When the summer is bursting through in all its fine greenery, and traditional May Day festival rites are kept to welcome in the luscious fertility of this time, I am keeping a lament, for this is the time that I gave birth to death instead of new life

How do we find that place of compassion deep in our soulful hearts to forgive our ancestors? For the mistakes that they made, the suffering they may have caused or endured, and for the wounds that they may have passed down to us through the generations?

Often it was just the scraps I’d saved for the small blackbird with a bright yellow beak and a clear eye, who would visit every morning and sing to me so sweetly. It was my joy to feed him whatever I had left from my meagre meals.

Walking amongst the old tombstones of ancient Sussex churches, primroses, yellow and purple magnolia blossoms blooming in the Spring sunlight, I am a sacred fool talking to the dead

The practice of Utiseta is an old Norse tradition. The wise women, the seers, would sit out on the burial mounds of their ancestors or that of a wise leader, to seek knowledge and to gain answers.

Old, lonely, widowed, strange,

with their dark haired cats

melting gold on a silver spoon

I would simply listen for the laughter of William, Thomazin, Thomas, Jane, and John carried on the wind in high summer across the green fields and Cornish hedgerows.

My voice now holds the voice of the storyteller; the voice of the poet; the voice of my ancestors and adopted ancestors whose voices I hear still echoing in the place of their trauma, waiting to be cleared

A small dance of feathers directly above brought me out of my reverie, and I could see from the flash of pink red breast, black cap and grey wings this was a bullfinch.