An Ode to Auchenshuggle
and the places where we rest.
Hi, I’m Debbie, a spiritual director, writer, host and mother based in Glasgow. I offer stories, ponderings and gentle invitations to share a moment with your soul.
Hello friend,
Join me today as I celebrate one of my favourite local haunts and read on for a few lovely things.
An Ode to Auchenshuggle Forest
For a humble patch of trees, you are surprisingly significant to me. A tiny sanctuary sandwiched between the persistent drone of London Road and the racket of the M74. Your closest neighbours: an industrial estate, Matalan and KFC.
Firstly, there’s your name, how perfectly Scottish with the soft ‘ch’ from loch and the ‘oo’ of a shooglie peg. Apparently your title is borrowed from the nearby Terminus where the trams completed their cross-city journey until the early 60s. There are rumours that Glasgow Corporation Transport Department invented the name so that curious tourists and city dwellers would travel there1.
Part of it is your proximity, it takes about 10 minutes and 5 green men to walk to your wooden gate and the Forestry Commission sign toppled by Storm Éowyn. You're a little more reclusive than our local Park, which suits me. You don’t have any of those modern conveniences like a picnic bench, toilets or a car park. You are a slice of rustic wild.
Once through the gate your path reaches a mile and is trodden with memories; layered, composting, nourishing. You were our lockdown hideout, home of fairy doors and fallen logs to rest my tired, pregnant body on. There’s that one tree the kids (and Paul) cannot resist climbing. The den we regularly reconstruct branch by branch. The spot where we had our St Bridget’s Day campfire with friends. And there’s where I slung the hammock between two trees one sultry summer afternoon to read.
What magic do you hold that quiets the motorway, amplifies birdsong and transports us elsewhere? You’ve cast your spell on many a visitor who’s wandered to ‘Our Forest’ with us. Is it those two concrete lampposts hidden amongst the trees, inviting Narnian daydreams? Your deer are a miracle to me, I blow them a kiss before they scatter back into camouflage.
I have a confession, I told my colleague that you’re not ‘a destination’. She’s a strider, rather than a dawdler, so I’m not sure you two would be a good match. Plus, I want to keep you to myself. Have you noticed, I’ve visited more regularly these past few months? I made a pact with the puppy that we’d visit you every Thursday and it’s become a quiet cornerstone of my week. He’s released from his tether to scamper and I start to breathe a little free-er.
You are a patch stitched into an unlikely landscape, or rather you’re the original and the neighbourhood developed around you. You and I are kindred, slightly out of place here, yet rooted and growing all the same.
Some Lovely Things
I wrote my Ode to Auchenshuggle after reading James Parker’s ‘Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes: Odes to Being Alive’. This book is a collection of his Odes, previously published in The Atlantic. Not to be devoured all in one go, it’s a lovely book to pick up and enjoy one ode at a time.
Parker’s Odes are “short exercises in gratitude. Or in attention, which may in the end be the same thing.”2 His writing savours the squirrel in the street, naps, a misplaced cup of tea. And so I thought I’d have a play and relish one of my own mundane gifts.
I wonder what commonplace moment, object or place you would choose for your own Ode?
“Your odes, too—can you see them? They’re swimming in your ambience. They want to be written, but only by you. There’s an everlasting valentine at the nucleus of creation, and it’s got your name on it.” - James Parker
I have come to love, value and need my regular walks in my urban patch of trees. This place invites me to rest and to lay down whatever else is going on for a few moments. My Thursday walks are a practice and place I’m holding in mind as Fiona and I prepare for our Rest in the In Between Online Retreat on Sunday 23rd February.
During the online retreat we will wonder together how to rest here in the In Between places of our lives. We will name our shifts and uncertainties and offer ourselves a compassionate pause. We will gather with poems, prayers and ancient wisdom, we’ll reflect and journal off screen, and we’ll hold one another's stories with tenderness and compassion.
Rest is not simple, but it is essential as we work to be people of hope and love in the world, rather than people overwhelmed by the pain and fear. My friend and collaborator Fiona Koefoed-Jesperson wrote a beautiful piece about this, and the need for our self-care to be a shared practice. She asks:
What does it look like to recognise the cost of resistance and choose to love and care for ourselves in the midst of it?
One more lovely thing I’d love to share with you is Fiona Stewart’s Substack The Preferred Story Her poetry and writing is both playful and profound. Here she is delighting in those ‘little shafts of hopeful light’. It is always worth listening to her audio.
May we be the ones who notice and delight in our everyday gifts.
May we wander under trees, find the light and offer ourselves moments to rest.
May we be nourished to continue to choose love and hope for ourselves and those around us.
With love,
Debbie
P.S. If you’d like time to rest and to savour, our Iona In Between Retreat still has a couple of spaces if you’d like to join us this May.