Neglected places love beauty
Weaving love into the abandoned and a link to tomorrows creativity circle
Neglected places love beauty and beauty loves neglected places.
Neglected places, with their quiet yearning, possess an unspoken kinship with beauty.
I watched as they softened and yielded, cradled by the tender caress of Birch and Rowan roots, and as nettle, dandelion, and clover unfurled with defiant grace amidst adversity.
These forsaken realms stirred to life, welcoming the wild, the beautiful, the true with open arms.
Inspired, I embarked on a journey inward, venturing into the neglected landscapes within my own soul, introducing them to the burgeoning beauty of the world, offering them seeds of wonder. In the hush of dawn.
I collected those seeds—dewdrops glistening on spider webs, the burnt orange glow of a sunset reflected on water, and the delicate spiral of a fern unfurling.
“Look,” I would murmur to the wounded fragments of myself, carrying the seeds into the dim-lit recesses and slowly, the roots took hold, breathing life back into the forgotten corners of my being.
In this quiet rebirth, I recognised a truth so simple it nearly broke me: we are all just trying to become what we already are. The neglected places don't need fixing—they need witnessing. They need someone brave enough to say, "I see you. You belong here too."
Some days I felt like the world's worst gardener, standing helpless as my inner storms flattened the tender shoots I'd so carefully tended.
I began to understand that my broken places weren't mistakes to be hidden but doorways to be walked through. The cracks where the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen would say. The places where my humanity meets my divinity.
And so I came to treasure these fractured parts of myself, the way one might cherish ancient pottery restored with gold-filled seams—kintsugi of the soul. Each break, each mend, a testament to survival.
On the days when darkness threatened to swallow me whole, I would wander to the abandoned lot at the edge of town. There, amid the rusted machinery and crumbling foundations, wildflowers danced in defiance. Purple loosestrife reaching skyward through concrete cracks. Poppies nodding in conversation with the wind. Nature reclaiming what was once taken.
"You see?" I'd whisper to my trembling heart. "Even here. Even now."
The earth knows how to hold wounds. I've watched her gather broken things into her embrace—fallen trees, abandoned nests, even the scars we humans carve into her skin. She doesn't rush the healing, doesn't turn away from the hurt. Instead, she sends her patient tendrils—mycorrhizal networks beneath the soil—to cradle the damaged places, to feed them, to whisper: take your time.
I learned to speak the grammar of healing from these plant teachers. My wounds, like disturbed soil, were not just empty spaces of pain but fertile ground awaiting a different kind of attention. They asked not for erasure but for the dignity of being held in good company.
Sometimes I would lie down among the meadow grass, feeling the earth press against my spine, and imagine those mycorrhizal threads rising up to meet me, connecting my brokenness to the vast web of life. In those moments, I could feel my isolation dissolving like morning mist.
"We are never truly alone in our suffering," the dandelions seemed to say as they pushed through impossible crevices, their yellow faces turned defiantly toward the sun.
I began to collect these moments like precious stones: the way lichen painted abandoned concrete with maps to nowhere and everywhere; how moss cushioned the sharp edges of discarded metal; the persistent chicory blooming blue against all odds. Each observation became a small devotion, a prayer of sorts.
And perhaps this is what true love is—not the absence of wounds, but the willingness to hold space for another's broken places without trying to fix them. To say, "I see this pain in you, and I will sit with you in it until the wildflowers come."
I began collecting others' stories of neglect and renewal like precious seeds. The elderly man who planted a garden after his wife died, how the tomatoes grew sweeter for having been watered with his tears. The abandoned church now home to a colony of bats, their wings like dark prayers filling the empty sanctuary. The child who found a bird's nest in the hollowed stump of what was once her climbing tree.
Each story wove itself into the growing tapestry of my understanding. We were all apprentices in the art of becoming whole, learning that wholeness doesn't mean unbroken—it means integrated, like the meadow that holds both wildflower and weed in equal reverence.
Much wild May beauty to you
Brigit xx
LINK TO TOMORROWS CREATIVITY CIRCLE BELOW…..
Tomorrow is our usual weekly creativity circle, same time as always 12.45 - 2.30.
This is a lovely and supportive space where we check in together and then go into silence with our cameras on and explore the creativity practise we are drawn to explore. In this way the group anchors each individual into something they want to explore, with less temptation to distract ourselves.
People have explored such things as poetry, writing, journaling, free writing, painting, doodling, drawing, sketchbook work, crafting, nature based practise, singing, knitting, collaging, planning, dreaming, cleaning and more.
After the hour we come back together and share how it was for us. See this as a space to come together and and start to let a creative aspect in you unfold, no need to be perfect, an artist or creator, this is to curiously step forth and le ourselves play, discover, unearth through some creative form.
LINK……..