Welcome To The Saltmarsh

Once upon a time I worked as a traditional therapist: charting individual mental health in a room with two chairs and a box of tissues (and, most likely, a generic image of beach pebbles). This way of working remains necessary and important for a great many people and situations (though perhaps without the pebbles).

But perhaps, like me, you’ve navigated right to the edge of those maps and something feels missing. Perhaps, like me, you sense that some of those maps may no longer fully serve their purpose. Perhaps, like me, you feel the feather-ruffling call of waters more mysterious, timeless — a little more daunting, yes — and perhaps even wondrous.

I am convinced that within each of our stories is a sacred gift; inviting us onto a pilgrimage to find it — a journey that often takes us beyond the periphery of our carefully drawn maps, and into the restorative saltmarsh of our wounds. And while I’ve been privileged to help guide many others in that journey, it’s through my own peregrination that I’ve witnessed this broken starlight shine most brazenly. My own trauma history, and related struggles with OCD, train my trickster medicine, inspire my fellowship with other peregrini, and ask me to testify to the wonder found even in our darkest tales.

The world’s greatest itinerant storyteller regularly reminds me to love God and love my neighbour. This is the true north that guides my compass.

In these night times, I feel most at home in the reedy waters between mythology, psychology and theology; gazing at the misty horizon where the secular and sacred meet.

I’m particularly inspired by these constellations:

Reimagining Care: trauma wise to its own medicine; calling time on capitalist and colonialist definitions of wellbeing; personal testimony to the limitations of professional beliefs; communal tending of grief, wonder and imagination; soul as a story beyond rational minds, lived in relationship with other humans, place and the wild, and forever restored in the divine.

Rewilding Christianity: living scripture; church hurt daring prodigal return; practical, embodied theology; new rituals and liturgy; devotional longing; the page turn between heresy and holy; reclaiming the Sabbath; the still utterly radical Jesus and his Christ gift.

Remembering Community: letting go the weight of familial and societal monomyths, and yielding to the rich ecosystems beneath; feasting tables set for strangers and exiles and the untold in between; trusting the wisdom of ancestors, seasons and more than human kin; remembering how to deeply witness and listen.

While accidentally locked down in the Outer Hebrides during the pandemic winter, I had a series of mystical Christian reconversion experiences. I am still apprenticing to the stories my time in that landscape gave me; a sprig of her wild heather caught forever under the most sensitive skin of my soul — wind-spun and whining for where it came from.

But Venice has been calling my heart ever since my very first visit in 2012, and after the pandemic I finally made her my home. La Serenissima’s lagoon barena is a constant creative mentor, while the city encourages me to journey sustainably.