Where the Words Find Me

There’s something about being outside that helps me breathe differently.

When I walk, really walk, not rushing, not thinking about where I’m going, just listening to the world around me, it feels like my thoughts start to loosen. The noise in my head quietens, and the words begin to appear.

Nature has always been my reset button. The open air gives me permission to pause, to step outside of the endless “shoulds” and “musts” of everyday life.

When I’m walking through the trees, or standing beside water, I can feel the weight I’ve been carrying start to shift. It’s as though the world gently holds what I can’t.

There’s one place I often return to; a stretch of countryside that reminds me of my grandad. He used to take me walking there when I was younger.

He’d tell stories, and teach me things about the sea; when the tides would come in and go out, and when the crabs might crawl from under the rocks. He saw poetry in everything.

When he passed away, I didn’t know how to process the loss. There were no words big enough to describe the ache that lived in my chest. So I started writing, not to be read, but to remember.

Each line was a conversation with him, a way to say what I never got to say out loud.

That’s how poetry first found me. Through grief. Through love. Through a need to make sense of something that didn’t make sense at all.

Even now, when I feel stuck, creatively or emotionally, I go walking. Sometimes I talk to him in my head. Sometimes I just listen to the sound of my footsteps or the wind moving through the leaves. And somewhere in that quiet, the words always return.

Writing, for me, has never just been about expression. It’s about clarity. It’s about finding space to feel what I haven’t yet felt, and to remember that healing doesn’t always happen at a desk.

Sometimes it happens out there.

By the sea.

In the stillness.

Where the words find me again.