At the Heart’s Farthest Edge

In October 2020, as new lock downs were implemented, Jan Fortune moved from a beloved home of twenty years in North Wales to a tiny hamlet in a forest in Finistère. Isolated during lockdowns, facing major unforeseen house renovations, illness and bereavement, she was also training as a herbalist while juggling work. Constantly, she asked herself: What are you doing here? How had a moment in a church gazing at a stained glass window as a four-year-old, a friendship between two girls who role-played their way through seven years as people from 10th century Moorish Spain, a thirty-one year volatile marriage, work-place assaults, a heart-changing encounter with herbalism and a new relationship led to this place in the seventh decade of life? At the heart's farthest edge unravels a series of cusp moments so slight they might have vanished unnoticed, yet in retrospect make sense of following a call to a forest in a new land and language, exploring herbalism, creativity and the ways in which we might live a small life well in this beautiful, wounded world. Friendship, motherhood, love, making art and the natural world collide with the times we live in to produce a love letter to moments that persist across years, shining with joy or the sheen of tears, revealing how our deepest stories matter.