'In Search of My Mother's Garden I found my own'

Above: Still form Speaking in Silence (2020)

Alice Walker is one of those authors who's words touch deep inside your soul. The messages which transcend the words that make them, resonant with truth and an intention to spread those truths. I love her work because of this, and because they remind me of my mum.

Walker once wrote 'in search of my mother's garden, I found my own.' In making Speaking in Silence I not only uncovered my own truths but also truths about my mother, which in turn allowed me to bring forward compassion I always felt for her onto myself. In seeing the world from her eyes, I have learned to love myself as she loves me.

So in looking in this way, with integrity and soul and the love of motherhood, I began to know myself.

This film about my childhood memories is as much a story of suffering and finding comfort in silence as an ode to the strength of my mother. Messages I bring forward to another young girl in a surrogate guardianship.

Now 25, in my developing adulthood, I see the cycles and patterns of my mother and my mother’s mother repeated in me. Our genetics, our lives, the chemistry of our minds and souls shared.

But it is not only us.

There have been hundreds of women before me living out these trials, seemingly written to repeat across the play of time. In knowing this, I find comfort in every moment of suffering, and pride in every moment of strength. I feel them all with me, and I hope always to bring the blessings in my life that they had brought in theirs.

I hope one day too to know the joy and pain of motherhood so that I may know in this purest of love.

I hold onto hope in the child that I might one day bare, to continue our story with hope and compassion that they will feel in their heart. To fill the world with a little more gentle, unconditional, accepting love.

'And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often that not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see:or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.' (Alice Walker)