Where does your heart rest?

Finding the pauses to nurture the journey in a challenging world

Primel-Tregastel headland

Hello friends, familiar and new, and welcome to a house in a hamlet in a forest in Brittany. 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. My Sunday posts are always free and you are so welcome here. Let’s create a little alchemy together.

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Last month I travelled to the coast with Adam, to a place where the headland is surrounded by sea and the wind keens always. Behind a bank hunching its back to the ocean, a swathe of wood violets, gorse — abundant and golden — speckled with sea campion, white stars against green grasses, blackthorn — fierce and exquisite — people the heath, guard the stony paths, and the sea — turquoise and peridot, scintillates to the sun’s pulse and the moon’s pull, breaks in foam and spume — liquid towers white against ochre granite. April, the sky a wash of blues — hot cyan to linen smoke, the bay in the distance a dust-blue shadow. Further out, on this needle of land, ocean swells to the thrill of wind around a crest of gale-sculpted rocks, and a water pipit hymns the day with a fast fall of sweetness, insistent as summer cicadas.

Midweek, Adam drove to Plougasnou to buy coffee and bread at a supermarket on a new-build trading estate he described as having ‘a low ontological quotient’. How place infiltrates us. Forest and coast, a spit of Celtic earth that sings of a home I might never have known — the antipode of that estate.

I went to the coast to rest and write.

The first three months of the year had been intense work, pushing myself harder each day. And this month we're on tour for Cinnamon Press's 20th anniversary. This is voluntary work, but no less intense for that — moving between venues across the UK for readings to celebrate the output of wonderful writing from a diverse group of writers across two decades. It's wonderful and exhausting.

I’m well-versed in driving myself. When I first met A, a wonderful friend laughed and said, ‘Heaven help him, he has no idea his life is about to go a million miles an hour.’ I’ve been busy since I was three-years-old. Juggling and logistics are my super-power and my curse.

I came to the forest almost five years ago to change the balance, shift the pace. I imagined the autoimmune diagnosis would focus this intent, but even on sabbatical last autumn, I found work to do, measuring myself against some illusory standard of usefulness.

So many of us do this, don’t we?

Tend to others, offer solace, weave spaces of rest and restoration while driving ourselves onwards, merciless and judgemental in ways we would never be towards loved ones, friends… anyone.

At breakfast on one of the mornings by the coast, I said to Adam, ‘We’ve been here four days and I’ve only read and reviewed two poetry collections.’

But despite this, or perhaps because Adam gives no credence to my ‘I’ve only done…’ in those few days —

oh, I slept, well and deeply, allowing myself to drowse and daydream into long, lazy mornings.

I walked along the wide beach and out to the headland, delighting in the flowers singing Spring awake —

seapink thrift
fat daisies
primrose
valerian
rosemary, fragrant and purple
blackthorn
sea campion
dandelion
violet
pink sorell
gorse
three-cornered leek
lesser celandine
greater periwinkle
common bluebell
scurvygrass
marsh stitchwort

and back at the cottage garden, a single calla lily.

I read essays and articles, poetry and and an illustrated novella.

I watched films with Adam in the evenings — Georgia O’Keeffe and a heart-wrenching series about Zelda Fitzgerald’s early years of marriage to Scott.

I lingered with Adam over long dinners, talking books and surrealism, jazz and the songs of birds.

I worked on the third draft of a big project — and, thanks to a conversation with the inimitable Laurie Stone, I began falling a little in love with the person writing it — over-busy, restless, with a tendency to see the red flags and jump in anyway.

How many of us need to fall a little in love too with the self that steps back from burnout and frazzle? The one who, mistletoe-like, doesn’t touch ground, is away with the stars and owls, able to sometimes step away from the dramas of a cacophonous world or the chorus of ‘musts’ and ‘shoulds’ into a place of deep flow, where we refuse to see the world as mundane, a space

— beyond the surfaces of things, attentive to every stem and leaf, to the forest
— deep in the life of dreams and rest
— sensitive to a world beyond noise and clamour, senses bright and open
— where language and hierarchies dissolve in the face of encounters so ephemeral that all that remains is feeling and image
— of remembrance of what it is to be connected to all life

A place that delivers us back to daily life thrilled, alive…

At the end of this tour in the UK, we will pause for a few days in a friend's converted barn on her organic farm in Cornwall before getting on the ferry. It's one of the places where my heart rests, a place that Adam might describe as having 'a high ontological quotient'... a place where trance is more powerful than busyness and all the measurements we make of ourselves.

In this challenging, turbulent, beautiful world, all of us need to find and value the sanctuaries where our hearts truly rest.

There is no extraordinary wisdom in this, only a chain of cusp moments that have brought me to a willingness to take the time to pause so that I can grapple with the same questions so many of us face in this aching world.

That’s also what I’m doing here each week on Substack. I have some ways with words and a growing understanding of the profound healing offered by plants. I have, as all of us do, a life that has yielded some uncommon moments and an intuition that whatever I offer must be a love letter to the terrifying, awe-inspiring journey of this messy life that we have only once and long to craft creatively.

Shall we see where it might lead us together?

My work here on Substack (and with a small group of writers and those on transformative paths with herbs) is how my living is supported.

My Sunday newsletters will always be free, but if you can help me to keep doing this work, in return for your turst and investment (£40 a year -- just 0.77p per week), ‘Alchemical wonderings’ provides a space for a community exploring creative and transformational journeys because our world needs a different story.

I gather online with paid subscribers monthly to write calmly by candlelight (nurtured by prompts and nourishment from a herbal ally) and also at the Celtic lunar festivals for regular writing workshops.

If you are a writer or creative —

If you are someone who cares about connection — to others,human and non-human, and to the earth —

If you value compassion, generosity and paying deep attention —

If you want a life that includes passion & joy without turning away from all that is hurting, lost and broken in our fragile, beautiful world —

this is a space for you.

Over the last 20 years I’ve worked with 100s of writers as an editor as well as writing and publishing my own novels, poetry collections and non-fiction works. I’ve taught writing courses in the UK, Europe and globally, with writers from beginners to university professors. I host a writing community and mentor memoirists, fiction writers and poets, and delight in seeing their manuscripts become gorgeous books — many of them prize-winning. I'm a herbal practitioner and work with individuals as well as teaching herbal courses based around wellness and finding delight in this embodied life.

Above all, I want to explore with others how to craft life creatively and live a small life well.

Let's create a little alchemy together.