Lately, September

on not being able to process autumn and metaphorically moving house

My digital studio doors are open once more in November!

If you’d like to join me and a gathering group for a fireside vibe of gentle movement, guided relaxation, journalling and conversation, The Settling is a new four week journey I’m holding space for every Monday in November, online 7pm. If you are working with me as a doula in November, this will be included and I’m also gifting spaces to anyone who joins me here as a founding member. You can find our more and book your place here.

I’m also holding an hours space for long awaited pregnancies on Thursday October 19th 7pm and you can find out more about this here.

Oh I feel at home here.

I hope you feel at home here with me too. If Substack is a new home I’ve moved into, you can imagine me with keys in my hand, rooms and unpacked boxes yet to be reunited. Here is what the house looks like so far;

The Weeks - this very thing you’re reading. Newsletters. Life insights, catchings ups. These will always be free.

This week I’ve also added ‘griefnotes’ - a work in progress but a little attic room for me to curl into and explore love, loss, now and then.

griefnotes

Next to that is ‘voicenotes’. This will be me in audio version. It might even be voicenotes from friends. I don’t know what will make it into noted voice so that will be an interesting box opening.

The first note is a recording I made whilst preparing for a workshop I led this time last year on friendships, trying to conceive and the collision between the two. This is the first thing I’ve placed behind the paywall, should you want to cross the threshold of my house as a much loved guest. There’s also a free blogpost about friendships I wrote at the time, reshaped for 2023.

Infertility; the meteor that landed on my friendships

There will be other writings. I’ll be writing about infertility and…. other places in the landscape. I’m yet to write about so many things that span out from that place, notably peri-menopause. It’s coming.

I also write for another Substack The Harbour - writing and community here will be about long awaited pregnancy. This week I’ve written about The Gap

Another feature behind the door are meditations, I’ll be uploading some from the archives and last week recorded a little heart womb journey.

Heart to Womb

Turning my face away from autumn

I have run my way past and over the conkers I would normally pause to savour and collect. I’m ignoring the calls of sycamore leaves on my patio, seedheads and condensation on the windows. I’m yet to accept that summer was a very diluted season in 2023. It’s been concentrated in other non seasonal ways and I’ve felt adrift from the turning of the wheel - a rare thing for me. I’m trusting in this though. Sensation, attunement and inhabiting time and place - none of these are things that will be forced or hurried. It will come.

For those who have asked about my Dad, I am so grateful for your courage to do that. He’s doing incredibly well on his current treatment plan and for this I am deeply grateful. He turns eighty this week and we’re stretching the celebrations out for days.

That run I signed up to

At the time of writing there are thirteen days and nights between me and the Manchester Half start line. I’m not ready. I will never be, ready. A treadmill fall has chewed up my legs and whilst they are healing, I have had to resign to a slower pace, that finishing the course will be enough, that the last three miles will feel like torture, that we can’t control everything.

I have no idea if I’ll run at all, should an illness or other life event happen. I cannot know if stomach cramp, gales, blisters or insomnia will make things even harder. And yet, how we try to control the uncontrollable. Has this run reminded me of infertility? But of course. The gnawing truth that ‘trying our best’ guarantees nothing is a pill that’s resistant to swallowing. But I do know that I raised more than the fundraising goal I set, that I did the training to the best of my ability and that it has given me a sense of connection to far more than the sum of its parts. It has been worth it.

Reconnecting to community

I have emerged from the pandemic at a gentle and glacial pace. I don’t feel at odds with this. Leaving an established academic career in the height of lockdowns was a curious departure. A leaving party on Zoom. A new working life created largely online. I live behind the lid of the laptop and I like a lot about that. But recently there has been a seeking for the entanglement of human bodies gathered in community, with artefacts and meaning making.

On the equinox I had the pleasure of being in a yoga workshop led by J Brown. I practiced with him every Wednesday throughout Covid times and by strange coincidence for an American teacher, four of us in the group of 6-12 were from Manchester. To meet everyone in person was long awaited and surreal as we moved from 2D to 3D creatures, our heights being a surprise to all of us. As I stepped into the beautiful Space at the Mill studio in Manchester City Centre, the smell of the incense, the blankets and props and people coming together was a homecoming. I am re-emerging.

I began my four year Psychotherapy Diploma this weekend. It’s a long journey and one I am committed to. This is going to require transition. Will I be writing in this way as I build my private practice? Will the meeting of my work now and my work to be find a marriage? I don’t know the answers to this today. But I can feel the shapeshifting of where my words will live. Of how much of my house I want to share. I think here is the bridge. I also can’t know this and that is OK.

Things Consumed

I read ‘The Infertile Midwife’ by Sophie Martin in one sitting. I cried and felt so much resonance with the telling of a story that words can’t do justice to. This week we spoke to Sophie on our Golden Shores podcast, the conversation will be out this month.

I’m now excitedly listening to Book Seven of Strike ‘The Running Grave’ (Robert Rowling!) At 34 hours long, I will be for some time.

The return of soups and stews and pies has returned and I’m kind of in denial about that too. Butternut everything for me please.

I’ll be curating more writings and listens this month and will send out ‘The Weeks’ again before the month is out.

Love, H x