Sometimes, however hard we try, we are just not heard. As we get older we suspect that perhaps, with some people, we may never share a language. How do we make sense of painful broken communication, and what can we do about it?

The tower doesn't fall because something cruel and external decides to strike it. In this reading, it falls because it was already unsustainable, and something in us knew it long before the lightning arrived.

The Winter Solstice has always been important to me but the year I moved to Portugal, somehow, I missed it. I remember I had planned walk to a waterfall to dip my toes in the freezing water. I would have said a prayer for the new year’s light. I

I often discuss thresholds, and the liminal, and rites of passage, with the people I talk with.

And suddenly, here I am, laboriously writing with one hand, catapulted, without warning, into my own in-between. In the space of weeks I have had the foundations shimmy away from under me as my relationship ended abruptly, and then my arm broke, and I now am forced to manage my life in the rawness of necessity. I am having to walk the talk like never before.