Last week I spent a joyful afternoon making a Christmas wreath in the kitchen of the brilliant Annie Jenkins.
It was both wonderfully organised and completely free - the best kind of supervised creative play. The time flew past, and we all left with a completely different wreath - no two the same size, shape, or mix of colours, each brilliantly festive.
What a gift.
Back in August last year, I shared a photo of an abandoned creative project - a large pile of painstakingly cut fabric strips. The skeleton of a patchwork quilt.
Making one was a long-held dream that felt so exciting in theory, but not in reality.
Luckily for me, my mum offered to take the project on, and a couple of weeks ago she delivered the finished article in person.
It’s absolutely gorgeous.
Over the course of a few weeks recently, I asked for a helping hand with all kinds of things:
My daughter painted my nails for our friend’s birthday celebration. It’s not something I do well, and she’s brilliant at it. It was a delightful treat to have glamorous hands for a few days.
My husband did all the late-night pickups in an unexpected week. We share most things pretty evenly, but he knows I power down early. It made a big difference.
Three local friends with dogs of their own took care of Freddie for a day when we all had to be somewhere else. They shared walking and being with him, he had a fabulous time, and we could focus on what we needed to.
What a gift.
You know those people in your life?
The ones you have a rich shared history or an instant understanding with?
The people who bring out the best in you, who it’s easy to be completely yourself with, and talk about anything and everything?
The people who you can dive straight in with without getting lost - from the start or after many years?
They’re simply your people, and they are a complete gift.
There are 2 things making my everyday life a bit better this week:
#1, a new fan | Oh how I love it - and Claire Pedrick for the recommendation and the wise words that accompanied it.
With temperatures in the UK hitting over 30 degrees recently, my west facing coaching space and me have been feeling the heat. I really needed to make some changes. This fan is super effective, portable, and the colour puts a smile on my face.
#2, an index box | I often draw something during a coaching session, and have compiled a number of postcards over the years. Useful coaching prompts had turned into a messy pile that was hard to find things in. Now they have a home and the neat organisation makes my heart sing.
On Saturday my lovely adventure buddy Penny and I did a beautiful 7 mile walk through various green bits of London, some of which were familiar to us and some not.
We’ve walked a lot together before - mini adventures finding our own way from home to Buckingham Palace, and from Battersea Park to home.
This time we followed someone else route - a section of the Capital Ring - where there was a particular way to go and markers to help us stay on track.
I started writing a weekly reflection back in October 2022. As well as sharing them here, I created a blog page on my website where they all live.
The vision to was to create a useful resource, both for me and others. A kind of library - a place to store and structure what I was writing and learning about, for the benefit of me and anyone who wanted to access it.
Except I never put a filing system in, so it became less of a library and more of a disorganised and increasingly large pile!
If only there was a way of grouping and organising them to make them searchable. Ah, Categories and Tags - the things I’d ignored since the start…
The first half of May has mainly been about the Lake District, first on a family trip, and most recently at the Fred Whitton Challenge in Grasmere.
It’s an event that my husband has done solo for the last few years, first as a rider and most recently as an artist, but this time I went with him.
What a gift.
Time in a gorgeous location, a fun shared experience, a super friendly event with incredible community spirit, the loveliest people - plus, witnessing the true power of a support system.
I love fitting pieces together to create a picture - in all areas of life.
It’s such a joy to make sense of things and see how they come together, to join the dots, to see the clarity emerge and the wood for the trees.
I know now that taking time at the beginning to sort through the pieces is an important part of the process.
In a puzzle that’s finding the edges, grouping obvious colours, gathering things to build around. And it’s a pretty similar process in other situations too.
I know how useful it is, and I am always, always tempted to skip it, because I’m impatient to get going and want to be onto the satisfying part!
