Intricately beautiful
Day in day out faithful
Fragile and hopeful
Stories in our hearts

We talk a lot about letting go. Many people have written many things about it, and probably I will too. But this is a post about holding on.

My feet on the ground and Robin’s lead in my hand and sound of the birds in the hedgerow, would be a prayer anyway, whether I liked it or not.

And now, each time I am in a place of home and share a meal or a cheese toastie or humous and crisps or fresh pomegranate, it is holy.

My legs ached, and my heart was full to burst with these rich rolling mountains, this land of my mother and grandparents, that holds me as I walk.

I think walking IS a prayer. The assembly of bones on the ground. The weary muscles and small movements onward and honest conversation with each bit of land.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours, May the clarity of light be yours, May the fluency of the ocean be yours, May the protection of the ancestors be yours

The cold stretching in every direction. And the beauty that stubbornly makes its home in the expanse of cold. The light that is coming into the world.

Suddenly we were on the edge of slopes that dropped away and away and away, rich and green and raw and beautifully terrifying and somehow kind.

I’d booked a place on this quiet week at Othona. It’s going to be silence, I told people who asked where I was going, and I think we go for walks and there’s poetry. And we get to swim in the sea, if we want to. I did want to.

In this season, a seed of an idea impossibly grew, that a little van would be a way to hold this time and all these things... To be present to this moment, to the unknown moments to come.

Your story is good. Whoever you are, however your story unfolds; whether you tell your story loudly, or hesitantly, or in tears into your pillow, or words, or actions, or just in keeping walking. Your story is good. You are beloved.

We’re making a pilgrimage. A journey by choice. Exploring wilderness and prayer, beauty and listening, silence and stories, steps into the unknown and finding home in the unexpected.