Just over a year ago, my mother died. It was a few months after my second baby was born and a month before Christmas. She was the last in the generation above me, and this fact reordered things in ways that are only just revealing themselves.

This time last year, I was still unravelling – months of hospitals, grief and the unmanageable weight of suffering pressing into my postpartum body.

Roshi Joan Halifax, a Buddhist teacher, once said that grief, particularly that for a parent, scours the heart. The life I once had was disintegrating. Yet what I found at the bottom was not pessimism or despair but rather a softening. A welcome and changing sense of who I was in the world.

The late psychologist James Hillman called this kind of season the process of growing down – sinking deep into the roots of things, relaxing into the life we are given, not the one we imagined.

In my growing down, what once felt urgent no longer felt compelling. I stopped fretting over the small stuff and I started to notice that the present carried all sorts of offerings........

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