Perhaps grief – in all of its heart-breaking, heart-opening glory – is coming home to life.

Advertising sells a life with no shadow. Healing makes room for a real one.

Written by 14-year-old Theo, this poem offers a young person’s reflection on power, blame, and the struggle to be heard.

"A burning love so powerful that reason and wrong have no place.

There’s some caution sitting there too, deep in my lower energy centres… riding horses doesn’t come without an element of risk.

Looking back now, I can see how closely my own nervous system mirrored that plant - surviving, adapting, never quite thriving, but quietly refusing to die.

The lotus reminds us that growth can be uncomfortable, but in her own time, at her own pace, the unfolding is worth it.

A threshold is the sacred line between the known and the unknown. Safety and risk. Familiar and unfamiliar. The new beginning and the old ending. A moment when the only way is onwards.

In those circles, everyone was both storyteller and listener. No hierarchy. No rush. Just life, shared in its many voices.

“Perhaps we can embrace the mud, just as it is… and simply say, ‘Yes, mud. Yes, lotus.’”

Pain is not the end of the story. It’s often the threshold of a transformation that does not deny the ordeal of its own creation.

To me, this poem is an example of the magic and mystery revealed when engaging in cultural repair.

In a world already straining under climate collapse, social injustice, and collective trauma, how do we justify giving ourselves the attention and rest we might desperately need? How do we carve out space to tend to ourselves when so much outside seems unwell?

If grieving is feeling, then feeling is life, allowed. Just as it is.