Tag: mending softly

Comfort in a time of Chaos

Dear Hearts…

How are you holding up in these uncertain times?

It has been quite a long time since I’ve shared my voice here. I’ve been on a hiatus to focus on furthering my studies. Now, having completed a Masters in Sustainable Agriculture degree, moved house, renovated and taken a moment to recover from the state of burnout I pushed myself into, I feel more ready and able to return to this space.

And so, as it happens, I am returning at a time when the news cycles seem heavier than usual lately. Every scroll through our phones brings another story of geopolitical tensions, war drums beating somewhere in the world, economic instability, and a lingering sense that the ground beneath our collective feet is shifting in ways that we cannot control. Even if these events are unfolding far from our homes, their emotional tremors travel easily across borders. They reach us in the quiet moments — in the tightening of our chests, the low hum of worry, the questions about what the future might hold.

I’ve been asking myself – how to I create sense of security and comfort in a time of chaos?

In times like these, I find myself reaching to the familiar embrace of nature, growing my own food, grounding in green spaces, breathing and moving through forested paths on daily morning walks. It’s a constant that makes me feel safe. In addition, I also find myself returning to certain books that have served as spiritual and psychological companions through several difficult seasons of my life. One such book is Man’s Search for Meaning by the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.

Those of you who read my book, Mending Softly, may remember that at times I leaned on Frankl’s work while navigating the grief of pregnancy loss, because during that fragile season his ideas offered me a kind of steady lantern — something to hold onto while finding my way through the dark.

Frankl’s insights were forged in the unimaginable conditions of Nazi concentration camps, yet the wisdom that emerged from that suffering speaks powerfully to all seasons of uncertainty — including the one we find ourselves in today.

So, with this in mind, I thought it might be meaningful to revisit some of the key lessons from his work and reflect on how they might help us navigate a world that sometimes feels unstable and frightening.

The Freedom to Choose Our Response or Attitude

One of Frankl’s most enduring observations is that even when everything else is stripped away, we retain the freedom to choose our response to what is happening around us.

He wrote that everything can be taken from a person except one thing — the last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.

This lesson has surfaced for me frequently over the years because it is both humbling and empowering, and perhaps even more so lately, as I find myself in an unusually reactive state of fear. Yet this idea is reminding me that, yes, there are so many things in life we cannot control: global conflicts, political decisions, economic systems, natural disasters, illness, loss. But within that vast landscape of uncertainty there remains a small but powerful territory that belongs entirely to us — our inner posture toward life.

During my own grief journey, as described in Mending Softly, I remember reaching a moment where I realised I could either sink deeper into despair or gently reach back toward life again, breath by breath. I began asking myself – what is thriving in my life, and what is thriving around me? – doing my best to redirect my attention to those things. Hand in hand with that, Frankl’s work reminded me that meaning and dignity are often found in that quiet act of choosing how we show up to what is.

Meaning as a source of Sustenance

Frankl believed that the deepest human drive is the search for meaning.

Not the fleeting rush of happiness.

Not success.

But, meaning.

In the concentration camps he observed that prisoners who held onto a sense of purpose — be it the thought of a loved one waiting for them, a piece of work left unfinished, a responsibility yet to be fulfilled — were often more resilient in the face of unimaginable suffering.

Meaning, in other words, can become a lifeline, a driving force that sustained them.

Granted, in our modern world the challenges or threats we face may look different, but the principle remains the same. When the world feels chaotic or frightening, reconnecting with what gives our lives meaning can anchor us again.

Your meaning might live in your relationships.

In your creative work.

In caring for your family.

In tending a garden.

In offering kindness where you can.

These seemingly small acts are not insignificant. They are threads of meaning that weave stability into an uncertain world.

Love as a Source of Strength

Another striking theme in Frankl’s writing is the power of love.

During his imprisonment, he often survived emotionally by imagining conversations with his wife and reflecting on the depth of his love for her. Even when separated from those we love, he believed that love remains a profound source of meaning and inner strength.

In a time where global tensions can make humanity seem so fractured and hostile, I feel that this is a particularly important reminder.

Expressed through compassion, empathy, and connection — love remains one of the most quietly radical forces we have available to us, especially because it reminds us of our shared humanity.

Suffering Can Be Transformed

Frankl never romanticised suffering. But he did suggest that when suffering is unavoidable, we still have the ability to transform how we carry it.

Again, this is a reminder that while we cannot always choose what happens to us, we can choose whether suffering becomes a place where meaning ends — or a place where meaning begins.

This idea was deeply personal for me during the season that eventually became Mending Softly, something I reflect on more specifically in the chapter on Post Traumatic Growth. Loss broke something open in my life. Yet slowly, through reflection, writing, and community, I discovered that the experience could also become a source of compassion, connection, and purpose.

The pain did not disappear. But it became woven into a story of resilience rather than despair.

Living Responsively to Life

Lastly, probably one the most beautiful ideas that Frankl’s work offers is that instead of asking what we expect from life, we might consider what life is asking of us.

Each moment presents us with a question.

How will we respond?

What will we choose?

What kind of human being will we be in this situation?

These questions feel particularly relevant in a world where fear and division often dominate public discourse.

Perhaps life is asking us to cultivate steadiness.

Perhaps it is asking us to practice compassion.

Or, perhaps it is inviting us to become small pockets of calm, kindness and meaning within a turbulent world.

A Gentle Invitation

So today, dear hearts, I leave you with a few reflective questions that echo Frankl’s philosophy:

What gives your life meaning right now?

What small acts of kindness or creativity could you offer the world today?

And perhaps most importantly:

What is the most life-affirming response available to you in this moment?

Even in uncertain times, meaning remains available to us. Often it lives in the quiet, everyday choices we make — the way we care, the way we create, the way we continue showing up for life despite its fragility.

And sometimes, simply continuing to breathe, love, and hope is its own quiet form of courage.

With warmth.

Jodi Sky

Mending Softly – The Book that I’m Writing About Recovering After Ectopic Pregnancy Loss

It’s so strange to think that around this time last year I was pregnant. Of all the things that have been thrown my way, I’d never imagined that I’d ended up having ectopic pregnancy and face the fallout thereafter. Needless to say, it’s been a tumultuous year,  one where we’ve dealt with one obstacle after the next – from the pregnancy loss, to my husband being retrenched  and everything in between. It took a lot to remain grounded and positive when it felt like everything was falling apart. This is way I am so grateful to have come to a much better space, feeling inspired and stronger that I’d imagine possible.

One thing that was very striking for me was how different the experience of ectopic pregnancy loss was from previous miscarriages. I was also stunned to find very little information and supportive resources around the recovering from such a traumatic experience. This force me to do a lot of research and apply the many self-care and emotional healing tools that I had in my toolbox to my own situation. I ended up documenting my own healing journey and along the way felt guided to write about book about my recovery process. This is how my upcoming book, ‘Mending Softly: Hope and Healing After Ectopic Pregnancy Loss, was born. In this book I share my experience and the steps that I took to support myself through the process of grieving, healing and ultimately learning to find hope again. During my quest for healing, I connected very deeply with various analogies about pottery and the art of mending broken pottery pots or ceramics, something that I’ve woven into the various themes throughout the book, and something that in part also inspired the book’s title.

The Mending Softly book is due to be release in June 2020, mostly likely around the solstice. In the meantime, I am would love to share a little glimpse into it’s contents:

MS Cover 300dpi

“Preface

“Imagine that your life before infertility was a vase. One day a loss or trauma tips that beautiful vase to the ground. Tiny and large shards of glass are everywhere. What are you going to do with these glass shards?” ~ Joanna Flemons

I wish I’d fallen softly. Light and graceful like a feather drifting slowly to the earth on a warm and dreamy summer’s day. I wish that I’d landed softly too. But there is nothing soft or graceful about that devastating moment when the worst has come to pass. The unavoidable truth is that it is hard, cold and brutal. All that you know to be true and good in life shatters in an instant. You feel like a delicate pottery bowl violently tossed from your place of rest, watching yourself crash and scatter across the hostile dark earth. The sound is deafening. Time stops. Inside, the quiet ache of shock and heartbreak slowly makes its grip known. They cut deep, these jagged edges of broken sherds. You gasp for air hungrily, yet somehow forget how to breathe.

Is there any point in breathing if this is what the world is asking me to face? You think to yourself.

Somehow though, whether through madness or magic, you find a way to. You keep breathing even when you don’t think you can. You surprise yourself.

The fall is hard – the crashing, the breaking, the scattering of your broken clay body. What I found however, is that the mending is slow, soft and although somewhat ungraceful still, you sense yourself being held by an unseen force, something greater than you wrapping you in its balm. Remember this on those days when it feels like healing will never come. Perhaps it is true that you may never be the same again going forward. Innocence is lost after all, the innocence of hope and the innocence of a joyful or easy pregnancy. While I don’t want to diminish the depth of your hurt, trauma and fear of an uncertain future, I do want to offer a glimmer of hope for the possibility of finding healing and wholeness beyond the pain. No one likes hearing that healing comes with time, but the truth is that it does.

Over the years, I’ve read many stories about how ancient sherds of broken pottery are mended. In the aftermath of my ectopic pregnancy loss I kept revisiting literature about this mending process with great fascinating for reasons I couldn’t understand. There’s a slow and mindful art to carefully piecing back together each sherd in order to recreate the remnants of what the original artefact once was. A deeply thoughtful and somewhat intuitive art, if will. Something in this process of mending broken pottery seemed to resonate in the context of my quest for hope and healing. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why at first, but the deeper I reached in search of meaning, the more clearly I saw just how it mirrored my own unravelling and how it offered itself as a metaphor for my potential to mend myself. Each individual piece with its distinct shape, with its unique lines and curves is a memoir of its own, a tale of what was before. Like a quiet whisper it narrates the story of the devastating blow that was dealt and gives insight into how things fell apart.

Then comes the restoration, the time laboured effort to gently rebuild what’s been broken. The act of mending asks three important things of you – patience, trust and surrender. The fractures, the cracks, the staples and the revealing swaths of glue stand out boldly like the wounds in my heart and soul that cannot be hidden from sight. And the missing pieces, those gaping holes are anecdotes of the things that are lost forever – my baby, my fallopian tube, a piece of my dignity and fertility – the things you learn to live without. Or perhaps I should say the things that you learn to carry on living for in spite of what has happened, because through surrender and acceptance you discover the power of your personal strength and resilience. Something profound happens when you wake up in a calm green pasture on the other side of the treacherous storm you thought would end you. You discover who you are beyond the unimaginable. You discover what you are made of. Suddenly, the thing that may have broken you becomes the very thing that empowers and emboldens you.

Granted, this is difficult to imagine when you are at your lowest point. However, in the moment of my deepest despair I found myself faced with a choice – either I would sink even lower into the dark and scary place I felt I was losing myself to, or I could find a way to reach towards life. The depths of depression scared me more than the idea of living. Ultimately, I wanted my would-have-been-baby to mean something and for their memory not to be swallowed by a black hole of persistent misery. So, I began my path to mending softly, willing myself to breathe again, moment to moment.

I’ve had to dig deep to re-establish my sense of self and unearth the person I had become on the other side of tragedy. And writing this book has been part of my heart’s mending. I offer the words upon these pages in the hope that sharing my story with you as honestly as I can will bring some kind of comfort to own quest for healing. I want you to know that you are not alone, darling heart. I walk this road with you. While I don’t know how the rest of the journey will unfold or how either of ours will end, I do know that we are both survivors and thrivers. Keep breathing. May you find your place of peace through you own process of mending softly.”