In the North East of England, in the place where I grew up and to which I returned after many years of travel, there is an ancient Norse story about the power of words and writing.
The story goes that the god Odin was gifted with the knowledge of the runes after hanging upside down, with no food or drink, for nine days and nine nights from the branches of Yggdrasil, the World Tree. On the ninth day, Odin saw the runes revealed to him in the roots of the Tree and heard its branches sing the nine songs that are the basis of all rune magic.
Runes are mysterious symbols with magical significance. They are often carved on bones or stones or pieces of wood and can be used in divination and in the casting of spells and incantations.
Many years ago, the people of the North believed that each rune opened up its own direct channel to the gods’ powers. Runes provided healing from illness, pain and love gone wrong. They gave the powers of speech to those who had lost their voices. They assisted in childbirth as well as in war. They carried within them wisdom and essential knowledge.
This is just one origin story from one part of the world.
Finding symbols and forms to hold the feelings swirling inside us, singing our stories so that others might hear them, inscribing, carving, inking our stories on the world, are ways that we humans have attempted to make meaning out of our lives since the beginning of time itself. These practices, like the World Tree, have roots that reach deep inside us.
We find a name for a feeling or an idea and speak it into being. We shape it, smooth it, hold it on our tongue or on a charm around our neck or between the pages of a book and it becomes a little more solid, a little easier to understand.
I have been fascinated by these connections between writing, health and creativity since I was a small girl, making tiny books out of folded paper in a corner of my bedroom. Writing is the place that I return to, over and over, to find calm, release, new understandings. Inside the shapes of letters and words, I can acknowledge the feelings that sometimes seem too big to hold inside my own skin. Writing helps me to sense my way into my body, to investigate my feelings, understand them, perhaps even remake them.
All of this is what I call restorative writing. It’s the approach to writing that I've been developing now for over twenty-five years.
What do I mean by restorative writing?
I think of my approach to writing as restorative in three main ways:
- Writing can restore us to ourselves. It can restore the parts of us that we have forgotten, abandoned, neglected, disowned. It can help us to rest the weary parts, the parts that are too tired to continue in the ways that are no longer working for us. It is what comes through our bodies and onto the page, if we can only allow it to emerge. This is writing that we sing over the scattered bones, writing that helps us to let go of old, calcified forms, to shape-shift, to remake ourselves.
- We don’t have to do this alone. Restorative writing can restore us to one another. When we write together, in kind, compassionate community, we restore our faith in the power of words and stories. We create spaces together where we can write privately and share our reflections and experiences, where we can open up our most tender parts but also feel perfectly OK in those times when we prefer to hold our pages close to our chests. Many of us have learned along the way that writing spaces are tricky and competitive, places where words and selves get pulled apart. Restorative writing is about making safe spaces together, where we can welcome all the hesitant and hurt and frightened parts of ourselves, as well as the joyous and courageous and celebratory.
- Restorative writing can restore us to the world. We can explore the way that our spaces and identities shape us. We can rediscover what it is to write from a sense of ourselves at this place and time on the planet, and how we are held by the more-than-human world. We can learn to trust again, to feel again, and how it might feel to be part of something bigger than just one human body again.
If you are worn out, if you are grieving, if you are heartbroken, if you are uncertain or afraid, if you are stuck or cynical or numb, a restorative approach to writing can help you. Whether you are feeling adventurous or afraid, yearning or overwhelmed, hopeful or confused, or perhaps a little of all of these emotions, you are welcome here.
Looking for a space to explore restorative writing? Find out more here.
