(see also earthyvox creative walking collective page)

The gathered sounds, images, physical pieces and text responses are making their way here all at slowtime-rivertime once.

||: Sing freely for 8 steps, listen for 8 steps :||

Holly song for a mother’s mind-walk before school

I have mothering duties to attend so I hold a holly leaf in my mind’s eye. This is survival – this is an exquisite preservation. Bring your being into a series of sharp points – a knowledge of pain, a deep and shiny prayer of green, a spell of resilience. Holly gathers the midsummer under her midwinter skin and time is loosened and stilled.

When I am walking/listening with voice, an ear-span of vibrations and resonances bubble at many points within a soundweb and I become aware of portals opening back into the hidden calm and throb of multiple simultaneous dimensions of life… It helps me to ‘sneak through the temporal paradigms’ as Manchán Magan puts it.

Having walked with voice, ear, images for a lifetime, I lean into it as a named walk-as-score for the first time with my son on the 17th November 2024 in Wingham, Kent – exploring how to call a walk a creative act, that day. Earth casually reassured us that creative acts don’t even have to have a name – she gave us small potatoes from the wintering field, music in the whistling stubble-pipes, and the light; the sheer, fast Kent light.

There are other walks to bring here soon, both solo, duo and collective.

above, below: walking Wingham, November 2024. “I want to keep going”, my son said.

below: walking the Darent Valley from Otford to Shoreham, Kent, 19th September 2025, with an anxious small boy. My son had recently started school, and a few very early days into this big transformation he told me, “I didn’t want this much change this soon – all of my beautiful days are gone!” He was struggling in his heart with the unrelenting psychic intensity of this sudden new industrial framework, so I lifted him away from it all for four days; brought him back to the river, the ancient, alive place he has known for the whole of his young life. I went there to carry him into the chalkstream, to hug the shadow-side of the onslaught, so that he – so that we – could return to it four days later, fortified. 4 is stability. 4 days to build our resilience. River resilience.

Folded time of the old valley held tight the shifting of our days. We both needed to anchor our cells with river spells. This was a quiet, private, adventurous grief storm-cusp ceremonial walk on the last of 2025’s warm water days. This was gratitude, grief and belonging, tending to roots after rupture.

These stones were collected by Indigo for their beauty and marked with chalk and red earth from the riverbank by me and offered an incanted intention to, and sealed with their return to the river. Splash!