and heard the easeful sound  of it meeting the gate post. As she walked towards the woods she allowed the stories and people close to her heart to arise into her mind. Her walking found its own rhythm as her mind played its music.
It had been a tumultuous time. Playing her part in her outer life had meant some painful realisations and difficult decisions. There had been those who understood the path she had taken and those who definitely did not. There had been shocks to her system: ommissions, betrayals, battles. She was weary. Â
As she arrived at the first trees, the ones that edged the forest, the birch and the bramble, she felt her body softening and her breath deepening. The array of complicated  people in her inner world,  were becoming a little further away – a little more like characters in a story, and she felt more in her own part.
Simply as a woman walking into the woods
Her mind cast back now. She had had to be very strong. And she had had to sit with painful opposites where there was no possible answer. And even while split in two, she had carried others who needed her clarity and her capacity to make space for their own struggles without judgement. And sometimes, she had not managed  it. There were moments when her patience had failed and she did judge.  And times when she judged herself harshly and  her story fragmented further.
There had been pain involved, and loss, as looking for help she had stepped out of her way, reaching  in need  to people and places she had previously known as solid ground, only to find them crumbling and giving beneath her feet,  and she had even met the edge of a familiar hole in the earth that  she did not choose to go down again. So she walked around that.
Accepting the losses? How to do this when she had given so much to these parts of her life? Forgiving the betrayals? How to do this when she was still reeling from the ways some had turned on her?
As she walked further there was less light coming down onto the forest floor and she allowed the unanswered  questions to remain, but somehow held more in the shared cool, rich air she was now breathing beneath the trees canopy – a shared burden.
The journey was changing. Becoming less about them and those unresolved things and more about allowing the grief to come. The losses were lodged in her being and they deserved her full attention. A small violet looked up at her from the forest floor and shared in this moment with her.
She knew she was changing. And she knew that some were changing alongside her. She knew that the well she was drawing from now was different from the well that had quenched her thirst ten years before, twenty years before. And the company she was keeping – that was changing too.
She was seeking out those that were also living with thorny questions and not seeking out easy tidy-it-all-away answers. Those others who were also looking inward and learning to deeply nourish self – not to better clamber over others or to look shiny and new, but to grow in capacity to live into life more deeply. To turn their hard-won experiences into compost for the next chapter. To play their part in new life unfolding.
And – the forest helped her with this. Actively, as though it was truly interested in her human story.
And she walked on.
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 If this story speaks to you then you are in the right place. I wrote it with you in mind and in heart. The forest offers us this path of deeper becoming and I am glad to be your guide. I have crafted seven gatherings that will offer you space for reflecting, storying, meaning making, re-sourcing, and learning new self-supporting creative practices. There is a place for you here in a gentle and powerful seven month offering that begins Sunday May 26th . These followwing slides have all the content to help you to know if you will be joining us.
If you are getting the inner yes to spending time together this way, please follow the link to the course page. And if you would like to chat and say hello, and ask any questions you have, please follow the link under that to set up a 30 minute call. I understand that this is a financial commitment to be sure about, and I would also love to meet you. I do have a partial bursary if you are experiencing financial hardship, and I do offer a special price if you would like to do this with a trusted friend.
I look forward to creating with you soon.
Big Love
Sam