But. Maybe they do. Sometimes writing wants to take on a life of its own.

I’m in an interesting place with Birgitta. I’m trying to portray her as the real woman she was before she became a saint. The woman the hagiographies don’t necessarily talk about. The woman who laughed and cried and battled with herself like every other human on the planet. To be honest, I’ve learned to read carefully between the lines of text that was written with an agenda – that of convincing the 14th century papal powers to declare her a saint. Those are the writings we have available – she didn’t leave a lifetime of journals and memoirs the way people do now. Bridget Morris, one of Birgitta’s most famous 20th century biographers, said it well: Most hagiographical material lies between the extremes of spurious legend and richly ornamented character portrayals. The word itself comes from two greek words, hagios (meaning holy) and graphic (meaning writing). I find hagiographies difficult to read because they are so slanted, and I feel manipulated. And deprived. To have done what she did, Birgitta was obviously radical, a force to be reckoned with. A woman like that is going to be far more interesting than her hagiography would lead us to believe. It bears mentioning that she was canonised in 1391, a mere 18 years after her death. The case they built for her was obviously a strong one. Which means it was almost certainly heavily slanted.

For the past week I’ve been playing with some new and radical ideas of my own. I am writing historical fiction about a real person so I get to create details and stories to flesh out the known skeleton of her life. The best that I can do is portray her as a relatable woman. A relatable woman who absolutely lived her incredibly deep devotion, but was not beyond her own struggles, challenges, mistakes, and quirks. The more deeply I read between the lines of her biographies (and hagiographies), the more inspirational I find her to be. Because she was real.

My fresh insights aren’t sugar-coated. Do I have the courage to write about her in that way? It makes for a better story, for sure, but… yikes! Am I badmouthing a saint?? That’s not my intention. I just want you to meet the incredible woman I am coming to know. She had grit. She had juice. She had courage.

So, who do you want to hear about? A woman with more than a bit of wildfire in her? Or a sugar-coated ascetic? I think accidentally posting my poem earlier shows how I really feel and what I want to do, even if it scares me…

I can tell you this much – I’m awake now!

for almost 70 years

I’ve told you I’m nice

Or at least promised to try to be nice

I’ve snu?ed out my sparkly flame to fit what I think you’ll like.

I can’t do it anymore. I’m done.

It’s time to pull

my skinny ragged self out of my own belly

where I’ve held her in chains –

yes, those chains that wake me in the night

With rattling hurting aching su?ocation.

But she’s not dead

She is rising.

Eye of the Tiger. Oh yeah.

She’s not nice. Nope. She’s mad.

She’s seen it all, pretending to be asleep, trying to sleep.

Ask her what she knows.

Ask her who she is

Under the soft flesh of her self-induced coma.

Ask her what’s under the layers of Nice

Ask her about the clenched jaws, the fat, the roiling gut.

Ask me who I am, again and again.

Breathe life back into my lungs;

It might not be too late – but time is fleeing

Don’t waste it now,

Don’t go back to sleep.

Find those sparks and fan them into flames

For god’s sake, fan them!

They may devour you, burn your edges, but

Let me tell you who I am

Let me be wild, outrageous.

Let me dance – for god’s sake let me dance

before it’s too late.

Let my song become my wail of rage.

Let me tell my truth.

Let me change the world.

This is everything I need for imagining her life there 700 years ago – the soft green grass, the stone walls connected by an archway with a path leading through the portal to the land and the water beyond.

I am spending so much time in the wildness of my own imagination as I study the life of a very real woman, that this is all it took for me to ground and root into her story and life. Not only can I visualize the years Birgitta spent here, but I can almost hear the sounds of her children and grandchildren here as the lived, worked and played. Back in the day, this was a thriving estate with moats and outbuildings that supported a large community and a number of businesses.

The fortified medieval manor sat on a promontory in Lake Boren now known as Birgittas Udde (Birgitta’s Point). Although it dates back to the 1200’s, Ulvåsa was not actually documented until 1315 when young Birgitta was betrothed and then wed to Ulf Gudmarsson there. Today only the cellar and drained moats survive of the 13th-century stronghold where she and Ulf lived and raised their family.

Photo of the ruins by Stefan Qvarnström as posted on Google Earth in 2024. Photo of the sign to Birgittas udde, next to a St Olavsleden waymark, is by Rommel Paulo Viloan, posted in 2025.

Birgitta married young (age 13 – these were the Middle Ages, after all), and gave birth to eight children. One of the tutors she hired to teach her children, a man named Nils Hermansson, was deeply impacted by the time he spent with the family. He later wrote a hymn, Rosa, Rorans Bonitatem (Rose, whose rare goodness) which is sung in her honour at all Bridgettine convents to this day. Finding stories and music that have survived for 700 years feels like magic, little medieval gifts to lift us on difficult days in our modern times, and in this case it accompanies a lovely piece of modern (albeit vintage) jewelry.

Rosa, rorans bonitatem,
stella stillans claritatem,
Birgitta, vas gratiae.
Rora caeli pietatem,
stilla vitae puritatem
in vallem miseriae.

Which translates to:

Rose showering down goodness,
star dripping with clarity,
Bridget, vessel of grace.
Rain down the mercy of heaven,
drop the purity of life
into this valley of misery.

The image of Birgitta is modeled from a sculpture in Vadstena on the shore of Lake Vattern, the home of the abbey she founded after her husband died.

Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, the hymn is available online, performed by various professional musicians and ensembles – here is one of them. Enjoy!

I’ve known for years that Birgitta journeyed to Trondheim in Norway on pilgrimage to Nidaros Cathedral to venerate the bones of St Olav, before she embarked on her more famous pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago. It’s been ten years since I visited Sweden where over the course of a summer I found myself on various segments of the St Olavsleden, the pilgrim road that leads across Sweden and into Norway. I learned to search for the distinctive trail side insignia long before I started following the yellow arrows of the camino in Spain; I’ve followed bits of the path by foot, bicycle, and car, touching the land where the road starts on mainland Sweden before heading north and west into Norway. For years, those memories have bubbled inside me, a bit overshadowed by other stories from both my life and Birgitta’s.

As I’ve gone deeper into the medieval rabbit hole of Birgitta’s life and times, I’ve come across a few clues that Birgitta’s pilgrimage to Norway might have been more important to her story than most biographers realise. It was a prelude, a time of deep emotion for her, and not an experience we should gloss over.

I know that grief can be taken on pilgrimage, that the empty road becomes a place for re-entering one’s own life. It was on the road through the Norwegian forests that Birgitta’s life changed direction forever.

Jeff and I will be travelling to Trondheim in a few months, to visit the shrine of St Olav. I want to learn about this saint and the pilgrims who have travelled to honour and beseech him for centuries. As much as anything, I want to follow in their footsteps and particularly in Birgitta’s wake. We won’t travel the the entire road, and won’t actually go by foot anywhere but the approach to the cathedral itself – but we will visit Trondheim to get a sense of the people, the culture, the cathedral. My pilgrimage will be as much academic as spiritual, although I suspect those pathways will mingle together to a point at which they seem indistinguishable.

For us, it marks a return to the travel that we love. Our preparation for this journey, which will be. by plane, train, and foot, will be part of our pilgrimage as we learn about St Olav and what he meant to Birgitta in the 14th century, as well as what he might mean to us in the 21st century. I am posting this on St Olav’s feast day, the 29th of July, less than a week after Birgitta’s feast day. I don’t yet know enough about him, but the whispers of invitation are getting louder.

The photos are from my 2016 explorations of the St Olavsleden in Sweden, with thanks to Jill Geoffrion for the photos of me.

Those are the outer gestures I make, but there are other, inner, observances – particularly for Birgitta. I have lived with her, studied her life, for over a decade now, and I marvel at how she moves through my life, and what her presence has come to mean to me. Studying her life has brought medieval studies to life for me, and has brought me back to life as a writer, teaching me that my seventies can be a time of vitality, learning, and excitement.

My gratitude knows no bounds.

In some churches Birgitta is being held up today as a ‘formidable’ woman, and one who knew how to abide in God.  I would say that sums her up pretty well. But I also love the descriptions given by those who knew her, that she was high-spirited and possessed a cheerful nature. Being formidable is admirable, but it is good cheer that makes one approachable and allows love to flourish.

Happy Feast Day, St Birgitta!

I am currently taking a class on historical fiction writing to help me wrestle with the question of how to fill in the blanks that history has overlooked, convincingly and in an enjoyable style. The first assignment was to write about my character’s life just before my story begins, and that seems like a good place for me to begin this introduction:

Birgitta Birgersdotter was born into a noble Swedish family in 1303, and was taught at a young age to manage the affairs of an extensive, busy, and extremely devout household. Married at only 13, she gave birth to eight children, and was deeply involved with their day-to-day lives, the management of the family estate with its farms and small businesses, her husband’s legal and political career, as well as the charities she founded to care for the poor, the sick, and the unwed mothers in the area. 

However, her life became far more complicated as King Magnus, her cousin, had called her to Stockholm to oversee the royal household and serve as a guide and tutor to his young wife, Blanche of Namur, who had recently arrived from Belgium. A direct summons from the king couldn’t be ignored, even when he is a close relative. This was a difficult assignment for Birgitta. She was a devoted mother, and not only did she have to leave her home, but she had to part from her children, some of whom were still quite young. Arrangements were quickly made for them to be sent away to different convents and monasteries to board and be educated.

Birgitta didn’t enjoy her new life. She carried out her duties extremely well, but didn’t approve of what was, to her mind, the corrupt nature of court life, but she was well-loved and the household ran smoothly because of her efficiency and thoroughness. She was extremely beautiful, which was seen as a valuable attribute, and is said to have been intelligent and constantly cheerful. Her high ideals, however, were not appreciated, nor were her stern moral and financial warnings about the extravagances of the royal family and its court. 

She served as Mistress of the Household for the royal family for almost five years, and was feeling more convinced than ever of the futility of her efforts to influence the King and Queen. Birgitta was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the luxuries and frivolity that she saw around her, when word reached her that her son, Gudmar, had died at his school in Stockholm. Never a strong child, his death was nevertheless a shock for his devoted parents. Weighed down by grief, Birgitta and her husband, Ulf, decided that the time had come to leave court life, but wanted to do so quietly and without drama. Buoyed by their faith, and supported by their reputation for being devout, the couple realised that embarking on a pilgrimage would give them the escape they desired.

And as centuries of pilgrims can attest, pilgrimage is a time-honoured way of grieving as busy people make a break from their daily lives in order to devote themselves to their faith, or lack thereof, and commit to a routine of simple living and constant walking to a place they deem holy. 

It was at this point that a noble mother became a pilgrim…. and my story begins. 

Most of you follow me on Substack and/or know me personally, so you probably already have a sense of my current interest and the work I have been concentrating on recently. It is three-fold:

• My Writing Journey
• Pilgrimage
• Medieval Studies, focusing on the life of St Birgitta of Sweden and her 14th century pilgrimage along the camino

While the term Ariadne’s Thread is most closely associated with the labyrinth symbol, I believe deeply that the labyrinth is more than just a design. In my life, it serves as both an archetypal symbol and a metaphor to help me to understand my experience.

I have have been writing as Ariadne’s Thread for well over 20 years now, since 2002 when I published Ariadne’s Thread: Legends of the Labyrinth, a small booklet on labyrinth traditions and practices, and then I followed that with my PhD dissertation in 2003, Ariadne’s Thread: The Transformative Potential of Labyrinth Walking. I started this website and blog a few years later, in 2007, and have used it to document my work and my pilgrimages ever since.

Publicly I have gone very quiet for the past year while I carefully navigated my path in order to discern the direction I want to go at this point in my life. First and foremost, I have been embracing my writerly soul, finding my voice, my passion, and a new depth of authenticity. Privately, I have been writing more than I have ever done, in a variety of genres and forms. You will see that I have changed the tagline on my site to My Writing Pilgrimage which feels significant and absolutely spot on.

Second, I have been diving into the life and times of the medieval woman I first encountered nearly a decade ago, St Birgitta of Sweden. Although I’ve been interested in her for a long time, my relationship to her has felt increasingly personal over this past year, and my extensive research is developing into a book. I will use this website and blog to discuss my research, but I’ll be giving a chattier “dispatch from the road” on my Substack which I am renaming Following the Thread. The posts will be separate and distinct, and I hope that you will consider subscribing to both.

I can’t tell you how excited I am and how good it feels to be moving forward and starting to share this unexpected passion. I had no idea my 70’s would be so interesting!

But underneath those obvious changes, two things always weave below the surface of Thanksgiving: tradition and thankfulness. When I wake up on Thanksgiving morning, I can sense other families stirring, sense that others are beginning to prepare their feasts, whatever they will be eating. While I might be alone in my kitchen I always feel like I am cooking in community that day.

We cooked a mini-feast this year. It was just the two of us, but we wanted the day to be as cosy and meaningful as we could make it – and I didn’t want to be exhausted at the end of the day. We have much to be thankful for this year – we have just passed an important anniversary; last year at this time we were in America where my husband was recovering from a medical emergency and had just been discharged from hospital following major surgery and two weeks in intensive care. We all knew how lucky he was to have survived.

Oddly, he started craving peach juice. That is something we don’t have in the UK and he admitted he had never tasted it, but he knew he wanted it. Our older grandchildren went out on the hunt – peach juice isn’t easy to find, even in America. When they came home with a bottle of chilled juice, it was as good as he had imagined. So we sent those grandchildren out for more. And more.

As she prepared our family’s traditional pigs-in-blankets for breakfast on Thanksgiving morning, my daughter purloined some of the peach juice and made spontaneous Bellinis – a stroke of brilliance and fun that will forever be a symbol of the miracle of life that we experienced in 2023.

Peach juice is even harder to source in England – on Wednesday we traipsed through five different supermarkets in search of anything remotely peachy. We did – finally – find some. But my personal miracle of the day was looking down at the black boots that I was wearing over my jeggings. I hadn’t been able to wear them – or any shoe with a heel – in more than three years. I had injured my knee so severely that walking at all was difficult for many many months and painful for even longer, and I haven’t been able to wear shoes with any heel at all. I had opted for prayer, patience and gentle exercise rather than the injections or knee replacement that I was offered. Wearing my boots and dashing through shops this week felt like another miracle, the miracle of mobility. That moment of noticing my boots and feeling my own vitality will be with me forever. Sometimes it is the little things that touch us most deeply and remind us of how much we have to be thankful for.

We lit a fire on Thanksgiving to warm the house, cooked a chicken and a few Anglicized sides using British ingredients, and drank peach Bellinis. Our hearts were full.

My parents were born only days apart, in the same rural town. Both lost their fathers too early. Like my mother, Arden, too was one of three children. He and my mother attended the same school and married after he returned from military service as a Marine Corps pilot. Both wanted a family, but my mother’s heart condition made pregnancy impossible, and because my mother wasn’t expected to live a long life, no adoption agency would consider them.

But miracles do happen. The night that my birth mother went into labour, she arrived at the hospital with a clear decision already made. She wanted to have me adopted but didn’t want to work with an agency -and her attending doctor knew that Rowena and Arden wanted a baby. Invisible forces were at play that day – in a way that no mortal could have scripted, the separate stories of a courageous unwed mother, her newborn child, and a wise but childless couple wove together. I was adopted in a private adoption – I was only 5 days old when I was discharged from the hospital and went home to my new life. My new parents were progressive in their thinking and always completely open about my adoption – nothing about it was ever kept secret from me, and that in itself was highly unusual in the mid 1950’s.

My parents adopted me with full awareness that my mother might not live to see me into adulthood. That means that my father knew that he might well end up raising me as a single parent, a single father. Of course they would have hoped that my mother would defy the odds, but the fact remained that he wanted me so much that he was willing to do whatever it took. And that is how I think of him now: hands on. This was a remarkable man.

I loved my dad, completely and totally. But in an ugly teenager way, I made him a bad guy in my made-up story about myself and what a difficult life I had. I thought of myself as a give-away child. I think it is a story that many adopted children tell themselves, and mine seemed all the more believable because my (adoptive) mother and father divorced when I was only three. But it was not a true story. Far from being a giveaway, I was the child of extraordinary collaborative parenting.

We don’t have the abundance of photos that build up around 21st century babies, but I have a myriad of memories and mental images, snapshots in time that only I can access. I remember my dad rubbing my aching legs as a young girl – I had been born with hip problems and was in a cast from the waist down for many months and I still remember the achiness I lived with as a child. My dad would rub my legs to ease the pain at bedtime. Sometimes he would sing to me, too – I especially remember him singing his beloved Marine Corps Hymn. As a pilot, his love of flying ran deep. He would take me to watch the airplanes taking off and landing at the little Napa airport, sharing his passion for aviation and all things travel – he loved cars, trains, planes and shared his fascination with me. I remember the thrill of spotting “going trains” with him whenever we went anywhere.

I was only three when my parents separated, and I remember the shock and sadness of him telling me that he wasn’t going to live with us anymore – it must have broken his heart to tell me that. But I also remember his tiny apartment and my visits there. In fact, I remember being there when he told me he was going to marry my stepmother. I don’t think either of them ever understood how happy that made me, from the get-go. I knew they belonged together. I remember him cooking breakfasts – eggs, bacon, pancakes. I remember his joy when they told me I was going to be a big sister.

Looking back as an adult, what touches me most deeply was his continued commitment to me. And this part of the story didn’t happen in a vacuum – it is a tribute to both my parents and to the people they later married. My father came to visit me every day while I was growing up. Every single day. As time moved on and the families changed and grew, he never once let up on his commitment or involvement. And it was done with the full support of our extended family. This is the man I want you to know.

My most often repeated parenting quote comes from my Dad… you never stop worrying about your kids…

Dad died in 1997. He knew my children but not my sister’s daughter. He never met my husband, Jeff. And yet… the night I was flying to England to ultimately marry Jeff, I felt my dad with me, as real as if he was sitting in the next seat. He was flying me into my new life and I sensed that I had his blessing..

Arden was a trusted and beloved dentist and an active member of our community, but he suffered with ill health in the last years of his life. He was a skilled professional and his work was important to him, but I think he would have wanted to be remembered as a parent first and foremost. He never quit worrying about my sister and me, never quit caring, never stopped loving.

Happy 101st birthday, Dad!