A Homecoming of Sorts: Five Days Healing in the Cheviots
A Homecoming of Sorts
Five days healing in the Cheviots
By Trevor H. Smith
August 2023
In the summer of 2023, having been all but broken in both spirit and mind by the events of the previous two years, I took myself off into the depths of Northumberland to see if I could make things better.
In the six months that followed, I gathered my notes into a piece of writing that talks about what it is to find comfort in solitude, to trust in strangers, and to be willing to accept one’s failures.
In July 2021, my good friend Mike had been out for a bike ride down quiet country lanes when his heart stopped beating. In June 2022, my brother-in-law, Thom, succumbed to lymphoma after eighteen months of treatment. These two events bookended the biggest creative opportunity of my life to date, a 200-mile hike around the Turkish Lycian Way, followed by exhibitions and an accompanying publication, but it ended in disappointment and heartbreak.
Five Days Healing in the Cheviots is not the end of grief, rather, it puts a cap on the end of a period of deep sadness and self-doubt and lays down a marker for the re-emergence of hope, and the beginning of the next chapter in my creative journey.