Hello folks,
It’s been a while hasn’t it. Before I get started I just want to thank all my subscribers, for sticking around & supporting me during this period of gestation. It’s been much appreciated & the time away has given space for the sediments to settle & new life to emerge.
Since November I have been considering the deletion of my Substack. I felt the inspiration to write for ‘In Search of Roots’ waning, I was losing interest. I initially thought that perhaps this was due to being immersed in the writing of my first novel. It wasn’t. After a few months of sitting with this, I came to see that my lack of inspiration had more to do with the title of this project. My lack of inspiration spoke more to the internal adaptations that have been taking place since I started this project in February 2023.
My intentions for starting this project were to archive thoughts & encounters. Plants & recipes. Art & poetry. The project was a means of holding the fragments of my experience through Place so, I could reflect & look back upon the constellations of my thinking month to month. The project was also a means of building my self-esteem & confidence. I have written all my life. From the age of 7 I have kept diaries & journals. I have performed. I’ve had poems published here & there. But, writing properly, writing in the way I wanted to write, that terrified me. To fail at the thing I had always dreamed of was too great a risk. Better to keep it as a dream. Afterall, what I had to say wasn’t good enough. Would never be of interest.
What has emerged over the last 12 months has been beautiful. Nearly 300 of you, most of whom I do not know have subscribed to this project. Some of you pay to read my words. Send me encouraging & heart-warming messages to continue. This has been a wellspring of joy & gratitude. This project & your support has helped me nurture a self-belief I’ve never had. Without that & without your encouragement, I wouldn’t now be writing a novel. I wouldn’t have booked myself onto an Arvon retreat. I would never have met the community of writers I always hoped for, who encourage & uphold one another. I would never have met
, whose novel Thin Places, inspired me & offered the glimmers of hope I most needed. Hope that whispered that if she could, I could too. I wouldn’t now have her as my mentor, holding my hand through the process of writing & publishing for the novel, I never believed I ever could write.When I look back today, I see that each of the essays, poems, plants, paintings & songs reflect elements of the places & people I visited last year. They reflect the textures & colours & smells & tones of the beings that touched me, that sunk beneath the supple skin & into ideas. Nonetheless, beneath the logic & rationale of archiving Life. I wanted ‘In Search of Roots’ to be an exploration, an inquiry as to whether I could feel rooted, I wanted ‘In Search of Roots’ to be the place I documented that exploration.
It is the latter which brings forth the germination of a new project. I’m stood atop different ground now. I no longer feel that I am searching. This is not an insubstantial moment. Continuing under the premise of searching does something to the creature of me. Searching is a word that speaks to lostness. This generates a dissonance within me and where I find myself today. I no longer feel lost. It reminds me of Ben Okri in ‘Astonishing the Gods’:
“You are searching for something you have already found, such are the reasons for unhappiness”.
To continue under the banner of a quest surely would lead to the loss of all I have gathered, could lead to an amnesic haze of distraction that would disturb the soil of my writing & the purpose of such a task.
Things here are changing. As I said they would this time last year, though I thought for very different reasons. My hopes for the new phase of this project aren’t too dissimilar to ‘In Search of Roots’. This will be a transcontextual space where I will share, plants, recipes, poems, songs, stories & essays. However, the focus of my essays will be somewhat different I suspect. Such is the nature of internal shifts; I can feel they are there, rumbling beneath the surface but I can’t yet see the physical manifestations of new rhythms.
What I can say is that I’ll be speaking more about my work; teaching ancestral skills/complexity/systems thinking through the disciplines of wild pigment/paint making, mark-making, oral storytelling, herbalism, singing, ceremony, reciprocal foraging, creative writing, meditation & other fibres of living. I teach this curriculum in Rape Crisis Centres, Recovery Colleges & Charities with folks who are marginalised & have been brutally severed from Place. Place as body. Place as Land.
I want the next phase of this project to be fractal. Mycorrhizal. I want to archive some of what I’m observing in my teaching. I’d like to write more about the development of my pedagogical theory/practice ‘Ecologies of Place’. I’d like to write more about this very new experience of being in the soil, seed & root; having finally found the places, both internal & external & the people & practices that root me, have rooted me back into Earth. I’d like to write more about my relationship with my practices. I’d like to write more about the ecology of oppression & how contemporary ecological perspectives on the polycrisis seemingly overlook the contexts within marginalised communities. I’d like to write about Joy. Recovery. Plant Medicine & what it has to teach us. Singing. Storytelling. And, I’m certain there will be other things but for now that’s what’s brewing.
I’ll be changing my logo & other bits & pieces that I’ve mentioned above in the coming weeks.
Thank you everyone for supporting me until this point.
Imbolc blessings,
Hannah-may