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It is November 2025 and I am at my mother's home on The Mull of Galloway. Snow has settled on the hills in the distance and my time at the Mawddach Residency earlier this year is only just beginning to sink in and integrate. I expected this—as a somatic practitioner, I am aware the body's way of processing things is often slow, especially when an experience runs deeply.
I cannot deny that I miss waking up to the skin of the estuary, the way the tide sheds itself and unearths the river anew every single day. The soft drag of the water on rock, the way it slowly creeps closer until it is upon the wall that separates the house from the ocean; the wall that came to frame so many of my entrances onto and into the land. I'd sit there and meditate sometimes, using my hand to shield my head from the seagull that had decided to protect its young with a ferociousness that unnerved me—that I understood at the same time. I swam from there, down a slim line of steps that stemmed straight into the water when the tide was at its highest. I swim off the edges here too, from the Mull's granite beaches, stripping off in the eye of the wind, but there was a holding to Mawddach. The way the estuary changed shape—a femininity that enraptured me. Made me creaturely. I spent many hours in the mud, sinking my whole body into sand, moving from one state to another—water to earth, and back again. Exploring that space between, the porousness. This is what fascinated me the most. The shoreline. The meeting point of two bodies. This is where the poems came from. I ended up developing a pamphlet during my stay, which I have only just begun editing. It is called 'motherSHORE' and explores this line as a ritual space, a site of metamorphosis, the potential for transformation that we all carry. Tracking in my body the movement from water to land, my time at Mawddach opened me up to a wider body of work sensing the ancestral lineage of the body. I believe in understanding our evolution from aquatic life to terrestrial movement, we can deepen our relationship to bodies of water, especially in a time of mass pollution and untethering. I write my poetry from encountership, and since my time as artist in residence, I have carried a deeper resonance with the water that surrounds this island we call home. Now on the Mull in deep wintertime, I hope to further develop my receptiveness to the shorelines here, and await what other poems or utterances arise while navigating this envelope of darkness. Emily Spivey substack
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