Welcome to my world!

That’s me in my ‘garden office’ where I hang out during the summer, weather permitting. After more than 30 years in England, I’m back in the beautiful Siebengebirge near Bonn, Germany, within spitting distance of where I was born and raised.

I’m a writer and translator. Also a mother and grandmother, wife, sister and friend. Also an explorer within the vibrational field that connects the outer and inner worlds we all live in. Also a student and practitioner of shamanic and Buddhist traditions, a lover of animals, herbs and wild flowers, energy psychology, stories, mantras and poetry, and of course my English and German families, and my friends old and new. A voracious life-long learner, it took me a while to accept that I may also be a teacher of sorts – I gather information and experiences in my inner and outer worlds, combine them in ways that make sense to me, and put it all into stories, books, blogposts. Which is my way of handing stuff on.

Writing is a bit like breathing for me – so natural I hardly even notice it, and utterly vital…

I was fortunate to grow up in a house filled with books, and when I was 12 and first had a room of my own I started writing a journal. I still do. Makes me feel grounded, clears my head, and helps me find beauty and appreciation instead of focusing on the chaos I sometimes create around me. I spend a lot of time with my nose in books. Those I’m reading are strewn all over the house, as are notes for those I’m in the process of writing.

In my early twenties I sold all my worldly goods and moved to England, entirely on trust: I just knew I needed to live there and that it would be all right. And it was. Tough and challenging at times, but also amazing and often downright miraculous. But I always felt temporary, always on the look-out for the next new thing, as though moving to yet another town or getting yet another job would finally make everything ‘right’. I couldn’t name what exactly I was searching for, but I knew it had to do with the concept of home and belonging. And then I came full circle.

Following the impulse to return to where I originated from put a stop to that manic need to keep running: I was ‘home’ in ways that had eluded me all my life. Home, as it turns out, isn’t actually locational. Rebuilding my relationship with my mother during her final years was a major part of my homecoming. Finding a modern-day shaman (www.die-kraftreise.de) who guided me back to the old ways – some of which I’d lived by all my life, not quite knowing what they connected me to but feeling a deep connection all the same – was another type of homecoming. And now, as my journey continues, I realise that there are no limits, and that appreciation of what-is will keep me in the flow and has me waking up in the mornings with a smile on my face. (Well, most mornings, anyway…) Everything just keeps unfolding in astonishing ways.

I share my life with my husband, the British landscape painter Oliver Wolf, and our ancient foster-dog, a beautiful, gentle person (part bear, part fox, part hoover…) who wants to live out his life in peace and quiet. Happy to oblige, Little Bear!

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. —George Bernard Shaw