“After Half-Term: The Butterfly Farmer Is Taking Flight”......
The red thread of creative consciousness runs through it all.
Dear friends, co-creators, and curious readers,
As we return from the pause of half-term, I wanted to share something quietly extraordinary: while many of us were resting, this project—our project—continued to grow in rich, unexpected ways.
🦋 The Butterfly Farmer is more than a book now. It’s a living movement of care, transformation, and creative co-production—rooted in schools, sustained by poetry, and pollinated by community.
What began almost three years ago with small workshops and gentle conversations in schools has blossomed into something remarkable. This is a long-growing garden, and its roots are deep.
The Schools Nurturing the Vision
This work continues to be shaped by the incredible commitment of schools who have made space for imagination and care to guide the curriculum. Thank you to:
Bridge, Blean, Wye, Whitstable, Wincheap, Challock, and St Peter’s, for your vision and trust.
Each of you is part of this unfolding story, where the creative and ecological meet: where butterflies are not only life cycles, but metaphors for trauma, change, and resilience.
Partnership with Hearts Delight Farm
A heartfelt thank you to Roland Brown at Hearts Delight Farm, whose passion for butterflies and conservation supports this work at its deepest level. With Roland’s guidance—and the support of the Kent Butterfly Conservation Trust—we are grounding The Butterfly Farmer in the ecology of wonder and responsibility.
We’ve also been welcomed by the Rare Breeds Centre in Ashford, a place where sensory learning and poetic thinking meet seamlessly. These spaces are helping us hold the work gently, tenderly, and truthfully.
What’s Coming Next
This term, schools begin their journeys into the Enchanted Gardens—a series of experiential activities rooted in nature, care, and imagination. Children’s art and poetry will be gathered and displayed in a local bookshop window, giving the public a glimpse into the co-created worlds they are helping to shape.
Conversations are also underway with the university about hosting a small gallery exhibition, a dedicated space where children's voices, visuals, and verse can be held with dignity and seen as the deeply valuable contributions they are.
And… I have some amazing news that I’m not quite able to share just yet. It’s with comms, but once cleared, it marks a profound step forward for both The Butterfly Farmer and this wider constellation of work.
🔴 The Red Thread
Woven through it all is what I call the red thread—the thread of creative consciousness that runs through every part of my thesis. It is present in every output: the poetry, the workshops, the performances, the play, the children’s books, the quiet moments in the woods with paint and paper. It ties together the absurd and the sacred, the scholarly and the sensory, the whispered and the witnessed.
This thread was spun from the waiting rooms—those emotional landscapes nurses often inhabit silently.
My PhD uses the lived trauma of nurses as the bedrock for creative therapeutics—a practice rooted in listening, expression, and radical tenderness. These are The Whispers from the Waiting Rooms—the origin point of my practice and the pulse behind the Hobopoet, the wanderer who gathers fragments and spins them into coherence.
And So We Grow
To the teachers returning from half-term: welcome back. While you rested, the roots deepened. The wings kept forming. And now we are ready to unfurl them wider, together.
Thank you to every child, every educator, every butterfly, and every being who continues to believe in the power of creative education to change —quietly, relationally, and beautifully.
With love and seeds of hope,
The #hobopoet
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