1. Thank you for opening my email in a no doubt inundated inbox

2. If you’d like to go straight to finding out about my upcoming group experience Refugia, you can skip straight to it here

3. My therapeutic writing retreat ‘Alchemy’ has new dates for May 2027 - if you’d like to be kept in the loop with details and booking, drop me a note

~

There was a family anecdote involving my little self that had a shelf life of perhaps a few months, maybe a year or two. A small moment retold, one that made them laugh, and I revelled in that. Such a fleeting thing to retell here really but it allows me to begin a broader point. I was seven or eight, immersed in reading I think, and a question bubbled up that began with ‘Muuuum?', followed by an uncertain pause for her attention. At the same time I flung one arm over my head, making a frame for it, reaching my fingers down to scratch my jaw on the opposite side. Easy enough, unthinking, a bit awkward and funny-looking. I bet you’re trying it now.

It’s a funny little glimpse of the unusual ways and places my body has found comfort. Lying on my belly watching tv into adulthood while everyone sits upholstered. Sucking my thumb, hunched over a book in a tight corner. Long moments outside of time standing at the skylight till the pins and needles set in. And later, finding surprising solace and serenity deep in underground caves, and high on mountain edges. The calm dosed in rushes, the reassurance of aliveness at my limits.

~

Two weeks ago I found comfort, calm, and something like vitality in watching a public information film about the climate emergency with a group of strangers. There was a local screening of the People’s Emergency Briefing organised on a Friday night and I chose to go alone. Perhaps that’s not quite in the spirit of collective action, but it’s certainly in my habit of doing new and difficult things solo. There were a few familiar faces but no one for whom I’d feel any caretaking responsibility, and that mattered.

Having seen the film screenings shared in various circles, I knew roughly what to expect: a presentation of confronting evidence and forecasts from leading experts across all areas including weather, health, food, economics and national security. In prospect: grave, urgent, heavy. Nevertheless, I responded to the woman’s smile next to me as the film began with ‘I’ve been looking forward to this all day’, and I meant it.

That same morning I’d hosted a climate collapse circle online on The Portal, initiated by a community swell of alarm and grief in summer temperatures that the media only care to describe as record-breaking. It was an hour of togetherness, a rare and non-judgemental listening space for all we carry in relation to the losses we feel in our bones, those that we witness as well and those that reach directly into our lives. (Falling Together is a monthly circle on The Portal, hosted by experienced facilitators, and the next one is Wednesday 2nd September 6-7pm - you just need a free account to join.)

In both spaces that day, I felt two things bound by a third. The shared devastation at the threads of life as we know it being forced undone, and the frustrated rage at the lack of action held mobile in the space between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The third thing, the thing that bound us and carried me forward, was a deep sense of togetherness, a profound comfort and relief in the unspoken finding language and company. I experience this as something close to elation, a feeling that roots as well as rises. That day, the feeling buoyed me above the fathoms of despair as the wildfires burned, and that evening I rejoined my family at home - children, partner, father - with a pragmatic kind of hope. A hope that requires us to be proactive in its making and manifestation. A hope for a still-altered, yet still liveable future that that simply will not become without our participation, without sacrificing our comforts, without coming to know the far edges of our identities and our relationships.

I am increasingly coming to find that in these times of trouble I must risk one kind of comfort to discover another, and in new and unlikely places.

The film screening was followed by a discussion with those sitting close by - intended to be small groups of three I think, yet ours ballooned to an unwieldy eight. For that reason and for due to the short amount of time we had, there wasn’t enough connection possible, enough relation, for the kind of exchange I was hungry for. Instead there was quick and slippery disagreement about economic models, with one person saying that degrowth is naive and that there is no alternative to capitalism. In our small and brief community, a locked and red-faced polarity reared up that would have been a desolation had it not been for the woman across from me who eyed me kindly in our mutual quietness.

She had travelled far for this screening, she later shared. We came to hear that across decades of climate activism she still had hope. While she believes that life nevertheless is fundamentally changed and we must be prepared for great losses and adversity, her resolve to influence what she can only deepens. Another woman, with a Yorkshire accent that further grounded her words, spoke about taking action for those still to be born, our future ancestors. That they have a right to a good life, and those who live through these times have a responsibility to ensure it. She also said that in her bones she knows she’ll live to a hundred years old, and so she knows she has long work ahead. I loved her for sharing that, for her frank and unwavering devotion, and for the companionable echo her words have left in my heart.

~

All in all, I find comfort in the unclad truth, and always have. When the full facts are known but aren’t being presented (and when it comes to the climate emergency, they’re absolutely not: you can join the demand for a televised National Emergency Briefing here) I feel restless and untethered, tossed any which way my algorithmic newsfeed takes me. Being with difficult truth is surprise antidote to anxiety, to that desperate grasping for ground. Being with the truth with others is strange and enduring comfort in times that require us to keep relocating, over and again, the steady point between despair and denial. And sometimes the truth is in abiding the discomfort of not really knowing at all, together.

~

Refugia: Staying with the Trouble

Refugia is a truthful space, and therefore in these times of trouble, a space of solace and of resource through the slow unfolding of deep relation. I’m gathering around group of 6 people for the next round of this 6 month experience, which begins in October.

Refugia is for those feeling alarmed and unsteady with the language of polycrisis, the prospect of collapse and rising fascism. It is for those who sometimes feel frozen and at other times burnt out by the seeming speed and fragmentation of these times.

Refugia is for those feeling the relentless shockwaves amid either the silence or loud polarity of those close by. It is for those reaching for response, while needing to hold the relational threads of their own lives, feeling stretched between both. It is for those longing for rest and for ground, as well as for participation…and amongst it all, heeding the irresistible, irrepressible call to life.

‘I feel gratitude to have felt held, respected, listened to, challenged safely, to have expanded knowledge…and to have seen parts of the earth, views, experiences with you all I hadn’t yet seen, thanks to you all.’ - Refugia participant

Refugia means ‘a small space of safety where life endures’. Indeed, life in this space can thrive among us, even in adversity. The terrain we might explore is vast and terrific, and we will only come to know it by what emerges from our togetherness.

Guided by conversational encounter, shared reading and therapeutic writing practices, we will navigate our individual and relational responses to the current realities. During our time together we will consider, explore and contextualise these realities, all the while rooting ourselves in the safe enough experience of slow, curious and nourishing connection.

Take a further look here, and let me know if you’d like to talk about the possibilities.

~ ~ ~

I’m making a return after some time ‘away’ to consider what it is I want to say, and how I want to say it. I have needed to make a quieter place of my world to really hear my own thoughts, to make a cradle for expression. I’ve been saying no, slowing down even when it honestly feels so uncomfortable to do so, allowing fewer words in so that I can detect the sonar of my own creativity. I am reminded that writing really does mean everything to me, including action.

I have remembered, electrified, that moving expression and meaning-making out onto the page, then sharing with trusted others, and then pushing it out into the world (it does feel like pushing just now) are further layers of creative self expression, and of experiencing self in the world of others. Of being amongst it all. In these layers I will often fear a dilution of meaning, a loss of essence of the original piece, and so I’ve come to hold a somewhat miserly grip that only actually serves to throttle further flow.

In sharing though, a paradox: there is instead the possibility of a deepening intimacy with the piece with each remove. This is my experience of those times when I have been bold enough to share: the writing only becomes and becomes, and really in ways I have no say over, and no right to say. There is an ongoing relational vibrancy to be experienced here, a tantalising groundlessness: by sharing I rewild both the words and myself in the world of others. Most times, the next call after creating the thing is moving the thing out into the world in some way, any way. This is the very point I feel most resistance, I’ll be honest, and I’ve been trying to soften the muscle clenched hard around it. When the tension releases, even just a little, I find beneath it layers of curiosity and intrigue, excitement even, not over the prospect of feedback and response so much as what this thing becomes next.

I wrote Pruning, which I share below in text and audio, in the midst of a study in grief. I don’t know what else to call Life’s Poetry with Nicola Duffell, save to describe it as a soul-level experience of contemplation, witnessing and revelation over 6 months. Her next programme begins in October. This poem emerged after a dawn moment alone in the garden, one of those times when the words seem to write themselves.

I am filled with moments that ask to be written, and I admit to rarely answering. So sharing it here is a celebration of having answered, and of having lingered with it for a few months to allow it further shape. It feels a little vulnerable but not so much as it might have done even a year ago, and I’m honing the skill of recognising a certain kind of vulnerability as a way marker onward rather than a closed road.

Pruning
This morning, early, after checking my blood,
I cut back the rosemary,
woody and wild,
ancient, insistent.
It was suffocating the life from underneath, you see
that lay damply patient, dark.
The naive greens and waiting pinks, the budding spires
Of hyacinth, of helloborus.
Surely too intent on this life.
With quiet force they return like old promises,
making their demands for space and light and encouragement:
they need to be able to fucking breathe.

And so I cut back the rosemary.
Hard.
Before coffee,
before reason,
before company.
Meddling with the experiment of sun on soil.
For hyacinth, brief and intense.
For helloborus, nodding,
formidable.

~ ~ ~

Therapeutic Writing

I have some therapeutic writing news for Autumn / Winter to share with you next time, but for now I’d like to invite you to a free upcoming session with myself and Nicola Duffel. On Tuesday 14th July at 6.30-7.45pm (BST) Nicola and I will be joining in conversation about the medicine in writing through life’s most challenging times, with around 45 minutes of guided therapeutic writing time. Here’s a bit more from Nicola about this event (all you need to join is a free account with The Portal) and you can book your spot here.

This Willow Weeps is a writing exploration with the wonderful Ruth Coates. We have both found medicine in writing and all that it can offer. I recently attended Ruth’s Alchemy retreat in the Scottish Boarders and it was beyond beautiful. Writing can offer us a way to process, a way to practice, a way to tend to our grief and to soul - and this is what we’ll be exploring.

And what of the Willow? The Willow tree has been with me since childhood, it’s often a symbol of loss - the weeping willow. It also has great strength too. We’ll explore the symbolism of the willow. We’ll be weaving altogether - willow, grief, writing and water. Bring your writing materials and a candle.

Ruth is a psychotherapist and therapeutic writing guide, working from her shepherd’s hut nestled in the woods of East Lothian. For the last 6 years Ruth has brought her love of words right into the heart of her work, guiding writing sessions and courses, and mostly recently a retreat, to share with others the alchemy that is possible with this practice.

Nicola Duffell tends to grief and soul in an increasingly complex and devastating world. She knows the deepest, darkest heartbreak that comes from experiencing personal loss. She’s also alive to the collective nature of life, grief and death. Still she’s someone who fiercely believes in the beauty of this life and what it is to be human in this world.

It would be really wonderful to see you there.

I have facilitated various in person events over the years with writing as focus, as well as many more online as either monthly writing sessions like The Sunday Pages or long programmes like Writing Unbound and Alchemy. Both these in person and online experiences have been highly rewarding and have also contained their own itch - the latter to experience what moves through this kind of writing in an embodied togetherness, and the former to encounter the reach and depth of writing over a few days in good company (preferably somewhere green, spacious and beautiful).

It is my true delight to invite you into the final spot on Alchemy, a therapeutic writing retreat with movement, nourishment and rest at heart. We’ll gather for three days from 14th to 17th May in peaceful Abbey St Bathans, nestled in a woodland valley alongside the Whiteadder Water in the Scottish Borders. Full details are here on my website.

As well as morning and early evening writing circles, there’ll be gentle movement sessions to support what rises to alchemise. On Friday I’ll be guiding an introduction to Animal Flow (here’s in which at the gym I teach weekly classes) which meets you and your body at any level of ability, and on Saturday we have a truly alchemising experience with Ailsa of Move To Feel. I’ll let Ailsa’s words share a sense of what to expect:

‘Move To Feel is a creative mindful movement practice which invites you to move, dance, sense, play and connect. Sessions are outdoors in nature on silent disco headsets, which create a fun, sensory and intimate feeling, whilst live guidance over an eclectic mix of music guides you on an immersive journey. Space and time to switch off busy minds, shake off the bullshit and practise coming home to your aligned mind, body and soul. Absolutely all body shapes, ages and abilities are perfect — no lycra, no rhythm, no confidence and no experience necessary! It will always meet you where you are at.’

We’ll also be nourished by the delicious and wholesome food cooked up by my chef friend Catherine. With plenty of time to enjoy the house, gardens and surroundings, I will also offer you optional 1-1 space across the weekend to support your reflection and integration.

And if you’re keen but you’ve participated before in Alchemy online, be encouraged! The writing pathway as well as the prompts are all original, created specifically for the retreat with your unique experience in mind.

If this appeals and your diary agrees, then simply reply to this from your inbox or email me at ruthcoatescounselling@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to offer you a 10% discount on the price.

Something tells me this invitation will meet the person who is quietly, and perhaps unknowingly until now, waiting for an experience just like this. I cannot wait to welcome you.

~ ~ ~

The Sunday Pages

This Sunday at 6-7.15pm UK we’ll be gathering online for an extended therapeutic writing hour. With spring in the air, the emphasis will be on a sense of emergence and the different ways we might be meeting that. Are you feeling in flow with the budding earth or in friction? Here is a space for awareness, reflection and encouragement through the wisdom of your own words.

If you’ll be joining me for the first time, welcome! I guide the session in a way that supports you to ease into and out of this writing practice, with guidance on the prompts and the timings.

Click here to book your place through The Portal, where you’ll find two price options of £7 or £15 depending on your circumstances. You’ll receive the zoom link with your booking confirmation. Alternatively you can book directly through my website (only £15 option available there) and I’ll follow up with our zoom link.

Alchemy: writing & movement in the Scottish Borders

I am beyond delighted to share that I have one space remaining on this special retreat in May. Join us in the lush borders countryside of Abbey St Bathans for a few peaceful days of reflection, movement, good food and warm company. We’ll begin and end the days writing, with two special movement sessions, 1-1 support from myself, and delicious, nutritious cookery from my good friend Catherine. You’ll find more details here, and as a subscriber I’d like to offer you a discount of 10% until 2nd April - just use ELLIPSIS10 at the checkout.

The Beginning is Always Today

A free therapeutic writing guide to be with in your own time

I’ve been a creator and participant on The Portal now for over two years and my gratitude for this space and community away from profit-hungry algorithms is as deep as my learning over that time. Some of you might remember that I sometimes used to produce PDF versions of my live writing sessions. Consider this a significant evolution! To access the resource all you need is a free account on The Portal, which also opens the door to wonderful other free experiences, such as Communing sessions hosted by Portal creators and fascinating, encouraging conversations like the Spiral Series held by leftist developmental coach Keri Jarvis. The Beginning Is Always Today is part of The Portal’s Spring Playlist full of goodness to support you in the Grief & Re-emergence you may be holding this season.

Until next time, thank you for being here with me.

Come communing with me on The Portal ~ a free writing session Thursday 12th March 7-8pm, with plenty more gatherings on offer from the Portal community. All you need to join is a free experiencer account.

The Sunday Pages returns for a Spring gathering ~ Sunday 29th March 6-7.15pm

Alchemy: Therapeutic Writing & Movement Retreat in the Scottish Borders, May 14th-17th ~ one space left. Is it yours?

I was standing at the bus stop yesterday morning, for the short trip to The Therapy Hut. I had rushed there, obviously. Does anyone here know a way not to rush to the bus stop? I’d missed one recently despite rushing ahead of time. The bus had arrived and gone early, the tracker told me. So yesterday I rushed ahead further still to synchronise with the travelling dot on the tracker. This rushing gives me time, something I must somehow unlearn.

Standing waiting, I felt my rushing heart yet to settle and so too my rushing thoughts. An untidy mosaic of thinking, fragments unmaking a picture. The day ahead: a group call, endless admin, and then clients. Will I need a fire or not at the hut? Then remembering as overlap that I’ve run out of firewood. The moments before: passing a friend in her car. We were close once, and there was a griefy, anxious moment in the passing. An uncertain and folded smile, a brief glance aimed at eye contact. The sun on the windscreen meant I couldn’t see how it landed, nor what was offered.

The traffic streamed on in front of me. Automatically I scanned the passengers for familiarity in this small town of interconnecting groups and communities. An odd mixture of warmth and wariness, a light vigilance. The city preserves me from this.

The house next to the bus stop was receiving a furniture delivery, the large van idling noisily and close. I only really registered the clank and bang of goods unloaded and received when it had stopped, my nerves uncoiling with relief. Hard not to notice the man in full orange hi-vis who crossed the road as I arrived. Now he worked away on a drain cover with a hammer, a few meters up the road. Impossible to wrench away eyes and ears from this.

Except in the moments. When he rested from the hammering, when the drain cover came free, when there was a lull in the traffic, and when the delivery van finally left.

Birdsong.

Trilling in revolutions of high notes from the trees across the road. The eyes follow the ears don’t they, and while mine searched in vain for the songbird they stretched instead to the sea beyond the trees, and to the small volcanic island there with its lighthouse, framed by the branches. A pause, an expansion, a perspective shift shimmering along my own branches and arriving as a deeper breath in the ribcage. A long and longed for exhale.

When the traffic resumed - inevitably, inexorably - my ears remained attuned to the birdsong in the near-distance, and the waveroar in the far. Unable or unwilling to unnotice, I don’t know. But I could choose now to bring my attention to another layer of the soundscape, primal and persistent. To know the company of these sounds - to be stilled and soothed by them - even if, even when, even so.

They tend to disappear when we need them most, or stay stubbornly indoors refusing to breach the threshold of the throat. It seems that in the moments when we must stretch for them, words insist on existing on the edges of vision and diction, exasperatingly out of reach.

Words escape me, we say when it seems there is too much to say, or when words alone threaten a grave injustice. To even attempt at language contains an insult at times, or at least the risk and possible injury of getting it wrong. Better to say this placeholder of silence then, words escape me. Sometimes, these three words make an exit.

I was an English Literature student in a group discussing postmodernism when I ventured, heart leaping, that we are forever removed from one other in our innermost lives and that language in all its meaning and mischief might be our best attempt at bridging the spaces between us, reaching for connection. Since then I’ve thought that all art makes the same bid - to touch in on the depths of being human, to affirm our shared and unlikely existence. I still see the look of irritated bemusement my tutor wore, still feel the ghost of irrelevance and moving on in the group. Not a word.

I do still believe it though. I think we reach for language to reach for one another, to help one another understand our complex human lives both individually and collectively. To make ever unending sense of this life. In recent times, as the world seemingly accelerates into chaos and collapse, I have been hungrier than ever for the words of others. Devouring poems and essays and novels and think-pieces in an attempt to understand from outside everything I felt (and continue to feel) within me: the worry, the grief, the wonder, the community, the fear, the joy, the anxiety, the strident despite-it-all aliveness. Trying to make the outside make sense inside me, trying to make the inside make sense outside of me.

Words have never mattered more, perhaps because of their very inadequacy to express the absurdity of living in times riven through with injustice. Paradoxically, their value has only increased. They show me my endeavour to understand, to know the old stories and to begin to weave new ones. At the same time I feel in company more than million-strong with my fellow readers and writers and critical thinkers.

So I am not seduced by the internal shrug, words escape me. I refuse any mutual abandonment. When I reach for them, words of some kind, in some infinitely renewed arrangement, do find me, and I find them. I discover them, emergent, when I venture to speak in courageous spaces, and most especially when I write. Despite the blank and blinking page, despite my seeming wordlessness, words do indeed escape me. There they are on the page, a fossil of having tried.

I hope they find you in their reach, and I hope you keep reaching too.

Upcoming Writing Dates & Alchemy Retreat

Communing ~ Writing with Ruth - Thursday 12th May 7-8pm online FREE

This is part of a series of free events hosted by several creators on The Portal, where I now hold all my online experiences:

‘The Portal isn’t another course platform - it’s infrastructure for a different way of relating to knowledge and to each other. In the face of polycrisis, we need spaces where wisdom can flow unimpeded by algorithms designed for profit rather than flourishing. We need digital ecosystems that mirror the collaborative intelligence of natural ones.’

All you need to join is a free account on The Portal - all the details are here as well as the full list of Communing events. So much goodness on offer, and it would be wonderful to share in it with you.

The Sunday Pages ~ Spring Equinox - Sunday 6-7.15pm online

While I have reduced the frequency of The Sunday Pages sessions for now, writing is increasingly core across my practice both therapeutically and personally. It takes a central place in my current programme Refugia and I’m welcoming a new area of supporting those who want to work closely with their writing either in fortnightly or monthly mentoring. It seems many of us are finding it of vital resource in turbulent times, and I am finding it myself evermore a trustworthy practice. I envisage a time when I move again to offering a more frequent writing space, but for now perhaps it will be the more special for its relative rarity.

On such note, the next Sunday Pages will be on 29th March, just after the Spring Equinox, for an extended hour 6-7.15pm. As you may well know, this is a space in which you are warmly supported to meet life through the wisdom of your own words, and at this coming time of rising energy you can expect a collection of enlivening and uplifting writing prompts. Places are £15 and you can book here.

The Alchemy Retreat - therapeutic writing & movement in the Scottish Borders - 14-17th May 2026. There are now 4 spaces left on this experience of deep rest, reflection and connection at a beautiful time of year. Take a look at the details here.

In defence of the shallows

I used to be wholly against small talk, mainly because I don’t feel very skilled at it. I hid in my rejection of the shallows. But I see the essential value of small talk now. Its artful ways in and out of depth.

One of my favourite quotes was once Anaïs Nin’s ‘I connect deeply, or not at all’, feeling so recognised by it. There was a comforting conviction in it, for a time. A way to stay at arms length perhaps. It’s not so true for me these days, there’s a loosening. I now grant that small talk can be highly purposeful and important. Pleasurable, even, to share a brief moment of connection with a passerby, a fellow passenger, a shop assistant. A conventional pleasantry can change the tone of a morning, can raise a smile and lift the mood, establish a common ground that settles or enlivens the nervous system. We connect in the small everyday touches of exchange, the flit of belonging. The glance, the nod, the smile, the greeting, then the affect.

Small talk can be a way of acknowledging that we have company in each other, that we are present to one another. A craft for negotiating intimacy, it builds trust and rapport in an affirmation of existing together - ‘I see you, you see me.’ I appear to be hungrier these days for small moments at the bus stop, in the supermarket aisle, on the dog walk, in the waiting room, perhaps because our meaning to each other seems ever more-imperilled by rampant individualism and accelerating technologies. Devices thieve away these moments of possibility between us, diverting and draining the collective shallows. Our meaning to each other, and our meaning-making together, is what must be remembered, restored (or is it restoried?) and carried forward.

When the shallows keep us from one another

But when the small talk endures beyond its purpose, when we are stuck in the corridor and not passing through to enter the hall of conversation, this I have always found so uncomfortable and increasingly intolerable. Maybe I understand more now, maybe I’m just tired of playing the game these days, maybe things feel more urgent.

Small talk quickly turns stale when it outstays its welcome. When the effort to stay in the shallows denies the depths, all effort now in steering away rather than towards. When the speaking attempts to obscure or disavow the insistent unspoken, the void is filled by creeping disconnection, and I begin to long for the places we aren’t moving to together. Is it a strange form of homesickness I feel under my skin? When I’m with someone in this way, I’m concurrently missing them, aching from a removed, masked place for all the possibilities of us.

I think many of us feel this way. We long for more connection, and we are hungry for belonging, for a deeper relating, for intimacy. There is meant to be more than this. We cannot afford to stay resident in the shallows - we must be agile in the water - and yet we seem so woefully unpracticed in wading further in.

In these times of deep trouble and global instability, of multiple crisis and threat, of killing and collapse, we need to meet each other in the depths more than ever. We must practice, we must participate and we must invite each other in. We need each other in spaces of relational intimacy for solace, for inspiration, for belonging, and for practice. Thinking-with, being-with, becoming-with, as Donna Haraway might put it.

The following words then offer fresher sustenance, a swap of Anaïs Nin for Mary Oliver:

‘Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.’

And also your joys, your dreams, your weirdness, your aliveness, your longings, your sorrows, your possibilities. We can risk the depths together, and all they might contain, drinking from the wellsprings we find there. Trepidation is normal in the terrain of not knowing, but might we not come to know more in our coming together?What can know and not know in gathering, in truly encountering one another? At the very least we might help each other move between surface and depth with more skill and agility, and with less isolation and fear. And that really is something.

Let me tell you about Refugia, which begins next week on Tuesday 27th January. This is a small group experience of 6 people gathering over 6 months. There are two spots left and still time for messages and conversation to explore the possibilities of this experience for you.

Refugia is for those feeling alarmed and unsteady with the language of polycrisis, collapse and fascism, for those who feel frozen by the seeming speed and fragmentation of these times, for those longing for rest as well as for participation…and amongst it all, heeding the irresistible, irrepressible call back to life.

Here is a place for those staying with the trouble. Refugia robustly supports you in the courage to feel what it is to be consciously alive together in these times, through small community and 1-1 support. Over 6 months, Refugia will offer a therapeutic space of conversation, reflection and encounter, supporting you in growing awareness and resourcefulness in relation to our collective context. We’ll meet one another at the threshold of learning and unlearning, deepening into all we know and all that cannot yet be known.

This is a space of depth and dimension, where timelines convene - the wounds and wisdom of the past, the textures of the present, and the future reimagined. Supported by reading and therapeutic writing practices, we will navigate our individual and relational responses to the current realities. We will consider, explore and contextualise these realities, while rooting ourselves in the safe enough experience of slow, curious and nourishing connection. The terrain before us is vast and terrific; we will only come to know it through what emerges from our unique togetherness.

Gathering online on fortnightly Tuesday mornings 10-12, there will also be ongoing community space, and a monthly 1-1 session with myself. Take a look here for more details, with accessible payment option and plans. Please email me at ruthcoatescounselling@gmail.com (or reply to this directly) if your curiosity is stirring.

We live in frayed, disorientating, chaotic times in which we are constantly seduced into leaving. By which I mean disconnecting, withdrawing, distancing, distracting. We leave each other, ourselves and the earth beneath our feet in myriad and multiplying ways. Over and again in ways we are even forgetting, we are leaving. We leave to be right, we leave to recuperate, we leave to numb out and we leave to keep up. We spend, we scroll, we disregard and we deny. We flee proliferate uncertainties for the faux-comfort of binary absolutes.

Last year I lost two friendships, both casualities of the quick and certain exit rather than us both staying, even for just a conversation longer, in the messy middle of our different opinions. There is an alternative landscape just before the last text message that I sometimes long for - a terrain of caring, complex relating where we don’t just agree to disagree but we seek to understand the difference, and to know more, become more, together. We stay, we practice, we become.

I’m half way through a wonderful 6-month grief community experience, Life’s Poetry with Nicola Duffell, and this is what I believe I’m practicing there with others - staying. I’m staying with my grief - for my mother, for this world - in a way that is entirely counter to that demanded by the over-culture. To stay and feel and know from that place - to live from that deeper, stiller place - is a kind of rebellion in my mind. A reclaiming of power and efficacy in the world; a coming back to life, together.

Refugia is my new offering, and the offer is to stay. Stay with knowing, stay with learning, stay with uncertainty, stay in presence, stay with relationships that are rewarding and imperfect, stay with yourself, stay. Staying with the trouble within us, between us and among us requiries us to practice, and reclaim, a relational complexity and agility from which we are alienated in the everyday, and by design.

Refugia is for those feeling alarmed and unsteady with the language of polycrisis, collapse and fascism, for those who at times feel frozen by the seeming speed and fragmentation of these times, for those longing for rest as well as for participation…and amongst it all, heeding the irresistible, irrepressible call back to life.

Guided by conversational encounter, shared reading and therapeutic writing practices, we will navigate our individual and relational responses to the current realities. During our time together we will consider, explore and contextualise these realities, all the while rooting ourselves in the safe enough experience of slow, curious and nourishing connection. We will assemble for 6 months January-June, gathering on fortnightly Tuesday mornings with an ongoing online community space and 1-1 monthly sessions with myself for support and reflection.

Refugia means ‘a small space of safety where life endures’. Indeed, life in this space can thrive among us, even when surrounded by adversity. The terrain we might explore is vast and terrific, and to some extent we will only come to know it by what emerges from our togetherness.

We begin as a group of six on Tuesday 27th January. If you’re curious take a look here for more details, and do get in touch to explore the possibilities.

Ahead of Refugia beginning, I’ll be joined by the brilliant mind and chat of Keri Jarvis this coming Wednesday (7th) at 10am to discuss the necessity of small, intimate community as we emerge into further honesty and reckoning about living in a world of proliferate threat. The emphasis here is on exploring the need for collective spaces of encounter, how we might witness one another in compassion and honesty, how we might practice the relational ethics and agility needed now and in the future, and how to to stay present together and in most aliveness during times of great urgency and uncertainty.

Here’s the link if you’d like to join us - you’d be so welcome. This is a free event and a recording will be available.

Refugia: coming to life while staying with the trouble

It’s been quite a year hasn’t it, it’s been quite a few years now, and there are indeed more troubling years to come. Donna Haraway writes: ‘We – all of us on Terra – live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response.’

We are in need of new kinds of places, extraordinary places for extraordinary times, to feel all that we feel, to hold each other in honesty, to hear each others’ grief and hope and despair and joy, and for this to be held therapeutically and in community - this is why I’ve created Refugia. This is a 6 month experience of coming-together and becoming-with, to be supported by a small group of 6 people who want to stay with life and stay with the trouble, who know truly that one cannot be parsed from the other. There will be therapeutic writing practices, key texts, conversation, and encounter alongside an online community area and 1-1 support. We begin 27th January and I’m currently meeting those who are curious for an intial chat - take a look at Refugia here and get in touch if something stirs in you.

Alchemy: a therapeutic writing retreat in the Scottish Borders

While my 9 week online therapeutic writing programme, Alchemy, has been retired in one form, it finds a new and exciting lease of life in an in-person retreat in May 2026. I’m very close to being able to share full details, but I can confirm that we’ll be gathering in the beautiful riverside setting of Abbey St Bathans in the Scottish Borders for a 3-night stay 14th-17th May. I know in my bones that the combination of dedicated writing time, 1-1 support, movement, nature, nourishing food and good company will deeply support you in connection, in rest, and in becoming. If you’d like to share your interest with me at this point, do get in touch.

The Other Mother

After all the gratifying rituals that ready a camper van for sleep, I climbed into my bed and cried.

In early June I took the diagonal journey from south east to north west, from one Scottish coast to another. I travelled solo in our camper van, high on self-sufficiency and time alone, while welcoming the prospect of joining others also journeying to Ullapool for a geology field trip with a difference. Finding myself among strangers is something I’ve been intentional about these last few years.

I’d adventured before with author and psychotherapist Ruth Allen. I think I’ll call it that: adventuring, of the deeply therapeutic kind, across inner and outer landscapes. Inside out, outside in. Last time in the caves of Yorkshire, this time among the mountains of the North West Highlands. Immersion in land, in weather, in the encounter of new people.

I arrived at the campsite just outside the town, and following a first meeting with the group and later a walk with Ruth along the beach, I took to my van. Tears of joy, of relief, of awe rolled up and fell as I took in the midsummer night sky sketched full of mountain and water.

Our first excursion the following day took us to Achmelvich beach, all shades of blue and white, where we were guided to roam and seek a place to be. To be in solitude amongst the rocky outcrop hugging sand and sea, in quiet, in the body, in communion. After some awkwardness I found my spot, a nook that sheltered on both sides and supported my back in a way that tilted my face skyward. After some minutes I moved away, that’s enough now surely, but twice made a giddy return to the spot, and finding such reluctance to leave when the time came.

The rest here is worked up from notes I gathered shortly after, back together on the sand.

//

A place to be held, to be held in place.

A rock, a rock nook, warmed by weeks of sun, and hard. Stored solar sustenance. A hard place to leave. I want to explore the embrace, to know it closer and deeper, and so I keep returning. I marvel how the cradle of my hip, my pelvis, can be so cradled. How the hard muscle of my shoulder, the lock of bone and bone along my spine, can soften against something harder still. Gently prising space. I deepen.

I am prone, and I pronate my heart to this.

It is time that is cradled here: the flash of my life, a heartbeat in the grand scheme. This nook, this being held in place by deep time, rescues me from the tempting nihilistic shrug. What’s the point? When life seems all collapse and chaos, with no inherent design nor purpose. Admittedly, strangely, the shrug can be of momentary comfort in the assault of seemingly decrepit days.

Instead though, this embrace. Tender force, that holds and folds me back into my own universe, my own meaning-making. Everything slows into more. Breath, pulse, possibility, time, time, time.

The span of my life fits with ease into this abiding nook. The geological trustworthiness, the steadfastness, of this embrace telegraphs to other ways of my being held across time that both could and could not be. Some that still can and some that now forever cannot, be. As a child I was rarely certain of open or closed, whether to harden or soften, or if an embrace would be possible at all. I would be lithified by a silence, and liquified by a smile, learning a fidelity to others but not to myself.

Only braced, heart still open, hoping. For days and for weeks, over years. Until I hardened, pressurised mineral, resentment building like sediment.

Emotional experiences in other lives past, the kind that leave craters and fissures, behave like elemental forces exerting stress across the years. Causing erosions here and formations there: absence and presence. Knowing years stretch across generations. Ancestral pressure moved along the line from daughter to daughter to daughter.

And now, here, me…I am keenly aware of the daily effort to resist other mineral processes that come with the passing of decades, the calcification within, the hardening and narrowing of chamber and passage. The ossification of habit. Stress fractures. The question of when to brace, when to release and how, with whom.

My midlife task then is to soften in the hard places. To find the hard places that I might soften within. For years and only recently knowingly, I have been seeking out the timeless, certain embrace of the other mother, the living mother of nature. Water, rock, earth, beast. While I tend evermore to my structure, skeletal and strong.

Outside in, inside out.

If you’ve read to this point, thank you. This piece means a lot to me - I’ve nurtured it a while - and so it means a lot to share it. Ruth Allen is adventuring again next year to the North West Highlands Geopark…perhaps you’ll join her and the rangers there.

Thank you for reading this and for your company here - I am grateful. Take a look at the end of this piece for news about Alchemy (a retreat!) and Refugia, a new therapeutic space I’m offering next year.

The hostility of this weather is unrelenting.

The beach is strewn with sea debris, the sand passive and fatigued from a high tide that now retreats, but not today with grace; the storm forcing foam up the beach to mock the tideline. The sea barrels and boils, the horizon violently unflattened by wild white crests that rise and rise again, undefeated. Monochrome pallets ignorant of texture and hue.

My senses, tested, attempt to meet the rigour of this scene. A force within me swelling in respect and awe of the sea, a regardless and mercurial mother.

I am inexplicable joy.

I seek and find proof of life in cold red cheeks and yelps of resilience, a shivering dog and a quest for rock climbing despite it all. I find proof of life in a stern line of cormorants, sentients guarding the line between rock and ocean. Black necks curving out from black feathers, black beaks all stolidly pointing in one direction: the sea, the source. Black between grey and grey and white and grey. Maybe they are waiting patiently for a chance, maybe they are waiting to fly, to resume. Maybe they, like me, simply stand in awe despite it all. My binoculars transport them to arms length and momentarily I stand in line with them.

But I am not comorant. I am soft resilience bookended by waterproofs and the promise of a warm fire in the hearth.

There are days when life seems only to be testing how much we can bear. Today I briefly met myself, unbidden, in the stoicism running deep in my bloodline, standing watch at the line between rock and ocean.

It is time for Alchemy, my 9 week therapeutic writing experience, to become something new. After five rounds and many beautiful souls joining me, I’m resting the current format to prepare the soil for an in-person weekend experience. The Alchemy Retreat will take place in Spring 2026 over 3 days and very likely in the Scottish Borders. I’ll be sharing details as soon as I have a couple of things confirmed, but do share your interest with me if this sounds compelling. My email is ruthcoatescounselling@gmail.com or you can send me a message here on Substack. Both new and old alchemists welcome.

And now, something entirely new, beginning in January 2026.

Refugia is a therapeutic group experience of conversation, reflection and encounter, held over 6 months, and supporting people in their growing awareness and resourcefulness in relation to our collective context.

Refugia is for those feeling alarmed and unsteady with the language of polycrisis, collapse and fascism, for those who feel frozen by the demanded speed and fragmentation of this moment, for those feeling the deep need for rest as well as a longing to participate…and amongst it all, all the while, hearing the drumbeat: the irresistible, irrepressible call back to life.

Refugia robustly supports you in the courage to feel what it is to be alive together in these times, through small community and 1-1 support. Here is a space to be greeted at the threshold of learning and unlearning, deepening into all we know and all that cannot yet be known. This is a space of depth and dimension, where timelines convene - the wounds and wisdom of the past, the textures of the present, and the future reimagined.

Refugia means ‘a small space of safety where life endures’. Indeed, life in this space can thrive among us, even when surrounded by adversity. Writers and thinkers who will guide us along the way include Donna Haraway, Adrienne Maree Brown, Audre Lorde, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, to name just a few. The terrain we might explore is vast and terrific, and to some extent we will only come to know it by what emerges from our togetherness.

There are still some details to be worked out, a website to update, etc. That will all come very soon. But as you can see I cannot contain the energy and optimism I feel for this way of being together.

We’ll gather on fortnightly Tuesday mornings from late January to late June for conversation, writing and encounter. Alongside this there will be an ongoing online community space called The Well, and a monthly 1-1 session with myself. The maximum group size will be 6 people, and we’ll begin on 27th January. Again, if you would like to share your interest, please do - drop me a note at ruthcoatescounselling@gmail.com (or if you’re reading this as an email, you can simply reply).

I facilitate your written reflection with carefully curated prompts and quotes, so that you may deepen into your own knowing. Therapeutic writing is a meaningful and profound practice that both grounds and illuminates and, anything but frivolous, it offers steadfast company in times of great change and uncertainty.

The dates of our writing gatherings, live and online 6-7.15pm, are:

Sunday 28th September ~ Longing

Sunday 26th October ~ Imagining

Sunday 30th November ~ Becoming

Leafing is hosted by The Portal* where we will gather in community for the time in between sessions. There I will share weekly prompts and reading notes to support your ongoing reflection and writing practice, and audio recordings will be made available should you be unable to attend a session. Leafing is an ongoing experience of containment, company and connection - I’m looking forward to being alongside you week to week, month to month.

Places are either £75 or £35 depending on your circumstances - you choose - and no one will be turned away for lack of funds. If you wish to pay by instalments, that can also be arranged between us.

Please feel free to get in touch with any wonderings.

An elderly neighbour passed away last month. Latterly I’d been calling her friend.

Having shared the same street for years, we only came to share depths more than this over the last 10 months. She was 92, her longevity I credit to her avid curiosity in life, her determination to face each day perfectly dressed and coiffed (even with painfully reduced mobility in her final months), and to her crisp memory that put my errant own to shame. She was also not a little obstinate, something she would openly admit to with a twinkling wink.

I hope she knew that her company lifted my spirits as much as I hope mine lifted hers.

I would find myself asking questions I wouldn’t stretch to in other company, and I answered hers fully, truthfully. Gratefully disarmed. Each time I would bring a little gift - some scones I’d baked, a hunk of banana bread, a little pot of wild garlic pesto. Each time I’d tell the same little lie - it was nothing - and yet I was giddy in my gifting. Each time she would thank me with a telling off: you really shouldn’t have. And then we’d enjoy a small feast together.

Each visit might have been the last, each conversation, each story shared, each confidence. All of us live by this law of course, but we were brought more honest by her frankness about death. I’m ready, she said. I think this gave us special permission to risk truly seeing the other. It was a gift that she trusted me in this way, a woman exactly half her age.

The last time I saw her was the evening before I left for a holiday. I was rushing and stressing about the proliferate things still to do, so I popped round to say hello, ‘just for a bit’. Ordinarily I don’t drink, the exception being when an elderly friend asks the moment you’re across the threshold if you’ll share some champagne with her. The only answer in such circumstances is yes, by the way. I emerged two hours later, drunk on bubbles, on vibrant conversation, and the heady juxtaposition of a vivacious life being very nearly at its end.

My daily walk with our dog takes me past her house, just two doors down and across. I would always wave and smile through her thick net curtains, just on the off chance she would see me. A one-way act of faith, hoping to punctuate a long and perhaps lonely day. Her house stands empty now of course, yet I imagine everything remains ordered and immaculate. I still give a little nod and a smile as I go past. From my kitchen window I can see her small front garden, which she was tending right up until her frailest days. Her frothy white hydrangeas are nodding brown now. I wonder if she’d mind me taking some to make an autumn wreath for the front door? She would have been able to see it from behind her net curtains, just two doors up and across. It would be a small gesture to remember a friendship, brief and deep, and to honour a woman who was ardently against a funeral.

I’ll make something new from what risks being forgotten, as a way to tend to this grateful grief.

Leafing: something known becomes something new

I took a break from my therapeutic writing spaces over the summer, as I usually do. This time it was with a knowing that change was coming, and feeling my desire for it. Some time and space given over to not knowing has been filled with travel and with family and with a revitalised connection with my own writing. That’s feeling very alive!

This September, monthly writing sessions resume but this time they’ll be gathered together with October and November for a programme that guides us along the transitions of Autumn.

Sessions will be slightly longer, audio recordings will be available, and most especially we will be gathered into community on The Portal. There I will share further reading pieces along with prompts to support your ongoing writing practice, and we will enjoy a space of connection, reflection and inspiration.

Leafing invites you into the good company of your own words alongside like-hearted others as we write together from early Autumn into the first days of Winter.

Online sessions take place on Sundays 28th September, 26th October, and 30th November 6-7.15pm. Audio recordings will be made available inside the community space at The Portal.

I’m tingling with anticipation for something known becoming something new. I hope you’ll join me.

You’ll find the booking link with more details here.

🍁

The Sunday Pages is still alive and well! It will return for special dates in the calendar year, for seasonal moments, and particular themes. There’s already planning space in my notebook for a new year session, and for a return of the Unsent Letter. I love the sourcing and creating process, so do let me know if there’s a particular area you’re being called to reflect upon.

🍁

Soon enough, the reassuring tread of floorboard and stair, and there he is at the kitchen door.

Me: Morning. How's your face?

Him: Ok, I don't think you can see it. Morning.

Me: No, there's no bruise there at all. Did you sleep well?

Him: Yeah, I just really didn't want to get up.

A shuffle towards me, a bed-fresh squeeze.

Me: Are you worried about today? About what might happen if you see him?

A shrug. With a wary eye he performs a deft scan of my feelings and locates my worry. He has always been too good at this.

Him: Nah. Are you ok?

There, the shift.

Me: I worry about you, it's a big thing and I'm proud of you for standing up to him but maybe he'll hold a grudge.

He gathers a concoction of oats and seeds and raisins for his porridge. He weighs each in the bowl, a curious inherited habit that nods to his love of maths as well as for his dad. Precision important yet the counter is still covered. Spilling, spilling.

Him: I'm glad I punched him back.

He reads quietly as usual while he eats, and I wonder at the illusion of absorption, porridge and boy. It's all still there, it's just not showing in quite the same way.

He's part of the action now, embodied in the fight as well as the resolve. My mind can only conjure the possibilities of act and consequence.

I lied.

The first bloom of a bruise encircles his eye, and with it I perceive that something else unfurls within him. An awareness, a visceral power, a coming to fuller consciousness as separate, as self.

Oh there.

There's the familiar pang of mothering at ever increasing distance, and by degrees. My surrender to his learning from the amphitheatre of others. The slow evaporation of my power to protect and accompany in a world so saturated with threat, and so too with beauty.

Does he hold himself more squarely now, as he walks through the world? Or has it always been so, I just haven't been able to really see it til now? As separate, as himself. Is it him that swells with a bemused kind of pride, or is it me?

I can't help but feel that something awakened is also something lost.

In me, in him.

Because actually I think that the company of like-minded people can be a bit dull, even suffocating, at least to creativity and progress. Like-minded folk are in agreement. They have the same views, beliefs and attitudes. There’s a lot of synchronised nodding and shaking of heads, a lot of comfort, a lot of safety. In our increasingly polarised world, we sink into saturated spaces of agreement either side of gaping division.

Like-minded company is nice, for which synonyms in this context may include sterile, siloed, monotonous. Nothing grows here, nothing becomes. No new ideas, no experimenting, no new experiences nor changed perspectives.

Like-minded. I meant the word as encouragement: come in, you’re in good company here! While I can neither guarantee the minds nor the hearts of your writing fellows, like-hearted brings me so much closer to the reality of what I wish to facilitate. Possibility proliferates.

And all hearts, I believe, are beleaguered just now. We exist deep within systems designed to drown out some natural rhythms and bring others to a deathly stop. We are separated from our own aliveness, from feeling the buzz and beat of it. We receive missives to choose one reality and stick to it, to swear an oath to monolithic truth, to live as if the heart were small and fragile. But the heart is strong, the heart is capacious, that heart is wise. I’ve just returned from a retreat on Ulva - an island off an island off an island - where I became gratefully reacquainted to the thrum of the land, to the hum and twitter of creaturely life, to the delightful song of women in conversation, and to the melody of my own heart.

Away from the distractions and duties that plague our moments, therapeutic writing is a space to come into awareness, to arrive in relationship with the self, to sit with the heart as teacher. It might feel selfish or indulgent, I know this. But listen, should you need such rationale: we tend to the heart within us to tend to other hearts - not as hierarchy, ‘me first’ oxygen mask style - but in symphony. From the greek word ‘symphonia’: sounding together. Beating together.

We need this, I need this, the world needs. The world needs our creativity, our capacity to feel and express with courage, to listen to and communicate from the heart. Rare are the spaces for reflection, and rarer still opportunities to reflect with other hearts for company.

Join me at 6pm this Sunday for my monthly therapeutic writing hour* when we will be guided by the many gifts of hawthorn, medicine for the heart. We will gather with like hearted folk for some guided private writing time with no need to share - simply listening for your own rhythm to join the symphony of others.

(*if you’ve previously booked through my website, you’ll notice this is a new link via The Portal Collective. This is a wonderful new space for learning, community and collaboration, and it’s a happy new home for my writing experiences.)

So I’ll be brief. Because while writing isn’t helping right now I trust it implicitly as a loyal companion, one that guides me in to my inner world, so that I might better navigate the outer one. And I love to support this relationship for others. Therapeutic writing is a step into a different timeline, one where slow reflection, deep connection and meaning-making is possible. In place of reacting and hurrying, we enter a dynamic pause where the material world is suspended. This is precious, generous time, and so rare for us.

The purpose of these words then is simple invitation: come write with me. This 27th April at 6pm we’ll be gathering again for my monthly therapeutic writing hour, The Sunday Pages.

I’ve been thinking of how much just one week of our life holds, how it’s so easy to let one week slip into another without pausing to reflect and integrate on the many encounters and experiences of this handful of days. The Sunday Pages is a quiet, private space away from the world’s clamour to know what you know, to feel what you feel, and to love what you love. All through the magic and wisdom of your own words.

Join me to reflect upon and integrate the manifold experience of just one week of life - the conversations, the gifts and the exertions of the body, the infinite dance of thought and feeling, the bewildering ways life pulls us back into the past or away off into the future. I’ll guide you with prompts and timings for this supportive, restorative hour. This is private writing time just for you alongside like-hearted others. As such you are not asked to share your words, though the chatbox is there for connection and exchange. You are warmly welcome, just as you are.

Your place is £10 and you can book your spot here right up until we begin. If the cost is inaccessible to you just now but you feel the draw of therapeutic writing, please do come. Get in touch and I’ll send you an access code.

If you’ve read this far then you’ll know that I’ve warmed up a bit! And also I wonder if you might be someone who is curious to deepen your experience of therapeutic writing…

Alchemy is my 9 week therapeutic writing programme weaving together private reflection with community, creativity and support. The programme begins again and for the final time this year on Tuesday 29th April (next week!)

You don’t have to think of yourself as a writer.

You don’t have to feel that you are creative.

You don’t have to know yourself to be wise.

None of these things is required of before you cross the threshold with me.

Yet each of them are already true. Somewhere along the path together, I trust you’ll come to this thinking, this believing, this knowing.

Take a look at the Alchemy page which shares more about the elements and structure of the programme, as well as testimonials and payment options. If you’re at all curious, it would be wonderful to hear from you. I love talking about therapeutic writing almost as much as I do guiding it.

I feel the cut of my daughter's words, unmeant, and I cry.

A song on the radio, sweeps me back into old car journeys, old kitchen clatter, and I cry.

My husband tells me that thing about a dog being a chapter in our lives, but for them we're the whole book. And I cry.

I walk my hound on the beach, watch her hunt and pull and scamper. I take a few breaths cold and deep, and, smiling, I cry.

I watch a genocide projected from the palm of my hand - the devastation of mothers and children - and I cry. And I cry.

Grief draws closer it seems as time goes on. It doesn't ache so much anymore, not in that breathtaking, crumpling way. But it melts out into every corner of life, every crack and pause. Every moment now has another possibility. The could have beens and should have beens. The never was, never could be. This is bittersweet: that alternate life, the reflection in the window, is how I keep her close.

The tears are sweet and welcome, reassuring even. And they mingle with the tears of other griefs, other injustices, that do not sweeten with time. Those tears remind me I am human and wash my heart with resolve to live like one.

It is heroic to love from a broken heart, and I think my mother did this. I was loved, and there was so much loving and living yet for the both of us. I think this life, this time of living, asks us all to learn to love from heartbreak, and we might trust there is a ferocity, a vitality, a necessity in living this way. There is more loving and living for all of us.

Pema Chödrön, Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher, wrote a book called ‘When Things Fall Apart’. I lend copies to clients, I gift it to friends. It is deep companionship for broken-hearted times. One of the many gems:

‘We don’t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people’s hearts.’

This is the least and the most we can do.

Tend to your heart, tend to the hearts of others, tend to every kind of heart.

You are loved. Keep going.

Everything you touch, you change

Everything you change, changes you.

- Octavia Butler

Last week I devoured ‘The Parable of the Sower’ by Octavia Butler. I very reluctantly turned the last few pages, and since then I have filled the void with pages of non-fiction that continue to spin out the themes. I haven’t thought about picking up another story yet; this one needs some reverence in the between, perhaps so that I can continue knowing it through its absence. Like a small grief, perhaps, this reliving.

This is the first I’ve read of Octavia’s works, and it won’t be the last. It is darkly beautiful, confronting, raw, unflinchingly human, and strewn with all horror and hope. Written in the 1990s, it depicts a future set in the years 2024-27. Unsettling one day to read the diary entry of Lauren Olamina on the very date I was living. Arresting to read about the wild fires - commonplace, indiscriminate - devastating the west coast of America. This is the fiction I need just now, the kind that holds me while it tells me an adjacent truth and urges me to imagine other ways. It is an urgency, the need to reimagine who we are to each other and how we might live. Adrienne Maree Brown, an ardent fan of Octavia’s work, describes science fiction as ‘where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behaviour’. This.

It is the non-fiction world of Adrienne’s ‘Emergent Strategy’ I’m immersed in now, no less lyrical, no less real, no less hopeful. Her words in turn have inspired the theme for this Sunday’s therapeutic writing hour: fractals.

When I’ve not had my nose in a book, I’ve been paying more attention to the living world around me and much less to the continuous siren of a screen. Not long ago I felt the creeping return of a cold anxiety paired with a strange and new remoteness, as if watching my life from dispassionate distance. Also a siren, and one I could respond to with change. A slow, steady vitality has expanded into the interstices of my day, nudging out the constant, fragmented vigilance I thought I needed to stay informed and connected. I can still be a citizen, I can still act, I can still care, I can still learn…but this must be from a place of connection and curiosity, resource and replenishment, a place where I choose my teachers.

Adrienne writes that ‘it’s ok to feel beautiful in the process of creating justice’ and I’m letting this guide and teach me in place of feeling overwrought and under resourced.

In my renewed noticing, the gathering crows are hard to ignore. It’s usually the heron that signals to me, reassures me, guides me. But the crows have been noisily insistent, a few days ago gathering in flappy cacophony atop a tree outside my house. Demanding my attention. Since then they caw and circle in ones and twos, I spot them on chimney tops, on beaches, on streets. I look up their meaning and learn that they signify change coming, while I discard omens of death - for now at least, though death is change too of course, as is birth.

The crow is bold, and wily, and one of number. I learn that a murder of crows may assemble to protect those who feed among them. So the crow is organised too, protector and facilitator both. I decide, since we are in the epoch of simply renaming stuff, that crows gather in collaboration and not murder. A collaboration of crows, then, gathered in noisy fanfare outside my house, reminding me of change coming, change already underway, change always.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.

― Octavia E. Butler

Octavia’s fictional religion of Earthseed offers me the one god I might actually believe in. Change is at the heart of my work and of course all of our lives should we acknowledge it. At levels cellular to cosmic, relational to ecological, change is the one truth we know. A distillation of all therapeutic endeavour leaves us with the acknowledgement and expression of change, and the adaptation to it.

The hard truths of Earthseed provide surprising comfort in acknowledging the inherent precarity of life, while also offering a framework for action. This is real. Yield to change, Earthseed says, and also take opportunities to affect change. Here is the existential view that change is perhaps the one universal truth, and that we can be transformative agents rather than passive subjects. This is how we become truly alive to ourselves and each other, how we restore justice, how we imagine new worlds into being.

In a fractal conception, I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making. Each day should be lived on purpose.

- Adrienne Maree Brown

Here are some of the ways change is wending its way through me, and how I am shaping it:

The Portal - wonderful things are coming on this new platform, and are already underway. I am in the process of migrating my courses away from algorithms, ads and tech bros and into this collaborative, female founded new space. It’s beautiful in there. Alchemy is already settled in and The Sunday Pages very soon too. If you’re a creator and looking for a warm, friendly and nurturing ecosystem to home your membership / course / offer, then take a look. It’s an exciting and empowering time to join.

The Sunday Pages is this weekend - 23rd February 6-7pm. This is my monthly writing hour, a private space in good company, in which I offer writing prompts to navigate a different theme each time. It’s an engaging, reflective, restorative hour. The theme this time is ‘fractals’ and my intention is to guide you in writing to explore the relationship between the small and the large of life.

Both aspects of my work, psychotherapy and writing, are rooted ever more firmly in social justice, and my belief in transformative change at every level of existence. There are new work developments coming this year, with my intention to live with more clarity and strength from these roots, intertwined as they are with others in community. I think this will be most tangible in my therapeutic writing spaces. Saying that, you might not actually notice anything even if you’ve frequently written with me; I think the shift has been by stealth, underway and interwoven for some time now.

I believe we write to know ourselves in relationship - to self, to others, to the world. We write to make our own connections through unfolding awareness and expression, and we write to know our interconnections, to locate ourselves as subjects and agents of change in the ever-shifting ecosystem of others. We write to understand the world as much as we can, to express our own world within it as much as we can, and to create new worlds, new ways of living, as much as we possibly can. I’ve always known this, I’ve just found some new ground to root further into and rise from.

Moving forward, I hope you’ll join me.

As usual, this is a session of writing prompts curated around a theme, during which I offer invitations to relaxation and mindfulness and perhaps some gentle seated movement. I offer these to encourage presence and deep reflection, and to nurture flow both within and from our words.

So the theme for this extended writing session is Yonder.

I fell in love with this word sometime early December. It features a lot in carols doesn’t it, and it crops up in the language around Christmas and Yuletide.

And I thought it contained so much more than the kind of glance we give it at this time of year.

Yonder seems to me to hold something essential about wintering. About this moment in the year, this long moment, longer than we really are led to understand.

This is still a time of winter celebration, of winter retreat and resourcing, of winter immersion. How might we weave this into the reality of our lives?

So yonder to me means to consider the distance, the horizon. And for that we need to have travelled. It suggests to me that we have arrived at a certain point, perhaps on a journey. To think on yonder we need to be still a moment and take in the view around us with our own eyes, as well as the path that brought us here.

So we might look back, we might look down at our feet, we might look at the horizon.

We might consider the condition of our shoes, whether the view is clear or clouded. Or we might check on a few things. We might check on our kit, our resources, our energy, and our intentions for the onward path.

And I got to thinking that to look yonder, we must be here now, acknowledging the so far and how we have been carrying it. Feeling the terrain underfoot and the wind against our skin, feeling the beat of our own heart.

And the best moments of a hike, of a journey - I'm thinking of a mountain perhaps,

or it could be a journey across any kind of natural landscape - the best moments are surely, for me anyway, the moments of rest.

Gathering with companions, taking water, sharing food, reorganising kits, adjusting clothing, filling the lungs, resting the muscles, the gaze adjusting from foreground to distance and back again.

We might share a smile at this point, or a sigh or a story.

When we still ourselves in rest and reflection, we might check the map. The one we always hold within us. Have we wandered off the path a little? And if so, how are we finding the untrodden way?

And where to next? What might be the rough coordinates? How might we imagine the journeying to come? How might we reimagine it? And how might we leave some room for the inevitable unexpected?

What if we gaze at the horizon a while in this moment? What if we let the distance meet us?

Less striving, less rushing, less struggle. More thriving, more noticing, more trust.

So perhaps you'll join me this Sunday 5th January to begin the year writing, and let your very own words be your guide onward.

In a few days’ time, it will have been a year since my mum passed away. Since I lost her. Since she died. There are many ways, it turns out, to speak about a person’s death, but none feels so right as this one: she left. And as the moments tick me closer to the day of her leaving, the memories return with a new clarity. I’m glad of them.

December was full of my mistakes. Forgotten details and poor judgement born of over commitment and neglect of capacity: old ways raising their plaintive cry. Stop, please rest. A proliferation of yes when by body was longing for no. And when I finally listened, when I slowed and slowed again, the loss rose at last to meet me. I attended a movement class by the wonderful Ruth Allen in the closing days before Christmas, and she asked us ‘Can your slow be even slower?’ Grief dissolved me in that moment, lay blanketed on the floor of my hut, and I was joyful with relief. Grief has its allies, I have come to know.

Also known to me now is that a person comes back to life after dementia finally takes them. ‘Finally’ because as anyone who has loved someone slowly stricken with forgetting knows, dementia takes them from us, and then again, and again. My mum is alive now in my thoughts and memories, in my living, with a quality and cadence I couldn’t know in the intervening years of her decline. The long years of leaving.

What few people tell you is the relationship with a parent can carry on after death. And following years of inexorable fade into dementia, a living loss, my relationship with my mum has been a vibrant place to encounter. I didn't expect this ongoingness, this learning from her through new doorways of remembrance. New compassion and understanding I can only have from this standpoint, without her. At times this vibrant space feels like a liberation into new vigour for my life - a one-sided ongoingness that releases me from the tangle once between us, the obscurity from each other that is as deserving of commemoration as our fondness, our warmth towards one another. At other times, there is only the bereft ache of her absence. But even this pain, the empty-handed reach, is sweet acknowledgment of the sometime embrace that she alone could give.

In early summer this year, my Hoya plant flowered for this first time. Years I have had this, a cutting from one of the plants my mum had on the windowsills of my childhood. And years it lay stubbornly unfruitful on a high shelf in the kitchen. The Hoya is a hardy thing, of muted needs, living a quiet and resilient existence. A bit like her really, and a bit like this grief. This year, with no further tending than the erratic usual, a sudden blooming: small waxen flowers bunched downwards, pinkly unreal, with tears of sticky nectar only ever suspended, about to fall. My daughter plant, cut from the mother, chose this year to grow the bud and bloom from it.

The loss of my mother has mingled this year with the grief I feel as I witness images of massacre and devastation across the world, beyond which I could ever imagine and yet it continues in plain sight. And not by some calamity, but by Western design and intent. These images have unmade me. Grief and rage have unmade me, have undone the world I thought I knew. Again I am grateful, strange to say amidst the colossal loss and carnage perhaps, but the gratitude is for being able to feel this. Much worse to feel nothing. It stokes the fire in my heart to feel this, to seek to restore justice in the small ways I know how and to learn new ways in community. I am so thankful to have found The Portal Collective to support, inspire, challenge and hold me in this. I wish to be alive to my grief in all the ways it rises in me, for all the reasons, so that I may live with full heart and my eyes wide open.

The Hoya bud is there now, empty and expectant. It will flower again, if only I tend to it from time to time. The hawthorn waits too, outside my kitchen door. Its first leaves have fallen away and it stands now simple and sturdy. Essentially a twig in a pot, yet bursting with unseen life to come. Trusting this, I am content to wait.

Soon, on the day my mother left one year ago, I will take a walk in the memorial wood not far from here. Not a place she was commemorated and scattered, but a place I choose to go to remember. Sometimes remembering is a choice, sometimes it assails me. Important though for me to have chosen this place to remember rather than feel it imposed. A place teeming with life, the trees knowing best how to hold death among the reach of their roots and branches. A place to smile and to weep, to skip and scamper should the impulse arise, to stand in stillness hand on heart if the moment calls.

To remember what could never be and what always was, and to marvel at the ongoing unfolding of this life even so.

The root apparently outstrips the reach.

What supports their elevation, the rise skyward, is the concealed depth and sprawl below ground.

I don’t know why I say ‘apparently’: more than an idea, this is a geological fact pertaining particularly I think to the Himalayan range. But don’t quote me on that. This is a subject I can’t merit with the correct terms, nothing beyond metaphor at least.

Perhaps the downward bearing of each of Earth’s mountains is essential yet overlooked, and is a fact most impressively shared about this showy bunch of peaks. Its a fair boast: the roots of the Himalayan mountains are around five times deeper than their height. The less dense material of the mountain extends down into the planet, in whose denser interior it floats, much like an iceberg in water. The unseen as unequal counterweight to the seen. I might be writing my way into believing it.

Enough to venture onward then by saying the information shared with me began to move within me, as much of what I hear in therapy does. It lingered, lending itself both as metaphor and truth to my understanding of what it is to be human.

We exist in omission, and not all of what is hidden must be revealed to air and light. This perhaps runs counter to a received understanding of what happens in therapy. The idea that it exposes all past experiences, every detail and feeling and point of view, is a fallacy. And an understandable fear for those considering this kind of support. And perhaps, unfortunately, some people have actually experienced something like this in therapy - vulnerability unmet, wounds repeated and not repaired, locating a nerve and leaving it bare. But good therapy - good enough therapy - isn’t about extraction and exposure. Some - much - of what is unseen and unsaid can remain so. Must, in some circumstances, remain so. Not everything can, nor need be, known and explored on the way to some notion of clarity or purity or wholeness.

Yet we can be aware of the vastness underneath, the mystery of it. We can respect that our roots keep us upright and that every aspect need not be held up to the light for examination. But we are able to feel supported by our histories, even when they are painful.

We’re tasked with the paradox of seeking towards wholeness yet never fully arriving there - such is the ongoingness of relational life, both in and out of the therapy room. Some of those Himalayan peaks, you know, are still growing.

We can nurture both spatial and emotional awareness of what lies underfoot - the density, dimension, the extra-sensory knowing - and we can learn to respect and receive its support from the dark depths as we ourselves continue to expand.