The physical space I write in is nothing special – usually I just take my laptop into bed or park myself on the sofa, sometimes following the sunny spots around the house like a cat. But the mental space to write in is something else.

If you’re a regular reader, you may notice I’ve written more this year than I have since beginning this blog. I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that this year I’ve also been more connected to the world than I have been since Zoe died. For the first couple of years I was in a fog of grief and spent long periods alone. Despite the need I had to write, the posts were few and far between. I was writing them in my head constantly, but the same thoughts and feelings would go round and round for months before I felt I could express them and they tumbled out almost fully formed.

This year I find it’s the connections and conversations with people that have got me thinking and writing (The labels I will not own, How to guard your heart). Sometimes it has been the things people have commented on the writing itself and even the fact that people have been moved by some of my posts (thinking The return of Charlie Cat and Always wear the sparkly shoes here). In joining 1000 Voices for Compassion, I found the connections with people who share my values and those of The Angel Zoe Kindness project and was inspired by some of their themes and writing for my own writing (The friendship seat, My Tribe, Compassion is hereditary).

I still need plenty of alone time to process my thoughts and feelings, but it’s less through thinking than it is through purposely not thinking. When I can empty my mind by dancing, by gardening, by focusing on physically creating something like prayer flags or button angels.

It’s in those moments, when my mind is empty of conscious thought, that an insight from those connections might percolate to the surface, that my little angel muse will pop up unexpectedly, in a fleeting thought or sudden jolt of memory and I find myself in the space to write. About her, for her, for my own healing, for however my hard won life lessons (or hers) might touch someone else.