This Autumn I’ve embarked on training as an ecotherapist with Natural Academy, having completed the Foundation Year in the Summer. It’s an applied ecopsychology model and deeply resonates with the place I find myself in here in the second part of my life, wanting to move back towards or reconnect with the deep nature-connectedness of my childhood in New Zealand where I lived by and with the sea.

It also feels as if I’m taking the final steps towards the vision of a professional future I had during the Pandemic when I envisioned my therapeutic practice as a sturdy and practical wooden stool with three legs: writing, talking and nature. I’m dreaming that stool into being and it feels like I’m on the cusp of something new in my life. It’s a place of uncertainty and mystery still, which doesn’t always feel comfortable, because I don’t quite know where it will lead but some days I enjoy that challenge to live in the reality of life where all things are uncertain really.

I wrote a poem on the last weekend I attended which I’m sharing here with you on the eve of my next training weekend: nervous, excited and sitting with the unknown. For context, Natural Academy define ecopsychology by drawing on the roots or etymology of the component parts of the word as the study or a conversation of (ology) the dwelling place (eco – oikos) of the soul (psyche). So it really lends itself to the mythopoetic register from which I respond in this poem,

a conversation in the dwelling place of Soul

I go out to sit on the land in a place called Sky View

Bramble speaks to me there, bold and untameable

a force of Life, a Lifeforce

she speaks and I listen

she shows me what it is to just keep going forth

keep going in sunshine and rain

keep going even on Soil which is degraded and weeping

keep going and not minding if this is the Epoch of Trauma

if this is some kind of ending

she just keeps the faith

she minds the beginning

she just keeps re-growing, again and again

I sit with Bramble

I curl up in the protective hollow of her

I am a wounded animal

safely held by thorns and green leaf

we are real and we are whole, Bramble and me

she tells me she will take over this piece of earth

she will heal it

and I keep faith with her here in this place

the dwelling place of Soul

a woman made of Oak speaks to me too

here in Sky View

on this open hillside where I go to weep

and beneath her the Stinging Nettles

raise their sweet, sharp voices to sing together

for what has been lost in me

they have compassion, these Beings

they are knowing

they sing into the four windows of my Soul

sing into windows where only I listen

Nettle, Oak and Bramble

sound out their notes together

a heartfelt song I cannot quite understand

then Nettle stings me to wake me up

and I laugh with her

I feel the depths of the joy in this resourceful place

I hear the ancient archetypes: the Child, the Muse, the Trickster

they all call out to the Wild Indigenous One

they call out to her to come home

call out to her from the depths of Love that is held dear

by all in this dwelling place

listen, can you hear them call out?

can you hear their song?

can you hear how they call me to allow all parts of myself to come home?

can you hear how they call out to you too?

Bramble, Oak and Nettle long to be embodied in us

we are whole when we are rooted like that

when we live in the Family of Things

with Bramble

with Rock

with Rook and Crow

with Moss

with Nettle

with Oak

with Spindle

with Tiny Wren

with Red Berries

with Green Leaf

with Cliff Face

with Sand Path

with the Dark and Mysterious Night

with the Unknowable

with Sunshine in the Morning

we are not Self Apart

we are Whole when we live in the Family of Things

we are the Wild Indigenous Ones

the Nurturing and Generative Adults

I draw it on paper with my blood:

I remember I am one who sat beneath the Tree and watched

all night

I belong to the Family of Things

I laugh with Dewdrops

I will be mad and alive in the morning when it comes

I am the one who listens to Bramble’s everlasting song

and sits beneath Oak

in Her ancient presence

I am mad, wild and alive