Welcome

Welcome to my blog – with extras! Extras like courses and events, cup of tea sessions, meditation recordings and podcasts, poetry and stories.

I am an elder woman: I’ve seen a lot of life and a lot of death, navigated many transitions and passed through numerous thresholds. I have worked in many different capacities but all of them are simply vehicles for my particular shape of love. This website is one way of offering my love and my gifts to you.

Please do feel invited to write to me, send poems, images and so on – I would love to hear from you.

I hope you will leave my site feeling warmer, comforted, smiling on the inside and in some way accompanied.

With love,

Nickie

“[Nickie is] like a magic porridge pot overflowing with love to give”. S.E.

  • “But grief and griever alike endure”
    by nickie.aven

    It is ‘anniversary season’ for me– my son’s birthday just gone, my husband’s anniversary and birthday arriving. You might think that by now I am well practised at navigating this territory. Not at all. Yet again I stand helpless, as pain saps my joy and wearies my spirit.

    To find out how I feel, often I write.

    Season after season
    and yet again spring.
    You are never coming home.

    I wrote this to my husband today. 5 years since I watched him die and I’ve only just figured that out? Grief, I will say it again, doesn’t take a straight course: round we go again and deeper, or maybe a detour here and a tangent there. But grief cannot have a goal or an end point because we don’t know where we’re going. Our old life, the old us, the old certainties, are gone. What are we becoming? What moulding, breaking, rebuilding, reconfiguring, transformed version of ourselves is going to emerge, blinking into a doubtful sunlight?

    Oh, but I’m so wise… I wish. Knowing there are no goals, what do I strive for? Knowing to allow the process, why do I try my best to do well? Can I really work hard to soften? This poem by Wendell Berry, which gives its name to the title of today’s blog, comforts me:

    I don’t believe that grief passes away.
    It has its time and place forever
    More time is added to it; 
    it becomes a story within a story.
    But grief and griever alike endure.


    “Too cold for snow”

    5 years ago, the only story I could see was one of outrageous loss. I was obliterated, not by devastating storms of tears and fury but by numb, grey nothingness. I wished for the torrents to come: at least grant me the courtesy of catharsis. No… the cold, grey, listless landscape remained.

    “It’s too cold for snow”: I remembered my grandmother saying that. Too cold almost for life. Inertia. And yet, the human spirit endures. The story did not end, I did not end.

    I look back on my life now and I can say that the pivotal moment was summer 2012. The births of my beautiful children were deeply significant, their births birthing something in me, but they didn’t cause my life to pivot. That happened when a man reverenced me with his love. Nothing can or will ever take that from me, not even death. The rest of my life continues with that understanding, I almost want to say, with that sacred initiation into womanhood.

    Teresa of Avila says:

    ...when the holy thaws
    …..then God comes closest
    From Love Poems to God, translations by Daniel Ladinsky




    Thawing

    Over these past years I have been thawing; the ‘holy’ within me, little by little, loving the warmth back into my fingers and my toes. Sparks of passion, which look a lot like compassion, reaching out to warm another. This blog is one such spark.

    Over this past week I have been gifted again and again: from tea cake and chocolate cake, to a sound bath and special walk and, oh my goodness, the most exquisite ‘book’ of haiku gifted me by a friend, and written by a woman who, after her husband died suddenly, began distilling her feelings into little precious haiku. Do I resonate with her? Oh yes I do:

    so now you are gone
    i must create riverbeds
    to keep me flowing

    in the joy of life
    there is a great emptiness
    that never fills up

    (Anja Saunders from her collection of haiku – Fragrant Feathers)

    I couldn’t resist sharing those, but what I was going to say, was that in the gifting, mostly by women who didn’t know this time to be an especially tender one, I have felt as if the ‘universe’ knew me intimately, like it nudged them to take care of me. And does it stop the pain? No. Pain is an inevitable fact because I love my son and my husband. Love is in the present not in the past and so absence hurts. Sometimes it is crippling, sometimes I can cradle it tenderly. And this is how it is.

    But that is not the end of the story. I don’t know what the end of the story might be and it doesn’t matter. While “grief and griever alike endure”, I’ll keep writing my story, and as kindly to myself as possible, follow the call of Love.

    With my love

    Nickie

    NEWS

    New: Resources Page

    New Podcasts

    I have created a new page, which I call ‘Resources’. You will now find the audio meditations there but I have added three brand new podcasts. The very skilled Liz Scott of Inner Compass and I have been in conversation about how to support someone who is grieving, how to listen to them, bear witness to them without trying to fix them.  

    Podcast 1 is mostly about my experience of grief. Number 2 is about not fixing and how, as the listener, to be with the discomfort of that. The third one we called, ‘Myths and Platitudes’.  Please do go to the website here and have a listen. They are not heavy duty, despite the subject, and they are accessible and clear.

    We plan a couple more podcasts in the next month or so- ‘When grief isn’t pretty’ and another which will be more focused on the grieving person themselves.

    Books: I’m in the process of compiling a list of books I have found useful. Please write and tell me what has been helpful for you.

    Organisations: In due course there will be a list of organisations which you can access for support – please write to me with suggestions for those too, if you have any.

    Dying Matters Week in the UK ends on Sunday. If you are local to South Hams, there is a huge amount happening in Totnes this weekend – find the line up here. I will be offering a creative writing workshop at 12.15pm and another short workshop, “Sit beside me on my mourning bench”, at 2pm, both at Birdwood House.

    Creatively Writing Through Loss Thank you for your kind response to this online course. A few of you have signed up already. Please see here for details or write to me if you’d like more specific information.

    TO SIGN UP FOR THIS FORTNIGHTLY BLOG, PLEASE CLICK ON THE SUBSCRIBE BUTTON. BLOGS WILL ARRIVE IN YOUR INBOX FROM SUBSTACK WITH MY NAME ON THEM. THE NEXT BLOG IS DUE ON 25TH MAY. IF IT DOES NOT ARRIVE PLEASE CHECK YOUR JUNK FOLDER.