Rose moon over the Solstice Forest
The grace to create new stories because we are each others' destiny
Hello friends, familiar and new, and welcome to a house in a forest in France. I’m Jan and I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. Let’s create a little alchemy together.
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How do we stay supple of soul in a world so full of suffering?
How do we resist despair to insist on lingering over the generosity of this earth?
How do we live for relationship in a world of slick content and constant consumerism?
There are no easy answers. Living with the questions is a large part of the response, but there are also tools of hope and transformation — story, the more than human world, gathering in community, mourning with those who mourn, rejoicing with those who rejoice.
This Summer Solstice I've been asking these questions in relation to the novel I've just launched, a novel I wrote as a way of exploring and imagining a story of love and resilience in a challenging world.
Around every 20 years June's full moon coincides with the Summer Solstice. This year is one of those year's— the huge June full moon, low to the horizon, reflecting a pinkish-orange light as it rises as the sun sets, mirroring our star's light into the night. It's names are delicious, warm as summer — strawberry moon, rose moon, horse moon, flower moon, mead moon, hot moon..
The longest day took on a freight of tears for us in our first midsummer in the forest with the passing of A's dad during a time when travel was still restricted due to Covid, so we didn't get to say goodbye in person.
But grief and joy so often mingle across years and this year I was launching my novel, smiling at grief in a house in a forest where life grows, around the Solstice. On the 20th, the moon bright as the days ended, the first in-person reading I've done since February 2020, just before the first lockdown in the UK. And on the 22nd, the moon still bright enough for the owls in the garden to be jubilant — the females kew-wick finished with the male's long hooo — the Zoom luanch for friends and family around the world.
The novel is set at Summer Solstice 2065, and in that year the moon will be full on June 18th, just before Viola and her community keep the feast. They too bring their grief for those they have lost as well as their gratitude for the lives they have woven together and hope for an uncertain future. It was ever thus and will be — this weaving of our threads of sorrow and gladness, haunting and wonder.
The human residents of small hamlet in the Huelgoat forest arrive with their stories while the forest with all its more than human life tells its own tale of trauma and healing, mycelia and flourishing. We are in this together. In a world of so much othering and isolation, we need connection, we need relationships — with plants, with non-human animals, with other humans, with our own bodies and the stuff of life...
We are intimately related to everything and unless we wake up to this, as individual writers and as a species, we will run out of a planet on which to live and think and love and write.
Alan Lightman, in Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, puts it like this:
The material of the doomed stars and the material of my doomed body are actually the same material. Literally the same atoms; It is astonishing but true that if I could attach a small tag to each of the atoms of my body and travel with them backward in time, I would find that those atoms originated in particular stars in the sky. Those exact atoms.
And Mary Oliver says the same thing, but pushes further in terms of the consequences:
... I would say that there are thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and out chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are family, and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list ... — we are at risk together or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each others' destiny.
We are each other's destiny. Sit with that for a while. It's at the heart of the novel I was so thrilled to launch this last week. It's at the heart of our survival as a species enmeshed with all of life.
What are your griefs this midsummer?
What are your joys?
What do you hope?
And how do you embody the ways in which we are each others' destiny — in your writing and in your life?
For me, it begins with every walk in the forest, with how the plants speak to me of transformation and a different story. And I can only hear those voices if I am listening with every sense, if I am allowing those senses to soften into a quality of attention that infuses every atom of me that was once a doomed star.
It's in how I thread sorrow and savouring the joys into the rituals of each day. It's how I live in the questions at the edge of my heart and write what flows from them. By paying attention.
When I was writing the novel the human story flowed out of me. I'd spent a lot of time walking the same small area of forest before going to Budapest for a writing break. I had no idea what story would emerge. The seed was a single character—Viola, a herbalist in this forest that I'd been breathing in for the last year. From this seed, the human story unfolded with more ease than I've ever known in writing. But I also felt the forest tugging me to go back, listen more, soften more, be more permeable, more gracious.
In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil writes about how it’s attention, not trying to bend the world to our will that is transformative.
The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them… Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse? Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles which have nothing to do with the matter. What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem. Attention is something quite different.
Pride is a tightening up of this kind. There is a lack of grace (we can give the word its double meaning here) in the proud man. It is the result of a mistake.
We don't change the world by constriction and force, but by softening and expanding our senses, by attention.
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
This is alchemy.
There are terrible, unspeakable things happening in this world. To stay supple of soul we have to resist and rest, gather and support. We have to find moments under a rose moon in a forest, or whatever place brings us solace and expansion, and listen—with an attention that is pure grace. And then we will tell new stories of how we are each others' destiny.
It has been such a pleasure and privilege to launch this book that came from a forest of voices here in the place it is set. It's a tiny witness to our relatedness to all life. A handprint in the dark cave of a fragile world, but it's there.
This Summer Solstice season I wish you expansiveness and openness, I wish you the grace to listen with every cell to our more than human kith and our human kin as an act of prayer for the earth and all her creatures.
Gather Listen Tender
Join me for a Lammas workshop as we explore how to attend with all our senses open, how we relate to what is other with tender attention.
We will write from heart and from the earth as we gather in community.
Lammas is the time of early harvest, a time of gathering and offering.
Let’s gather,listen and tender and create a little alchemy together.
The workshop will be on Thursday August 1 at 1pm BST (for other time zones see Time Buddy).
The investment is £14 or become a paid annual subscriber with 30% discount and join this and other occasional workshops free (I’ll send the link to paid subscribers before the event)
Watch the launch of smiling at grief in a house in a forest where life grows
If you’d like to watch a recording of the online launch you’ll find a discount code for 20% off the book valid to the end of July.
Jan this is all so profoundly well written.. especially here « For me, it begins with every walk in the forest, with how the plants speak to me of transformation and a different story »
Which for me is a part of my every day… perhaps because it is the only moment in the day I have absolute solitude, it has become almost like prayer…
Huge congratulations on publishing your book and belated (I’m so behind with reading) solstice wishes to you in you beautiful forest - xx
Softening, opening, listening -- thanks for these great thoughts, Jan, and congratulations on your book.