The page is waiting for you

and every day is a new invitation

✨Dates to note! ✨

✎ Monday 6 May:
Launch of Season 1 - Access to your Restorative Writing Toolkit and Class 1

✎ Friday 10 May: Class 2

🌸 Saturday 11 May 4-5pm (British Summer Time):
Writing Together - live on Zoom

Dear writing friends,

When I sat down to write today, I didn’t know what would spill into the holding spaces of my spiral.

Yesterday, I drew some coloured spirals in my notebook, ready to fill with words. The process of making them with these vivid markers was calming in itself.

But today, when I sat at my desk, my feelings didn’t emerge in smooth shapes. What I felt was sharp and jagged and loud and despairing, as well as full of hope.

When I share pictures of my spiral-writing practice, people often tell me, very generously, that my handwriting is lovely or that they can’t make their spirals look like mine; so I wanted to share this morning’s page with you so that you can see the smudgy, agitated shape of my writing today, the words moving faster than my pen.

I’m always amazed when people tell me that they have read – or tried to read– the words on my spirals. (I think I imagined that this would be impossible, requiring some particularly neck-cricking acrobatics.) I very rarely read them back to myself. Sometimes, a phrase or sentence will appear and find its way into my crafted writing. Most of the time, the value is in the process, in getting the feelings ‘out there’ or letting my attention float above the page, noticing my breath, the movement of my fingers, the pressure of the pen.

It’s not about making beautiful shapes – although they are beautiful, even in smudgy despair or flattened sorrow or scribbled impatience or spikey rage.

It’s mostly about writingandbreathing, writing-as-breathing-sensing-noticing.

Each day, the page offers me this new invitation: to feel my way into my body, to notice what I find there, to let words attach themselves to the sensations.

There is always a new invitation.

As Jane Hirshfield writes, in ‘Tree’, one of my favourite poems:

’Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.   
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.’

When you’re ready – and you’ll know when the time feels right – the page is waiting for you. This wonderful community is waiting to welcome you.

Restorative Writing: Season 1 begins this Monday 6 May 2024!
Receive beautiful prompts, designed to help you to express and find form for your feelings, experiment with writing in different ways and gain new inspiration. You can work through the Season (eight weeks) on your own and at your own pace or you can join us in the comments, threads and the live Writing Together sessions on Zoom. But there is absolutely no expectation that you join us or share anything. You can do this in the way that feels right for you.

All the details are below.

With love,
Sophie x

🗓
Upcoming timetable for Restorative Writing Season 1: Core Practices
Mark your calendars!

✎ Monday 6 May:
Launch of Season 1 - Access to your Restorative Writing Toolkit and Class 1

✎ Friday 10 May: Class 2

🌸 Saturday 11 May 4-5pm (UK summertime):
Writing Together - live on Zoom

✎ Friday 17 May: Class 2

🌼 Wednesday 22 May 7-8pm (UK Summertime):
Writing Together - live on Zoom

✎ Friday 24 May: Class 3
✎ Friday 31 May: Class 4
✎ Friday 7 June: Class 5

🌸 Sunday 9 June: 4-5pm Writing Together - live on Zoom

✎ Friday 14 June: Class 6

☀️ Sat 22 June 4-5pm: Celebratory creative solstice sharing of writing and/or reflection. No requirement to read your own work out loud. Come and celebrate this community and what you’ve achieved.