I’m Jo, I live in beautiful South Devon, with my partner and our little cat.

I was diagnosed on 19th November 2024 with metastatic breast cancer, with secondaries in my bones and lymph nodes.

I have been training as a death doula / soul midwife, and it feels so important to share my journey. In a society that avoids talking about death, I want to open up those conversations. Death is coming to us all, it’s just that some of us get to walk towards it with the gift of knowing.

I intend to fully embrace each day, living richly, wildly, fully, (hopefully for a good while yet) whilst also accepting that, as we all will, in time I’ll reach my death, ready for the great mystery.

My spirituality is wildly pagan, animistic, druidic and so this does, of course, impact my ideas of what living and dying means.

My road may well be different to yours, but maybe I can leave a few waymarkers for you to follow, or inspire you to plan to lay down your own.

So here I will share images, moments of wonder, random thoughts, things to ponder. I’m absolutely not looking for sympathy, for magic remedies, to be fixed, just for my path to be witnessed, to share the journey.

Each day, I am going to sew a felt feather, with a few words that reflect my day. I will share it here to recognise the wonder alongside the grief and the fear. To celebrate the joy of friendship, community, nature.

The words will be sewn in proto-celtic, my prayer language, our bronze age ancestor tongue. There are subtleties in the words I have chosen and weavings around these words, which I love.

To learn more about this beautiful language, I highly recommend Carolyn Hillyer’s lexicon “Her Bone Bundle”.

Please feel free to share this page with anyone you think may appreciate it.