A Phoenix from the flames

Hello from my dormant blog account.
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything, even longer than I thought as I had two blog posts sitting in drafts that I thought I had posted. Doh.

So why the revival. Well I’ve been inspired to write again for a number of reasons. In the summer I  attended a training and development weekend through work..more about this later but one of the workshops I attended was called ‘Write to inspire’ it was on my list of choices but I’ll admit not high up and I didn’t really know what to expect other than about poetry. I’ve written poetry before - even winning a prize back in the school days. I always write something for the anniversary of my son Daniel’s death but recently the writing I’ve been doing has been work based reports and policies. Not exactly outpourings from the heart.
So I entered the workshop with some trepidation. We talked about what had brought us there, what we were hoping to get out of it and about structure and types of poetry. We were told that by the end of the session we would have started to write a poem and if we felt brave enough, perform it. I was in a room with a group of women that I’d never met before but felt a sense of safety and camaraderie. Then a strange thing happened, as I was talking I felt a huge swell of emotion. I’m usually pretty good at keeping things in check but actually had to have a moment. On to the poetry. The room went quiet as we all got absorbed in the task. We didn’t have long but what was remarkable was that we all managed to write something and then perform it. Even more remarkable was that they were great. I went through a whole raft of emotions in that room but the result was definitely cathartic and unexpected. It just goes to show, we should try news things because there is always something to learn none more so than about yourself.
Back to the weekend. It was great to get to know some work colleagues better and catch up with ones I already know. It was also great to see the power of networking and the support that women can give to each other is so empowering. Empowerment is a bit of a buzz word that gets thrown about but if you see it in action it really is truly something.
I met lots of people from different brigades and as always found out about a job role I never knew existed in the fire service.  Apart from the poetry I also attended workshops on incident command and fire investigation. Both were informative in their own way and I learnt lots. There was plenty of silliness - dancing on a stage and breakout run to Aldi for booze to name just two. What’s interesting is that some of my work colleagues said that they couldn’t think of anything worse than spending the weekend with people from work. Maybe I’m just odd but they really are missing out but maybe that says more about them than me. I’ll leave it for you to decide.