Soul Sanctuary Hub

A monthly letter from Joanne, October 2026.

Opening Ritual

Before you read on, make yourself something warm to hold. Tea, cocoa, hot water with a slice of lemon — it doesn’t matter what. What matters is that it asks for both hands.

Sit somewhere you can see out of a window, even if all you can see is a wall or a strip of sky.

Hold the cup and feel its heat move into your palms. Now think of three people who hold a thread of your life whom you rarely thank. Not the obvious ones. Not the people you love out loud. The quieter ones. Maybe the neighbour who takes your bins in, or the woman at the corner shop who remembers what you buy, or the friend who texts on the day you’d forgotten was hard.

Say their names, softly, one at a time. You don’t have to do anything else. Just let them be named.

Take one slow breath for each.

Then begin.

— ✦ —

THIS MOON’S TALE – a short story about the strength of community connection.

‘The Bridge of Borrowed Stones’

There was once a valley cut in two by a river that could not be crossed.

It was not a wide river, but it was fast and cold and deep, and every spring when the snow came off the tops it rose and took whatever had been built across it. The people on the east bank grew barley. The people on the west bank kept sheep. They could see each other’s smoke, and hear each other’s dogs, and on still evenings they could hear each other’s singing. But they had not shaken hands in living memory.

Every few years somebody tried to build a bridge. A strong man from the east bank, who quarried great blocks from the fell and laid them with his own hands. A proud woman from the west bank, who hired masons from the town and paid them in fleeces. Each time the bridge was fine and each time the river took it, and the builders said the river was cursed, and went home.

In the year this story happened, there was an old woman on the east bank named Isobel, who had buried her husband and her son and had very little left but a hearth. She went down to the river one morning carrying a single stone from her own fireplace — a small, smoke-darkened stone she had prised loose from the back of the grate. She waded in as far as she dared and set it down on the riverbed and went home again.