Moth/er Midlife: a writing and ritual workshop for women
At the heart of Sladebank Woods near Stroud, we’ll gather to explore midlife as a powerful gateway - an invitation to enter peri/menopause and beyond with resilience, courage, and joy. Guided by the moth, a shapeshifting creature of metamorphosis, we’ll embrace this transition not as a loss but as an evolution: a natural milestone that celebrates wisdom, maturity, and growth, marking fresh flight into the rest of our lives.
Perimenopause can knock women off their orbit as hormonal changes impact physical, emotional, and intellectual wellbeing. It often lasts for years, yet shame around the end of reproductive life, within a society that ties women’s value to fertility, has meant many endure this phase in silence and without support.
Moths, however, are wiser. Navigating vast expanses of the night sky, they use celestial cues and subtle shifts in the Earth’s magnetic field to find their way. In this workshop the moth will be a metaphor, a mother guardian, drawn instinctively to light yet moving through shadow with courage. Having existed for nearly 190 million years, moths carry ancient symbolic weight across cultures. Their extraordinary capacity for metamorphosis signifies rebirth, freedom, and the hidden beauty of this overlooked stage of life.
We will blend creative writing exercises (including gentle journaling, so beginners are warmly welcome) with shared experience and ritual that embraces and celebrates midlife. Together, we’ll shape words that honour the body’s insight, give voice to untold stories, and celebrate luminous resilience.
Opening and closing rituals will root us in the woodland’s embrace. In this circle, we’ll find renewal and joy- leaving with writing that resonates and rituals that affirm our place in the spiralling cycle of change.
After the workshop, there is an added opportunity to use the sauna in Sladebank Woods - half hour slots are available with a maximum of 3 people from 6pm - 8pm for a small extra cost (see below). Juliette will be in touch for your preferred time slot after booking.
Maya Angelou
Passing Time
Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk
One paints the beginning
of a certain end.
The other, the end of a
sure beginning.
Date: Saturday 7th February
Time: 3pm – 6pm
Venue: Sladebank Woods, Summer Crescent, Stroud, GL5 1PP
Fee: £40 / 33 concessions
Add the option of a sauna after the ritual/writing workshop - coming soon
About your tutor
JLM Morton is a writer, celebrant and community arts producer. She has won the Laurie Lee Prize, been longlisted for the Nan Shepherd prize and her nonfiction has been published in Caught by the River, Oxford Review of Books and Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Juliette is widely published as a poet, the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes and highly commended by the Forward Prizes. Juliette was poet in residence at Sladebank Woods 2024/5. Find her online: www.jlmmorton.com