Jennifer Leach

Ancestrally Celtic with a dash of English, I was born in Zimbabwe and spent my  childhood in that beautiful wild country which represented - for we settler stock - a place of unfettered opportunity away from the strictures of the 'Motherland'. This vast landscape became truly my Mother. Those roots however, were colonial, tenuous, and unjustly planted. I was 14 when war forced my family to uproot itself, and after a collective interlude lasting less than 100 years, we returned to settle in the old land. I left behind beloved home, grandparents, great-grandmother too, cousins, family, friends, adored dog, and red soil.

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My new land was for a long time a place of difficulty and loneliness, and the journey here has been lengthy and testing. So many green shoots and flowering branches of promise are deftly beheaded by the old order, if they suggest growth of a challenging kind. 

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Along my path I have been gifted the joyous nourishment of family, partnership and motherhood, deep friendship, mentorship later in life than expected - and a rich calling from ancestors, and energies beyond our ken. Africa touched me with a shamanic quality of wilderness, and my being has now eased itself further and deeper into the neglected terra of the English landscape, into its old ways and truths. And indeed. it turns out. the soils are one and the same, in an eternal and infinite Universe that knows no boundaries. The river beneath the river flows within it all. There is always water in the wilderness.