06 Apr

Posted at 13:51h in Mental health
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Maybe being broken is not the end of things, but the beginning When my son is at school I go into his bedroom to quietly throw some things away. Like my husband, my seven year old son is a hoarder. It doesnt occur to him to throw out the things that are broken or no longer fit for purpose. Why put them in the bin when you can keep them scattered across the floor? At least once a week I sneak in and gather a collection to be disposed of. These are not highly valued toys, but what I would refer to as 'junk'....

01 Feb

Posted at 12:37h in Uncategorised
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In the words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”. Last night I took out my notebook and wrote a list of all I needed to do today. It was long. Impossibly long. Long enough to fill my time today, and probably tomorrow and the rest of the week too. I have never had a high-powered executive job where I get to wear a power suit a la movies from the 80s set on Wall Street. I am not on three different phone lines at once, delegating like a...

24 Jan

Posted at 15:31h in Mental health
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It is January in the north of England and my garden looks as you would expect; damp, leaf strewn, drained of colour: a mess. There is not much to be seen, but there is work to do. I plan to cut back some shrubs that have needed a hard prune since we moved in four years ago. They are overgrown and block light from the house. As I begin to work, my neighbour walks past on his way back from his allotment. He calls over, “Take it right to the floor, you will only get leaf this year, but the flowers will be back...

10 Jan

Posted at 10:28h in Family, Mental health
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Last week I took the kids to the park with a friend. Two adults, six children and a dog. Pretty ordinary. I arrived a little early. The kids raced ahead of me to the swings and I walked through the damp leaves following them up the path. Rewind thirteen months and I remember making this same journey. It was just before Christmas and we were desperate to find something to do on a grey day, some way to get the kids out of the house, even if just for an hour. We were tired at the end of the long term and...

15 Sep

Posted at 19:21h in Beauty, Faith, Living well
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It is tempting to want to be a builder; to work with a plan, to know what you are going to produce before you have finished, to be sure about all the details. But better by far to be a gardener; to work with the elements, to be surprised by the things that grow and those that don't, to be malleable and open to change, to have to adapt in order to thrive. Builders have a level of certainty about the outcome. They plan and prepare and Are-Not-Wrong. Rarely does anything happen along the way to change what they are attempting. Sure,...

14 Sep

Posted at 13:27h in Beauty, Faith, Living well
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Recently I've been thinking about the connectedness of everything. About how it is all part of the same thing. We are all substance and soil and soul. We are all atoms and curiosity and magic. And we are all in the conversation. A few years back, we lived close to a big park where I sometimes used to run. I ran to get fit, but really I ran to get out. To leave the house and be alone without children talking and questioning and demanding. I love my children, but by 6pm. after a day on my own with them, I was often ready...

13 Sep

Posted at 12:06h in Beauty, Living well
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(Before the summer I wrote three posts about creativity, you can read the first one here. This is part 4.) I want to live a creative life, of making and discovering, of spontaneity and hard work. But I have a problem in achieving this and I don't think I am alone: My life is too full. My cupboards and counter-tops are full, my inbox and to-do list is full. My day is full of errands and requests to be fulfilled for the small (and not so small!) people I am care for. My mind is full of their hopes and needs and desires and expectations, and whether or...

11 Sep

Posted at 18:00h in Family, Living well
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Learning to love someone is like poetry. I don't mean that it is beautiful and full of romantic imagery. I mean that it is hard. Poetry is hard. When I was 17 I went on a school trip to a day of talks about literature in the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. There were many speakers. They talked about their favourite texts, or about their own work. Some of it was very boring. But two of the talks have stayed with me, and I remember them all these (nearly 20) years later. Germaine Greer talked about her favourite Shakespearean sonnet and Simon Armitage unpicked his poem, Kid. I happened...