Find Your Voice describes itself as “a guided poetry journal for your heart and your art”. It’s not a book to teach you how to write, and it encourages the creation of accompanying collage art work, but it doesn’t set out to teach that either. Rather it wants to “take you on a creative journey” with the intention of guiding you towards your own writing style and, perhaps, your own illustrative style too.


Noor Unnahar has divided her book into three parts: Uncover Your Writing Stye, Discover Poetic Devices and Find Your Voice. She encourages you through inviting prompts and suggestions on how to mine your daily life for ideas. She finds ways for you to be inspired by things and opinions you hold that are uniquely yours.


It’s a great little book with far more depth than its slight size would suggest. We can’t rate it highly enough!


Find Your Voice by Noor Unnahar. Published by Clarkson Potter

Grow Your Own Physic Garden: Use the Power of Medicinal Plants Grounded in Science
by Elaine Perry, Valerie Laws and Nicolette Perry
Grow Your Own Physic Garden is designed to inspire readers to take an alternative approach to their health, one which is rooted in the scientific study of medicinal plants. By nurturing our own gardens the writers, who include a professor of neuroscience and a pharmacognosist (a person who studies medicines derived from plants) encourage us to grow the elements of our own remedies and put them to use.

The book covers a huge amount of ground. It takes plants individually and details their special features, the folklore surrounding them, the scientific evidence for their inclusion and their medicinal uses.

In addition the text discusses the history of physic gardens, how to choose plants for your climate, plus tips on design, layout and labelling. In terms of plant care there are also extensive notes on pests, pruning, sourcing seeds, foraging, harvesting and staying safe while doing all of the above. And, of course, there are detailed descriptions of how to utilise the power of the plants in your garden.

This book is incredibly comprehensive, covering everything you need to know to create and, more importantly, make medicinal use of, your own physic garden.

Published by DPG Publishing ISBN number 978 1 9163504 0 3

www.dilstonphysicgarden.com

On a hill overlooking the Vally of the River Tyne there’s a handful of acres devoted to some very special plants. Dilston is a physic garden - not a pairing of words we’re used to hearing now, but a few hundred years ago everyone would have known its meaning. It’s a botanical medicine chest.


When we visit gardens open to the public we’re accustomed to carefully curated displays chosen for height, colour and dramatic effect. Dilston is different. In what appears to be a kind of chaos, the plants are arranged by botanical and curative relationships. Everything you need for a healing balm lies close together, aromatic herbs for creating teas or infusions are grouped in neighbouring beds. And the smells! To brush through the garden is to journey through an aromatic landscape.


We’ve been on a couple of courses here - Wild Medicine, Wild Food and Making Autumnal Remedies. The results sit in our kitchen: a lotion for aching joints, an infusion to warm you on cold days, cough lozenges - all made from the plants of Dilston and all grounded in serious medical research.


Inspired by our experiences at Dilston, a part of the Happy House garden is now being developed as a physic garden. So far we’ve outlined a quatrefoil sequence of beds, dug the trenches for brick paths and laid down a mix of healthy topsoil and compost. By this time next year we hope to be making our own remedies at home!


www.dilstonphysicgarden.com

The Comfort of Things is a beautiful book by Daniel Miller. Along with Significant Objects by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker and Taking Things Seriously by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes they form a magical trio of books that increase our understanding of how and why objects carry meaning and importance for us far beyond their material worth.

Balanced on top of this stack is a small opulence of a book - 'Tiny Treasures' written and illustrated by Yorkshire artist and designer and yogi Hannah Nunn. Hannah is a person who really gives the world the gift of her attention, she finds treasure every day in the natural world and this perfectly presented book captures that. 

Sometimes we keep objects because they link to our memories, or they are culturally significant to us. Reminders of who we are, how we got here and what is important to us. Sometimes it's the aesthetic of an object or its function that makes us want to treasure it. But those items we choose to keep, from the thousands and thousands that pass through our lives have stories that we treasure.
​
“What five objects, things, or memories would you like to own again and why” Edith Marks (a question that is part of the Jewish Druts'yla tradition from my studies with Shonaleigh)

“Sense of Place” refers to the emotive bonds and attachments people develop or experience in particular locations and environments, at scales ranging from the home to the nation.” From The International Encylopedia of Human Geography


Imagine you’re house hunting. You step into a strange building for the first time. How does it feel? Is it welcoming, does it feel anonymous or do your senses tell you that this place feels like home? Most of us have felt this - it’s about having a sense of place. We might feel drawn to a special building, a hill, a street, a lake and wonder why it makes us feel something special. And out of the wondering has sometimes come amazing stuff.

A sense of place is a concept that has been a major inspiration in the lives of musicians like John Lennon and Paul MacCartney writing about Liverpool - Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields - or Ralph Vaughan Williams composing his Norfolk Rhapsody. It’s cast its spell over artists like Stanley Spencer who spent much of his career portraying biblical events in his village of Cookham, which he nicknamed “the holy suburb of heaven” or John Constable’s pictures along the River Stour where he grew up.

But poets, in particular, have celebrated the sense of place. Here are a few favourites:

Dylan Thomas’ “play for voices” Under Milk Wood is set in the mythical harbour town of Llareggub - based on the poet’s home town of Laugharne. Many of his poems describe this place. Poem in October is an especially wonderful example:


A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds


Here’s the whole poem:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=24096


February Evening in New York by Denise Levertov is a short atmospheric sketch of the city with gorgeous images:


a winter light opens air to iris blue


It’s a winter evening as the stores close and the workers head home but she wreaths it in magic:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42535/february-evening-in-new-york


And lastly a beautiful evocation of the city of Oxford by Keith Douglas, a promising talent whose life was cut short in the Second World War. His lovely lines:


summer holds her breath in a dark street
the trees nocturnally scented, lovers like moths


unfold in a tumble of beautiful phrases.
https://clarehayns.co.uk/2019/06/21/poem-oxford-by-keith-douglas/


If you’d like to explore with us your own special places through poetry take a look at our online poetry courses:
https://www.happyhousemasham.com/online-courses-words-stories.html#/
Or contact us to book for an experience of Experiments in Poetry:
https://www.happyhousemasham.com/experiencesandevents.html#/​

Our latest experiences and creative treasure boxes contain both tools to help meditation and creative exercises. I have always found creativity and meditation to go happily hand in hand (and indeed science proves they activate the same type of brainwaves). I've just qualified formally as a meditation teacher via the British School of Meditation and here's some of my journey to this place....



Throughout most of my life I have dipped in and out of the practise of meditation - sometimes not entirely sure what it was or even how I felt about being someone who meditated. 


I started connecting with meditation as a concept and a practise when I was doing an ‘A’ Level in Buddhism and Christianity in my teens. I was fascinated by the comparisons between the two religions and tentatively tried Zen meditation. Although I enjoyed it I found it hard and wrongly felt I had to perhaps commit to a religion to practise it properly.


Around the same time I went to a silent retreat at a Christian convent. This was also an enjoyable but challenging experience. Their way of meditating was different again and involved chanting and long periods of silence and contemplation.


So in my teens and twenties I associated meditation with religion and belief. It wasn’t until much later that I understood religion and meditation are not necessarily connected and I felt free to meditate in a different way. 


After a period of ill health I realised I could lower my blood pressure significantly with daily meditation. It made me feel more in balance and gave me tools to centre myself in times when life was tough. Overall I was calmer, less stressed and happier when I meditated. Meditation helped ease pain and discomfort as well as improving my sleep.


When I started teaching more in my early 40’s I realised that I had worked into my practise as an artist a period of refocussing and meditation before I started to work in the studio. Sometimes this was as simple as a few minutes of centring my attention and breathing; sometimes it meant going for a mindful walk; doing some tai chi or just sitting and noticing my thoughts, observing them and letting them go before I worked. I hadn’t really noticed how beneficial this was to my creative process, it was just something I did. I did notice however how much a busy mind, stress and tension affected the creative process of those I was teaching.


And so slowly I began to explore more about meditation. I did more tai chi; a course on embodiment and somatics, yoqi, I read and practised mindfulness, took part in shamanic meditation and journeying, experienced meditation on retreats and used it more and more in my daily life. I tentatively introduced some of my meditation practises occasionally to those I was leading on a creative journey. I discovered their experience was richer, easier and more satisfying because of it.


To my mind creativity has never been so important in our world as it is today - and yet the stress of fast paced contemporary living makes it tough to achieve the space and time to access it. Creativity is vital to our personal lives as well as our professional ones. To be able to think and act creatively helps us problem solve and grow as humans. I know meditation can help access that creative part of ourselves more easily, to have a richer and more fulfilling connection to life.
I hope you'd like to join me at Happy House for some creative experiences that will combine some of what I have learnt from meditation too.

Serves 4

250g gooseberries, washed, topped and tailed
200g Greek yogurt - use the full fat stuff - it works best
200ml double or heavy cream
3 tbsp caster sugar
1-2 tbsp icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
​

Put the caster sugar and gooseberries in a heavy pan with 2 tablespoons of water.


Gently bring to a simmer. When the fruit starts to burst open remove the pan from the heat.


With a fork mash the gooseberries until you have a pulp. Transfer to a bowl and then chill in the fridge for about 20 minutes or until cold.
​

Using a hand or electric whisk, gently beat together the yoghurt, icing sugar and vanilla in bowl until smooth. Then add the cream and continue to whisk. The mixture will begin to thicken.


Place the gooseberry pulp on the thick, creamy mixture and,  with a small spoon or a skewer, run the fruit through the mix. Don’t overdo it - you want to create a swirl, rather than mix everything together completely. Decant into glasses and serve.

My body has a few miles on the clock now. It’s been lifting, walking, running, eating, dancing, snoring and playing for 69 years and remarkably, it seems good for another 69 (though that might be a tad optimistic!). I put a lot of this down to what happens in the first minutes of every day when I unroll a mat, turn on some quiet music and lose myself in a sequence of muscle-stretching, mind-relaxing positions. It wasn’t always so.


I was a mercurial child, one minute running, jumping and  riding my bike and the next flat out on the sofa, my little lungs wheezing like leaky harmonium bellows. I was stuck in this cycle until a blue inhaler was put in my hand for the first time and I was no longer in thrall to the chest-clutching, throat-strangling grasp of asthma. But I knew from then on that my body needed looking after.


When I was a student in Durham a peculiar change took place over my generation. We somehow went from competitive drinking, heavy smoking, bacon butty munchers to whole food scoffing, earth befriending pseudo Buddhists. I suppose it was inevitable after the heroes of our teenage years, the holy Beatles, had embraced mysticism, that it would come our way in time.


And so yoga entered my life. As someone who always struggled with sitting cross legged as a child I didn’t see myself as a promising yogi but, as I came to see, that’s kinda the point. Despite the rise of various would-be gurus around me who claimed to be “more spiritual than thou” they couldn’t obscure the fact that yoga is for everyone.


So I picked up a few poses, absorbed the wisdom that “you’re as old as your spine”, creaked my body into mountains, warriors, planks and downward facing dogs and felt amazing.


You’d think I’d be hooked, wouldn’t you, but I was just human. A few years of drinking too much, the sleep-deprivation that comes with bringing up children and worrying about there never being enough money all got in the way but gradually I came back to the yoga mat.


Now I get up every morning, put on some lovely music and spend a happy twenty minutes trying to emulate the gracefulness of a swan, while more closely resembling an arthritic flamingo. My metal knee limits a few poses, but not many and I rise from my purple mat refreshed, awake and ready for the day.


I still ache, I still lose my balance but I still come back for more. As I hold poses my mind focuses on the moment, and the reality of the day ahead dissolves to the point where it’s just me and my body in a quiet niche of time.




A book recommendation:
If you’d like helpful guide I’m a big fan of B.K.S Iyengar’s “Light on Yoga”. Rather than a thin white woman with a perfectly sculpted body wrapped in a designer leotard he’s an old Indian man in black pants. He shows you a host of positions and explains what each one is good for.