A thin film of dust settles on my skin. Around me, stubble pushes through cracked, cured clay. This is the forty-second day without rain.

Today a young roe deer stood in the empty channel of the riverbed, his hooves braced against brittle stone, nosing patiently between weeds in search of water. The land has taken on the yellowed hue of early death, yet the farmers tell me this is how it survives: the grasses retreat above ground so that the roots below can endure. I imagine them as threads woven through the earth, a hidden network holding fast in the darkness, sustaining one another until the rain finally returns.

As surely as the earth needs water, I know this drought. By day I feel it beneath my skin, by night it settles into my clenched jaw and restless sleep. For six years the medication I have taken after cancer has worked quietly, almost invisibly, like heat drawing moisture from the soil. Ten years of prevention, they told me. I remember crying the first day I swallowed that little white pill, not because I feared dying, but because I feared becoming someone I no longer recognised. It was another roll of the dice, another unseen defence against a future that might never come, and wouldn’t any of us do almost anything for a little more time? No one tells you that some losses arrive without sound. They gather, one dry day after another, one thought less sharp, one dream further away, until one morning you realise you have stopped reaching for the things that once made you feel most alive.

The tablets did not change me all at once; they weathered me. They softened the edges of my thinking, quietened my curiosity and slowly wore away my resilience until I felt I was somehow outside myself, somehow further away. No one tells you that identity rarely shatters; more often it erodes so gently that you mistake the erosion for yourself. One season the colours lose their richness, then wonder arrives less often. Life grows smaller until your body learns to mistake uncertainty for danger, until you start scanning the horizon for storms that have not yet gathered. Once, uncertainty had felt like adventure. It drew me towards mountains, remote lands and stories not yet written; it asked me to trust my feet, my instincts and the quiet unfolding of whatever lay beyond the next ridge, somewhere along the way that changed. I had begun arranging my life around certainty, mistaking vigilance for wisdom and survival for living. The greatest loss was not my creativity, but the slow forgetting of the woman who believed that not knowing was where life began.

As July turned to August, I found myself longing for the softness of new grass, for the saturated greens of spring, for abundance and stillness, but more than anything, for the roots of my own creativity. How had I not heard my own voice become silent?

Perhaps the first whisper came beside the Welsh sea, the first place I had slept deeply in years. Maybe it was the dolphins carving through the bay, or the seals rising and disappearing beside ribbons of driftwood and seaweed. It did not arrive like a revelation. It was not dramatic like the turning tide, nor insistent like the gulls calling their young to shelter. It came as quietly as a river emptying in drought, so gradually that you don’t notice the water leaving, only that one day it no longer flows.

And what now, as the earth waits for rain?

As the medication leaves my body, something else returns. Before my words comes attention. I notice the swifts in the evening sky preparing to leave, the skylarks raising their young among the ragwort-filled headlands, the scent of blackberries and warm dust rising from the tracks after another cloudless day. I find myself standing still for longer, listening, watching, allowing the landscape to become me. Then, almost without noticing, the words returned—not as a flood breaking its banks, but as a spring rising quietly through dry ground, gathering strength beneath the surface long before it reveals itself.

Yet the fields remind me that rain offers no promises. The roots cannot summon it. They cannot bargain with the sky or persuade the clouds to gather. They can only remain alive beneath the cracked earth, holding on through a season they cannot control.

As summer leans towards autumn, another season waits for me too. Soon I must decide whether to begin the tablets again, not because they can save the life I am living today, but because they may protect a life I hope is still to come. They ask me to surrender something I can feel, for something I can never know. And so I find myself asking the earth a question that for all its quiet wisdom it cannot answer.

What are we willing to sacrifice for a future that cannot be promised?

Would you trade the sharpness of your thoughts for some years you may never have needed to protect? Would you quieten the voice that tells you who you are for the possibility of another spring? How much of ourselves can we slowly surrender before the future we have worked so hard to preserve no longer belongs to the same person? These are not choices any of us would willingly make, and yet life has a way of placing them silently in our hands, asking us to choose, without ever allowing us to know what might have happened had we walked the other path.

Life is lived somewhere between the grace of luck and the choices we make. We tend our fields as carefully as we can, but we cannot command the rain. We nurture what lies beneath because sometimes our belief is the only thing available to us, trusting that unseen things are still alive even when the land above appears lifeless.

Each evening I return to the farmyard. I watch the enduring landscape. Beneath the cracked earth, patient and persistent, the roots continue their unseen work. The well cannot fill until the rain falls; it can only remain deep enough to receive it.

Hope does not often live in certainty. It lives in the quiet belief that beneath the longest drought, the deepest parts of ourselves are waiting for the season in which we can grow.

As I step onto the forest path, the valley is washed in autumn light. Amber spills across the slopes. Reds and golds pressed into the dark earth below every larch and maple. The air holds the sharpness of the turning season, the warmth is thin, winter’s edge has not yet settled. In the ice-cut gullies water flows softly. It will be a month or so before it is silenced by frost, and many more before the crash of the spring melt can be heard amongst the trees.

The meadows are empty, their grass has been chewed low by the cows that have left their summer pastures to overwinter in the valley farms. They left last month in a procession of gratitude for safe passage and fertility. Their flower-adorned ribbons in which they paraded have been untied, but their bells still ripple through the valley.

The hikers have gone home, and the hunters’ cabins are locked. Wooden shutters are closed, and wood stacks are depleted. All that remains are the wilting geraniums of a summer well-tended. It is the long month of rolling towards the snow. Today, the mountain belongs only to itself.

We climb the path I have known since childhood, the one that Rob and I have hiked together every year since we met. It zigzags through the forest to a ridge of exposed beauty. Passing through the forest, I run my fingertips along the bark of the trees that line the path; the underside of the lichen is as intricate as a fern and as rough as sandpaper. The forest is thick with petrichor and pine. A single red maple burns in the midst of the green, a flame caught in still air.

The rhythm of the climb returns to me like a melody from a long-forgotten song: breath, step, heart, step. I know it by instinct. The track is familiar in the way a body remembers another, each curve, each incline, each root. The scent of a dear old friend. Each turn, the ones we counted as children hold a memory of past ascents. Beside the path, the last of this year’s blueberries cling to the browning stalks; their skin is sun-loosened and frost-tender. In the clearings, lingonberries glint like small rubies, just the way I remember.

We climb out of the forest to find that the mist that framed the valley has lifted its thin veil. Sunlight finds the ridge and paints it in light.

In the meadow below the summit, six chamois stand only meters from us. Stock still we watch. Their striped faces are framed by their curved horns and the whites of their eyes are large with fear. We duck down yielding to their grace, giving them their space to be home. Before they turn, they stamp their feet and let out a long warning whistle, then they are gone.

The ridge rises before me, narrow and clean, a thread of rock drawn through the sky. At the summit, the valley drops away on all sides. There is nothing above me but a blue haze, the sinking sun, and a black kite circling. The world unfolds in quiet astonishment.

The descent from this mountain, my mountain, always feels like falling. Toes are forced to wrap around rock, heels cup the ground, and the pace quickens to a run. Here, we move in every plane. There is freedom in letting yourself fall, in allowing your legs to move at the pace of gravity. Moving this way is to play; to play with the mountain, with the illusion of control and to be in the landscape.

Rob looks back to check I am ok. We are both grinning. Being in the mountains, being on this mountain is such a joy. Before we hit the lower path, just before the sun sinks behind the peaks, we dance in the marmot meadow. We twirl and spin for the mountain, for freedom, for life.

As we cross the boundary to the village, at the edge of the shadowed forest, women forage for fungi and fruit. The mountain always provides. I stand and press a rock against my palm, it is warm and streaked with blue. I wrap my fingers around its sharp edges and carry it home, a token of this extraordinary day.

When the sun dips behind the western Rofan range and the shadows grow long across my valley, I turn once more toward my mountain. I burn the image of perfect light and a perfect day into memory. Thank you, old friend, dear mountain. Thank you for your beauty, for your patience and for always teaching me how to return.

I wake to the sound of rain hammering the van roof. The sky is thick with bleakness. I shiver into the duvet and bury my fingers in Juno’s soft ginger fur. She lifts her head and flicks her eyes toward the skylight. I wonder if she is questioning it too—the weather’s insistence and the call to stay. Today is the reason we drove north. Despite the downpour, curiosity about the route and the desire to move quietens the voice that says not today.

I dress in layers of wool and waterproofs and step out of the van. The canvas of our awning is already soaked through. I push my feet into the wet grass and embrace the awakening sensation of mud squelching between my toes. There will be little comfort today.

Above the campsite, the low ceiling of the sky has folded in on itself muffling sound and scent into a stubborn greyness. From the first stride, my head has to negotiate with my legs, willing them to shake off their cold stiffness and ease into the path ahead.

As the west side of the lake comes into view, the rain intensifies. Exposed on the hilltop my spirit lifts with the wind. There is no choice but to succumb to the weather. I climb onto a small boulder to gain a better view. I claw my fingers into the rock’s slimy crevices and pull myself upward until my muddy footprints mark the summit. With wet hair whipping across my cheeks, I watch the gale push the lake in waves of grey light. The surface shivers like skin.

The idea to run The Ullswater Way, a 20 mile route around the lake of Ullswater, began long before the rain. I dreamt of it before autumn arrived—before the summer’s parched grass loosened into clods and clumps, and before this year unfolded with more stillness than I had planned. I have a history with this lake, years of half-finished swims and end-to-end attempts. Each time I was undone by its vastness. I had allowed its biting chill, its energy to drain the warmth from my dreams. Every failure was a conversation, the lake saying not yet. And this was how I came to know the stubbornly wild spirit of this place, as if each time it whispered that there is a time for everything, and that time was not mine.

And yet the time is always now, to try, to venture, to endure. The truth is, I can’t think without movement, I can’t find depth in stillness. I am drawn to routes and journeys that carry me beyond the disquiet of my mind. I am called to movement, knowing that my body will tell what my head cannot speak.

Above Pooley Bridge, the rain becomes a steady percussion. It beats against my hood with the rhythm of a metronome. The fells are streaming, alive with runoff. The Herdwicks hold the higher ground. Today, every creature must endure.

Time washes down over the paths in a flow of muddied rain. My body feels the motion of water; in turn, my mind is fluid. Before we arrive at Howtown, I know what is missing. I sense the landscape pushing against me, and I against it. Dialogue is forming through resistance and surrender. To run is to know a landscape intimately, like being thrust into the current of a river.

Choosing this route is more than a circumnavigation of the lake, it is an exploration of the intangible understanding of place. Today, below Little Mell Fell, Place Fell, and Gowbarrow, I have come to know their mood, their tone and their atmosphere.

By the time I reach Aira Force, I am more elemental than witness. Water falls through air, air through lungs, lungs through effort. The body feels porous, a vessel for the landscape. The path folds back on itself—circular, inevitable, complete. My muscles hold a trace of the fells, the rain-slicked rock, the vibrant heather, the raw exfoliation of hail on skin. To move here is to translate place, to let it write itself into bone and breath.

When I finally stop, stillness feels acceptable. The rain has eased, the low sky has risen, and the feeling of completeness steadies thought. The language of running forms in the space between desire and challenge. As if to choose to remain is to explore what resists us. The rain, the wind, the cold, the terrain, they test perception, dismantling the illusion that learning is purely an act of the mind. Through endurance, experience ripens into insight, I am reminded that understanding is not something we acquire, but something we become.

I turn back to see the lake one last time. Much of the route is hidden by fell and forest, but I know the landscape is written within me, line by line, until I am part of its telling. A quiet echo of rain and wind and movement, a trace of what the act of enduring has revealed.

Share

I am chasing morning under a tie-dye sky. The ground is copper and iron, and I am on my knees placing stones around me, as if to frame my disconnection. I have been searching for words, the way you search for an old friend, the way you search your soul. I have nothing in mind, so time rolls on. A bird takes to the sky. I watch rain fall on leaves.

I wanted to write about the summer. To compose a story about how the chasm in the earth that lies outside my window, waiting for pipes and a promised build had stolen my words and inspiration. I wanted to explore what remained after the place where I planted my hope and penned my journal became nothing more than a scar of deep clay. I was desperate to let my unconscious flow across the page, to understand how that exposed underbelly, filled with the faces of unfamiliar people digging and stacking, shifted my sense of home and all that felt familiar. But before I realised it, the words were already gone, and sometime in spring the topaz sky faded to milk.

My scribbled notes tell me it was February when I first felt the fatigue of writing, building and hoping. As early summer arrived I was tired and distracted, and by July my writing was as brittle and parched as the grass. My thoughts, burnt out and scattered like seed heads across cracked earth, were scratchy and fragmented. And as we often do when lost, I clung to what felt certain—the footpaths that feel like home and the animals that live beside me, their rhythms did not falter— I hoped their constancy might conjure my own.

Seasons often slide gently into one another, their transition marked by a meld of colours and a blend of weather, but this year, nature didn’t play this hand. In one day the sharpness of summer passed, its fiery edges dulled in mellowing light, softening the air with the promise of winter. And in me, as in the land, something shifted. September, ushering in an early autumn, brought with it the clarity and reality that none of this had been about losing direction, it had been about change, about losing connection. An unconscious retreat to a place where the world felt safe. I know now that this was months of change, undecipherable in the moment, but seismic as a whole.

It was many months before I could hold the depth of thought I needed to shape words on a page. I’ve never been able to write because I felt I should, but it wasn’t just words, it was desire. In August I wondered if I would ever write again.

It was not so much autumn as the autumn light that drew me back. This gentle light which highlights tenderness and beauty, transformed my thoughts. Perhaps its gift is its temporality, or its fragility, or its ability to reveal what the summer sun leaves hidden. How can we not want to feel deeply or have a desire to create when we study the delicate veins of a dying leaf or the shimmer of a spider’s thread? It may of course be nothing more than the slow turning of the world toward rest and space and shadows. Whatever it brings, it brings awareness.

By September, I could write how the summer felt, how through wheat-dust I had watched ants dance in rhythmic waves above the acid-green lime trees. I described how the hedgerows brimmed with fruit until the laden brambles weaved through the grass and tangled in teasels. I journaled about the essence of the summer, of the jammy scent of blackberries and sap. As summer tired I watched swifts line the telegraph wires, I wrote of their journey ahead and the way their small bodies waited for the wind to carry them south. I remembered the day the eaves above my desk fell silent.

The collapse of certainty always hollows my voice, and change writes its own rhythm. I find it challenging to sit in silence and trust that truth will emerge. But connection and creation, like purpose, are rebuilt in small breaths, in the quiet noticing, and in the work that no one sees.

Nothing here is particularly insightful or new; it is neither a story of adventure nor about the building that transformed my sense of home into something unfamiliar. It is simply a rambling meditation on the inner seasons of self-discovery. It is the enduring work of finding and re-finding meaning and identity. However, I offer these words to anyone who has become disconnected from their own story and anyone who has lost their desire to create. Keep going, because there is no change without loss.

In the garden the wintered stalks of alliums stand like skeletons. The turbid sky carries the scent of burning ash, and the smoke from the old oil drum bellows south. I turn my palms to the open flame.

Beyond our plot of unkempt cottage plants and knobbly budding trees, the gardens lay empty. Too cold for cutting back, my neighbours say, wait a couple more weeks, they suggest. Yet, with sodden gloves and ghoulishly white fingers, I dig, prune, and cut. I am making space for the roots of the oaks and the woodland seeds; I am sowing new life among the wild garlic and wood anemone.

It was mid-February, mid-murk, mid-depression before I understood this need to till and clear, to create the metaphorical space for my academic life to give way to something more organic. Assignments and projects that occupied the weekend hours and summer nights now stretched like a blank canvas, leaving time and headspace ripe for growth and plans.

It took six months for my list of curiosities to raise their heads through the composted remains of last year's learnings. As winter arrived, I felt no rush to answer what was next. I felt no urgency to fill the gap that finishing my master's left. Instead, I waited for the flood waters to wash back into the rivers and for the ground to feel firm enough to hold new foundations. It took longer still to see that what I was building, a series of seemingly unconnected ideas that were neither set in stone nor whimsical, could be cast together to form the shape of my future.

My list of explorations is a dive into what I may already know, at least at surface level, yet it feels more complex and fluent than the expression of everything that came before. The thoughts arrived like a whisper carried on the winds that blew over dormant January fields, turning my head just long enough for me to feel their possibility.

I have always been a connector of things and a solver of problems. I love to surround myself with the words and wisdom of others and thrive when my world feels varied. This spring, I want to understand native plants and behavioural finance, to know the truth about AI and the resurgence of pastoralism. I want to understand how citizen science can change travel and how to write for the mountains. I want to swim in tarns I don’t yet know and run ridgeline routes that make me hold my breath. I want to explore ways to show how adventure can heal. And I want to leave room to not know.

This year, I will plant these questions like seeds and nurture them with exploration. Instead of structured study, I will return to being patient in tending to knowledge and choose varied ways of learning. Some questions may transform and others will lead to dead ends, but new questions will always come and ideas will be cultivated. Curiosity is kind like that.

I consider my garden, this little space of earth I have dressed with trees and flowers. The hellebores do not depend on the daffodils nor the rowen or the oak. We are often told that we must find the whole, that everything must build to something. That we should know where we are going before we start. But curiosity is fragmented and what it can show us may be more important than finding ways to neatly bind a life.

The fire cackles through the oily remains of yew. Aside from the birds that move in squads across the bleak afternoon sky, I am alone. I don't need to imagine the richness of summer or to know when the first buds will show. I am not tempted to return inside to the cosiness of the cottage or rest on the seat beside the pond. Instead, I stand ankle-deep in clag and clay, wearing earth streaked across my face like war paint. Today I am making space. Today, I am laying foundations.

Somewhere just beyond the M54, where the roundabout is littered with human detritus and a bloodied body of a pheasant, the fog breaks for the first time in days. The hedgerow that borders the single-track road has been flailed to fresh green. Thorny remains, like the needles of now discarded Christmas trees are splayed across the tarmac. It is just after 3 pm. We are chasing the sun west to the coast of mid-Wales.

At the border, the tallow sky has the lightness of watercolour. It holds a brightness that I haven't felt in weeks. The days that rose to the crescendo of Christmas were besieged with mud, murk and uncertainty. The 25th of December, a day that stands as a way marker for the choices we have made and those we have not, arrived in a mist. As the last days of the year rolled in, so came the inevitable question of what next.

Just after 4 pm, we reach the coast road. Beyond the sheep-sucking bog, silhouettes of gorse and dunes stand against a rich impasto sunset. Rose pink and feathered orange add layers of impossible beauty to the dying day. I wonder when I last saw colours so vibrant.

Before bed, I walk Juno along the cliffs. Clouds shadow the Cold Moon; darkness penetrates, blurring the boundary of self and sea. I step away from the path, unsure where the grass ends and the precipice begins. I close my eyes and listen to waves. It feels good to stand close to the edge.

I wake at high tide. Before day breaks, I switch on my head torch and begin to run. 300m above the beach, I follow a single track that ribbons through thick swathes of deep green forest. Beams of light stream through the fingers of pine. Thoughts focus on the present. Here, life thrives on interconnections and intricacy.

My breath reads the incline, and my feet the ground. I settle my pace and allow myself to feel the land, its energy, resistance and flow. I sense the tranquillity of the moss giving way to the grit of loose gravel. My eyes see only streams of sun, reminding me that the months of light are coming. I am warmed by their delicious possibility. Today, I am in love with the forest.

A soundtrack of surf and seagulls accompanies me as I follow the narrow path that leads home over the mud and sandstone cliffs. My legs are heavy now; the landscape presses against me, and the salt clings to my skin. I run past wind-morphed oaks and twisted hazels. The seascape has the power to shape us.

At the summit of the last cliff top, I stop to catch my breath. On the beach below, the petrified stumps of alder, oak and birch are exposed by the low tide. The air is salty and sulphurous with seaweed. The breeze is damp. In the relationship of movement and resistance, this stillness feels like surrender.

Between land and sea, permanence and impermanence, thoughts carry on the wind. In the way that a shell holds the sound of the ocean, I begin to hear what my body already knows. My future will be shaped by the landscapes I move through.

As I stand and stare towards the russet slopes of south Snowdonia, I know I am driftwood and pine. I move where the land and light call me. I am the journeys I make and the places I run.

I pass the last farm and follow the sheep-edged river to the gate where the path climbs to Longsleddale. Beside me, water tumbles from frozen fellsides. Removing my glove to force the frozen latch, I turn to see the view. I take two deep, icy breaths and squint into the sunrise. Barely two miles from the village, I feel myself relax for the first time in weeks.

Feathered clouds arrow east. They are uplit by the lush peach sunrise. Today, the world feels rich.

It is the first hard frost of winter. Woodsmoke hangs across the lane and the salmon leaps are already frozen. Rich amber and gold leaves no longer float on the breath of Autumn, they lie mingled with half-chewed straw entombed in ice.

Six miles to the south, the town of Kendal throngs with the stories of aspiration and achievement. The streets are filled with the movement of bodies and events in hidden yards where accents jar. Kendal Mountain Festival, a weekend of films, books and talks, was why I had travelled north. Designed to inspire, it feels as imposing as it is enlightening. It feels full on. In the bars and streets, I hear people say it makes them want more from their life, different paths, different places. Through this storytelling, I am drawn into the vastness of the world and the endlessness of possibility, yet my mind focusses on the present, to trails that lay close.

In the past weeks, I've found myself craving the emptiness of the fells. I needed to move, unplanned, unmeasured, across the summit and valley. Each day, I escaped the festival because Longsleddale, Kentmere or Cunswick Scar did not demand anything of me. With Juno running beside me, I can be silent, overwhelmed, moved, breathless, angry, excited, I can be raw. I can be whoever I need to be.

My feet dance over frozen bog and down root-choked paths. A place of inspiration needs no walls. Straight lines meander and doubts melt with the frost. Each gate opens like a question until there is too much space to answer.

I pass by the old Kentmere church. I trace my palm across its stone and press my fingers into its windbitten wall. Below on the stream-veined pasture, a herren is poised for breakfast. His stillness calls my own.

When my legs are heavy and my mind lightened by the unassuming, effortless beauty of Autumn, I return to the filled rooms and stages to hear stories of the power of the human spirit. One moves me to tears, another etches its way into my thoughts. All talk of resilience and contribution. Such inspiration creates seeds of ideas and curiosity teaches me how to plant them. But the seeds won't grow in the event hall or between the words of others, they will only root when I ground myself and them in earth.

That evening a friend asks me what I would do with my life if I could do anything, I answer nothing more. At the festival it is easy to believe life is about extremes, that we all need an Everest and to get sucked into feeling that life is not enough. But for me it is about small joys, a run on the fell, a shared walk, a sunrise or gaining a new perspective. It is about balance. I love hearing the stories of others, but of all the things the festival taught me, perhaps the most important is that I am grateful to be brave enough to follow my own path.

The light of my laptop penetrates the glass and glows into the dusky autumn light. From the kitchen table, I watch the robin on the old garden wall. As this curious bird turns its head to question my presence, my husband Rob says, "Still on the chapter summaries?" I cock my head like the robin. I squint at the text and wince at the truth. "When are you going to write some more of the book?" It's a fair question. It's been four years.

Four years ago, when I didn't yet understand the peculiarity of the publishing industry and didn't overthink the process or the story, I sent my first chapter to three publishers. Two wrote back promptly, encouraging me to complete the adventure I was writing about and then formally submit. And so that was the plan. I was going on an adventure, I was going to write a book, and maybe someone would publish it. I thought it was that simple.

In 2020, the dream of writing a book was not new, but back then, it didn't hold my attention in the way it does now. When I sent the early draft to the publishers, I hadn't yet toiled over the big questions of why, how, or for whom. I hadn't yet stripped back the layers of experience. And so, I let this gold dust, this opportunity of publication slip through my fingers.

I planned to write a classic hero's tale of setting off to the North Pole to collect new data on climate change. But it was more than that. It was a story of the months and years that followed cancer treatment; it was about rebuilding a life when all felt lost. The adventure I was writing about wasn't a traditional flag-planting trip that the poles are known for, rather, it was to gather climate data on microplastics and black carbon in the high north. Data that only exists because of our team of six women. That is why I wanted to go. In the face of my own mortality, I wanted to contribute something to the Earth's most fragile landscapes.

It wasn't long before the uncertainty that I felt about my own life played out in the uncertainty of the expedition. Three months after our first training trip, the Russian invasion of Ukraine halted all travel to the North Pole. While I realised that my ambition wasn't specifically the Pole, standing on top of the world offered something neat and complete. If there was no North Pole, how would this end?

In hindsight and reading this, you may think, but of course, you have to live the ending before you can write it. I wanted the story to be hopeful, but more than that, I tried to control the narrative because I needed to believe it would offer a resolution. I wanted to write my own future, but I didn't dare imagine it stretching beyond the next few months. Try as I did, I couldn't write past it, so after three chapters I stopped writing.

Whilst I didn't continue with the book, I filled notebooks and tapped endless words into my laptop. As a team, we slept for weeks on the ice, surrounded only by white and sky. We slept in the bone-deep cold and pulled sleds filled with 50kg of ice cores. I have never felt more alive than at 3am under the soft pink glow of the midnight sun scouring the horizon for polar bears. I have never felt more sure of the insignificance of humanity than in a landscape of this scale. I have never known such power to heal, create community and transform lives than in these wild and remote places. I wrote about all of this, but not for the book; I wrote it just for me.

When I returned home, I signed up for a writing course, determined that one day I would become skilled enough to find the words to describe not just the book but the beauty and emotions of the landscape. For the next two years, I side-lined the book to study. The course helped reveal what I was curious about and where the heart of my writing lay. Eventually, I gained the confidence to combine this with my experience to create something unique. Whilst my writing developed, my vulnerability deepened. Sometime halfway through the first year, a guest speaker was invited to talk to our cohort about the process of writing a book. I have no idea how the subject arose, but rather nonchalantly, the words, "The world does not need another cancer story," rolled off her tongue. And with those eight words, she tore apart the last threads of confidence in the book. That night, I buried the chapters and killed my ambition.

Months passed, but the desire to write a book did not, so I made a new plan. I ripped the heart out of my story and came up with some non-fiction ideas around adventure. I wrote chapter summaries and presented them to my small but wonderful writing group. There was nodding and super helpful suggestions, but they knew it, and I knew it. It lacked soul, it was self-protective, and it was dull.

I replayed the 'not another cancer story' comments for 18 months. I wrote the words and studied them from other angles. I am grateful to all the people I told who were angry on my behalf, for I could only see the sadness in the invalidation of my story and her sorrowful lack of empathy. Then, just as the power of the sentence began to fade,  I woke  in the night and saw it differently. Those eight words made me question everything about what the book was and what it could be. I had clarity about why it mattered and how it may transform lives. The thing I had come to know was that my story is not about cancer; it is about something far more universal. It is about who we want to be in the world and what we will risk to find it.

Late this summer, two things collided, encouraging me to re-open the manuscript. The first was finding someone to discuss the ideas with, which was invaluable. The second is more profound. The second is a woman at spin who came into class and told me she had breast cancer. She told me she would keep showing up, she told me all she wanted was to be able her dog. Then she lost herself in the music and spun her legs like her life depended on it. I wanted to tell her to stand firm that there was a silent network of hands to catch her. I wanted to tell her she will be lost and found and lost and found again. I wanted to say to her that the landscape will hold her. I want her to know that there is hope and meaning in all of our futures.

This story is not just reserved for cancer or illness; it is any life-changing moment that makes us question who we are and how we rebuild a future. We need more recovery narratives beyond a clinical setting. We need to know that adventure can change our lives. We need to know that we can change our world and our futures. We need to know.

it's taken me four years, an expedition that didn't work out how I expected it to, and a long, personal journey of recovery, but the book is no longer a hero's story; it is more nuanced, brave, and original. It is about the power of landscapes and finding meaning, the light in the dark.

Now, I am working on my proposal and keen to submit to agents and publishers. After four years, at least fifteen drafts and many hours spent on chapter summaries I am closer than I have ever been. Most importantly now more than ever, I believe in this story, and I believe in its potential to touch lives. Of course, I am terrified about being told my story is not exciting enough to sell a book or … unique to warrant publication or ....… fill-in-the-blank enough. But how will we ever achieve our dreams unless we take a few risk

Through the brilliant night sky, neon pink light beams across the clay fields of home. With bare feet in wet grass I spin like a compass to due north. The fuchsia streak was not dancing in the way I have come to know the movement of the Northern Lights, but its presence this far south awakened something I had long forgotten.

It has been three years since I saw the aurora borealis for the first time. Three years since I learnt how folklore and magic are woven into their dancing spirits. I was one day's drive from civilisation, unrolling my sleeping bag on the mezzanine of one of the most remote huts in Iceland, when I looked up and saw the acid green streaks of light perfectly framed by the cabin's north window. I was spellbound by the wildness of the night sky.

The weather was fierce that evening on the edge of the glacier. Sat stock-still against the snow-clad wood of the building, I tilted my head and raised my eyes to the sky. The Atlantic wind whipped my hood against my skin and beat the windows like a drum. Icy air arrived in waves burning my throat and stealing breath. With knees bent and cloaked inside my down jacket I folded myself into smallness, shrunk by the vastness of the sky. Time stretched out to the stars. I stayed until my hands were white and numb and my body stiff with cold. I was utterly captivated by the beauty of the solar storm exploding across the darkness.

Some say the aurora is the spirit of dead warriors; others claim it is the deceased guiding the living. Many believe them to be spirit animals. Each belief is steeped in heritage and culture. These are the stories through which identity is created and calved. But, when I travelled to Iceland, I didn't know any of that, and I didn't know that the power of this elusive and vivid light could or would shape my story.

I had not chosen Iceland because of its night sky but because it was unknown. This remote and otherworldy landscape felt different in my imagination, as if mythical. Its distance and exposure represented the rawness and isolation I was chasing. In this faraway place, I hoped to be different, to escape. In many ways, I chose it in defiance.

That night, as I lay curled in my down sleeping bag and thought back to how the spirit sky had arrived like an invitation. It offered a window to a different future that re-ignited my desire for something more elemental. I understood that what I was looking for could not be found in following my old thought patterns. To move forward I had to transcend rationality. I had to allow myself to feel what should come next.

Soon after, I understood that feeling and reconciling the distance of my desires was not as simple as choosing it or putting one ski in front of another to slide across the glacier. But that night, under the intense storm of the aurora, I learnt the dimensions of what I did not know.

We are now in the Solar Maximum of solar cycle 25. This is the peak of an 11-year cycle where the sun's north and south magnetic poles flip. This next year holds the potential for one of the most extraordinary displays of our time. I already know that early in 2025, I will drive far, far north and camp or sit for hours, perhaps days, below a wintery night sky in the hope of glimpsing this wonder one more time. And maybe, just maybe its illumination will guide me to the next chapter.

From the crag, I watch the cranberry sunset burn across the fells. The bracken is already the colour of embers. Arctic air flows down the wind-blown Glengarry valley that sits between Blencathra and Skiddaw. It carries the rawness of winter. The wind is sharp, but I am already softened by the arrival of autumn and comforted by the return of dark nights.

When the world feels too busy or too full, I am called to mountains and adventure. So, I have come here, someplace other to escape the comforts of home, the urgency of life and the whiteness of my desk. And that is how I find myself sitting alone on the cold damp earth of the Lake District fells, watching the sun set on September.

Modulations of lights dissipate westwards as I think of the changes in key that this season invites. September brought both endings and beginnings. The end of a course I have worked towards for two years, and with that the opportunity to expand into something new. Annual blood tests and hospital appointments drew me back to the fears of my past illness. Then good results offered autumn days that could be planned. September brought change.

As I unwrap this gift of time and consider what seeds to plant to carry me through the lamplit months of fires and frost, the seasonal shift and change in tempo pull me back to the question that always occupies my thoughts, what do I want to do with this time? There was a period some years ago when these questions weighed so heavily that I did not have the strength to open other doors. I was disoriented by what I had been, and what I thought I should be. Big life moments tear down boundaries and force us to stretch into the unknown, and yet in this new vast space all I could do was spin in ever-reducing circles.

When I knew I needed to create a different future and had no idea how. When I knew I needed to retract and find new inspiration so that I could blossom again, I leant into adventure—not the extreme or the hardcore, but the kind built on presence and contribution, the kind grounded in landscapes of meaning.

I let the journey show me that I can be brave, resilient, and useful. It revealed my values and taught me that we can make a difference. Some people are self-assured, they have big goals and life-long ambitions. They are confident in their purpose, but not me. I was searching in the spaces of difference and otherness. I was impatient for all that was unsolved. Adventure became the wind under the sails of my hopes. It helped me find new landscapes, new understanding, and new words. It showed me that whether we have realised our purpose or not, most of us have the power to write a different future. We have the power to choose our story.

That adventure, and the many that have followed taught me about community, new landscapes, and lost selves. But mostly, it revealed the power of connection, both human and other. Adventure showed me who I am.

Being in wild places gave me the space to write, but writing and adventure are not so different. As explorations of self, they are both about connection. They are both ways of expanding into the unknown. If adventuring through different places helped me find my voice, then writing in wild places gave me tone and rhythm.

The fells are barely decipherable now and the darkness is unfettered by artificial light. I sit a while longer and trace the patterns in constellations. I lie back and wonder about the hidden lines that join disparate parts of my own life, both the seen and the unseen. I am curious about what words will flow when I think of this evening spent under the Autumn night sky.

I cast my eyes over the waning crescent moon. Its beams are splintered by the limbs of the forest, and I know that like them, I may never know my whole self, but there is value in adventures that push the boundaries of our worlds, and in moments that make the ordinary extraordinary. There is much joy in chasing sunsets.

In 2015, Rob and I met in a council swimming pool, where the alarm for unidentified floating objects plays out far more often than it should. It was a swim club of sorts. I was training for my first triathlon and Rob for an Ironman. I watched with curiosity as this man, who turned up week after week, seemed only to cling like cliffhanger to the lip of the pool. For two months, all he said was, "You go" as I swam length after length. The elephant, or perhaps the camel in the pool, remained, but we were all thinking it. Who enters an Ironman if they can't swim?

And that was the thing. The truth was the bit none of us saw. Rob had epilepsy, and epilepsy and swimming are a bad combo.

Rob learning to swim is one of the many hidden stories that won't ever make it into the wider adventure or sporting world. However, this seemingly ordinary yet life-changing decision proved to him and others what was possible. In the absence of knowledge or reports of other’s experiences, Rob knew that the reduction in stress resulting from exercise lowered his risk of seizures. Yet still, the only writing he could find about water-based sports and epilepsy came in the form of a chlorine-eroded poolside sign that read. 'Those who suffer from seizures should notify reception before entering the pool.'

In recent years, a plethora of books have hit the shelves, telling us that mental fortitude can be confirmed through adventure or sporting success. Inspiration is sold in records of extreme distances and fastest times. Adventure and running are big business, and that is rarely inclusive. Commerciality, explicit or otherwise, sweeps away nuance and sucks the soul from stories. It wipes away the tales of grace, joy and courage. It blacks out belonging from those who need it most, those who feel they don’t fit.

During chemo, I searched online articles for snippets about those who chose running or cycling, something other than succumbing to the sofa and daytime TV. I was looking for ways to back up my fundamental refusal to give in to the physical effects of treatment. I read running books, memoirs, magazines and blogs, not one mentioned the thing that I felt in my bones – the need to run to hold on to a sense of myself.

Like so many others, my story of running is not one of greatness. It is not even one of achievement. It is hidden in the mundanity of one foot in front of another. My running story is not even about running. At its heart, it is an exploration of self and landscape. There is no shiny, publishable story of hardship that has become the standard narrative and yet it has value, not just to me, but to others searching for a different way.

Two weeks ago, we arrived in Chamonix on the last day of the UTMB, a 100-mile running race that circumnavigates Mont Blanc. We drank coffee and watched runners stumbling over the carpeted finish. The elite runners were long gone, yet the cobbled streets thronged with the vibration of 1,000 clapping hands. Each one celebrated the ordinary and extraordinary. Each finisher had a story, and yet the ones we are told, focus on the hardship on the trail or the success of the end goal. But if we care to look, the truth is more subtle, it is the thing we haven’t chosen, it is hidden in our motivation.

When I question what lights me up or makes me run, it is learning and growth. I love to see people push beyond their perceived limits, not to win or achieve but to experience something more profound. This is endurance, but not the sporting kind.

On the trails around Chamonix, I met finishers easing off tired muscles in glacial lakes. "How was it?" I asked.

"The hardest thing I have ever done."

And that is the thing, despite what we are sold, running is not the hardest thing in life; that is reserved for the things we don't choose, for the reason we turn up. Those are the stories we need to share.

Share

We crossed the bridge of bleached birch and galvanised steel. Beyond the river, wooden homes were painted in muted tones. We climbed the hill to the gorge. Gone were the city's red houses, traditionally painted in cod blood and fat. In Norway, house colour denotes wealth and occupation. In the village of Vossvangen, affluence is limed in white.

The young and the old sat drinking tea on south-facing balconies. Gardens flowed to the water's edge. Big windows soaked up the almost midnight sun, and decks merged into forest. There was a blending of man and nature, a calmness.

We left the gorge, the river, and the residents behind. We strolled by the swimmers and the dog walkers and followed the path to the town square. We were only passing through.

We took the local bus to Gudvagen, a small settlement home to a Viking village, a petrol station, and a couple of waterside hotels. Behind the concrete structures, Nærøyford, a narrow sea inlet, floods the glacial valley. From the grassy banks, I stared at the 1,000m amphitheatre of vertical quartzite cliffs. The scale seemed unfathomable. Beyond the safety of the beach, the seabed drops away 500m.

We had come to kayak the fjords and camp on its banks. I'd poured over landscape images for years, yet as I stood there, I knew I could never have imagined the grandeur or immensity.

We spent the afternoon gliding through glassy water, spotting seals, and paddling to waterfalls that seemed to cascade from the sky. Later in the afternoon, with tired shoulders and a desire to move more freely, we pulled into a patch of land on the bend of the fjord. Only accessible by boat, we arrived at the wildest of wild camping spots.

Although privately owned, the beach allows open access. The 1957 Outdoor Recreation Act enshrined Norwegians' long-standing right to be in nature, regardless of who owns the land.

By the water's edge, rustic benches surround a stone-ringed fire pit. With clear water, forested banks, and unending views, the site was the stuff of Instagram dreams, but things worked differently there. Nature enthusiasts are encouraged not to geo-tag in the hope that such places may be preserved.

As the evening rolled into dusk, I noticed that despite the bright homes and farmsteads, there was a barrenness and loneliness. Norway felt as harsh as it was beautiful.

A few years ago, when I became interested in how the adventure narrative could be challenged, I read about the word friluftsliv. Its literal translation is 'free-air life' and is recognised as part of Norwegian national identity. In contemporary Norwegian society, it means participating in outdoor activities, but it also has a deeper sense of de-stressing and sharing a common culture. It is saturated in meaning.

Of course, words such as friluftsliv, hygge and lagom are a marketer’s dream. As concepts, they are whittled to one word to sell dreams of change. Perhaps these words are passé, but they will be recycled, and new ones will arrive. And yet, for me, friluftsliv remains. I recognise it as a way of being, something felt not built, existing in the space where words are not enough. It flows from the inside out.

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's 1959 poem "On the Heights" uses the term for the first time, and since then, the idea has evolved. Recognised as part of Norwegian cultural heritage, it can be felt in conversations, read in outdoor signs, and sensed in Norwegian literature.

It would be easy to claim that friluftsliv is for the wealthy and capable, but this is not a concept developed from big adventure or the experience economy. It does not comply with the typical portrayal of personal growth against nature; it is about rhythms, encounters, and participation. Mostly, it's about connectedness. It is a 5-day kayak alone, yet it is also a walk in the woods. It is nature first.

I woke early and swam below the cliffs. We made pancakes rich with foraged blueberries and sat for hours soaking up the sound of waterfalls. It was hours before the first electric cruiser, 'Future of the Fjords,' came by. It stirred the wake as if trying to pull us back to reality, but we were hidden in the coves, held by nature.

We strolled to the summit of a mountain accessible only by water and human power; except for sheep and lemmings, we were alone. Stillness abounds in both the summit perspective and the fjord edge. There is freedom in our insignificance. Norway is a country of big nature and introspection.

The following day, we packed up and paddled to the town of Undredal, made famous by some rather punchy local brown goats' cheese and as the inspiration for the Disney film Frozen. I looked back where we paddled and knew that I would return. In Norway, access to the outdoors is not about big adventure; rather, it is about being in nature and of nature. It is about coexistence.

What I will remember most about the fjords, is the feeling of being part of them.

The grave, decorated with sunflower wreaths, has a simple beauty. Beyond it, headstones are linked by family name. This tiny stone-built church, which lies in the verdant and Herdwick-filled Wasdale valley, is the final resting place of the greatest ever fell runner.

We hadn't come here to visit the grave. Nor were we part of the 1,000 or so fell runners who had crossed the surrounding mountains the previous weekend to accompany Joss Naylor on his final journey through his home valley. Instead, we detoured the end of our run to quietly pay our respects.

Obituaries tell of his running prowess, and how his legendary status was forged on mental fortitude, formed through the adversity of his childhood, but what stuck with me was his authenticity. I had the pleasure of meeting him when I got placed in a fell race a few years ago. He had turned out, driving for nearly two hours to clap and present medals to us, a bunch of slow unknowns, on a wet Saturday in October. He simply turned to me and said, 'It's a good ol' Lakeland day.' And, it was precisely that.

In a world where running, perhaps with the exception of fell running, has become uber-commercialised, Joss ran for the fells and the love of the landscape. Reportedly never earning a penny from his running achievements, his preference was a solitary game that took him and his success far from the public gaze to the wild fell tops and mountains beyond. Perhaps most importantly, as a person, a guardian of the land and in sport, he gave back more than he took.

It was this thought I had as I stood humbled at his graveside. How can we try to build a life that is ambitious yet free from expectation? How can we accomplish our adventure and sporting dreams yet give back more than we take? And how do we hold that relationship with the land over which we move?

And I thought of legacy. I had the previous evening sat around a campfire and talked of this with someone who, like me, had a life-changing experience. After much wine-fuelled rumination, we agreed that we don't get to choose our legacy. Whilst there is much truth in that, if I can aspire to one thing, if I could choose one word, it would be authenticity.

Beyond the seemingly legendary running achievements that define the life of Joss Naylor, he showed us that if we remain connected to the land and live authentically, we can give back more than we take. That seems to me, to be a life very well lived.

I live in phases. My life has always been this way, and this phase of book writing, Fleetwood Mac and my second masters is done. I can't fight it. Enthusiasm waned and washed out with the June rain and the Strawberry Moon.

I write as if this is a choice. As if I summon the end so it may be replaced with something more, but I don't yet know what will rise as ambition falls. It is strange to wake from the business of every day, from the goals I have worked tirelessly towards, and feel their hold diminish.

It begins, as it always does, with a shift in distraction. Then, desire for ideas and influence. I search for new vibes, old places, and offbeat lives. I move. I run to distance myself from old thoughts.

The new, blooms in a string of insignificant happenings. I feel neither grief nor joy. Acceptance drifts like a gentle tide. Whilst I surrender to fading dreams, the needle of experience threads moments into momentum

And just like that, I no longer have the will to write a book. The time is not now. I am drawn to engagement over introspection. I have much to unearth. I have a deadline of 20,000 words to write, yet I write this.

 I am a variety hunter, a connector of disparate themes, a dreamer. I want to distil the essence of a place in the fewest words. I want to read travel books and endless memoirs. I want to build a base for what lies ahead.

I am bored by my story. I want to hear yours. I don't want to share; I want to learn. I want to swap containment for contribution, stillness for spinning, the familiar for the unknown. I want adventure.

I have been here before. Of course, I have. I live my life in phases. I am a candle that burns, then burns out. It is all just layers of moments and invisible threads.

Whatever comes next, whatever filters through the pregnant pause of this gap in desire, will be more. And although it will be my next phase, I already know it will pass.

I balance on the razor-thin ridge of the Seebergspitz. Beyond the one-meter-wide staircase of limestone slabs, the mountain tumbles 1000 meters into an abyss of distant valleys. To the north, conical clouds, the colour of volcanic plumes, gather on the pinnacle of the Rofanspitz. We are only five minutes from the summit when I feel the first droplets of rain on outstretched fingers.

Instinctively we turn, steadying ourselves with our rock-dusted hands. At most, we have two or three minutes. We pivot and wedge our feet into toe-length holds and barely defined ledges. The ground is slick with rain. We cannot fall.

I scramble from the airiest point on the shoulder into the perceived safety of a single line of dwarf pine. Lightning crashes to our right and thunder booms overhead. We continue to run in the direction of the col. Below me, Rob and Juno hide among the tall trees of the Alpine forest. They crouch low in the sodden grass. This is our best hope.

The truth is, I wanted the storm to come, not because of the draw of the elemental force of thunder and lightning or because of the otherworldly transformation of the atmosphere from light to dark. No, it is much more straightforward. I wanted the storm to tell me to turn from the mountain. The edge of the rocks and their deathly drops had forced me to my hands and knees; I was terrified of falling.

To mark Rob's 50th, we had planned a mid-summer ascent to Grand Paradiso, a mountain in the heart of the Grand Paradiso National Park in the Northern Italian Alps. This peak, known to be one of the most accessible and least exposed 4000m mountain in Europe, seemed to be a perfect ambition for this occasion, today, standing on the crested ridge of the Seebergspitz, I knew I would not stand on its summit.

At home that evening, I can't square my lack of courage or accept my weakness. I do what I always do in this situation, I search logic, for a way to rationalise emotion. I work back through my beliefs, questioning their validity and truth, reminding myself that fear is the thief of dreams.

I google the summit and trawl YouTube looking for something reassuring, anything which suggests I would be ok. How do I tell Rob? There are practical considerations like ropes and guides. Repeatedly, the screen tells me there will be no time to clip onto the fixed rope because of the queue of people trying to summit. Queue? There would be a queue. And there are videos. I stop searching.

I have always considered that my most meaningful ascents remain undocumented and invalidated by the outside world. They are the days, the journeys that take me fully into nature and myself. I know that anyone can create publicity around their ascents, but how does that affect experience and meaning. If I go to the mountain for connection, then inner solitude must be the outcome of highest value.

Recently, I have read that in mountaineering circles, there is a groundswell of unreported trips, a return to something unknown. Is there anything more intriguing than the untold story, or a journey that leaves only the hint of the lightest of footprints? Hopefully the world is moving beyond queuing for summits and being pulled by named mountains, for what is in a name other than recognition.

In the meaning-making of my mountain ambition, I aspire to capture only the essence of experience in its fleeting and ephemeral glory. I journal to keep a record of memory, sometimes privately and silently, and sometimes so that when I am home in the flatlands of England, I may still feel the magic of mountains. There is nothing in that hope that speaks of summits or the desire to climb through fear.

Share

Then there is Rob. Before I speak, he tells me that he, too feels the same way, that we will find our mountain, and just like that, we rewrite the plan.

I think back to the exposed ridge of the Seebergspizt. Would I have felt differently on a sunny day? Would I have been more courageous if the brooding clouds had not cast me into their shadows? Did the storm change the course of my life? I hope so, for that is the power of nature and the pull of mountains.

I sit on the deck of the house and watch the valley gain vibrancy in the morning light. The meadows are uncut and the slopes are drenched in green. I search for inspiration in the velvet texture of the moss wrapped bark, the gold heads of the globe flowers and the permanence of mountains.

I woke early this morning, tired from sleep broken by the fear of what the day may bring. I have been trying to journal for hours, but the words are clouded, shrouded, and fog-bound. I crave the free flow of thought and the headspace to write.

I return to the house and check my phone. I am in that place where parents and ill health collide, in a space where worry and care are not enough. These are the uncontrollables. I am 1000 miles away, and there has been no call.

When the rain slows, I hike to the summit of my favourite Austrian peak; a wooden cross marks its rocky top. From the metal casing, I pull a leather-bound book and read the words of others. Among the stories of those who have stood here and scribed their ascent, I am searching for my own inky history, for the words we wrote as a family and how this place became us.

I am drawn towards the edge where limestone falls away to the forest and the wildflower meadow beyond. I am seeking perspective and chasing risk. I shuffle closer and crane my neck as if to test my will and courage, to jolt my body from stasis, but I am held, distracted and wordless.

I balance on the edge of the rock to try to quieten my mind to singularity. These thoughts, the words that will not come, are sense-making and peace-seeking, they are my invisible work.

I step to safety, turn from the summit, and run. I leap weather-drenched rocks and duck under lichen-dipped pine. Branches the colour of frost pass in a blur of beauty. The rivers are in spate and I am searching for flow. I run as if to escape myself. As the mist bellows, thoughts channel, running is my script and movement is my language.

As the moon rises and rain falls in sheets, I walk to the forest beyond the garden. Beneath the carved overhang of the old shepherd's hut I listen to the rhythm of the rain, to droplets playing leaves like keys. I breathe deeply and write. I write only of the simplicity and truth of running, of the connection and intimacy of the forest. I am gentle with myself and ask nothing more.

Sometimes the words won't come. So often, I am failed by their failure. The truth is the only thing worth writing, and sometimes I can't reach it, sometimes it is too hard, sometimes all I can do is run.

I tiptoe over the wet grass to the pergola. This structure, made of wrinkly tin, larch and love, sits at the end of the garden between the olive tree and an apricot rose. I watch sunbeams of soft light play on the wind. White blossom, as if breath blown, falls from the apple tree whilst its branches scrabble for the sky. Under the calls of the buzzard, I am searching for threads. 

Perhaps it was the sensation of warm sun on bare skin, or the swifts arriving on the wing of the southwesterly wind, but this week, thoughts and ideas revealed themselves, transforming kernels to crop. 

What differences hid amongst the lengthening days of May, was it the audiobook, the gentle tone of another's life that I listened to as Juno played amongst the frothy heads of cow parsley. Perhaps it was the evening I spent moon gazing in meadow tall grass under the dusky finale of a concerto of birdsong. Maybe the answers lay in the pages of the memoir that kept me awake with its beauty and artful turn of phrase. It is all of this, and yet not. 

A baby blackbird darts behind the leathery, narrow leaves of the old yew tree, he is revealed only by his pitchy call and unrelenting bounce. Alone, he scans the sky for his mother for sustenance and reassurance. We cannot grow alone.

When I first felt compelled to write, I thought of my words like stones, each one building a bridge to something more. I hoped of writing into fullness, into a richer life and into human connection.

The dry wind drags moisture from the lime green leaves of the acer. I inherited this tree with the cottage. I had long dreamt of a small place with roses around the door, perfect symmetry and a hidden history held within dimpled walls. In the bare garden, stripped after the death of the previous owner lay pots of trees bound and forgotten. For two years I moved the terracotta pot from bed to bed, willing its hand-shaped leaves to stretch into the spring air. It is the height of the old wall now, and in the south-facing shade of its paper-thin foliage, a hydrangea waits to bloom. We cannot thrive alone.

This week revealed new paths to study, a different perspective for my story and dreams of wild Alaska. These are my crops. Thoughts grown, opportunities created and understanding deepened, all cultivated with tenderness in a virtuous circle of connection and growth.

In the inner circle of my writing community, we talked of transformation. For that hour our lives merged, we shared stories, experiences and publications, each one offered a new perspective. Later, I bought the books we talked of, I opened them and peered in as if they were a doorway to a new land, a new adventure in thought. I journaled my new learnings and let them fall freely onto the page. Today, in the pergola I open my notebook and read, in the space between the lines I hear their voices. 

The crows return to roost behind the church clock, and the resident hedgehog shuffles behind the pond. Our yellow cottage, lit by the glow of festoon lights buzzes with life. We are all of this space, we all belong. 

I think of the way I have read myself into a new place or into the lives of others, what then is possible if we share our writing in the stage of creation. Without perfection or completion, and beyond my own thoughts I will weave new threads. There is a richness in togetherness and in the community of voices that live in my words. 

Share

A generous pile of notebooks sit on my desk, they are ordered from largest to smallest. The spine of the bottom book, perhaps the oldest of all, is not yet dog-eared or faded. It is blue and gold, bright and bold and full of dreams. 

With its hedgehog printed cover and soft pink pages, this book is a story of missed chances and affirmations—a timeline of hope, a kind of penned record of the evolution of an ever-shifting self. 

Each page is a year, circled and bound like a slice of time with a beginning and an end. Doodles of ambitions hold plans that spin out like spider legs or the twisted tendrils of unfurling ferns. 

It has been a long time since I ran my fingers over the matt cover of my hopes. This week I removed the notebook from the pile, turned back the cover and began to search. I read each page seeking clues to why, why despite the risk and the exposure I feel compelled to write.

I thumb back to 2015. Between the margins, in handwriting unsure and unkempt, I see I didn't dream of writing. I dreamt of being brave enough to write. 'To write' rolled on in 2016, 2017, and 2018. Each year it occupied the same north-western corner of the page, each year it was inked in black, not vivid enough for colour, not large enough to be true. 

'To write’ two simple words, yet they are not. In the words of my journals I find my place in the world, it stretches out as a marriage of thoughts and ideas. I think of the letters my parents kept when I left school and travelled the world, stamped and enveloped they are a bag of memories. And yet, this is different, this is driven by something more. 

I read back through the pages. 

In 2019, I journaled about my wedding. 

Then I got cancer. 

Then I got brave. 

No more affirmations. 

No more entries.

Blank.

In 2020, I started to write. I blogged out my tears and penned my sadness, but I couldn't find the words. I didn't want to; I was too afraid that the act of writing would make them real, like a Ouija board calling the spirits.

In tear-smudged ink, I write.

'Have you ever been too scared to look inside? Have you ever felt your raspy breath constrict the V-shaped voice box that connects thoughts and body? This is me.'

I journal my way through medication and emptiness, writing of the landscape and the beauty of my garden. I photograph birds and the new tree growth and describe footpaths, old memories and past adventures.

I write deep in mossy forests, on the Cairngorms plateau, and in places that used to make me feel safe. I risk frostbite to write under the pale pink light of the midnight sun, searching for myself in the gaps between words. In snatched moments, I pen journal entries, postcards, and handwritten letters. I write for the glacier, the sun and the storm.  

2020, 2021, 2022, 2023: There were no lists, no affirmations, 1460 dreamless days. But there were words, thousands of them and dreams that formed in fragments. 

I write the opening chapters of a book at least eight times, re-order and re-edit. I open wounds, dress and undress the truth, and wrap beauty around rawness. I cry for days when I am told the world does not need another cancer story. 

Each morning, I journal in bed as the east-facing headstones in the old churchyard are bathed at sunrise. I try to find my voice amongst the blackbirds and lush grasses. I cannot call with the crows; I dare only hush with the breeze.

I share my first post, hold my breath and doubt myself. I enter competitions and study the words of others. I live between piles of books and shelves of notes, I write of adventures and let the landscape transform me. 

Through my words I hear my voice grow. While wondering and wavering about what I can offer this world, I ruminate on the arrogance of wanting to be heard. 'To write' is no longer my affirmation or ambition, it does not need to take up space or occupy a corner of the page; it is me, etched in my bones.

This week, in a moment drenched in perceived failure, I am reminded by those dearest to me that I am chasing a dream. I am still a dream seeker, an affirmation maker, a planner and what a privilege that is, for who would we be without hope? 

I open the hedgehog book, draw a circle around 2024 and let the tendrils unfurl. 

Share

The forest is dense and cast with flecks of afternoon light. The air carries the scent of sun-warmed sap. The trail, meandering through the narrow clearing, is edged with last year's pinecones and tangled roots. Limestone pebbles crunch under my feet; they are paled by the dappled black green of the trees. As I run, my rucksack rubs against the curve of my back and the slant of my shoulders. For the first time since I arrived in Slovenia, I feel a lightness.

Five hundred meters or so above me lay the hut where I had spent the afternoon. I had dozed in the top bunk of the 6-bed dormitory with my back pressed against the stained sheets and the unstuffed pillow. I had brushed my fingertips along the wooden slats of the roof. The familiar pattern of grain and the feeling of old wax curling under my nails took me to the ceiling of my childhood bedroom, to wooden homes and log fires. I thought back to those moments, the humans, the places, the animals and the landscapes, each shaping, making, and moulding. It was a slideshow of my history, an offering of perspective that only comes with dislocation.

Then came the grand finale, like a stream of credits, clarity of meaning, gratefulness, and closeness to what matters. These are the thoughts that are too hazy and unfathomable in the small spaces of normal life.

Running from the hut was not on the itinerary. In the months prior, I had spent many evenings at our kitchen table meticulously planning routes and, in particular, how to hike to this solitary hut. Located at 1600m, it stands over a valley of rich pastures and ink-blue ridges that rise to a cloud-striped sky. The curve of the bowl, still deep in snow, offers protection from avalanches and rock falls; this refuge lies high in the mountains of the Triglav National Park, deep in bear country, somewhere below an eagle sky.

From a distance, the stone exterior seems impenetrable and safe. Yet, its dirty rooms and smoky kitchen feel incongruent with its construction and at odds with the deep forest and emerald rivers. After months of intentions and days of planning, I leave before it strips the wildness from me. I go because I want to be part of the forest. I need to hear the black woodpecker one more time. I leave to see the heads of the wildflowers close with the setting sun, to chase something real. I go because I can. And that was how I found myself freestyling, tripping through the forest without a plan.

The path leads to a transient grazing pasture where cattle reside when it is not yet summer or not quite winter. The forest filled with the hanging heads of the muted hellebores edge into fields of sungazing crocus of deep purple and white. There are no people, just an atmosphere of calmness and a sense of space and scale that hangs between the peaks and the pastures of delicate flowers, between the day and the night, between the expected and the unexpected.

As I descend, I ease into aloneness; gone is the vulnerability that I felt as I left, I have lost that sense of exposure comes when there is no other, when there is no signal, GPS, or agenda. The mountains have stripped me of the fear that society demands I should carry, I am left with a feeling of old, something close to self-reliance and freedom.

It didn't start like this: I didn't come here because I am brave; I came because I was not. It began with lashings of self-doubt and anxiety that have held me in their grip for months, maybe years. Fear of having lost my courage or the tenacity required to be alone had welded me to the comforts and protection of the home. But I know today, as I think I have always known, that extraordinary things happen when I adventure alone.

In a place where the trail is barely decipherable, where the feet of humans had stepped but not yet marred the surface, two chaffinches fly from a larch tree, squawking and fluttering like winged sycamore seeds in the autumn breeze. I stand a little more than a meter from them; they do not halt their dance for me.

These moments and the wild Slovenian mountains teach me once again that aloneness has an intensity, a vibrancy and a magic.

In the forest, I am a dreamer. I am a soul searcher. I am feral.

The meadows were thick with spring, and the dry March air was heavy with the scent of cow shit and cut wood. Above us, an old tractor chugged and gurgled as it clung to the steep contours of the empty summer pasture; behind it, a shower of bovine excrement blasted into the fresh mountain breeze. I check the sky, they must be expecting rain.

Earlier that morning, we had driven the gorge-cut road past the grey-pink cliffs to the small Austrian village of Alpbach, here somewhere 100 meters or so above the jaunty streets of wooden chalets, newly bloomed crocuses had arrived early. The meadowed slope is greened with shifting seasons, emerald-rich in the valley, graduating to muted sage where the coarse spindles have been snow-crushed and drenched. Just above the forests of larch and pine, snow clings to the north slopes and hides in the shadowed divets; there will be no more snow this year. Nature will not wait for us.

It was last November when my dad phoned to ask if I would visit them. I have grown accustomed to this language, to his coded phrases of need, so I knew that on arrival, there would be a request; it would begin with "Can you just..." But today wasn't about a new mop or flickering light; the question that came was, ‘Bel, I'd like to see if I can still ski.’

I know that 'to see if I can still ski' is about much more than sport; it is about moving amongst mountains, it is escaping the crushing stillness and safetyism that we all have come to expect in old age. 'To ski' is about raging against the dying dream of adventure.

It is a bluebird day as we arrive in the car park next to skiers who look skywards to the summits. The rain has passed, and the light has a luminosity that merges mist and snow. Above the snowline is a tonal simplicity of rock, tree, and whiteness, a calmness. Inhaling deeply, I watch as my dad tightens his boots. I have been dreading this moment.

This is not how we used to be in the mountains. We were explorers, ski tourers, and mountaineers. We were adventurers, seekers, and non-conformists. We were the ones who turned our backs on resorts and mechanisation and headed into the distant white landscape.

For so many years, the gravitational pull of mountains cast my family into the hidden places of Europe, to the valleys, the alms, and the pastures; it swung any sense of traditional childhood into the margins; this is who we were as a family. How, then, do we belong when we grow old. Who do we become when the landscapes that found us, built us and shaped us only highlight our immobility and mortality. When the sense of self evaporates with the passing of time.

Today, I look into my dad's almost 88-year-old face, his age hidden behind a look of determination. He bends stiffly and tightens the orange ski boots he bought on his 80th birthday. He looks small and uneasy.

There is a sadness in the clunk and click of their plasticky lock; this is undoubtedly the last pair he will own, and perhaps soon, maybe today, they will be worn for the last time, relegated to the pile of our pasts. I want to be the one who celebrates his tenacity and his bravery, but instead, I am willing for him to change his mind, hoping he will say he won't go, desperate to protect him from being broken, but I know these are words I can never speak.

In my head, I work through a tick list of unwritten rules: don't ski on bad days, don't ski if you feel ill, don't ski alone, rules that protect, bind, and restrict; this is not how we live, and this is not who he taught me to be.

We carry his skis to the snow; I turn away and squint. He doesn't procrastinate as I would; he glides away into the crowd of multi-coloured skiers and goggled-adorned helmets. Just before he falls from vision, he stops; he looks to the valley; his eyes trace the summits of the dappled green-black forests of his past. His shoulders drop, and his head raises. I know that here, the world makes sense; it reminds him of who he is. I know because that was his gift to me.

The look of determination does not fall from his face until we return to the car park. There, he sits on the boot of the car and looks up. Tiredness has not yet drained the blood from his legs or soaked through old bones. He turns to me and smiles. Memories of my dad ski touring, silhouetted against the morning sun, flick like a picture show through my mind. The man who cast the shadow that my sister and I followed unquestioningly into the mountains stands beside me; he still dreams of adventure.

That afternoon I watch a blackbird building a nest behind the old wooden shutters. The pine slats, cut and carved to offer protection from cold and snow, now hold the promise of a home, a shelter for the bird's young. She collects moss and releases the feathered strands of green; the sun-filled alpine air holds each momentarily before they float and settle on the patio below. Soon, threads of moss lie across the slate tiles like splashed paint. She is relentless. The bird does not concern itself with failure, risk or what-ifs; it has a purpose and a dream.

My dad comes over to where I am watching the bird. We sit silently together as the light of the setting sun transforms the summit tops from soft pink to ice blue. When the daylight has fallen behind the western peaks, he turns to me and says,' I've checked the weather; I think we should go cycling tomorrow.'