Finding Our Way Back

Last week I was lucky enough to attend an immersive sound journey over two days, held in a replica round house deep in the Dorset countryside. There was thatch above us, the smell of woodsmoke, and a circle of people settling onto their blankets and mats. The energy was palpable before the sound had even begun, and when Sika started the soundscape, our hearts were lifted to a place of profound healing and peace. I could feel my worries drifting away, and I felt myself land for the first time in ages.

Sitting there afterwards, I found myself wondering about the people who once lived in houses like that one. Their lives were more physical and arduous than ours, I know, but I wonder whether they had access to a deeper peace in their everyday lives. There were no notifications and nobody expecting an instant reply. When the day’s work was done, it was done, and the evening consisted of firelight, conversation and rest. Their pace was set by the seasons and the daylight. However hard their bodies worked, their minds may have known a stillness that many of us have never experienced. They grounded themselves without trying, working so closely with the earth, gathering round the fire to listen to music and to their own stories, their narrative history. The hearth held everything: cooking, warmth, company, belonging.

That connection to the earth ran through the whole of their lives, and I think it still runs through ours. We are connected in the same web as the trees, the pollinators and the meadows, which is why our heart aches when we watch forests come down or sewage flow into our rivers. Harming the earth is harming ourselves, and I suspect most of us feel that.

So I have been asking myself how we find our way back. Moving into a round house is tempting some days (the phone is probably staying, though). What feels truer is taking small pieces of that older way of living and weaving them into the lives we already have.

I have started with the fire. There is a reason we are all drawn to a flame, whether it is a bonfire, a wood burner or a single candle on the kitchen table.

A shared meal has the same effect. The hearth was where food and friends met, and eating together is still the simplest form of community we have. Cooking an extra bowl for an elderly neighbour counts. So does soup at the kitchen table with someone you love.

The earth itself is another doorway. Herbs on a windowsill count as growing something. Bare feet on the grass, when the weather allows it, count as a kind of prayer. Even noticing what the trees are doing this month reminds us of something we may have forgotten: we belong here.

And then there are the stories. Our ancestors passed everything on around the fire, and the telling bonded them to each other. I have been asking the older people in my life about their childhoods, and every conversation leaves me feeling more rooted. Their stories are ours to carry, and the window for hearing them will close one day.

It amounts to very little on paper: a few minutes by a candle, a meal shared, bare feet on the ground. Yet these small acts weave us back into the web of life and into each other, and I think that is where our peace has been waiting for us.

Where in your day could one small piece of the old way live?

With love,

Sally Heart

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With love,

Sally Heart 💛