Each season of Sanctuary begins with an ✨Invitation, unfolds through a ✨Practice, and comes to rest in a ✨Pause.
Together, they form a seasonal journey that invites you to slow down and embody the turning of the Celtic Year.
If you are new here, begin with the ✨Welcome.
This Pause invites you to walk gently back through the crossings of this season, returning to the places within yourself that feel tender, uncertain, or unfinished.
As you do, begin to notice what the journey has asked of your heart, and what you may be carry differently now, even if the path ahead has not yet fully revealed itself.
The Unsettling
A few evenings ago, I went walking at dusk along a narrow path that winds through the hills near my home.
Rain had passed through earlier that afternoon, leaving the earth dark and fragrant beneath the long grasses. The air still carried that soft dampness that comes after spring rain, when everything feels suspended between seasons.
As I walked, I became aware of how unsettled I felt inwardly.
The sky was heavy with layered cloud, though streaks of pale gold still lingered near the horizon. Wind moved through the grasses in long rippling waves, while the trees along the edge of the path bent softly in the evening light, their leaves flashing silver-green each time they turned toward the sky.
At first, I could not have told you exactly what it was. I noticed the feeling living in my heart and body far more than in my thoughts. There was a tender ache beneath the surface of things, like something unresolved following me like a shadow along the path.
I felt grief’s familiar heaviness low in my chest. There it was: the longing to reach for someone who was no longer here, as though part of me still expected their presence to return beside me in ordinary moments. An absence that followed me everywhere, lingering beneath the wind in the grasses and the fading gold along the horizon.
As I continued walking, I began to realize how much of this season I had been carrying that feeling with me without ever fully naming it.
🌙 Some crossings unfold so quietly that we do not recognize them at first, only sensing that something within us has begun to shift beneath the surface of our lives.
Subscribe to ✨Sanctuary for seasonal reflections, gentle companioning, and a place to return to as you walk the crossings within.
Paths & Longings
This season has carried more uncertainty than I expected.
There are moments lately when I no longer fully recognize the shape of my own life.
Some days I feel hopeful that I am moving toward a life that fits me more honestly. Other days, self-doubt arrives quickly and convincingly, asking whether I am enough.
Alongside that uncertainty, I have also noticed how much grief I still carry.
There are losses that cannot be solved or outgrown, absences that remain no matter how much time passes around them. There are beings we continue reaching for long after they are no longer here, and no amount of personal growth changes that longing.
Sometimes the hardest part is not that the world stops, but that it continues.
This has been one of the deepest crossings of Beltane for me this year.
Everywhere, the world seems to lean toward fullness. Trees leaf out almost overnight. Gardens rise quickly from the dark earth. The days stretch themselves longer toward summer as nature remembers how to move forward again.
So why has grief made me uncertain of that same movement and fullness within my own life? Inwardly, I felt hollow and tender beside all this beauty and becoming.
Evening light turns the fields gold. Birds still call across the hills at dusk. Beauty keeps arriving, even while part of me remains unconvinced that I will ever fully emerge from this ache.
There were moments this spring when grief made me feel as though I was standing still, watching the world move steadily forward while my heart stubbornly remained turned toward what it was missing.
As I have moved through this season, I have found myself wondering what your heart may be carrying, and what it might be missing too.
What has been quietly walking beside you this season?
What crossings have you found yourself standing at lately?
What has your heart been reaching toward, even as it learns to carry what is missing?
This season seems to invite a quieter kind of honesty: noticing your heart and its longings with tenderness, and allowing yourself to acknowledge what you are carrying.
🕯️ Some crossings ask us to slow down enough to hear what our hearts have been carrying all along.
Join ✨Linger for seasonal practices, guided reflections, and gentle companioning for the path ahead.
Crossings & Carryings
As I walked that evening, I found myself thinking about the story I wrote in this season’s Invitation about Maggie and the moment she left her letter beneath the small cairn of stones before stepping into the crossings.
At first, I think I imagined that moment too simply.
I imagined crossings as transformation itself, as though leaving something behind meant emerging lighter on the other side, able to release the old story and step more cleanly into the new one. I imagined uncertainty falling away once the crossing had been made, as though clarity itself might be waiting just beyond the threshold.
But standing there on the path with the wind moving through the grasses around me, I realized crossings do not work that way.
Leaving something beneath the cairn does not mean it no longer hurts, just as choosing a new direction does not erase fear, and grief does not disappear simply because the season has changed around us.
More often, we carry the old ache with us into the new landscape, bringing our longings and unfinishedness alongside everything still becoming.
The crossing itself does not remove these things so much as slowly changing the way we learn to carry them.
That realization stayed with me as I continued walking.
The path curved upward along the hillside before opening into a clearing where the grasses grew shorter beneath the wind. I stopped there for a while, listening to the evening settle around me while birds called across the distant fields and the first chill of night moved into the air.
Standing there beneath the darkening sky, I could feel how tired I had become from trying to force myself into something new before I actually felt ready. So much of this season had been shaped by an inward pressure toward some visible reassurance that I was finally moving in the right direction.
As I turned back toward home, the sky had deepened into evening blue while the wind had begun to quiet around me. Along the edge of the path, the grasses swayed softly in the fading light, moving in their own rhythm.
The grasses simply followed the season in the way grasses do, bending gently with the wind.
Standing there for a moment, I realized perhaps this season was never asking me to become fearless or fully certain.
Perhaps it was only asking me to listen more honestly to the life already moving within me.
🌳 Hawthorn, Oak and Holly are trees of wisdom and crossings, reminding us that tenderness and endurance often walk side by side.
Walk the grove with ✨Sanctuary through seasonal reflections rooted in the wisdom of the Celtic trees.
Softening & Stillness
Standing there beneath the darkening sky, I began noticing that although many things in my life still felt unresolved, something within me had changed this season after all.
I was no longer fighting my own rhythm in the same way.
Earlier in the season, I believed movement required certainty, confidence, and visible progress, as though I needed to feel fearless before I could trust where my life was leading me. If I could not move boldly, perhaps I believed I was failing to move at all.
Somewhere between the crossings and the heather, between listening and walking, something softer had begun taking shape.
I began noticing my body sooner when it was overwhelmed instead of waiting until exhaustion forced me to stop. I began allowing slower days without immediately treating them as personal failures. I began recognizing how often fear disguises itself as striving, convincing me to stay busy so I would not have to listen too closely to myself.
Slowly, I began understanding that uncertainty itself is not proof that I am on the wrong path.
Some landscapes can only be walked slowly, and some truths only become visible after we have lived beside the questions for a while, allowing them to soften and unfold in their own time rather than demanding immediate clarity from them.
Perhaps this season has been inviting you into a similar kind of noticing.
One of the gentlest ways I have found to notice myself more honestly is through walking.
Something about moving slowly through a landscape softens the constant pressure to solve or figure everything out at once. The body settles into rhythm. Thoughts loosen slightly. Feelings we have been carrying quietly sometimes rise more clearly into awareness beneath the movement.
It helps, too, when there is nowhere particular you are trying to arrive. Without a destination, the walk becomes less about reaching something and more about paying attention to what is already present within and around you.
If you wish, take a slow walk sometime in the coming days. Simply walk slowly enough to notice your own rhythm beneath the movement.
Notice how your body feels as you move through the landscape. Notice where you tighten and where you soften. Pause if you come to a crossing, a bend in the path, or a quiet place where the wind moves through trees or grasses.
As you walk, allow yourself to listen inwardly, not for answers or certainty, but simply for honesty.
You might gently ask yourself:
What has been quietly asking for my attention this season?
Where have I been softening rather than forcing?
What would it mean to trust myself more gently through uncertainty?
You do not need to leave your walk transformed, nor do you need to leave with answers.
Perhaps it is enough, for now, to walk gently beside yourself, listening honestly to what is still becoming within you.
🌙 Dear Reader: What’s been quietly keeping pace beside you this season?
What might happen if you allowed yourself to walk beside it with greater tenderness?
Books & Gems
Some companion books for this season of crossings:
Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance (Bantam Books, 2004)
Pema Chödrön, Comfortable with Uncertainty (Shambhala Publications, 2002)
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart (Shambhala Publications, 1996)
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Viking, 2020)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013)
Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart (Bantam Books, 1993)
Cheryl Strayed, Wild (Knopf, 2012)
On the Record Player
Songs that played on my record player as I wrote:
🎶 Blackwinged Bird — Emm Gryner — A tender, reflective song about carrying grief and longing quietly beside you while continuing to move forward through uncertain landscapes.
🎵 Reach for Tomorrow — Ella Fitzgerald — A gentle, hope-filled piece that feels like walking toward light and possibility even while parts of the heart still remain unfinished.
🎶 Waterfall — Serena Ryder — A deeply emotional song about surrender, ache, and allowing yourself to soften into what the heart can no longer hold back.
🎵 Rain — Madonna — A luminous, atmospheric song where longing, memory, and tenderness move softly beneath the surface like weather passing through the soul.
✨ Thank you for being here and supporting my work.
🌙 If Sanctuary has lit a small lantern for you, please share it with someone else finding their way home.
An achingly tender reflection Kim on grief, loss, change and transition. Thank you for sharing, for taking us by the hand, as we walked through physical, emotional and natural landscapes and crossed muddy thresh holds together with you. As always with your writing I find so much here that resonates with me. I want to sit with your invitations to reflect. Your writing is laced with so much wisdom and beauty even when writing about the hardest subjects for the human heart. 🙏✨
This touched so many parts of my season Kim. Feeling uncertain but not knowing why. Assuming a feeling of being lost was failure. But no - it is the season telling me in a number of ways (because I didn't get the first memo!) that things are where they should be.