Of lights and peace
Dear friends
Hello from A Calm Place! I’ve had a busy couple of weeks so am very much in need of a bit of chilling out right now – hopefully this newsletter will be a little drop of calm for you too.
We’re back from a lovely weekend spent in beautiful Northumbria, in north-east England, where we stayed with friends, and then met up with some other friends on Holy Island (Lindisfarne) to scatter the ashes of a dear friend who died at the beginning of the year, far too young. So it was both happy and bittersweet for us.
One thing we managed to do, like much of the country over the weekend, was fulfil the bucket list dream of seeing the aurora borealis (“Northern lights”). The original plan was to go up to a hilltop park with our friends and the kids, where there was next to no light pollution, and the boys ended up still doing that, but while we were all there before the lightshow started, my daughter got super-tired and so my friend and I took her back to the house. I was feeling so disappointed about being so near and yet so far, but just before we put her to bed my friend suggested we try and see if we could see anything from the front door of the house. Overhead was the faintest of pale white arcs, like a rainbow, which was so faint I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been looking. However, when I looked at it through the night setting on my phone camera, the greens, pinks and purples were popping out, even with the streetlights nearby, it was so exciting to see! My photos weren’t great, I didn’t use any fancy settings or filters, just pointed and pressed, but hopefully this gives you an idea of how powerful a lightshow it was. I felt quite overwhelmed, and so lucky that we were able to see it.
(aurora borealis, Northumbria 10 May 2024)
Lindisfarne too is a very beautiful place, and although we were there for a sad reason, the weather was kind to us and I was able to rest in the calm atmosphere despite the many other people who’d had the same idea. I’m glad we were able to say goodbye to our friend there, take comfort in the fact that his final resting place is somewhere so calm and meaningful to him and his wife, and know that when we visit again we can remember him with fondness and peace as well as sadness. It wasn’t the time to write, but now that I’m back I’m thinking that I’d like to try and write a poem inspired by the place and the atmosphere there.
(St Cuthbert’s Isle from St Mary’s churchyard, Holy Island of Lindisfarne, 12 May 2024)
A week or so before that I had the very surreal experience of doing a reading from my book The Calm Place for the staff in-service training day for my daughter’s school. I’m definitely giving her a promotion, I don’t think there’s a single person at the school who doesn’t know I’ve written a book! It seemed to go well – they laughed at the right places, nodded in recognition, and seemed to appreciate the reminder to slow down and look at the extraordinary in the ordinary, which I think is at the heart of the book. My daughter has told me that lots of staff have come up to her to say they enjoyed it, so she’s proud of me too which is always a bonus!
(author in the wild, Stirling, 3 May 2024)
I also wanted to mention a couple of nature/nature-adjacent books I’ve enjoyed recently. I’m just over half way through Weathering by Ruth Allen, which was chosen as the first book in the writing around the edges gentle book club curated by Luisa Skinnerwhich celebrates women writers here on Substack, and I’m enjoying it very much. It combines the author’s training as both a geologist (she has a PhD in geology) and an outdoor therapist, and marks the connections between the two seemingly different disciplines of geology and therapy. I was a bit worried that it might be a bit ‘woo woo’ for me, but there’s enough science to keep cynical me happy, and enough wisdom for me to stop and savour passages with that gasp of recognition. Last night I read the chapter where she discusses walking with an older friend who is actively seeking to embrace elderhood and all that means, and I am pretty sure I will be returning to that section again and again.
(Weathering by Ruth Allen)
The other book I wanted to highlight, which I read a couple of months ago and which I’m pretty sure already is going to be my favourite book I read this year, is Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T Dungy. This book was largely written during the pandemic lockdown of 2020, while the author was stuck at home, helping her daughter with home learning while her husband worked online in a home office, and learning herself from all her garden in Colorado had to teach. There were so many thematic similarities with my book – garden, lockdown, home learning with a singleton daughter, the underlying global trauma of covid and of racial and environmental unrest during a tumultuous year – that I found myself nodding throughout, recognising thematic and experiential similarities even though our backgrounds and lives and environments are so different. I can’t praise the book highly enough, and implore you to buy it if you haven’t already; I am sure you won’t regret it! (also, isn’t this cover gorgeous?!)
(Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T Dungy)
That’s all for now, I hope those of you in the northern hemisphere are enjoying the stronger hints that summer is on the way, and those of you in the southern hemisphere appreciate this reminder of natural life even as much of your own nature has a bit of a nap for a few months. Do let me know in the comments if you have any book recommendations, or any fun nature sightings, I’m always keen and happy to see what’s going on all over the place and will try and respond to every comment!
Take care till next time,
Jackie