Most people who discover my work know me through Native Wisdom Hub, ceremonial leadership, or my writing on re-indigenisation. What fewer people know is that my first profession was language interpreting, working in sheriff courts and immigration tribunals where the smallest misunderstanding could have profound consequences. Returning to that work after many years reminded me that some of the skills we develop long before we find our life's direction often become quietly indispensable later on.

I turned thirty-seven a few weeks before expressing these words here.

We spent most of that day in the garden, sun properly out over Scotland in what has been our hottest summer for a very long time, the kids bouncing on their airtracks whilst Erika and I danced to salsa and old Cuban folklore — the music that's quietly been the backbone of our family life for years now, before ceremony or plant medicine entered it. An ordinary Wednesday, in the best possible way.

Experiencing and reading life the way I do, through the eyes of multiple spiritual modalities, not least numerology, I have begun to experience a particular flavour of freedom post-birthday. From a numerological perspective, I pay attention and calculate life in personal years — not January to December, but birthday to birthday. By that reckoning I’ve just crossed into a personal year 5, and if you know anything about numerology’s rough grammar, you’ll know that a 5 year speaks of freedom, movement, and horizons you haven’t seen yet. As usual, I don’t offer that as proof of anything, nor as fact. I offer it as the chosen lens I happened to be looking through when something else, something more ordinary and more interesting, caught my eye.

Post-birthday, I’ve returned to my freelance profession in language services.

Fourteen years ago, before any of this — before Native Wisdom Hub, before the book, before cacao and ceremony became the architecture of my working life — I qualified as a language interpreter and translator. Sheriff Courts. Immigration tribunals. Rooms where somebody’s whole future turns on whether the right word lands in the right place at the right moment. It was my first proper ‘trade’, if you will. Learned the long way, on my feet, in rooms with very high stakes and very little room for error.

I stepped away from it, on and off, for years, as other paths pulled harder. And now, at the start of this new personal cycle, I’ve stepped back in — at the same time as a small handful of new coaching enquiries have started arriving. Two worlds I’d always kept in separate rooms in my head, suddenly sharing a doorway.

And sitting in both rooms again, I noticed something I’d never quite named before.

There’s a particular skill interpreting demands of you that has nothing to do with vocabulary or grammar, and everything to do with something called verbal working memory — active short-term memory, if you want the plainer term for it. It’s the capacity to hold someone’s spoken words in your mind whilst you’re simultaneously unpacking their meaning, tracking the grammar, and building the equivalent sentence in a second language — all before the speaker has finished their next thought. You’re never just translating word for word. You’re holding a moving target in your mind long enough to do something precise with it.

I’m still learning what that skill is most useful for outside a courtroom, in the wider context of being of service to our shared world. But here’s what I’m noticing so far.

In a coaching conversation, that same capacity turns into something else entirely. It becomes the ability to hold a client’s words across a timeline — not just what they said thirty seconds ago, but what they said fifteen minutes ago, and sometimes what they said in a session three weeks back — and to move between those points when it might serve them. A client will say something in passing, almost throwaway, and twenty minutes later say something that rhymes or resonates with it in a way they haven’t noticed. I go back. I ask about the first thing, then the second, and I ask what they make of the two sitting next to each other.

More often than I expected, that’s the moment something shifts. Not because I’ve told them anything. I haven’t. I’ve just handed back two things they already said, side by side, and let them do the noticing.

I don’t think this makes me a particularly gifted coach. The actual coaching — asking the right question, staying quiet at the right moment, knowing when to lean in and when to leave a silence alone — is its own craft, and one I’m still apprenticed to after the best part of a decade. But I’ve come to believe the working memory piece is what lets that craft land with more precision than it otherwise would. It’s not the engine. It’s the thing that lets the engine idle quietly enough to hear what’s actually being said underneath the words.

There’s usually a narrative running beneath a person’s decisions and patterns, and it’s rarely the one they’d tell you first if you asked directly. Watching someone find the edges of that narrative — watching the moment their own words, reflected back, start to rearrange something in them — is one of the more honouring pieces of work I get to do. Not because I’m healing something for them. Because I’m helping them hear themselves clearly enough to start healing it on their own terms.

And underneath all of it, if I’m honest about where this is going, is a question I keep circling back to. If not for freedom, then what, in the end, are we actually building any of this for?

Freedom, as I’m coming to understand it this year, isn’t the absence of structure — courtrooms have plenty of that, and I’m walking back into them by choice. It’s what structure is for. It’s the thing that lets a person step properly into whichever life they came here for — building something that matters in their field, doing better work pushing the frontiers of whatever they’ve been called to, or simply being more fully present in the ordinary, unglamorous work of loving the people in front of them and nurturing the relationships that are most important to them.

I don’t know yet what this particular personal year is going to ask of me. I rarely do, at the start of one. But I’m grateful, this month, for a skill I built in rooms that had nothing to do with spirit or ceremony, and for the strange, quiet way it’s turned out to serve exactly that work after all.

With all my love,
Marc-John

*If you'd like to read more reflections like this, along with chapters from Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life, you'll find them over on my Substack.