garden of stones
A quiet garden for grief that doesn't fit inside ordinary conversation.
Somewhere between the worlds, there is a small, quiet garden. The water is dark enough to remember everything. A single white flower opens on the surface, asking nothing of you except that you arrive as you are.
Garden of Stones is the place I keep for the grief support that doesn't fit inside ordinary conversation - the loves that ended without ending, the lives that dissolved before they were lived, the homes and timelines that now live only in bone-memory.
Here, we don't rush sorrow toward meaning. We let it breathe, we let it ache, we let it take up its true size. We trust that what breaks the heart also widens it, aligning with love.
If you feel called, you may lay your words here as offerings: a fragment of poem, a shard of story, a letter to the one who is gone, a single sentence that refuses to be silent.
I will place them among the stones, beside the water, so that other sensitive souls can find them when their own nights are long, seeking writings for companionship.
This is all Garden of Stones promises: not to heal you, not to tidy what is wild, but to stand with you at the edge of what has been lost until you can feel again that your living life is still a place you might inhabit.
Offering your words:
If you'd like to place a stone in this garden, you're welcome to share your own writing on grief and love.
You can email your piece to hello@sourcestories.love. Please include the name you'd like to be credited by (or "Anonymous"), and whether your piece is in honour of a particular person, being, or place.
Writings from The Garden
Poems, letters, and small stories from the Garden of Stones serve as offerings of love and grief support.
You're welcome to pause with whatever piece feels like company for you today.
What’s placed here ranges from a single unfinished sentence to a longer reflection, there’s no size or polish a stone needs to belong in this garden.
She blew into my life like a breath of fresh air, all laughter and giggles with her rainbow hair. Our friendship grew from heartfelt chats on the phone and sweet visits when she was all on her own. She fit 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 spoke of it with pride. As we knew it would, cancer finally won, and now she’s at peace, her living is done. She chose her own time, she chose her own way; for grief support, I will miss her forever, each and every day. My beautiful Cath, it’s time for a rest; I know you were tired, you truly did your best. Whenever I see rainbows in the sky, I’ll know it’s you soaring high, reminding me of our bond and the spiritual attunement we shared. These writings for healing will carry your light, guiding me through the darkness and into the night.
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 to express my feelings.
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 me, and I know we have been incredibly lucky to share something so special. In moments of grief support, I have often found solace in our bond.
When I think of you, it is always in rainbow colors, bright and shiny. I smile because your vibrant personality matches your “rainbowness” to a T (is “rainbowness” even a word!). You have shown me the importance of spiritual attunement in our lives, helping us connect on a deeper level.
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 truly been a better place with you as my friend. Your essence will live on through my writings for healing, reminding me of the joy we shared.
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, this thing that hurt me.”
Over time, the body works its magic and healing happens, sometimes with a scar and sometimes without.
However, the wound left by significant loss is not tended by time.
The only medicine is grief—the kind of grief that comes in waves.
Small waves.
Large waves.
Waves filled with love.
These waves of grief support us as they roll in, bringing memories.
The waves come in and bring sorrow.
The waves come in and bring joy.
As these waves approach, they exist outside of time and facilitate spiritual attunement, allowing for true 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 perceive it. Some sinks all the way to the ocean floor. Sedna resides 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. This piece also serves as a medium for grief support, embracing the shadows of our experiences with compassion.
Sometimes I feel like I’m carrying a grief that didn’t start with me.
Within the feminine lineage 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, or 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, folded into the dishwater, or tucked into the hems of clothes you ironed for others.
Watching this, I learned very early that certain feelings had nowhere to go.
I saw how heartbreak would surface momentarily before getting 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 burdens they were never allowed to voice; about their bodies, desires, disappointments, and losses. I recognized how quickly tears could give way to guilt: I should be grateful. It wasn’t that bad. Others have it worse.
This is what I mean when I speak of exiled grief.
Not just grief tied to specific events but the entire river of unspoken feeling that never found safe ground. The parts of you that learned to live outside the village of acceptability, because to bring them home would have disrupted too much.
Even though I don’t identify as “woman” now, and don’t always resonate with the more packaged versions of “women” and “sisterhood” found in popular culture, the memories of the ancestral feminine still flow through the blood in my veins. I don’t need that label to sense 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, transformed into presence and spiritual attunement.
My own grief joined that lineage early on. 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—to England, my father's homeland.
By the time I was six months old, we were traveling back across the Channel to Germany, to where my mother’s family had been relocated after the borders shifted and their homeland was given to Poland. The language was ours; German became the soundscape of my mother’s bloodline, yet the soil beneath our feet bore 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 yet another ocean to Australia. Another foreign land, and another beginning.
On paper, these are just moves. In a child’s psyche, they are earthquakes.
Each relocation asked me to learn new codes, new skies, and new sounds. Pieces of me always arrived 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 both subtle and total: a quiet instruction that home is always provisional, that belonging is something you earn by adapting, behaving, coping.
When exile becomes your foundation, it’s easy to exile yourself.
That’s where exile transcended geography. It became a way of being: keeping parts of myself packed away, just in case. Learning to be fluent in the expectations of others, even when my inner language differed. Holding my sensitivity, spiritual experiences, and my not-quite-fitting gendered sense of self at arm’s length 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 available 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 those 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 realized 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, and 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 began 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 honor 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 beneath my feet.
Stones don’t flinch. They remember without turning away.
There was a moment while walking, holding a small stone, when I realized: the Land can hold what my lineage never had space for. Not instead of honoring 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’s my way of reaching out 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, 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 if their pain and mine never existed.
Sometimes, I imagine Sedna on the ocean floor as I do this: not restored to the boat and those who 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 contorting 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 signifies, 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 resonates with you, consider this an invitation, not to fix your grief, but to gently un-banished it.
And to let at least one small part of you come in from the cold.
Shae 2026