Tag: wellbeing
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Strong roots
I have been planting trees. Apple and hazelnut trees. All this tree planting feels brand new and I have been doing my very best to make sure that these trees are getting the care that they need. I can not tell you how many times I have been in to the local garden centre asking…
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To flourish…
A few Novembers ago, I was travelling through Scotland when I heard a BBC radio show called ‘The Susurrations of Trees’. It took my breath away. In particular, Bob Gilbert’s description of the sound of rain on the leaves of a copper beech transfixed me. It completely transformed my relationship with my neighbour’s great big…
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What’s your intention?
There’s a chair that I move around my garden. Sometimes it sits next to the Rowan tree that Graeme planted, other times it sits next to my blackcurrant bush, and this week it has been sitting underneath the tree that has been shedding leaves. The chair acts as a reminder for an intention I have…
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Making space
For as long as I can remember, I have always been chasing space. Space to read, space to paint, space to watch a sunset, space to meditate, space to write, space to sew, space to sit in a sunbeam streaming through the window. You get the drift. It’s not that I have never had the…
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Keeping it simple
As many of you know, I am currently at my cabin in Northern Manitoba (Canada). There have been a few forest fires up here, to say the least. What’s more is that due to the vast size of the Boreal forest, the fires will be an ongoing concern for months to come. This means that…
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What’s your prescription?
Recently, I have been delivering a programme on Rest and one the practices that we do is setting our personal prescriptions. What does this mean? To begin with, it’s an exercise taken from Claudia Hammond who is a BBC radio presenter and delivers the podcast ‘All in the Mind’. It’s the practice of what she…
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Re-emergence
Many years ago, a dear friend of mine happened across what she called ‘the day of the frogs’ . She had been over for an evening of soap making and had just moved into the area. When she left to drive home, she was a bit unsure of directions, so I made her promise me…
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The epiphany of awe
I am what some might call a prairie chick. Well, maybe I am a hen now. And yes, I know it isn’t exactly PC to relate myself to a bird- the poor chickens 😉What I mean by this statement is that I was raised on the Canadian Prairie. For those of you living in Canada…
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The cure for apathy
Watching the news this past week should have come with a trigger warning. Just as I was settling down to a Friday night of relaxing TV, live news coverage rolled in. Rather than feeling an ease into the weekend, the politics of our day activated a sense of shock, disgust, anger and ultimately a sadness…
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Against the grain
There is a Buddhist teacher named Pema Chodron who has famously declared that, “to be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest”. I remember when I read this for the time, a droll smirk formed on my face. Accompanying this smirk, my internal dialogue muttered the word, ‘Great..’.…
My Silent Place 