Crossing thresholds with the support of small, cherished, communities
and coming through for ourselves
This is a paid post for my (oh-so-modern) patrons (can I call you that?!) but I have included a paragraph or two to help you get a feel for whether you would like to join my community (£4 month or £40 year) and hopefully still get some value for not hitting delete. I write weekly and cover writing guidance, reflective personal essays on creativity, prose sketchbook pieces and other miscellaneous fragments from my life as a therapist alongside rock, including runic readings, travel dispatches and brief contemplations. There is a large back-catalogue. I am inordinately grateful for your eyes, your attentiveness, and your support. If you don’t want to subscribe, but would like to support my writing please consider reading or gifting one of my books: Grounded (2021) and Weathering (2024). For the latter, there is a free-for-everyone slow read here. You can also leave a kind review.
Latest free post: A rune reading for solstice
Booking now: Natural Forms and Narrative Journeys for non-fiction writers (Online Workshop, 25th July 2025) - tired already of AI its formulaic styles of writing? Great, come to this workshop and explore natural forms of storytelling that might just suit you better, and help you keep your voice, while all around you people are losing theirs…
Look for the eyes that love you when you make your work. This, a paraphrase of my own Note to creatives this week on Substack. Remembering there are more important and valuable things than our ideas, feels necessary for all sorts of reasons. The perspective-altering fact that most of us are loved by someone, and just how important this love is however it comes, is not insignificant when we feel like the world (or the crowd) doesn’t see us clearly as we want to be seen. I could just as easily have said don’t do your work for the approval of others, but despite its essential truth, it lacks something important too: it misses out the entirely human need to be recognised in our personhood and self-expression by trusted, loving others.
It is entirely normal that we can’t hold ourselves in our own esteem as a permanent state of being. Just as children need the loving gaze of a guardian, so does that child now an adult, still on occasion, need to be held in the gaze of a supportive friend, partner, mentor and so forth. Looking for the right eyes, the good eyes, releases us from seeking something impossible from a world far too big to love us as uniquely as we need, and places us back in the eyeline of who and what is perfectly capable of nurturing us. A few good people, an adoring animal, a patch of land. We used to call this local community. The good news is that technology gives us even more possibilities for nurturing this micro-community model, we’re just more accustomed to wanting huge anonymous numbers at this point. When we don’t get that we feel like technology is failing us, as perhaps we feel failed by people around us when we were young, and we overlook what is still possible; the deeply redemptive power of being cherished by a few, who by reciprocal turns we may then have space to cherish right back.
