Sabbatical Letter #6: Remembering, Restorying
Note: This series originally took the form of a newsletter to friends on my sabbatical travels from April to July 2026.
Dear friends,
I’ve bid the Lake District goodbye. I hold with gratitude: Being nourished with my mum’s cooking through her visit (permutations of meat and vegetables we rotate through to clear the apartment fridge, all welcome), visiting the mysterious Holy Island (only accessible at low tide - waters cover the causeway connecting it to mainland), the Farne Islands (home to 80,000 puffin couples that mate for life and raise one puffling a year in burrows in the ground), and doing final training walks through weather that ran the gamut (gently sunny, gusty and hidden in cloud, heatwave).
Crossing the Holy Island causeway
Puffin parents with catch for their young, watching out for hungry seagulls (yes, they eat pufflings!)
Wansfell Pike, swallowed up by cloud
I am without a laptop at the moment, having passed it to my mum to return to Singapore so I don't have to carry it on the Cotswolds Way. I'm editing this email on my phone in a café in Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare's birthplace and my last stop before I start the Cotswolds Way in two days). I typed initial drafts at the beautiful Manchester Central Library on a desktop computer, deskmates with people of every age and ethnicity - some doing serious work, others watching Youtube videos, making video calls. Library staff kindly issued me a library card to use the computers despite not having a permanent address. “We don't want you to have to pay.” (Manchester is a UNESCO City for Literature and the birthplace of the oldest public library in the English speaking world)
Library card for the second largest lending library in Britain. I could hypothetically check out something from their collection of more than a million books!
I've been thinking lately about the power of collecting.
We've done this since we were kids. Snoopy stickers, anything pink, anything with dinosaurs, country flag erasers. Redecoration ideas, tactics to raise children. It's knowledge gathering, research, intentional or not, on whatever that we are drawn to and uniquely gather into our own visible or invisible libraries. With our own constellations of interests and unique ways of perceiving and cultivating, we offer them, in new forms, back to the world.
James Beard Award-winning Helen Goh and her unique constellation offering: Ottolenghi pastry chef + trained psychologist.
Years of Yakitori research and expertise manifest in each cut of meat uniquely prepared and designed at Niwa Yakitori
The Paper Quilt Project at Abbott Hall - evolving community artwork made possible through careful facilitation and collection
We also collect things from the past.
Memories, gratitude, promises. This re-collecting, re-membering, is power, too. We use them to sing ourselves forward in tough times, pressing goodness and truth into weary hearts.
I come back to this quote time and time again from this video of Sandra McCracken's songwriting process:
"I wrote this (song) in a dark season, I was kind of in a fog - as we were writing I was trying to express what I was feeling, and Thad very pastorally said, the old spirituals would say sing not about where we are in the moment, 'my feet are tired, I'm in a fog', but 'my feet are strong, my eyes are clear', this way of singing ourselves forward, sometimes with tears, sometimes with defiance, sometimes with great celebration."
I try to do this in my daily journalling, too
I'm also thinking about returning (or re-turning).
In Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Inbound podcast, he opens each episode by reading a poem, talking about it, then closes it by returning to it again. Our experience of the poem is no longer the same. I experimented with this in the Lake District, closing my time there with the same walk I started with at Rydal Water, weeks apart, in completely different weather, as a different person.
Rydal Water, 4th and 26th June
This follows the Japanese idiom, ichi-go ichi-e, 一期一会, or “one time, one meeting” - another way of saying you can't step in the same river, or experience, twice.
Finally, there's re-using, re-storying.
I learned about the beautiful practice of re-using leftover sourdough to create new recipes at a Lake District bakery, a practice the owner inherited from her grandma.
But sometimes, there are stories that we want to transform in the re-telling. At Cathedral Cavern, a disused slate quarry in the Lake District, its man-made scars are now retold as otherworldly beauty.
Some questions:
If you had to conduct a presentation at a PowerPoint Party, what would your constellation of interests be?
Have you returned to a significant place after a period of time? How has it changed? (Or how have you changed to see it differently?)
Are there stories in your life you want to reinforce or retell?
Love,
SH