A-light in the lament: Poetic flowers amidst the scars

Hello Hedge Schoolers,<br/><br/>Tis&#8217; nice to meet your gaze again. My weekend has been a deep journey. Medicine journeys always are, revealing the snags and blind spots that cover my landscape. The work is always work in progress. <br/><br/>Healing. <br/><br/>Remembering. <br/><br/>Honouring. <br/><br/>Calling in prayers. <br/><br/>For me, the word 'tend' anchored me during the transformation. <br/><br/>How do we tend to the relationships, places and gifts we hold so dear? <br/><br/>Do we nourish our bodies, souls, friends, homes, etc...with the love they so much deserve?<br/><br/>Tending to our places helps nourish our lives through deep gratitude. I am so grateful. Grateful for all that is good in my life. Grateful for all the pain that I have endured in my life. Grateful for the scars on bones that grief has brought. <br/><br/>For it has shown me how deeply I love. <br/><br/>Tending to grief<br/><br/>Love is dire. For there is always the threat of death imminent on the landscape. When that death grips us, we are swallowed in the quicksand of dark feelings. So much hurt. So much. To release hurt that cuts so deeply to the bone, leaves scars as markings of resistance. So I've been tending to these scars in the only way I know how. I've been speaking alive the memory of my journey through the writing of my first book. A book that has always been my first book. <br/><br/>A book of lament. <br/><br/>A book where words that wail, weep their way across the page as I embody the remembering. A visceral memory that Dr. Martin Shaw calls 'bone memory'. <br/><br/>The book title landed over the weekend as I further tended to and digested the grief that had anchored me in pain. The grief that pushed me over the 'tairseach'. Over the threshold. <br/><br/>So "A-light in the lament: Poetic flowers amidst the scars" will be coming soon. <br/><br/>The tending to these scars also brought alive a desire to help others speak alive their grief. Brought alive the desire to hold space for the remembering and honouring of a lif