Danielle Martin

My relationship with yurts started long before I ever decided to live in one. In fact, the first yurt that became important to me wasn't in Mongolia, on a windswept hillside or even particularly close to nature. It was inside a room in the middle of Cardiff. Yurt in the City was exactly what it said on the tin: a yurt, in the city. It sat inside Meanwhile House, a building filled with rooms occupied by an eclectic collection of Cardiff creatives. Our neighbours included Cardiff FM, tattooists...

When we first realised we needed to leave our yurt, I found myself feeling emotions that I had not really expected. Of course there was the practical stress: where would we go, how would we move everything, what would we do next? But underneath the logistics was something much deeper that took me a while to acknowledge. I was grieving. I was grieving a future I had imagined. The yurt had become more than just a structure we lived in. It represented a choice we had made to step outside of the...

Like many people leaving university in 2008, I entered the world of work through whatever paths were available rather than those that felt intentionally chosen. What I found was not direction, but systems, interlocking structures designed to manage people, risk, and distress. I began working in homelessness, substance use, and frontline care. Over the years I moved through hostels, outreach services, needle exchange programmes, and harm reduction work. Early in my career, I worked in one of...