This is the place

How words can help us, even when it's not in the way that we planned.

We arrived there at high tide under a sky swollen with rain. The sea seethed against the causeway.

I fumbled for the key, my fingers stiff and wet, pushed open the front door, stepped across the grubby rug. The air in the hallway was sharp with cold. A mirror on the side wall reflected me back at myself. 

I felt the house refuse me. 

This was not the place.

Even if it hadn’t been raining all day, even if the old radiators had been belching out warmth, this house didn’t want us here.

We had come to remember my Dad, eighteen months after losing him, to stay for a week and walk on the beaches that he loved, to mark what would have been his eightieth birthday, here in a place where the sea meets the sky. 

We didn’t even unpack.

I had planned to write this piece from that place. I had imagined that perhaps I could make something good, something shining and true, to honour him. When I thought about writing this piece, I saw myself in my mind’s eye dipping my hands into rock pools, scooping shining pebbles and fragments of shell, setting them out on the shingle for the sea to take. 

In this way, my words would be my offering, each word a pebble or a shell, arranged and rearranged, over and over, until they made some kind of sense. 

Sometimes, things don’t make sense. Sometimes things don’t work out as we planned. In fact, they seldom do.

This was not the place. The broken boiler and damp bed sheets left no room for comfort, or the closeness we craved. 

We decided to cut our losses, as they say. We drove back through unrelenting rain. 

This morning, my chest tight with disappointment, I opened my email to the photographs sent by a dear friend, several days ago, from the other side of the ocean. The pictures show a memorial bell, hung in ceremony for my Dad last year from the branches of a pine tree, above a sunlit pool where fish swim, in a Japanese garden. 

I have never visited this place, but I have run my fingers over the branches of the pine tree and the flicker of the fish, orange and black and silver, and the shape of the bell on my laptop screen.

It’s a full year since my Dad’s name was written on this bell by kind people he never knew, led by my friend, a friend I made many years ago through writing.

My friend is emailing to tell me that the paper bearing my Dad’s name, which hung beneath the bell, has dispersed now, dissolved by the air, but the bell is still ringing.

‘I should let you know that it’s a sacred thing to have his name dissolve completely and be taken into nature — it has no negative connotations whatsoever in Japanese culture and is considered beautiful.  Also, the bell continues to ring as the breezes rustle the tree’s branches or rock the bell back and forth.  I hope it is still there when you eventually get to come visit.  If it does ever fall, the garden staff and volunteers know to keep it for you.’ 

I think of how the wind has been ringing out my Dad’s name for all this time. 

I think of how trying to lay out a line of words to catch the shape of a feeling is like trying to catch the wind. 

I think of how my work is the work of naming things, and of helping others to find names for their feelings, and how my Dad’s name, Roger – a name he found funny and often made jokes about – is a word I hold close, even as it dissolves into air.

There is no one place to honour him. He is everywhere.

This is the place. And this and this.

This is what words can do.

If there is someone you’d like to remember and honour today, please feel free to write their name here in the comments under this post. (If you feel comfortable, please do also tell us about them.)

✨ Our first Restorative Writing Season begins 6 May 2024. I’m excited to share this eight-week syllabus with you. It takes some of the key points I’ve learned over the past twenty-five years from my own practice, my teaching and my writing work with others, and leads you through a restorative writing process.

This is a space where you can develop your creative confidence and nurture yourself and your writing.

You’ll receive:

• My framework and key resources for Restorative Writing.

• Weekly short video ‘lessons’ introducing approaches, ideas, readings and writing ‘experiments’ that will help you to find a restorative writing practice that works for you.

• Three Writing Together live sessions on Zoom where we’ll share reflections – and some writing if you choose – but where there’s no pressure to share anything at all ‘out loud’.

• A private online community where we can share our written reflections and support one another throughout the eight weeks.

As a paid subscriber you’ll also get access to my entire archive of Restorative Writing posts and resources and my short course, Creative Rest.

If you are grieving, if you are heartbroken, if you are uncertain or afraid, if you are worn out and weary, stuck or cynical or numb, please join us. If you are feeling adventurous and afraid, yearning and overwhelmed, hopeful and devastated and confused, welcome.

You can read more about Restorative Writing here:
https://sophienicholls.substack.com/p/restorative-writing

If you subscribe now, you can also join our next Writing Together live session.

❤️ WRITING TOGETHER: Wednesday 10 April ❤️

WRITING TOGETHER - DOING THE ACTUAL WRITING WITH KINDNESS AND SELF-COMPASSION
6.30pm - 8pm (UK time)
Productivity tools and systems can so often make us feel less than, not enough, or just plain rubbish. Let’s be kind to ourselves and one another. In this workshop, we’ll apply some very simple ideas and techniques for ACTUALLY DOING writing and we’ll spend a full hour working on our individual writing together, with some optional space for reflection at the end. Bring along a project that you’ve been feeling stuck with or something that you’d like to make a start on or tend to with kindness.

When you join us for a Writing Together paid subscriber session, you’ll find a gentle and restorative writing space where you’ll receive support and inspiration for your writing and reflection. Camera on or off, we’ll write together in response to writing rituals, suggestions and prompts and then have an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve written and the process. The first part of the workshop is recorded for everyone so that you can catch up later if you can’t join us in ‘real time’. The second reflective part of the workshop is never recorded, in order to honour confidentiality.

❤️ Dear writing friends, thank you for receiving my words and giving them space and time in your day. I never take this for granted. Your support helps me to keep making and remaking this special place with you all.

With love,
Sophie x