying to create here.

Share

This week marks my 59^th birthday and the 40^th anniversary of my parents and brother’s deaths. The last day I saw Mum, Dad and Bill was on my 19^th birthday on 20 October 1985. I had moved out of the family home several months earlier to live in urban Melbourne where I volunteered for community radio station 3RRR and dreamed of becoming a journalist. I returned to my family’s property on Saturday, 19 October accompanied by my best friend for a birthday dinner. Below is an excerpt from my (as yet unpublished) book Between Two Waves, which remembers that birthday celebration and last words with each of my family members. They died a week later. Thus, my birthday and their deaths were eternally intertwined.

I was never one for ritual, for reasons I am only now coming to understand. Ritual terrified me in part because it conceded my ostracism and shame (believing I longer belonged in the world) and because acknowledging my loss would catapult me into panic and overwhelm. It brought me too close to my pain. And while I am generally good at hiding it, my birthday is often a day when I feel intensely lonely.

It took me decades to come into proper relationship with my grief and to accept that, contrary to the prevailing norms, it wasn’t something I could or should overcome. It is with this new openness to sorrow I decided that this year—the 40^th anniversary—I would find ways to remember. To create ritual. In his stunning book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller speaks of the loss of ritual in the western world, and how it has isolated us from our sorrow, ourselves and our communities. To heal we need to educate ourselves in ritual, he tells us. Ritual allows us to both hold our grief safely while entering the felt depths of our sorrow.

This week I decided to spend my birthday with my new partner on Phillip Island, a place steeped in memory. It was where my family had a holiday house in the 70s and 80s, a place where my family had its own rituals—fishing on the Newhaven Jetty, playing under the tea trees when the tide was out and walking Woolamai surf beach at dusk.

Together, my partner and I visited my old family holiday home, which appeared untouched, its ancient apricot and plum trees still standing and tenderly pruned. We drove past the jetty and walked Woolamai beach. I read him a story I wrote about our family walking the surf beach at dusk. And then he cooked me dinner, and poured us wine, and let me know he remembered that I was remembering the last time I saw my family. The simplicity of our day and evening, devoid of pretence or gratuitous celebration, allowed me to sit quietly and authentically with memory and gratitude and what Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of in his poem Remembrance.

You wait, with memories drifting,
For the something that made life blessed,
The mighty, the rare, the uplifting,
The awaking of stones, the rifting
That opened deeps unguessed.
…

All at once it comes back: now you know!
Trembling you rise, all aware
Of a year once long ago
With its grandeur and fear and prayer.

Next week, on 27 October 2025 I plan to visit the place where 40 years ago my family launched the boat in the mid-afternoon of a sunny Spring Day, never imagining three of them would never make it home (only my sister survived). I’ve never been there. But

Recently, I met a First Nations elder who spoke of walking with the spirits and suggested I visit the place of my parents and brother’s death. He said it would bring healing. And so next Monday I plan to visit the Warneet boat ramp where they had set sail and then the Hastings Police Station where my sister and I spent a long sleepless night on the balcony smoking cigarettes while a search mission was conducted in the control room below us.

Over the coming days I plan to explore what ritual means and how we can keep those we love close as we remember and honour them. Next week I’ll come back to this publication to share the experience of visiting these sacred personal sites.

Requiem - Woolamai Surf Beach 1979

(an excerpt from my manuscript Between Two Waves)

During the 1970s and early 80s our family had a holiday house on Newhaven—a small fishing town, just over the bridge, at Phillip Island. Beside a grass driveway, which ran along the fence line to the left of the house, stood an apricot tree, said to be a hundred years old; each summer it produced huge, golden red apricots. In the afternoons, after a day of catching crabs on the mudflats, fishing from the end of Newhaven jetty, chatting with local fishermen at the cool store and making up shipwreck games under giant tea trees at the shoreline, my siblings and I, on coming home, would twist apricots off the tree and eat them whole, as we wandered the back yard, the syrup running down our palms and dripping from our wrists. They were the sweetest, juiciest apricots I’ve ever tasted. Inside, in the cool dark of the Edwardian house, which had stood beside the tree for a century, hung the thick, sweet smell of Mum’s cooking: apricot jam, preserved apricots, stewed apricots and apricot crumble.

Behind our house, on a remnant piece of land between two lots, Jim the fisherman lived in a humpy. We adored Jim and often hung around the cool store at the foot of Newhaven Jetty, hoping to see him. He liked kids; he was always pleased to see us; you could tell because his eyes lit up. He was tall and slender and had a wrinkly face and neck. And he was fun, and gentle, and interesting. He told us tales of fishing and the sea. It never occurred to us to think of him as poor, his living quarters unusual, or eccentric. It was simply where Jim lived, and it was always the first place we visited when we arrived.

Holidays held their seasonal rituals. The trip to Red Rocks for a swim in the summer months or a tour of Churchill Island estate in winter. We’d drive to Kilcunda—15 minutes away on the Bass Coast—to visit the Harms family, where we searched for fossils in the nearby caves, or wandered through paddocks to the nearby creek, or spent the late afternoons watching the cows being milked at the dairy next door. Once every holiday we drove out to the Nobbies to see the fairy penguins. There were no penguin parades—with tiered seating, lighting, and blaring PAs—back then; just pitch-black hinterland, a dirt track and wobbling penguins stunned in our headlights. Every trip, without fail—or so it seemed—Dad got the car bogged and we had to wait in the cold night while Dad wandered to the nearest house and called for the help of a willing local or the RACV.

But of all the rituals, one was sacred—the walk along the surf beach at Cape Woolamai on the southeastern tip of the island. The beach lay four kilometres from our house, but on nights when the wind blew north, I could hear the surf roar and the pound of each wave from my bedroom; it felt so close I was sure it must be a tidal wave about to sweep us from our beds and out to sea.

Our ritual walks at Woolamai took place just before dusk. We piled into the car with blankets and jumpers, beanies pulled over ears. Dad took the highway towards Cowes, before turning off onto an unsealed road to Cape Woolamai. There were few holiday houses back then, just large expanses of coastal heath. We rumbled and shuddered along the road, and from above the cacophony of rocks and wheels and suspension Mum called to us to wind up the windows as dust filled the car.

The car clambered to a stop in the cliff top carpark, alongside a bunch of bleach-haired surfies with salted faces, burnt noses, wetsuits unzipped to their midriffs. They leaned against their combies and old Volvos, drinking soup, or coffee, or tea from polythene cups—the steam beading their juvenile whiskers.

A bitter wind tore through our clothes when we opened the car doors. We waited in the windbreak of the car as Mum pulled blankets from the boot. Bill had no patience for blankets and bolted down the bank toward the beach, Sue at his heels crying, ‘wait for me Bill… wait… wait’.

The rest of us staggered down the path, me behind Mum, Dad, and Julie, crouching awkwardly, clasping at chilled sand and sea grasses, stumbling with a heavy blanket in my arms. But when I stepped onto the beach—the roaring surf, the wild wind, the salt in my face—I felt the world expand and me with it. I rolled up my jeans and carried my sneakers in my hand along with my blanket.

Bill and Sue bounded ahead shouting to each other; their cries—and those of the seagulls above—soon drowned in the crash of the waves. After a while they were well ahead of us. Mum and Dad shared a blanket that they wrapped around themselves, Julie walked alongside them. I decided to make my own way and walked about 20 paces ahead.

Near the water’s edge, the sand was cool and damp, and the foamy leading edge of the break fizzed at my feet. The cuffs of my jeans were wet and scratched my ankles; my hair whipped my face. I felt the place flowing into me and me into it. And I came into myself. I must have been eleven or twelve, I could sense my adolescent freedom—just a year or two away. The thought of it sparked a rush of adrenalin, a sense of wonder and prescience, like I could almost touch my future self. My older, freer self.

As we walked, the light gilded the sand, the tips of the waves and the craggy cliffs ahead of me. The cliffs blazed, giving them the appearance of rising up from the earth. Above them, the sky was emblazoned vermillion and pink, the whole world pulsed with energy. The winds and surf and charged sky invited me into solitude, a loss of self-consciousness, a stillness. Through the gale, I imagined I could hear music, an orchestra reaching a crescendo.

And then, at that moment of crescendo, the clouds started to dim, and their colour drained. Internally I pleaded with the world to stop, to stay here lit up a little longer. But it slipped away, my world withdrew, and the cliffs faded to darkness. Mum and Dad called out to us to come together; it was time to return to the car. I walked a few more steps, then turned around. Mum and Dad were now silhouettes; I could just make them out against the darkened sea and sand dunes that shone grey in the dim light. The family came together and paired off under blankets for the walk back to the car—Dad and Sue, Julie and Bill, Mum and me. Mum felt warm as she wrapped her arm around me under our flapping blanket. I leaned into her: ‘Mum… I heard an orchestra playing through the waves.’ She squeezed my waist and with a meaningful smile whispered, ‘What a lovely experience to remember, Robynne’.

When we returned to the carpark, our car stood alone. We leaned on the car and whipped the sand from our feet, jumped quickly into the car, feeling the last of the wind as Sue climbed in and slammed the door.

My face tingled, my ears were still ringing, and my face was tight with salt. Dad started the engine and turned on the headlights and we shuddered back down the dirt road. Everyone was quiet. Everyone was holding onto the magic of their walk. Until thoughts turned to dinner and apricot crumble.

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Community Question on Remembrance

Do you have a special ritual or activity that helps you to honour or remember a loved-one? I would be honoured if you shared it with me. I’ll compile a list to share in my next post. (Please advise if you wish to remain anonymous).

Leave a comment

The Stillness Writers Room is a retreat for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.

The Stillness Writers Room retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.

The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.

Expressions of interest are currently open for 2026.

(NB: discounts for paid subscribers).

Register EOI for 2026

The Stillness Room

The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.

I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.

Buy me a coffee

If it’s too early to contemplate paid subscription, you may like to spot me a coffee. Every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space. And please share this post or the grief writing retreat with anyone you feel may need it.

Thank you for being here. And welcome.

Robynne x

PS. If you enjoyed this post, it would mean a great deal to me if you could like it, as it helps me to expand this community. And feel welcome to share with anyone you think may benefit from the discussion I’m trying to create here.

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In one of her adolescent diaries the essayist Susan Sontag wrote: ‘Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts — it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure — and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.’

What is it about music and its capacity to meet us where we are, to embody both present and emergent emotions, and offer solace and healing during times of sorrow? In my last post I wrote of the artist Motoi Yamamoto and how the rhythm of his body required to create his extraordinary salt installations was instrumental to him living and expressing his grief. Music can also draw us into the rhythm of grief and sorrow; it is within its rhythm we find healing.

The esteemed aestheticist and philosopher Susanne Langer, in her book Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art, explained the rhythm of music, its syncopations and tonality evokes feelings and resonates with the inner experience of the listener. Our appreciation of music’s emotionality is so innate, even infants can discern major and minor keys and their affective resonance. It’s believed early humans communicated through music and singing thousands of years before the emergence of language. Which explains perhaps its power over language to connect with what is deep within us.

Music is an embodied experience; our body responds not only to the notes but the relationship between them. The tonality, syncopations and enharmonic shifts in music—whether consonant or dissonant—will either confirm or deny our expectations and arouse a physiological response. Our heart rate increases, our blood pressure changes, and our breathing shallows or deepens; we can break out in goosebumps or a sweat. Dissonant harmonies in particular can evoke feelings of loss and yearning and lead us into our own experience from within the music. And it allows us to experience not one but various emotions simultaneously—like sorrow, wonder, joy—which closely simulates the rich and nuanced experience of grief.

No artist in recent times has more eloquently composed sorrow into song than Nick Cave in the four albums written since the death of his teenage son Arthur. I’ve written of his work extensively owing to Nick’s astonishing ability to draw us into the variegated depths, chaos, beauty and wonder of profound loss. In Ghosteen, his first album written after Arthur’s death by accident, we enter the disorienting, bewildering suffering of Nick and his wife Susie. Songlines are torn apart and reassembled. The instrumentation is dissonant and unsettling, as poetry, choir, oscillating synthesiser and nursery rhymes coalesce into a sound that is as infinitely tender and gracious as it is harrowing and dark. Nick’s vocals are raw and devoid of pretence as he searches his son through song. On one occasion his voice reaches falsetto, singing ‘… peace will come, and peace will come, and peace will come in time…’ On another, his voice strains as he sings (presumably to Susie),

Your soul is my anchor
I never asked to be freed
Well, sleep now, sleep now
Take as long as you need
Cause I’m just waiting for you
Waiting for you
To return.

Each song is the call of grief and love and the astounding beauty found at the heart of unbearable loss. Each song wrestles me with its dissonance to open to my own vulnerability, each lyric compelling me to grieve more fully. Nick has spoken of finding strength within his suffering and of his vulnerability and the ‘vulnerability of others becoming a shared armour’. Through his music he has been able to draw himself and others from suffering. Momentary perhaps, but enabling us to grow and deepen from within our experience. I, like countless others, have found both personal and collective healing through Nick’s recent albums, and he too has found this connection transformational and deeply purposeful.

Patti Smith, doyen of literary punk, musician, poet and writer has also drawn extensively on sorrow and vulnerability in her music and writing. Traumatic grief has had a profound and recurring presence in her life. Her closest friend Robert Mapplethorpe died in 1989 at 42, followed a year later by her pianist with Patti Smith Group, 37-year-old Richard Sohl. In 1994 her husband Fred (‘Sonic’) Smith died at 44 of heart failure, and less than a month later her beloved 42-year-old brother Todd died of a stroke. Sorrow and vulnerability have subsequently flamed her inspiration in songwriting, poetry and prose.

‘I find that sorrow breaks the heart open, makes you more vulnerable,’ she said in a 1996 interview with writer, Stephen Foehr. ‘… Sorrow is a beautiful state. You can find strength and clarity in [it]. You have to treasure it… to honour it.’ And we find evidence of this through her creative works. Patti has felt both her personal and creative life enriched by the spirit of those she has lost. She has spoken of how Tom and Fred and others have transformed her sense of self, where she has felt herself embody their particular traits, like empathy or patience, saying, ‘I find myself gifted, enhanced, a richer person, because I have magnified aspects of them within me.’

We witness this in her music, poetry and prose. Her album Gone Again, recorded just two years after Fred and Todd’s deaths, is permeated by grief, longing, and memory. Her voice—sometimes whispered, sometimes roared—resonates with emotional clarity, vivacity, strength and vulnerability as she brings each of those she has loved into the lyrics and music. In the marriage ballad, My Madrigal Patti’s voice is pure, elegiac and rich against unadorned accompaniment on piano and simple lyrics forming a meditation on Fred’s and her shared wedding vows ‘’til death do us part’.

Fireflies begins with the hauntingly tender strum of an esraj, a stringed Indian instrument and vocal accompaniment by Jeff Buckley (his last studio recording before his untimely death). In what Patti describes as her ‘last wailing’, the song is about the days of incessant yearning, when we wish only to commune with those we have lost; the days when rising from our beds and engaging with the world is impossible; the days we trudge the moors of sorrow toward a future life we can’t yet face.

Patti’s creative work has continued to be an interweaving of the living and the dead. Her book M Train, written two decades after the deaths of Fred and Todd and others (including her parents), melds current day anecdotes and musings with mementos, anecdotes and reveries of the deceased. In one anecdote she opens a childhood book and upon seeing her mother’s handwriting on the opening sleeve, slips into the remembrance of comfort and a whispered yearning for her mother. The book explores melancholy, the ever-presentness of grief and love, of memory and yearning, and how they thread their way through our days. The departed remain with her, and she is alert to their presence. ‘The dead speak,’ she writes, ‘but we have forgotten how to listen.’

I know this to be true because I too have felt my loved ones communicate to me—or through me—within the creative act. I believe many of us have learned that creativity offers both solace and an actual connection with those who are lost to us—an entry into the realm Patti Smith writes of. A realm lost to us, because we’ve forgotten how to listen.

It is something we’ll explore here in the The Stillness Room journal and that I’ll expand on in my next post, when I discuss the power of poetry and literature to awaken us to our experience and to put words to our sorrow. And I’ll share my own experience of writing my way through untended grief.

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Stillness Grief Writing Retreat

Open for Registration - HURRY ENDS SOON

The Stillness Grief Writing Retreat is for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.

The Retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.

The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.

Registration is now open for the following dates.

• Friday 22 August - Sunday 24 August, 2025

Registration: $385 (AUD)

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Community Question on the art of grief

What is your experience of music during periods of sorrow or mourning? Is there a a particular piece of music that supported you? Have you composed music to honour a loss or as a practice of healing? I would love to hear your story.

Leave a comment

M Train

Patti Smith

Published in 2015, M TRAIN stretches a period of several years in the early 2010s. Written in vignettes, Patti brings us into her daily life and inner world as she quietly wrestles with a prolonged malaise. It’s a book about loss and our search for safe places during times of solitude and melancholy. The departed are ever-present as she interweaves remembrance and yearning for her husband and brother (who both died 20 years earlier) with her preoccupation with coffee, her obsession with crime shows and her creative search within her melancholy. Patti explores loss within the everyday such as her disbelief and sorrow at the unexpected closing of her local New York café—a space that had held her as she wrote through her malaise.

Soon after she travels to Rockaway beach to visit its former barista at his new café—perhaps a search for belonging, for constancy and the familiar. It’s a fateful trip that leads her to buying a modest bungalow that she plans to restore. A couple of months later Hurricane Sandy rips through, uprooting trees, destroying boardwalks and flooding homes. Again, we are reminded of the impermanence and randomness of life, and the fragility of our plans and search for safety.

Yet at the heart of this book is Patti’s commitment to ritual, observance and caring for the departed. During her travels she often visits the graves of writers she admires. She arrives with small offerings, washes the tombstones and speaks quietly to them. There is something so simple yet reverent about this practice, and I wonder if the departed feel and respond to these kind gestures. Fred is ever-present, woven into her current life through reverie, silent conversations, and attending to when he is near. She feels him alongside her as she waits out Hurricane Sandy alone in the dark, at her New York apartment. He is present in the fallen branch of an oak across a driveway, ‘a message from him, my quiet man.’ And mid-flight, in a film whose central character looks so much like Fred she watches it twice. ‘…I began to weep. Just come back I was thinking. You’ve been gone long enough. Just come back.’ And with this Patti permits us our own yearning. I too have called to my family that they have been gone too long, I’ve struggled alone long enough, and it’s time to come home.

‘How is it we never fully comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?’ she asks and then weaves her love into her art and into a reverie that honours each of those she has lost. And through doing so she opens the reader to hold our losses close and contemplate how we might honour our loved ones more wholly. She gives us permission to live more intimately and creatively with our loss.

I highly recommend subscribing to Patti’s Substack - it’s pure joy.

The Stillness Room

The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.

I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.

Buy me a coffee

If it’s too early to contemplate paid subscription, you may like to spot me a coffee. Every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space. And please share this post or the grief writing retreat with anyone you feel may need it.

Thank you for being here. And welcome.

Robynne x

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In one of her adolescent diaries the essayist Susan Sontag wrote: ‘Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts — it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure — and the most sensual. I listen with my body and …

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In Japan, salt is sacred; extolled for its purifying and cleansing qualities since ancient times. It is central to rituals including marriages, childbirth and baptism. For Japanese funerals—Ososhiki—salt is laid in small piles called 'morishio’ outside the door of the funeral home and handed to mourners to sprinkle over their body on returning home. And it has been the chosen art medium of Motoi Yamamoto for over 30 years. Initially a painter, Yamamoto turned to salt in 1994 following the death of his sister Yuko, who died of a brain tumour at 24 years. Salt allowed him to preserve the memories of his sister and explore the ideas of life, death, grief and remembrance.

Over time his art developed alongside his grief. His earlier words, crafted from salt bricks were like large architectural remnants that terminated abruptly. Later, as his grief evolved, he designed intricate labyrinths from loose salt inspired by European mythology and the holistic notion of memory, and the hope of encountering his sister again. Then, in 2016 his wife, and mother of their four-year-old daughter, died of cancer and his designs transformed again. They became organic, circular like large swirling expanses of foaming water, infinitely tender in their lines and expression.

Yamamoto pours salt from a specially designed dispenser, spending up to ten hours a day, using the rhythm of his body and hands to painstakingly craft intensely intricate patterns on large expanses of floor. He is drawn to the purity, softness and transmuting quality of salt and its ubiquitous presence in nature—from our tears to the sea. For Yamamoto, salt is symbolic of the infinite presence of grief, the fragility of life, and eternal cycles of nature. He believes his desire to preserve memory through working with salt is equally futile and fundamental to healing.

The delicate nature of salt and its vulnerability to its environment is synonymous with our own experiences of grief. As a mineral it can transmute and inhabit many organisms over time, representing the ephemeral nature of life and memory. To honour this, at the end of each of his exhibitions, Yamamoto, gallery visitors and staff sweep up the installation, gather the salt and return it to the sea, into the cycle and rhythm of life.

Yamamoto’s work is an invitation to explore our personal losses and our relationship with memory and healing. His work reminds me of grief’s long, transitory journey, its ever-presentness, the love and beauty at its heart. Something in me softens and makes way for growth as I leaf the gracious image-filled pages of his artist book Return to The Sea. I sense myself entering into the rhythm of Yamomoto’s works, following the quiet rhythm of his body as he works. It brings me into presence not only with my grief, but with those I have lost, as if they too are present in his work. It’s something I feel deep within my body, an intrinsic knowledge or truth, a sense of being anchored to the world and within my specific experience.

This is the transformative and healing power of art. Through both aesthetic appreciation and creative practice, I have been granted some of the most moving and expansive experiences of my life. Whether standing before Vincent van Gogh’s self-portrait in the Musee d’Orsay, my body slipping into the exquisite rhythm of his brushstrokes—one fragile person standing before another. Or sitting at my desk in the early light of morning, the delicate strains of Arvo Part’s Tractus holding me as I write into the heart of my suffering.

The preeminent aesthetic philosopher, Susan Langer, said art gives us a unique access into the human experience in a way that language cannot. It is innate and primordial, just as it is representative of the highest of human achievement. Art offers us knowledge and insight into the depths and dimensions of our ‘felt sense of things’ and our place in the world. Its nature allows us to both connect with our feelings and experience feelings new to us. Yet beyond the felt experience itself, art—along with myth and ritual—embodies meaning. It is where we find the meaning of our human experience.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be exploring the role of art and artists in helping us heal and find meaning in our loss. We’ll delve into the works of Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ellen Bass, Gregory Orr, Mark Tredinnick and others and how they have threaded grief into their creative practice. And we’ll discuss how each of us can find our voice from within our suffering, and bring it into expression on the page, the canvas, or the keyboard for healing.

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Returning to the Sea

I recently attended Scanimalia, towards scanning for Ocean Care, an exhibition by my friend, the artist and academic Amanda Morgan. Her current collection is a meditation on the ocean, marine life and the powerful human connection we have—or might have—with other animals sharing our imperilled planet. The exhibition incorporates scanned images of sea objects she has gathered along the shores of Port Phillip Bay and Phillip Island during her swims.

Her work interweaves the sea, grief and healing into exquisite compositions of shells, starfish, seaweed, seeds, sponges, humans and light, thoughtfully arranged on the flatbed to represent the reef. Her work is profoundly moving and speaks to the many of us who have found healing through ocean swimming. I recall entering the gallery at her opening and feeling these stunning ocean images—replete with bubbles, sand and light—wash over me. I was drawn to the sublime artwork (shown with Amanda in the photo above) of a sea sponge. I purchased it and look to it each evening, seeing new detail in it every time. It feels so alive, so real I sense I could reach through the frame’s glass and touch its delicate gel ostia with my fingertips.

Amanda and I are icebergers at Dendy beach in Melbourne. We have each experienced a deep intimate connection with the sea and marine environment. We both have lost family members to the sea. Swimming in early light as the horizon ripens to morning has been healing for both of us. Amanda writes of the transformative and essential qualities of her connection to swimming and the sea’s natural environment. Quoting artist Miranda July, she speaks of finding within the marine environment ‘[a] beautiful, altered state of being’. For me, the return each morning to the sea, feels like a return to my loved ones, to memories of family and to the gentle resting place of my sorrow.

Amanda hasn’t spoken of it, yet I can feel her father present in each of her works. I suspect he was alongside her as she gathered the objects on the beaches after her swim, as she thoughtfully composed them on the flatbed and scanned the compositions into the collection’s stunning images full of love, beauty and light.

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Stillness Writers Room Session

I had the privilege of delivering my first Stillness Writers Room grief writing session to the Catalyst Network—a group of forward-thinking entrepreneurs and systems design practitioners. Thank you to Josie Gibson and the wonderful group who attended. This was also a taste-test for my upcoming Stillness Grief Writing Retreat. Book now to secure a seat for the August retreat. Numbers limited to 15.

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Stillness Grief Writing Retreat

Open for Registration

The Stillness Grief Writing Retreat is for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.

The Retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.

The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.

Registration is now open for the following dates.

• Friday 22 August - Sunday 24 August, 2025

(NB: discount for paid subscribers).

More information & registration

Learn more & EOI for future retreats

Community Question on the art of grief

Is there a particular artistic practice or an artwork, poem, book or piece of music, that supported you through a period of morning. I would love to hear your story.

Leave a comment

The Stillness Room

The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.

I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.

Buy me a coffee

If it’s too early to contemplate paid subscription, you may like to spot me a coffee. Every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space. And please share this post or the grief writing retreat with anyone you feel may need it.

Thank you for being here. And welcome.

Robynne x

In Japan, salt is sacred; extolled for its purifying and cleansing qualities since ancient times. It is central to rituals including marriages, childbirth and baptism. For Japanese funerals—Ososhiki—salt is laid in small piles called 'morishio’ outside the door of the funeral h…

Read more

I remember you playing piano in the evenings, in the moments before sleep. I was curled up in bed, in the swaddling grip of cool cotton sheets, and two woollen blankets that you had pulled tight in the making. Before I moved to my own room—after Mama moved out—I shared a room with Julie and Sue. It was a monster-sized room—a converted garage—with ceiling to floor windows on either side, and bookshelves and desks arranged to make three discrete bedrooms. My window looked across the front garden. I would look out, mesmerised as evening bled the colour from the garden, and illumed the interior of the Forster house next door. Through a gap in the trees, I would watch Mr and Mrs Forster washing the dishes at their kitchen window. It was a whole other world out there.

Each night you came to our room and bid us good night. You sat on my bed and tucked me in. You stroked my hair, kissed my forehead, and turned off the light, hovering at the switch to say one last goodnight. As soon as you left, I wiggled my legs to warm the sheets and extend the boundaries of my confinement. As they surrendered the last of their chill, your playing began from the living room. You’d warm up your fingers with a couple of scales and arpeggios, up and down the keyboard. And then there was silence. And my fear that you’d alighted the piano and moved elsewhere in the house.

And then I heard it; you played the first notes, and I relaxed, and the piano carried me to the threshold of sleep. The delight of Chopin’s Nocturne No 2, the aching beauty of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata 14 in C-sharp Minor, the grace of Schubert’s Impromptu in G-Flat Major. I turned over and drew my pillow to me. My world was safe, and warm, and dreamy. And you were close, present, beautiful.

My Mothers Coat

My mother had a favourite coat. An orchid pink trench coat bought from a tiny boutique in Collins Street. That coat was like an extension of her. It accentuated her dark hair, her refined features and petite figure. You couldn’t see the coat without seeing her in it. And so, it looked achingly remote and out of place, hanging in a wardrobe she’d never again open. One afternoon, after a day packing up the family home, I decided to take it home with me.

I loved that coat. I wore it day and night. Each day in the early months I would pull it from the wardrobe and wrap it around me. It did not suit me. I was too tall and too young. Nor was it my style. I’d only recently grown out of ripped stockings and opshop black. To the eye it looked all wrong.

But I didn’t wrap that coat around me to look good. I didn’t wrap it around me to look like my mother. Nor to remind me of her. I wore it to find her. Her love in the lining. Her assurance in its weight. Her presence wrapped around my sorrow. And every time I put on that coat, I found her waiting for me.

Her Mothers Coat - Rob Snarski

Cherished Australian musician, Rob Snarski, wrote this stunning song Her Mother’s Coat, adapted from the above reminiscence of my mother. The tenderness of his vocals still smart my eyes. The song was gifted to me by friend Billie Giles Corti.

The Stillness Room

The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I’ll explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.

I’ll launch the Stillness Writers Room retreat, a 2-day virtual writing program for people who wish to put words to their grief. See below for more details and a link to register an EOI. Maximum 15 attendees.

I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.

Buy me a coffee

If it’s too early to contemplate paid subscription, you may like to spot me a coffee. Every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space.

Thank you for being here. And welcome.

Robynne x

Community Question on Mothers

Feel welcome to share an anecdote or story of your mother than that honours her.

Leave a comment

The Stillness Writers Room is a retreat for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.

The Stillness Writers Room retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.

The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.

Expressions of interest are currently open for the following dates.

• Friday 20 June - Sunday 22 June, 2025

• Friday 22 August - Sunday 24 August, 2025

(NB: discounts for paid subscribers).

Learn more and register EOI

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In the early months of 1897, from a solitary cell in Reading Goal, Oscar Wilde penned some of the most tender words ever written about suffering. He was nearing the end of a two-year sentence in solitary confinement for ‘gross indecency’, a charge that stripped him of his freedom, reputation, wealth, home, and children. He had been publicly ridiculed and jeered by mobs, excommunicated by his friends and the establishment he had courted. A year into his incarceration his mother died. Wilde descended into despair. The most lauded playwright and author of his generation was debased and broken.

As he reckoned with himself, Wilde accepted that despite an œuvre of work exploring the human condition, he had himself shunned sorrow, believing it a ‘mode of imperfection’. It was only after a year in wretched despair, he conceded, ‘[T]he only thing for me was to accept everything’, and determined to seek meaning from it.

Thus, Wilde allowed himself to surrender, to collapse willingly into the reality of his situation and come to a place of ‘complete humility’. It was from this point he was liberated, not from, but into his suffering, and where he was to discover the intrinsic beauty of sorrow. He found at the heart of his pain an essential truth and a new way of perceiving the world. Writing from this state of humility he declared, ‘where there is sorrow, there is holy ground’.

I think many of us who’ve experienced deep sorrow, will be familiar with this husking back of our ego and a deliverance into something wholly beautiful. I recall the bewildering months following the death of my parents and brother, when my whole being quivered with incomprehensible pain. Everything I was and had been, everything I knew and believed was swept away to reveal something infinitely tender, indefinable, yet essential. I felt my self attune with the world beyond me, like I had disappeared into humanity itself, into the womb or essence of life.

My first experience of this was on the morning of my parents’ and brother’s deaths. Friends picked me up from the police station where my sisters and I had spent the night following the search mission. On the drive back to Melbourne, none of us certain what we were supposed to do, we stopped off at a beach. My friends gathered on the sand near the beach track, but I wandered onward. My friends now lived in another life, where I too had lived a day earlier; a life I no longer knew or had any attachment to.

I chose to sit on the beach near an outcrop of red rocks, just above the shoreline and looked up to the sky. Clouds drifted above. I recall feeling every cell in my body vibrating with an energy that seemed to fuse with the environment—the swirling clouds, the breath of the waves, the distant call of gulls. The environment seemed more aware of who and where I was than my friends. It was the most exquisitely beautiful and painful moment I had ever experienced.

It was my first foray onto holy ground. The feeling stayed with me until a few months later I buried my grief so as to be accepted back into the world. Still, fragments of the power and beauty of loss stayed with me and informed how I loved, how I related to others’ sorrow, how I sought to be in the world. A way of being that seemed wholly at odds with the world I actually lived in.

I was in my early 50s, when I next entered this holy ground. Our fifties seem to be a time of reckoning for many of us who were not granted the chance to live our sorrows when we were young. For me it was precipitated by a heartbreak that stripped me of all the pretences, self-deceptions and defences I’d built to ‘survive’. I was compelled to face who I really was—a fragile woman cowering under decades of untended sorrow.

And just as Wilde recounted, it required me to accept everything. With neither the power or will to resist, I found myself bowing down to my heartbreak, and in doing so, to my original sorrow. At times literally bowing to the ground in a state of complete humility.

Author, Elizabeth Gilbert, experienced the same power of grief to bow us toward the earth. Soon after the death of her wife Rayya she said in an interview with TED, ‘It's bigger than you. There's a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself… it's a bow down, a carve out...’

Humility is what grants us entry to holy ground, holding true to its Latin root humus, meaning “earth” and humilis, meaning “on the ground”. It’s a literal and metaphorical coming back to earth. It connects us with what is true and essential in ourselves, in life, and in nature. Wilde perceived this connection between humility and life’s essence writing: ‘… hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility… It is the one thing that has in it the elements of life.’

Through surrendering to grief, allowing it to embody me, I again experienced the vastness of love and sorrow in a way that expanded both within and beyond me. I felt myself in communion with life, with incomprehensible beauty. My body ached for the exquisiteness of the world, the fragility of it, and of each of us—the tenderness of our love and the immensity of our sorrow. Everything felt interconnected and interdependent. It brought me into a deep presence and infinite stillness within myself.

As Rilke wrote in a letter to his friend Adelheid von der Marwitz, following the loss of her brother in WW1, ‘Death…somehow has the task of forcing us into a deeper, more intimate layer of life, so that we grow out of it all the more vibrant and fertile.’

We learn that loss and love are intertwined. It is love that brings us to grief, it is grief that brings us to a deeper sense of ourselves and of life. Oscar Wilde’s epiphany as he contemplated his sorrow and its inherent beauty was to also acknowledge how it returns us to the world transformed, writing, ‘[T]o become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.’ And he saw it through the lens of love.

‘Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.’

This realisation, of the immensity of our capacity for love, and the depth of our sorrow, brings us very much into life, into a sense of meaning and purpose. The sense that love is what weaves this all together. As Laurie Anderson said of the death of her partner Lou Reed, ‘I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life—so beautiful, painful and dazzling—does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.’

This is what we learn—love is the holy ground upon which we walk with our sorrow. It is the fertile soil that connects us to the earth, to sorrow, to beauty, to joy, to each other. When we surrender to our loss, allow it to embody us, allow ourselves to be carried by it to its infinite depths we connect with the essence of life. It deepens our love, our connection to others, our relationship with nature, and with ourselves. It returns us to the world, transformed.

The Stillness Room

The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I’ll explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.

I’ll launch the Stillness Writers Room retreat, a 2-day virtual writing program for people who wish to put words to their grief. See below for more details and a link to register an EOI. Maximum 15 attendees.

I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.

Buy me a coffee

If it’s too early to contemplate paid subscription, you may like to spot me a coffee. Every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space.

Thank you for being here. And welcome.

Robynne x

Community Question on Beauty

Have you felt yourself on holy ground with your grief? Have you experienced grief’s beauty? I’d love you to share your experience here and start the conversation.

Leave a comment

De Profundis

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s quote ‘where there is sorrow, there is holy ground’ inspired today’s post and has long been one that spoke deeply to me. It both validates and honours grief. However I only recently read the letter from which it was gleaned. He wrote the letter to his former lover and betrayer Lord Arthur ‘Bosie’ Douglas over several months prior to his release from gaol, where he served two years of hard labour in solitary confinement (prisoners were not permitted to communicate with each other). On his release, Wilde handed the letter totalling 55,000 words to his friend Robert Ross to pass it on to Lord Douglas, who apparently never read it. Ross arranged the letter’s publication after Wilde’s death a few years later.

In a wide-ranging communication—traversing sorrow, beauty, the treatment of prisoners, the solace of small gestures, society’s ‘supreme vice of shallowness’ and refusal to acknowledge the damage caused by its actions, and a contemplation of the scriptures—Wilde explores the meaning of sorrow. He comes to appreciate his suffering as a gift that grants him a deep and prolific insight into himself and the world around him.

For the reader contemplating or working through their own sorrow there is much inspiration and solace to find here. It invites us to contemplate our own sorrows and the beauty residing within grief and consider how we live our grief in an unreceptive world. Wilde’s appraisal of the judicial system and how society treats those who suffer is compelling and as pertinent today as when he wrote it. His meditation on the story of Christ was unexpectedly and particularly illuminating for the agnostic reader.

De Profundis is available free from here.

Or purchase a copyrighted copy with additional information here.

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Contemplating sorrow’s beauty

Each of us experience grief and sorrow in our own unique way. For many of us there can be an opening to something beautiful within ourselves, and within the world. It’s because where there is grief there is love.

Spend some time reflecting on what grief has taught you. How have you seen or experienced things differently? Have you ever felt a sense of beauty, or a connection to nature when in the midst of grief? How did it feel, how did it inform your and how you look at life?

Take 15-20 minutes reflecting on those moments and what they meant to you at the time, and what they mean now when reflecting on them. Take some time to write or draw the experience and what it has meant to you.

If you would like to share your experience or what you’ve learned please leave a comment here. I would love to learn about your experience and people often find great solace learning of other people’s experience.

Leave a comment

The Stillness Writers Room is a retreat for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.

The Stillness Writers Room retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.

The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.

Expressions of interest are currently open for the following dates.

• Friday 20 June - Sunday 22 June, 2025

• Friday 22 August - Sunday 24 August, 2025

(NB: discounts for paid subscribers).

Learn more and register EOI

‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’ wrote philosopher, activist and mystic Simone Weil. Once described by Albert Camus as ‘the only great spirit in our time’, Weil believed that philosophy should be lived and experienced as it was espoused. Attention was a core tenet of her philosophy; bringing our authentic selves into presence with others, and offering our attention with honour, love and dignity.

She considered attention imperative to many aspects of life, including study, work and philosophy and most particularly to those who suffer. ‘Many who suffer feel exiled from the world… stripped of their humanity’ she wrote.

It’s an experience shared, I think, by many of us who’ve experienced grief. I lost my parents and my 16-year-old brother in a boating accident at nineteen and I recall an almost immediate sense of being alienated from the world—my friends, my extended family, my community.

For many years I yearned for someone to be present. Someone willing be with me at the outskirts of my pain. A friend who didn’t ask anything of me, but whose support would allow me to travel the vicissitudes of my grief. Someone to be my beacon when I felt able to return to the world. Such a friend was never found, and this is also a common experience.

When there is no-one, we are required to bury our grief and return to the world unhealed. As a consequence, we experience shame—a belief we must be grieving badly, a sense of no longer belonging. As trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk warns, suffering left unattended will lead to chronic illness, depression and despair.

Attention—compassionate witnessing—is essential for any of us to return from a place of suffering. Weil tells us that attention requires us to see the person in their ‘naked truth’. ‘The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing…’ wrote Weil, ‘Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. The quality of the attention counts much… warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.’

I have often felt a conflicted sense of gratitude and despair towards friends who’ve attempted support but failed to see me. Most especially when they’ve tried to cheer me up or move me toward solutions as if to suggest my suffering indicates I’m doing it wrong and a peptalk is all I need. My sorrow becomes a problem to be fixed. It brings to mind the oft-espoused dismissal of a person who has self-harmed as ‘crying for attention’. The conclusion drawn that the threat is not material, and we should thus ignore their cries and carry on. It took me years to question why after learning of a ‘cry for attention’ we never asked, ‘how can we give attention and ease their suffering?’.

Weil believed attention shaped not only our relationships with each other, but with the world around us. More recently, Iain McGilchrist, in his book The Master and His Emissary concurs with Weil’s view: ‘The attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to…. in that way it changes the world’. William James in 1890 in his work, Principles of Psychology IV wrote, ‘My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items I notice shape my mind.’

Which implies we tend to view another’s experience from the perspective of our reality, rather than theirs. It’s this imposition of the self-view that places a barrier between us, and why Simone Weil believed true attention so difficult to achieve. It means attention is a deliberate and conscious action, a turning toward.

True attention is suspending thought, judgement, perhaps even feeling and empathy, so as we can allow ourselves to be fully present with an other. Weil said attention was not about warmth alone, but a practice of receiving the other as they really are. To be purposefully unimpeded by our knowledge, biases or personal experience. Attending is about listening beyond the words of the other.

As Tennyson described in his epic poem In Memoriam A.H.H. ‘words half reveal and half conceal the soul within… given in outline and no more.’ We often only ever hear the ‘story’ of one’s grief, rarely their experience of it. To understand their experience we need to attend beyond the words to the tonality and modulation of their voice, the movement of their body, the depth or shallowness of breath, the flow of energy between us.

When we give true attention, we open ourselves not only to the experience of an other but to something deeper about our humanity. For Weil it brought us into the ideal relationship of man with the universe. By this I suspect she means into relationship with nature, with our essence, with our humanity. She believed God was only to be found in the ordinance of grace, the beauty of nature and one’s neighbour. It’s what Nick Cave also observed in a theredhandfiles post when asked about love:

‘Loving attention illuminates the unseen. To truly see someone… acknowledges and forgives our common and imperfect humanity. Love enacts a kind of vigilant perception — whether it is to a partner, a child, a co-worker, a neighbour, a fellow citizen, or any other person one may encounter in this life. Love says softly — I see you. I recognise you. You are human, as am I.’

I believe the practice of loving attention should also encompass the self. During times of sorrow, we need to attend to our grief in a way that is observant—without bias or self-judgement or the perceived expectations of others. It’s about acknowledging openly how suffering feels in our body, how it shifts throughout the course of a day, or a week, or over the months and years.

It’s about attending to the inner voice that tells us where we are; that often tells us, should we wish to listen, we need longer with our sorrow than we feel prepared to give ourselves. It’s about granting ourselves time in nature, in relationship with the sky, the earth, the seas, the horizon. It's about reading poetry and prose that illuminate our own experience and lead us to understanding. It’s about listening to music that draws us in and offers solace.

When we lovingly attend to our suffering, we find within us an internal beauty. It is from this beauty we find the love that is intrinsic to grief and to healing.

The Stillness Room

The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created so that we might each explore the nature of grief and what it is to be human. It’s a search for meaning through literature, poetry, writing, music, art, philosophy, contemplation and connection, that I’ll share through regular (fortnightly) posts, inspirations, recordings and interviews. I’ll explore themes including how we experience grief, the need for witnessing, how to listen, the healing power of art, poetry and music, the search for meaning after loss, the inner stillness found in nature. I’ve created this space so you can attend quietly to your story, and if you wish to, join the community.

In a few weeks, I’ll launch the Stillness Writers Room retreat, a 2-day virtual writing program for people who wish to put words to their grief. See below for more details and a link to register an EOI. Maximum 15 attendees.

I hope to build community here and invite you to reach out with your own story or to ask a question about grief or loss and anything you’d like me to address through this platform.

By me a coffee

I’m new here and still pulling everything together, so it may be too early to contemplate paid subscription, but if you would like to spot me a coffee, every morsel of support will be deeply appreciated and will help me dedicate more time to this space.

Thank you for being here. And welcome.

Robynne x

Why I’m here…

Hi, I’m Robynne Berg. I’m a grief educator, writer and business consultant and The Stillness Room is a space I’ve created to explore grief and what it is to be human.

It’s a search for meaning through philosophy, literature, poetry, writing, music, contemplation and connection. It’s a journey into the awe and beauty that lies at the heart of our suffering.

In 1985, when I was 19, my parents and brother died in a boating accident. It is the cataclysm around which the rest of my life revolves. For many years I kept my grief buried under social norms and my search for meaning was kept on hold.

Then, in my early 50s—a time of reckoning for many of us—my cultivated façade crumpled to expose a cavernous grief that had lain curled in on itself for decades.

This led to the writing of a book—Between Two Waves—that explores my story and the nature of grief and healing. When I distributed excerpts of my book on social media I was overwhelmed by the response. People with their own stories, who had travelled the most significant experience of their lives in silence. The reached out, looking to share their story, to connect and find community.

I realised this was my where I needed to be—sharing what is most fragile and vulnerable and beautiful in me, and in each of us.

I created The Stillness Room to welcome others into a safe place to explore their own stories. I hope you will join the conversation and find your own way through whatever it is that brings you here. I trust this offers you a place of solace, inspiration, meaning and healing. And please share with anyone you think may enjoy this community.

Community Question

What does loving attention mean to you? Have you felt it before? If you could tell a friend how you would like them to attend to your grief, what would you ask for?

Leave a comment

Faith, Hope & Carnage

Nick Cave & Seán O’Hagan

Faith, Hope & Carnage is an extended conversation between Nick Cave and journalist Seán O’Hagan, held during the long months of Covid lockdown, and gleaned from over 40 hours of recorded dialogue.

While the conversation traverses Nick’s life as a songwriter, musician and artist, at its heart, it’s a book about grief, healing, redemption and the search for meaning.

It’s the most generous and profound account of grief I’ve encountered. Nick’s openness in sharing his and his wife’s unfathomable loss of their teenage son, and how he experienced it (in his body, his work, his marriage) is incredibly moving. His slow and painful journey to redemption, and his sense of purpose and meaning is profoundly touching, illuminating and restorative.

It reads so close—so intimately— I often felt I was part of the conversation, evidenced by my annotations, including underlines, markings, sticky tags, scribbled comments and expressions of gratitude.

Even flicking through it to take this photo returned me to the same feelings of kinship, awe and gratitude I felt reading this book.

You do not need to be a fan of Nick Cave – you don’t even need to know who he is – to find this a thoughtful exploration of grief that is personally transformational and healing.

I’ll come back to Nick Cave and the many important themes he raises in this book, his music and theredhandfiles in this community.

If you have experienced profound grief, this book will offer solace, it’ll be your witness as you shape your own unique pathway through loss.

The theme of this first post is attention, and this book offers its reader just that – loving attention.

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Loving Attention

This activity picks up on today’s theme and invites you to take some time to offer loving attention to yourself. Take about 15-20 minutes for this activity.

Take some time for yourself in a place that is comfortable and safe. It may be at home or somewhere in nature. Ensure you have 15-20minutes without interruption.

Sit down and take a few deep breaths, focusing on the exhalation. At the end of each exhalation, linger in the pause before inhaling. Allow your body to come into comfort.

Once you feel comfort, allow yourself to slowly attend to how you are feeling. Don’t search for words to describe it, don’t judge it, just sit with it. When your mind starts running away with thoughts, bring it gently back to how you’re feeling.

The idea is to attend to what you’re feeling in your body. What sensations do you feel in different parts of your body? For example, you may notice warmth or heat just under the ribs, it may feel like it’s buzzing with hot energy, or it may feel torpid. You may notice a tingling in your arms, a contraction in your upper back, or rippling heat across your face or chest.

All of these sensations are your body expressing itself beyond the words. Often these feelings are the body trying to tell us something important. Too often we fail to hear it because our minds are too busy and distracted. Or we fear the feelings and try to push them down, which leads to greater discomfort.

Remember not to judge or put words to what the feeling means, simply attend to ‘what is’. If at any point you feel overwhelmed, open your eyes, take some calming breaths and slowly take yourself back to the feeling, reminding yourself that you are safe.

As you attend to how you’re feeling, do you notice the sensations changing or moving? Is the feeling becoming more pronounced, is it dissipating, or moving elsewhere in your body? Stay with the feeling.

After a 5-10 minutes you might notice an easing in your body. Something feels lighter. You may feel more tender towards yourself.

If you don’t notice any changes or it feels a little over or underwhelming, that’s okay. This is something that will get easier the more often you try it.

After 15 minutes brings yourself back to your breathing. Spend about 3 minutes reflecting on your experience. You may like to record what you felt and experienced in a journal.

Try to practice this activity once or twice a week. After a couple of weeks you’ll feel more comfortable and you should start to find a sense of calm descends during the practice. This calm can be present even when we’re enduring profound grief or loss. The calm is the result of attending to our bodies and feelings and allowing them to be.

Feel welcome to share your experience undertaking this activity.

Leave a comment

The Stillness Writers Room is a retreat for people who wish to put words to their grief. It’s a place for all writers—non-writers, emerging or professional—to work with self-enquiry and storytelling prompts to craft a written work to honour a grief— or other loss—and transform it into beauty.

The Stillness Writers Room retreat is a 2.5 day livestream writing program (via zoom). This is an intimate group with a maximum of 15 attendees. Alumni are then invited to join the SWR community.

The program will help you travel deep into the heart your story to develop your narrative and craft it into a piece of work whether an essay, memoir, short story, poem, prose, lyrics or journal.

Expressions of interest are currently open for the following dates.

• Friday 20 June - Sunday 22 June, 2025

• Friday 22 August - Sunday 24 August, 2025

(NB: discounts for paid subscribers).

Learn more and register EOI