goodbye 2020

I love how the sun and camera lens create red ovals within this image. One is inviting us to walk the path into it... or will Glinda The Good Witch step from the bubble? We could all use some glittering pink dress Glinda energy.

Usually at Winter Solstice I take great pleasure in making a walking ritual, where I think about all I'd like to shake off and leave behind and all I intent to nourish and invite in for the coming year. This Solstice if felt right not to ask for anything, to go with the flow into 2021 and embrace whatever comes along.

Last year I wrote down all that I wished to leave behind on small strips of paper, burning one by one and letting them go. I also wrote down all I wished to invite in and walked to a beloved sycamore tree, reading each word out loud before tightly folding each strip of paper and hiding them within a nook at the base of the sycamore. My intentions were for a stable home, a regular income and a rescue dog (who's name will be Mote). The global pandemic put a hold on these things, but they will come... I'm trying to count my many blessings at the close of a year that has been such a spiritual and mental test.

I'm hopeful for 2021 and send my best wishes to all 💖 

Lets keep looking out for each other 💖 

Glinda, are you there?

3rd birthday

My beautiful wee godson will be 3 on the 20th June. THREE. He is a blessing and I'm so glad to know him and his parents. I made him some dragon wings and will be sending these next week along with The Lost Words book. Magic!

eleanor

In May 2019 a dear friend died of ovarian cancer. As the first anniversary approached I saw a call on Facebook to make an offering or gesture by water at 11am on the date of her death. 

I got to the river in good time and gathered a handful of wild garlic, cow parsley and jack by the hedge, twisting and weaving the stems into a circle. Hunkered down in my chosen spot I observed sunlight reflected from the waters surface flickering upon the pale undersides of overhanging leaves and dippers dart from bank to bank, weaving invisible threads of flight. At 11am I placed my offering into the river and watching it float away, felt connected to others making their gestures in still and following waters and seas. A small thing but one that bought Eleanore and her loved ones into my thoughts these past few weeks.         

1916

My dad was born on the 11th of March 1916. To commemorate this I traveled to Scotland, walked to the cottage he was born in and planted daffodils by the front door. Soft rain fell, garden birds chirruped in the hedgerows and squawked my approach from the treetops. Snowdrops in their prime lit the way, turning my thoughts towards hope and renewal. Standing in the garden of the derelict cottage I felt very at home, though my father left this home in his youth the place echoed him. A shed full of rusting nails, bare gnarly apple trees, a slab path running the length of the cottage. HE was palpable.

I knocked on the door and considered time, of my grandmother Alexina birthing her last born on this day 100 years before, of me peering in the windows, haunting ghosts. Crouching down to dig I found rich dark soil, the sword like spikes of the daffodils pleasingly green against this earth. I left a note written in green ink, knowing it would wash away as rain pattered down, spreading, erasing my heartfelt words. I think of these daffodils now, hoping they bloom brightly, a token of life lived now as I acknowledge my father, my roots.

 Elgin

 Plant associated with Clan Logan - Furze (Gorse)

 Road to Easter Calcots

 Joynters Cottages

 Falkland Islands penny

 Haunting the long dead and gone...

 Geese

Memorial

dad

A days walking ritual from Elgin to Lossiemouth and back in forgiveness and in honour of my father Robert Logan.