garden of stones

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She blew into my life like a breath of fresh air

All laughter and giggles and rainbow hair

Our friendship just grew from chats on the phone

And visits when she was all on her own

She fitted right into our circle of friends

Her beautiful soul could never offend

Her trifles and cakes were the hits of the night

Her laughter infectious, her eyes shining bright

But sadly, her enemy was deep down inside

She fought it so hard and said so with pride

But as we knew it would, cancer finally won

And now she’s at peace, and her living is done

She chose her own time, she chose her own way

I will miss her for ever, each and every day

My beautiful Cath, it’s time for a rest

I know you were tired, you did your best

Whenever I see rainbows in the sky

I’ll know it’s just you soaring on high

© Kim D 4/07/2022

Dear Cath,

I know there is going to come a time when our phone calls will stop, so I thought I would write you a letter.

I want to tell you how much you mean to me, and how much I have valued your friendship over the years. From those first tentative beginnings, an absolutely beautiful relationship formed between you and I, and I know that we have been so lucky to have shared something so special.

When I think of you, it is always rainbow colours, bright and shiny. And I smile because your vibrant personality matches your “rainbowness” to a T (is “rainbowness” even a word!).

I will miss your presence in my life, miss the chats, the fun, the laughter, and the love. Thank you for all the ways you have enriched my life, my world has been a better place with you as my friend.

When you close your eyes for the last time, I hope it is a peaceful moment for you, and I hope you know how very much you are loved.

© Kim D 4/07/2022

Time doesn’t heal all wounds.

Maybe it heals the physical wounds that sit proudly on a body and say, “Here. Here is where it happened—the thing that hurt me.”

Over time, the body works its magic and healing happens, sometimes with a scar and sometimes without.

The wound left by significant loss is not tended by time.

The only medicine is grief.

Grief that comes in waves.

Small waves.
Large waves.

Waves filled with love.

The waves come in and bring memories.

The waves come in and bring sorrow.
The waves come in and bring joy.

The waves come in, outside of time, and bring healing.

Grief is the tide; love is the shore that remains.

Shae 2026

Ode to Sedna: An Exiled Feminine Archetype

Some grief lives on the surface, where others can see it. Some sinks all the way to the ocean floor. Sedna lives there — at the bottom of the sea — a companion for the exiled feminine in us all.

In northern Inuit myth, Sedna is cast from the boat by the hands that once promised to protect her. As she falls to the ocean floor, what is severed from her becomes the life of the sea, and she reigns there, exiled and sovereign.

“Ode to Sedna” is written for the exiled feminine in us all: the parts betrayed, dismembered, and yet somehow still the source of nourishment and life.

Sometimes I feel like I’m carrying a grief that didn’t start with me.

In the feminine line behind me, the humans who raised and shaped our family learned to survive by getting on with things. They learned to hold themselves together in public and, if they broke at all, to do it quietly, in the laundry, in the car, in the middle of the night with the sound turned down.

Their losses were real, but they rarely had the luxury of naming them. There was work to be done. Children to be fed. Rules to be followed. Reputation to be kept. Grief became something you swallowed, or folded into the dishwater, or tucked into the hems of clothes you ironed for other people.

Watching this, I learned very early that certain feelings had nowhere to go.

I saw how heartbreak would surface for a moment and then get locked back down with a joke, a change of subject, or the familiar phrase: “We don’t talk about that.” 

I saw how the women in my bloodline carried things they were never allowed to say — about their bodies, their desires, their disappointments, their losses. I saw how quickly tears could turn into guilt: I should be grateful. It wasn’t that bad. Other people have it worse.

This is what I mean when I talk about exiled grief.

Not just the grief for specific events, but the whole river of unspoken feeling that never found safe ground. The parts of you that learned to live outside the village of what was acceptable, because to bring them home would have disrupted too much.

Even though I don’t name myself “woman” now, and don’t always resonate with the more packaged versions of “women” and “sisterhood” in popular culture, the memories of the ancestral feminine still flow through the blood in my veins. I don’t need that label to feel how girlhood, motherhood, widowhood, and all the unnamed roles of those before me live in my body. 

The sacred feminine, for me, isn’t a club or a costume — it’s an essence of empowerment distilled through experience. It’s the wisdom of everything the feminine in my line has endured, transmuted into presence.

My own grief joined that lineage early.

My mother carried her own exile: war had already displaced her from East Germany, from the Prussian lands that once held her childhood, into the West. 

Later, she moved again, this time to England, home of my father.

By the time I was six months old, we were travelling back across the Channel to Germany, to the place where my mother’s family had been repositioned after the borders shifted and their homeland was given to Poland. The language was ours, German was the soundscape of my mother’s bloodline, but the soil beneath our feet carried the memory of forced movement and redrawn maps. My earliest years unfolded there; by the time I was nearly five, we were uprooted again. Then, at ten years old, I was taken across another ocean to Australia. Another foreign land, and another beginning.

On paper, these are just moves.
In the psyche of a child, they are earthquakes.

Each move asked me to learn new codes, new skies, new sounds. Pieces of me were always arriving after the suitcase had been unpacked. There was never quite enough time, or safety, to fully land before the ground shifted again. The psychological disruption was subtle and total: a quiet instruction that home is always provisional, that belonging is something you earn by adapting, behaving, coping.

When exile is your foundation, it becomes quite easy to exile yourself.

That’s where exile became more than geography.

It became a way of being: keeping a part of myself packed away, just in case. Learning to be fluent in other people’s expectations, even when my own inner language was different. Holding my sensitivity, my spiritual experiences, my not‑quite‑fitting‑anywhere gendered sense of self at a distance because they seemed to threaten the fragile stability we had.

What sat closest to that grief was guilt.

Guilt for not being easier.
Guilt for struggling when we had, technically, “survived.”
Guilt for needing a depth of presence and understanding that simply wasn’t resourced around me at the time.

Guilt became a kind of internal border guard. It kept escorting my feelings back out of town: No, not you. Not here. Not now. No one wants to hear this. You’ll upset people. You’ll be too much. You’ll be disloyal to the ones who coped by not feeling.

Years into my own spiritual path, as I began to live more in tune with my sacred feminine essence and less inside inherited scripts, I realised this border guard was exhausted. It was never meant to run my life. It was just trying to keep me safe in a system where my full truth felt unsafe. And underneath its vigilance were all the exiled ones:
my younger selves,
the women and feminine beings in my lineage,
the unlived versions of me who never got to say, “This hurt. I mattered. That was not ok.”

At the same time, something else was happening: the Land itself started to speak more loudly.

I live and work as a guest on this Land, on Country that has held the griefs, joys, and ceremonies of First Nations people for countless generations. I honour the Traditional Custodians here, their Elders past and present, and the lineages of care that preceded me. The more I acknowledged this, the more I felt the quiet, steady presence of stone and soil under my feet.

Stones don’t flinch. They remember without turning away.

There was a moment while walking, holding a small stone in my hand when I realised: the Land can hold what my lineage never had space for. Not instead of honouring those who came before me, but alongside them. Not as a bypass, but as a deeper resourcing.

The Garden of Stones grew from there.

On the website it has its own description — a room, a grief space, a way to place what’s too heavy to carry alone. But underneath that, for me, it is also a personal act of repair. 

It is my way of saying to the feminine in my bloodline, and to the younger exiled versions of myself:

“I see what you couldn’t say.
I feel the cost of what you had to swallow.
I will not ask my own heart to exile itself in the same way.”

When I place a stone, I am sometimes placing it for myself.
Sometimes for a younger version of me who had no language.
Sometimes for my mother and for all the displaced parts of her story.
Sometimes for a grandmother or great‑grandmother whose life I only know in fragments.

Each stone is a small refusal to keep living as though their pain and mine never happened. 

Sometimes I imagine Sedna on the ocean floor as I do this: not restored to the boat and those that betrayed her, but exiled and sovereign, presiding over a new world grown from what was cut away.

I do this work knowing I’m still learning how to belong to myself, to the Land, and to the wider web of life without needing to contort into someone else’s idea of who I should be. 

My quiet vow in all of this is that every being I touch through my frequency and presence may feel a little more at home — in their own body, in their own story, and on this Earth.

Writing this is one way I place my own stone in the Garden:
a marker that says, the exile stops here.
Not because everything is healed or finished, but because I am willing to turn toward what was never given room and say, “You are allowed to exist. You have a place.

”If any of this touches something in you, consider this an invitation, not to fix your grief, but to gently un‑banish it. 

And to let at least one small part of you come in from the cold.

Shae 2026