Opening the ground

a love letter to changing places and spaces

If you are new to my work, start here. If you have found me through my books Grounded or Weathering, then you might be interested in our community slow read that has just finished, but is always available on my Substack homepage. This is a free post for everyone, though most are for my paid supporters (£4 month/£40 year). I write weekly and cover writing guidance, reflective personal essays on creativity, prose sketchbook pieces and other miscellaneous fragments from my life alongside rock. I am inordinately grateful for your eyes, your attentiveness, and your support.

It feels like a betrayal, I say to my supervisor, as I feel a lump rise in my throat, I was there for years. It holds my clients stories. It holds my own. Have I bailed? Was I right to do this?

There are no easy answers, and I’m not seeking a rescue. I’m sat on the floor with my eyes closed and my arms open, letting myself feel the shifting proximity and distance of my old therapy space and my new one. The magnetism of one, the grief associated with the other. I want to pull back, but she encourages me to stay with the feeling. To allow myself to feel the guilt of what it’s like to leave a place I can’t fix. And how that triggers the pain of how it is not to be able to help people in crisis. To connect too with the guilt I carry for our species as many of us do. The guilt that it is healthy to feel and hold as an adult. I know I can hold it, so I do.

The old site is where I have always practiced. On it, with it, from it, I have written two books. I have facilitated many hundreds of hours of therapy. We have seen a pandemic. I have offered a fair amount of training and workshops. It was forested, then it wasn’t, and then – unexpectedly – it was again. I arrived one day and the diggers were in. A road built through. And, oh, the noise. I didn’t let myself grieve, I simply responded. I left.

It took me over a year to start to name the hurt; or to even fully recognise it. I have sat in supervision for a long time and looked at everything else but that. In that time too, Weathering was published which represented another sort of culmination. A wild trajectory. A lot of hard work in all of it. Where do I go from here? Was it all coming to an end? Have I been given too much too soon?

It is easier to talk about now, because it was not the end. I just needed time. And rest (a season or two in comfort). And reorientation. I needed to find my feet in my outdoor practice again and to work out what sort of practitioner I am now nearly a decade in to this work. I see a lot of therapists move straight from core training to supervision and wonder how they manage it. What do they know yet of what it is to have your first marriage with therapy, to fall into burn-out or out of love, and to then go through the fire of building it all again from the ground up, to forge a stronger, second marriage to this beautiful, heavy, frustrating and wonderful work? Give me a supervisor who has struggled to hold it, collapsed under the weight, questioned what it’s all about, and then come back not with resentment but joy, and clarity. Give me a therapist who has done the same.

What needs to be done? My supervisor asks me with a look that says all but tells me nothing. I love her capacity. I need to say goodbye, I reply, looking down at my hands. I need to say I’m sorry, and that I’ll never forget. I need to always go back even if it’s just me and the land. I need to bring something back into my new space.

At first I think I mean a gnarled length of moorland heather, but what I also mean is the recognition that this spot made me the therapist I am; that it is an indelible part of the ever-deepening and lengthening lineage in my work. Feeling into the distance and proximity of my therapy spaces now, and having named my guilt and betrayal, the feeling morphs. I realise I am a body between two places – a thread that connects behind and ahead. I have always been interstitial. A node between. A gap species. This is OK. I can hold this tension too. In geographic terms my new site is barely a couple of hills away from my old site.

There will be buzzards who do not notice this distance. When the swallows fly over they will pass overhead and this will be nothing compared to the distance they have already flown. As I wrote in my most recent zine, An Innate Waveform, there is a spatiality to the heart-sound that cannot be easily understood. All I know is that in the chambers of our most intimate dwellings there is no word for far.

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My new therapy space is a tent in the corner of a field on a regenerative farm run by a small group of quiet, fantastic women. Across the way a goshawk patrols. A small herd of heritage cows who are opening the land with hoof and tooth, sometimes pass the door as their grazing is rotated. In the next field, abundant thistle brings the goldfinch through. It has taken several years to get here, not least because I have been figuring out what I need to hold a practice today, in this present, that feels the most me. Because in this work you do need to be who you are. I thought, I knew and then I didn’t. I wobbled. I went back to the drawing board. I cried for all that was being lost. Then I decided.

Working from a tent that can be mobile and seasonal feels like the best solution for a landscape and practitioner in constant evolution. It feels like the best shelter for a person who is happiest out in the mountains under the stars. It feels like just the right level of permeability without being stifling or exposed. It feels like enough space to move and explore, while also being cosy and attentive. We can go out, we can go in.

The central pole anchors me to the centrality of nature-based practice in my life. It holds me in place and is my pole of rotation, but it also allows me to offer a more contained and encompassing space with my therapy clients. It enables us to sit on the floor, to move and dance, to lie down, to explore sound. To grieve, to hold, to witness. It will, I hope, slow us down. As I have been opening the space this week, I have noticed how precious and welcome it is just to sit and listen without interruption. I have listened to the birds, and the wind through the grass pouring into the mesh side panels, and struck the brass of my singing bowl. I have been convinced that there is no more beautiful, emptying, refilling sound than this. What can’t be healed through listening first?

The tent is a dreaming space. By which I mean a place to tend the dreams that come to us in sleep. It is a place to be curious about what the earth is dreaming through us, and what we are being called towards. In the tent, it is possible for six people to sit and write, or daydream, or move, or listen. The circle is an infinite shape: the tent will become what it needs to be. Maybe not just this summer, or this year, but in the next, and the one after. It is not a place to close off-from the world, but to find a way to re-enter it. To tend to the urgency in our lives, and our place in the world.

It is also then, simply, a place to feel into what hurts. The therapeutic invitation is the same as it has always been. We meet, we listen, we do the deep work. In this respect, nothing changes. What can we understand about this anxiety? What is numb in this depression? What has happened to you, I am listening. What has happened to the world, we are listening. What is new is a ‘home fire’ to orient ourselves around. A place to take off our shoes. Maybe a place to draw, or write, or read a poem. A place where regeneration is in the air and atmosphere, opening us like the ground, to new possibilities.

Still waiting for the ground-level seating. And the rain.

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If you are interested in beginning therapy, dream tending or mentoring outside in North Derbyshire, then you are welcome to drop me an email or find more information on my website. I offer outside-only as well as hybrid formats (part outdoors, part online) for those who are able to manage occasional travel. For future small group, in-person workshops please subscribe to my Substack or keep an eye on my website to hear first.

NEXT Substack: I’ve decided to share something a bit different for my paid supporters. A short story from my prose sketchbook. You will be my first eyes. I put my trust in you…be back soon!

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