How heartbreaking is that?

I’m an extraordinarily nostalgic person. Mr. Whippy on the corner, the tune before the van itself, coins hot in my fist, ninety-nine flake, extra sauce. Nobody worrying about E numbers or whether the milk was grass fed.

I have lived in Ibiza for four years now, and every summer I go back to the UK and some part of me is still standing on that corner, listening for that ice cream van.

In my nostalgia-filled heart, the nineties and early noughties live as the pinnacle of contentment. The Dawson’s Creek theme tune carried on the wind from somewhere I can’t place. The smell of a barbecue from next door’s garden, that particular smoke that means summer and nothing else. The sting of salt on the tip of my tongue from a packet of Walkers Salt & Shake, always undershaken, too much on the first three crisps and none at all by the bottom of the bag.

I particularly long for the freedom of teenagehood. The only cares in the world were where the next party was, and who fancied me.

But is that true?

In fact, I was a very tortured teenager. Plagued with insecurity, the kind that doesn’t feel like a phase, but like a permanent verdict on who you are. Whether someone fancied me wasn’t a passing curiosity. It was life or death. A boy not looking at me across a room could ruin a week.

So what am I actually longing for?

I wonder whether nostalgia is part of what it means to be human, this longing for a home we’ve never actually known. At the deepest level maybe it’s spiritual, some longing underneath the longing for union with God. But that’s too big to comprehend, so we translate it into warm apple pie, grandma’s hands, cycling to the neighbour’s. Cider in the park under a hazy sky. Whatever the flavour, it’s the same mystical place, “the past”, where everyone was happy and nobody had any real trouble.

For me it’s an entire childhood folded into Enid Blyton. Ginger beer. A dog called Timmy. England, green and settled and safe.

Except Enid Blyton was a racist. And England, it turns out, was never quite as safe as it looked from inside those pages. Not for everyone.

My beloved Aunt Janine turned eighty this year.

We do the same thing every birthday in my family. A circle. Each person says what they see in that person, one at a time, going round, until they’ve been told, in a dozen different ways, everything beautiful anyone in that room sees in them.

Eighty is different. So we asked her something additional.

Eighty years on this earth. What do you know that we don’t?

“Back your decisions,” she said. “If you’ve made one, stand behind it fully”

I have been turning it over since - what does it mean to back our life fully?

And in this line of inquiry - how do we back the season of life we are in?

Spring, the infinite possibility of everything, and underneath that, the torture of not yet knowing who you are, or what you’re for.

Summer, the career in full swing, the children, the dream itself, fulfilling. And underneath that, some part of you aching for the girl in spring, who only had to worry about who fancied her.

Autumn, which I actually think might be the greatest act for many women. The shedding of the masks, the power. But underneath that, the grief for small hands no longer grasping at your skirt.

Winter, already on the horizon. The peace of it, but the brittleness too. Friends passing on, children building lives you’re no longer quite inside of. And missing the version of you that was still right in the middle of everything.

And so the advice I take from my Aunt Janine. Don’t half-live the season you’re in because you’re busy grieving the last one, or already flinching at the next.

Even this one. Even the sticky-fingered, over-tired, not-sure-what-I’m-doing-with-my-life one.

Even this.

The blazing fullness of the summer of life. My son’s hand still small enough to disappear inside mine, the two of us too tired most nights to do anything but say goodnight, the longing for simpler, quieter days. Even this, which I will, one day, from some other corner, call the pinnacle of contentment.

I am not the girl who grew up fantasising about the big white wedding. But now that I’m planning it, I have to admit, I’m obsessed. I wouldn’t call myself a bridezilla exactly, but I would say that for the past two years a portion of my brain has been quietly reserved for all things wedding. And as we approach that final stretch, I’d estimate about 60% of my thinking is taken up with wedding planning: the logistics, the excitement, the conversations that begin with so, how’s it all going?

The wedding has colonised my mental real estate. Though as it turns out, that's the affordable part.

There’s a lot people say about weddings, but one thing is consistent: they are expensive. I’ve done everything I can to keep things reasonable. One of my best friends is making my dress, our celebrant is another friend, my parents are contributing generously, and the rest has been the result of digging into savings, cutting back, and an enormous amount of hustle. And we live in a culture that has thoughts about this. Why spend that much on a single day? That’s a car. That’s a deposit on a house. The implication being that to spend so much on something so fleeting is somehow irresponsible, even irrational.

But I have always been clear: for me, it’s worth it.

And this tension tells me something about modernity. It has become almost commonplace to see expenditure on ceremony as frivolous, a luxury you justify rather than a necessity you protect. Why spend on something transient and intangible when you could spend it on something you can touch, something you can use, something that holds its value?

This is a remarkably recent way of thinking. For most of human history, and still in many traditional communities today, ceremony was not the cherry on top of life. It was the structure of life. The Yoruba people of West Africa mark every significant transition, birth, coming of age, marriage, death, with elaborate ritual, not because they can afford the extravagance but because the ritual is the transition. Without the ceremony, the threshold has not truly been crossed. Similarly, in ancient Rome, the cost of a proper wedding, the sacrifices, the procession, the feast, was understood not as spending but as investing: in the protection of the gods, in the social fabric, in the luck of the union itself.

These ceremonies were the things around which a life was built. They marked the before and after. They gathered the community as witness and as blessing. They gave the new chapter, the marriage, the birth, the initiation, a solidity it would otherwise lack. You weren’t just having a wedding. You were making something real.

This is very much how I feel about ours. Yes, it is a brilliant excuse to gather everyone I love and have a party. But for me it is more than that. It is a rite of passage, the thing that will genuinely set us off on a good course for marriage. The wedding is not a decoration placed on top of the relationship we’ve already built. It is the ceremony that consecrates it. The foundation, not the flourish.

And of course you could have a profound rite of passage with a fire, some friends, and a few words spoken from the heart. It’s not the cost that makes it meaningful. But where we choose to spend, and where we dismiss spending as wasteful, often reveals what we actually value. When we dismiss ceremony as unnecessary, we are not being financially prudent. We are saying something about what we think makes life worth living.

This got me thinking about beauty.

I love flowers. There are always fresh ones in our house, wild from the garden, picked on walks, sometimes, when I’m feeling really abundant, roses from a florist. Cut flowers are, by any utilitarian logic, a terrible purchase. They’re expensive. They die in a week. And yet.

For me they are the pinnacle of beauty. And I have come to think that being surrounded by beauty, really surrounded by it, as a daily choice, matters more than we currently allow ourselves to admit.

For twenty years I’ve run a values workshop in my corporate work, helping people identify what matters most to them. I’ve delivered it to well over 10,000 people by now. As part of the exploration I put a list of a hundred values on the screen, courage, integrity, faith, inclusion, adventure, and so on, and ask people to choose five. And here’s the thing I always notice, the thing that still surprises me even after all these years: in all that time, only one person has ever chosen beauty.

Just one.

I think this would have been different a hundred years ago. Go back further still and beauty was not a private preference but a moral category. For the ancient Greeks, the kalos k’agathos, the beautiful and the good, were barely distinguishable. Beauty in the world was evidence of order, of rightness, of the divine at work. A beautiful ceremony, a beautiful object, a beautiful life: these were not indulgences. They were aspirations worth organising a society around.

In modernity we have elevated the tangible over the ceremonial, the functional over the beautiful, the measurable over the meaningful. And with that, something quietly slips away, an attunement to the world, a sense that how things are done matters as much as whether they get done.

Many of my friends are talking about the risks and rewards of using AI to do our writing. There are real gains - speed, clarity, structure. But what do we lose when we choose the concise, perfectly calibrated sentence that lands you at the destination instantly, instead of the long and wandering one that slips through fields and meanders between thoughts and doubles back on itself just to catch a particular quality of light before finally, almost reluctantly, arriving somewhere - like this one? We get there sure, but the journey was infinitely more boring.

For me, the capacity to create beauty - in language, in ceremony, in the way we choose to mark the moments of our lives, is one of the things that makes us human and makes the path of life worth walking.

It was heart-opening and deeply healing. I felt returned to my essence - joy, creativity, connection, a deep sense of love and peace for myself and all beings. I left feeling deeply seen, accepted, and a true sense of belonging. For the week that followed, I was a butterfly.

This week, the contraction came. If you’ve been on retreat you’ll know it - the moment when everything you set out to heal comes back threefold, and you want to fold your wings, crawl back into your chrysalis and sleep for a million years. It’s a well-trodden part of the path, we are warned it will come, and I know it will pass. And I know there’s something worth looking at.

For me it looked like feeling like a failure in every aspect of my life.

Failure as a mother, the house isn’t clean, I can’t cook, I shouldn’t need childcare for Zemi and should be doing it all on my own. Failure at work, I can’t seem to get anything off the ground, I’ve lost the thread of my purpose. I lost one of Ocean’s shoes at football and Zemi’s hat at the beach, and instead of letting it go, I spent days circling the same story: I am a mess. I cannot hold it all together. Something is fundamentally wrong with me.

One of the things I learned on the retreat: when you meet an edge, move towards it with curiosity. And so, faced with this old familiar story - that I am not enough - instead of collapsing under the weight of it (okay, there was a little collapse) or hardening and soldiering through, I got curious.

I’ve been in relationship with this not enough character for much of my life. For my teens and twenties it was constant, a fundamental truth that coloured everything. Through years of committed spiritual work, I’ve integrated so much of it. Most of the time now, I can genuinely access self-love and acceptance. But there it still is, waiting in the wings.

How? If, after all of this work, you are still here. Who are you, old friend?

The first thing I saw: this is not mine alone. Almost every woman on my retreat carried her own version. And I know from years of honest conversation, with men and women both, that this feeling is everywhere. Near-universal. Which means we have all been swimming in something we’ve mistaken for ourselves.

What if there is nothing wrong with us at all? What if the question we should be asking is what is wrong with the water?

A dear friend and I once sat under the stars and began drafting a charter for what we called the rebirth of the village. The first tenet was: no need goes unmet. In the village, each person brings their gifts in service of both themselves and the whole. Someone cooks. Someone tends the land. Someone sings. Someone listens. Someone cares for the children and the old. The load is distributed because it was always meant to be.

But this is not how most of us live anymore. We live in sealed units, each family an island, each person expected to be everything to everyone, provider, carer, creative, administrator, cook, cleaner, emotional anchor, all at once, alone. And then we wonder why we feel not enough. Of course we do. We were handed an impossible task and told the failure was ours.

When I looked beneath my personal story of failure, this is what I found: it’s true. I genuinely cannot do it all. Not because something is wrong with me, but because I was never meant to. None of us were.

This is why affirmations only go so far. Why therapy or trauma work or even plant medicines can only reach so deep. Because they work on the individual, and this wound is collective. We treat not enough as a personal healing crisis when it is, at its root, a symptom of how we live. So yes, we are not enough because we are cut off from part of ourselves - the part that is each other.

The other gift of the retreat was of course the medicine, and it offered a different angle on the same truth.

One of the things this work can give you is a glimpse of the divine, that which is holy in the sense of completely whole. For me, this means feeling myself held, without question, by all that is. God for some. Source for others. For me, I feel it as The Great Mother and The Great Father. In that space, every part of me that has ever felt broken, or alone, or not enough simply dissolves, because how can I be not enough when I am part of everything?

But in waking life, even if you, like me, are lucky enough to have loving parents, human love, as vast as it is, cannot fully close this particular gap. We can still feel separate. Still feel un-whole. What the medicine offers is a remembering at a different depth: that the separateness itself is the illusion.

And here is what strikes me: both threads are pointing at the same wound. In the human dimension we feel not enough because we are cut off from each other, from the village. In the spiritual, because we are cut off from all that is. The shape is identical. Only the scale differs.

I’m still integrating all of this, but here’s what I feel now.

Most of the not enough story that waits in the wings even when we are feeling great is the result of how we live, a structure that has severed us from our lifeforce and then handed us the bill for it.

And so I find myself drawn, more than ever, towards collective healing as much as personal healing. Towards questions like - What does collective care actually look like? What does it mean, in practice, to live in village, from the smallest daily gestures to the most fundamental reimagining of how we structure our lives?

These are the questions I am carrying into my midlife.

And then there is the part that perhaps will never fully resolve, that whispers, as long as we are here, as separate human beings inside these singular, precious, temporary lives, we will feel it sometimes. The ache of not-quite-enough. Until we return, at the end, to the great mother and the great father, and remember for the final time that we are now, and have always been, enough.

Last week the White House shared the below video. It shows footage of explosions in Iran, spliced with clips of SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “Want me to do it again?”

It was released days after 160 schoolgirls were killed by a US missile strike.

The sheer insanity and depravity of this, feels like a caricatured expression of the culmination of the insanity of the last six years, which has felt at times like a trippy dream, at others, a dystopian nightmare.

I think about the lockdowns. Mothers giving birth alone. Elders spending their final years separated from the lifeforce of family and community. In my own life, I believe my sister’s death - though eventually inevitable - was hastened by that isolation. And even if you thought the restrictions were warranted - to know that our own Prime Minister was hosting parties in Downing Street while the rest of us said goodbye to our dying through glass - reads to me like something out of the Hunger Games.

Then the Epstein files. The revelation that some of the most powerful men alive have used their power to exploit and abuse in the most unbelievable ways. The president of the most powerful nation on earth has been credibly named as a predator, a rapist, perhaps even a paedophile.

And then this: the warmongering of the nation that calls itself the moral beacon of the free world - its military adventures framed as entertainment, shared as content on a platform owned by the world’s richest man. A man who has said he wants to die on Mars.

The start of this year has been unbelievable. And there have been moments when I have felt my psyche almost fracture in the unbelievable-ness of it all, grappling with how far reality has strayed from anything I thought was possible.

And in this grappling - a slow realisation that nothing is sacred.

Not the fundamental human need for connection. Not the protection of women and children. Not the expectation that those who hold power might, at minimum, be held to the same laws as the rest of us. Not the preservation of life itself.

And yet. Through all of this I have been visited again and again by an old friend - Hope.

And today as flower shoots push through cold soil, as morning frost gives way to morning dew, as bears emerge blinking from hibernation and the world tilts again toward light - I feel her more than ever.

Because here is the thing about darkness - how far into the darkness we can stray from what most of us thought was possible creates the equal and opposite potential. The darkness sets the coordinates for the light.

So dream with me for a moment.

I imagine a world where everyone has access to clean water and abundant food, not as a luxury, not as an achievement, but simply as the baseline of being alive.

Where people don’t work “jobs” in order to survive, but contribute through their gifts and passions, where the line between work and living has dissolved.

Where art, music, dance and sport are not rewards earned from labour, not hobbies squeezed into the margins, but woven into the fabric of daily life.

Where children are at the centre of society, and schools are generative, forward-thinking places of exploration, not factories designed to produce compliant workers.

Where we have closed most of our prisons, not through force, but because we did the deeper work: healed our collective and individual trauma so it no longer replicates itself across generations, no longer detonates in violence and harm.

Where preventable disease is largely a memory, because we fundamentally reoriented toward health of body, community, land.

Unbelievable? About as unbelievable as the president of the United States releasing a video of his military bombing schoolgirls, cut to a cartoon. About as unbelievable as one man accumulating more wealth than billions of people combined and announcing his intention to detonate nuclear weapons on another planet so he can move there when this one bores him. About as unbelievable as the fact that we have built minds that are not human, and we are not entirely sure what they are.

If such unbelievable things can happen — and they have, and they are — then the unbelievably opposite is also possible. The unbelievably just. The unbelievably peaceful. The unbelievably beautiful that our hearts know, and have always known, is possible.

Nothing is sacred, yes.

Which means everything is up for grabs.

We are at the end of the year of the snake - the year of shedding. And I am being asked to shed an identity I have held dear for as long as I remember.

That of the “not-angry” woman.

Let me explain.

I Don’t Get Angry

I’ve always said I am someone who is not angry. Sad, yes. Hurt, for sure. But anger? “I just don’t feel it”.

And so when I started this mythic women series, Kali Ma was the one I felt most averse to.

For those who don’t know her, Kali is the Hindu goddess of destruction, time, and transformation. She is the dark mother who destroys what needs to die so that new life can emerge. She wields a sword that cuts through illusion with surgical precision. According to Hindu mythology, particularly the Devi Mahatmya, she emerged during a desperate battle when powerful demons, or asuras, threatened to take over the world. The other gods, who themselves were afraid of her, called on her because she was the only one ferocious enough to give them a chance of winning.

She is fierce, wrathful, dripping blood, adorned with skulls and severed heads - so not me (I thought).

But when I started this series, I set out with the explicit intention of asking these archetypes to illuminate what needed to be activated in feminine leadership, my own and the collective. And I am learning that when we invoke goddesses, we open ourselves up to forces far beyond what the rational mind can grasp. It is in a sense, a conjuring. We ask the universe to send us the very thing we ask for.

And so, fittingly, over the past few months I’ve found myself in repeated situations where boundaries were crossed or people treated me badly. And I did what I always do - I forgave, accepted, loved.

That is, until I didn’t.

One of my closest friends and I started working on a project together last year, something that mattered deeply to both of us.

The first time she cancelled last minute, I told myself it was fine. When she didn’t follow through on her commitments, I quietly picked up the slack. When she didn’t get back to me, I focussed on what she was going through.

But each time, I felt something rise in my body - a heat, a tightness. And each time I pushed it down, reached for the love in my heart, and smiled. “It’s totally fine.”

The pattern continued. More cancellations. More broken promises. Each time the heat got hotter, my smile tighter. But I kept finding my love for her. Kept letting it go.

Until last week, when something finally tipped me over the edge.

I went from “it’s all totally fine, I love you” to “you are a terrible person and I’m done.” No in between. No conversation. Just explosion.

Does anyone recognise this pattern?

This is the pattern of a woman who has spent years, or decades, suppressing her anger, but the flame has not gone out yet.

And in that moment, I was ready to torch the whole friendship.

It reminded me of the moment in Game of Thrones when Daenerys finds out that Cersei murdered Missandei and she snaps and torches King’s Landing. The righteous anger she had been carefully cultivating in service of liberation and justice turned into indiscriminate destruction, ultimately ending in her own death at the hands of the man she loves. (I still think she was robbed of her rightful ending, but that is a story for another piece!)

This is what anger looks like when it has been suppressed for too long and is finally unleashed without discernment. It is chaotic and consuming, destroying everything in its path and ultimately destroying the one who wields it.

Here’s what I am learning about anger.

Anger will always destroy. That is its nature, its purpose. But the important question is what will it destroy?

Now, if you have been with me for a while, you may be reading this and thinking, wait, is this really Holiday writing this? Holiday who has spent the past decade urging us to collapse the victim / villain binary, toward love no matter what, radical empathy and forgiveness as the path to healing.

And now she is telling us to get angry? WTF?

I get it. This may feel disorienting. It has been for me too.

But hear me out. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. But what happens if we substitute power for anger?

Anger without love becomes destructive, reckless, abusive. We have all seen that. But love without anger, I am realising, is also sentimental and anemic. It can lack the force required to interrupt harm.

My refusal to feel and speak my anger didn’t make me more loving. It delayed the truth until it could only arrive as an explosion, and by then, the roles of victim / villain were already written.

The love-only approach had me continuing to accommodate, continuing to forgive, continuing to see her humanity while abandoning my own. It kept the peace, but created the conditions for victim and villain to emerge.

On the other end, righteous rage without discernment burns everything down and creates new victims and villains in the ashes.

The sword of Kali is neither of these. It’s the precision that knows what needs to die - the pattern, the dynamic, the violation, and what needs to be protected - the humanity of both people).

The Mother’s Rage

And so what does Kali show us as a blueprint for feminine leadership now?

Like many of you, I have been brought to my knees as the horror of the Epstein files unfurls like a slow car crash. It sickens me to my stomach and I feel a profound grief.

But I am learning that this isn’t enough. I also need to tap into the primal rage of the mother. The wolf who will tear the predator who threatens her cubs limb from limb.

Grief yes. But this moment also calls for anger.

Kali.

Here she is not in service of protecting individual boundaries or speaking our truth, but she is here in her original form, the one who all the other gods call on when it’s time to slay some demons. And it is time to slay some demons.

I don’t have a neat prescription for how we organise and rise up practically and protect the children. For the victims here, it is already too late. And for those who continue to be harmed, there is often very little we can personally do.

So what can we do?

Here’s a belief of mine that hasn’t changed. The cultural and systemic change we want to see always has a root inside of us.

The root, inside of me and I’m guessing inside of many of you reading, is an inability to come into contact with our own anger. A fear that our anger makes us harmful, unattractive, unladylike, dangerous, unevolved - pick your narrative, the solution is the same.

We must learn to come into right relationship with our anger. To stop suppressing it in the name of being good, kind, or spiritual. To learn how to feel it early, cleanly, and truthfully.

To let go of the story that we are “not angry women”.

It’s time to get angry.

And here’s the spoiler - it might be the most loving thing we ever do.

A 2025 linguistic analysis of job descriptions found that “manage” appears in 80 percent of leadership roles, “control” in 40 percent, while “love” or “care” surface in under 3 percent. Across two decades of Harvard Business Review articles, fewer than twenty include the word “love.” Even our dictionaries and AI models define leadership through influence and management through control, with love entirely absent from the architecture of institutional language.

In the sites of public life where we most often locate leadership - politics and corporate life - our culture struggles to imagine Love as part of it. Leadership there has narrowed into oversight, optimisation, and control.

But it has not always been this way. When we look older and wider forms of leadership - chiefs, elders, queens, warrior-guardians - we find a wider palette. Authority could be brutal, yes, and often undemocratic, but it also carried threads of devotion, inspiration, and a sense of being chosen by lineage, by community, by the gods. People followed because they believed something lived in that person worth following. Even when the systems were flawed, the idea that leadership involved spirit, duty, or moral force mattered.

We had the chance to evolve beyond the harm while carrying forward the depth, to transcend the brutality and keep the potency, but instead we flattened everything into a disenchanted form of leadership. We kept control and discarded devotion. We stripped leadership to a single dimension, reward, punishment, efficiency, and in doing so, removed the conditions where Love could live.

So the question becomes: what would it mean to re-enchant leadership by restoring Love as a structural capacity?

I think of capacities like ingredients in a dish. A pinch of this, a dash of that, like a witch stirring a cauldron. Anxiety might be a trace of fear, a wisp of vigilance, a sprinkle of unspent energy. Courage might be desire mixed with fear and a spark of imagination. Different energies made from their own combinations.

Love is one of the most richest dishes we have, a meta-capacity woven from many others. And just as dishes that look similar can emerge from entirely different worlds, think of Korean kimchi jjigae and Russian shchi, Love has many recipes. Yet there are base ingredients that appear again and again across cultures and time:

Forgiveness, the act that makes repair possible.
Devotion, staying in service to what matters.
Integrity, aligning what we are, say, and do.
Passion, the fire that moves life forward.
Care, tending to what needs attention.
Presence, choosing to actually be here.
Humility, softening the ego for the sake of connection.
Courage, acting from truth even when it costs something.
Generosity, giving without keeping score.

If this is at least part of the recipe for Love, and we want leadership infused with Love, then the question becomes how these capacities could be encoded into the places where leadership lives.

Let us imagine it for a moment.

What does care look like in a corporate context?
Would it be a CFO gathering the entire company to apologise for decades of burnout, dissolving punitive performance systems, redistributing power, redesigning the organisation around human wellbeing?

And what does integrity look like in politics?
Would it be a governing party stepping aside because another group could better serve the people?

Can you see it? Me neither.

Because, the architecture of these sites was built from entirely different capacities, and it is structurally incongruent for them to hold the capacities of Love. You can repaint the walls, soften the lighting, even change the language at the door, but the blueprint resists it. The structure still performs the purpose it was made for.

But this does not mean there is no hope. Far from it.
It means we have been looking where hope was never meant to live.

Instead of returning to the sites of leadership that have made the world harder and less human, we can begin where Love is already alive, where it is still palpable:

The home.

The last foundational site of culture where Love has not been exiled.

Try picturing it now.

Forgiveness might be sitting down after an argument and saying, “I’m sorry. Let us start again”.
Presence might be putting the phone face down and turning fully toward the person in front of us.
Generosity might be offering someone rest, taking over the task even when we are tired too.

Can you see it now? Me too.

For many of us this might still be far from the home we grew up in, or even the one we are building, but it is not unimaginable.

And as luck would have it, luck in the old mythical sense, the force that rises to meet us as an ally, the home is not just the only viable place to lead with Love, it is the place that matters most. For the home is where culture re-stories and regenerates.

I have long believed that a new world will not be shaped by what we do, but by who we are becoming. The world we live in now is not an accident. It is the natural result of our collective consciousness, our habits of relating, the ways we see and treat one another. When we shift those inner capacities, the outer world reorganises around them. The future changes because the people shaping it have changed.

And this is not only about parenting.

It is about remembering that leadership is not something we step in and out of. It is not a role waiting for us in a meeting room. It is the quiet, continuous way we move through the world. It shows in how we care for ourselves and those around us, it’s how we speak about and to the other adults in our home, it’s how we meet our responsibilities and contribute to the places and people around us.

What we embody becomes the horizon the next generation grows toward. And the patterns we rehearse in the shelter of our homes become the patterns a civilisation later names as culture. The world does not begin “out there.” It begins in the rooms where we live our ordinary days.

Which is why, in its truest sense, leadership was never really about authority.
It is about the gravity of a life - the way a person’s inner alignment steadies the air around them. Leadership is a quality of being that draws people forward through example.

And this is where Love returns as a radical force.
Not a feeling, but an organising principle - the way a life comes into right relation with itself, with others, and with the world. To lead with Love is to let your way of being become a path others can walk.

To become, in the truest sense, someone worth following.

In that whisper, the first breath of the next world begins.

Mary is perhaps the most recognised mythological woman the world has ever known. Worshipped, adored, derided. And yet the more I look, the more I see how little we truly know her.

For centuries, the patriarchal church has imprisoned her splendour and her power by relentlessly celebrating her as humble, gentle, patient, self-effacing. A damaging half-truth. Older stories, hidden gospels, and mystical visions reveal her as something far more whole: humble and radical, gentle and fierce, deeply human and profoundly devoted to social, spiritual, and political transformation through the living power of Love.

So what is the other side of the story?

Imagine Mary not as an icon, but as a girl,
a girl who said yes at twelve to something in trust of her knowing,
a yes that marked her to carry a life and a destiny that would overturn worlds,
a girl carrying a pregnancy under threat of violence,
giving birth in a manger,
fleeing Herod’s attacks with a newborn to keep him alive.

See her as a young mother raising a strange, magical, often misunderstood child, supporting him, protecting him, believing in him, and eventually letting him go when he symbolically rejected her so he could declare that all women are his mothers. She accepted even that, trusting the larger purpose of his life.

She stood upright at the cross, not collapsed or hysterical as so many depictions suggest, but as mystics like Elizabeth of Schönau saw her: steady, feeding him her strength, her hope, her fierce faith in the divine plan, even as she watched her child be crucified.

And after his death, she steadied the disciples, assuring them he would rise, staying with them through their terror, confusion, and persecution.

In her story is encoded a very particular kind of love.
A love strong enough to hold what others cannot hold.
A love powerful enough to withstand what should break the heart.
A love that does not withdraw.
A passionate love.

We tend to connect the word passion to fire and intensity, but the origin of the word is the Latin passio meaning to suffer or endure.

We are living through a time marked by immense suffering.

Ecological catastrophe, political aggression, war, spiritual and psychological disorientation. In a moment like this, it feels almost impossible to imagine another world. How, we ask, could we possibly move from this moment to a world shaped by peace, equality, and unity, where systems grow from care and reciprocity, where the structures we build nourish rather than extract, and where every being has the conditions to thrive?

Recently, I have found myself thinking about the moment the first plane took flight. What it must have been like to live in a world of horses and carts and be told that metal vessels would one day rise into the sky, a reality so far beyond the available worldview that it could not yet be imagined. And yet within two generations, humans flew.

Paradigms do not shift gradually; they leap. Thomas Kuhn called these leaps ruptures, moments when the dominant model becomes too incoherent to hold what is emerging. Anthropologists speak of liminal thresholds, where old structures dissolve long before new ones take shape. In those in-between spaces, hope often collapses before possibility becomes visible.

I used to resist the idea that our era is uniquely significant. It felt like human arrogance, as if every generation does not imagine itself standing at the edge of history. But something in me can no longer deny that this moment is significant.

In Hindu cosmology, the Kali Yuga is the age of spiritual forgetting, an era shaped by confusion, fragmentation, distortion, and the unravelling of old forms. And there is a feeling now, undeniable in its depth, that we are reaching its final stages.

We are not living in a stable era with a few social challenges. We are living in profound collapse.

From the inside, it feels like everything is breaking. Institutions failing, narratives shattering, identities dissolving, meaning scattering.

But what if what feels like collapse is actually a contraction? Painful, disorienting, overwhelming, yet the very force that makes birth possible.

Birth is never clean. It is rupture, pressure, blood, pain, disorientation and extraordinary strength. I believe this is where we are now. In the birth canal.

When I was giving birth to Zemi last year in the corner of our bedroom with Jack, our midwife Anna, and our doula Cyd beside me, there was a moment, minutes before he entered the world, when his head was crowning at the threshold. The pain was so excruciating I felt like I was breaking from the inside out. I looked at Anna and screamed, “I can’t do this.” She met my eyes and said, “You can.”

Seconds later, with a cry pulled from deep in the earth, Zemi slipped into the world.

Anyone who has birthed, or lived through grief, heartbreak, transition, knows that moment. The moment the heart thinks it cannot go on, and yet it does. Because the love is greater than the breaking.

This is what this moment calls forth,
in our hearts,
in our leadership,
in our humanity.

As I write this, I am looking out over my garden. I love my garden.

In it we have seven olive trees that are apparently more than two thousand years old. Part of our rental contract is that we must look after them. But even if it were not, I would feel bound to them. Devoted. I talk to them. We trim the weeds at their roots. We teach the children not to climb them. We care for them not out of fear of what would happen if they die, but because we love them.

I think about this often in the context of climate catastrophe. So much of the dominant narrative around preventing collapse is driven by fear and control, deadlines counting down the years we supposedly have left, or campaigns warning that each choice we make is a step toward extinction.

I understand this impulse; in an emergency, fear and control feel like the only tools available. Anything to avert destruction.

But what if we are not in an emergency, but an emergence?

If that were true, it would explain why fear and control do not work. Why we can be told, with absolute clarity, that we have a limited number of years to act and yet still continue on as before.

Childbirth reminds us of this. Fear and control do not bring the baby through. They slow the birth, make it more painful, and in the worst cases place life at risk.

If we are in the birth of a new earth, then fear and control cannot be the forces we lean on. Perhaps what we must turn to instead is love.

Because what will make us protect the earth will not be sanctions or shame. It will be falling back in love, with rivers, hedgehogs, marshes, forests, olive trees, and becoming so devoted to them that protection overflows from the heart the way a mother’s passionate love overflows for her child.

Anthropological work on transitional societies shows that what carries people through collapse are continuity resources, inner capacities that hold meaning and relationship steady when external structures fail. Psychologists might call it resilience. Mystics call it devotion. I am invoking it as the passionate love of the archetypal mother, the force that stays with the process of becoming no matter how chaotic the process becomes.

Passionate love as a code for leadership is then less an emotion than a structural capacity, the ability to remain committed to life even as systems fail and new forms struggle to emerge.

And so we return to Mary, who embodies this principle in its purest form, the girl who said “let it be done to me” in devotion to humanity, the mother who carried her child across borders to keep him alive, the woman who stood upright at the cross, steady as everything shattered.

If we are living in the birth of a new paradigm, if the future is struggling to come through the pressures of the present, then what is required of leadership is not managerial competence but the archetypal capacity of the Mother: a passionate, unbreakable love for life; a love that sees beyond human flaws and failings and protects life no matter what; a love that can hold contractions without losing faith in what is trying to be born; a love steady enough to midwife a new earth.

Because at the end of any civilisation in contraction, the one force that remains structurally indestructible, psychologically, spiritually, mythologically, is the mother’s passionate love.

It is the strongest continuity resource we have, the presence that carries us through thresholds, steadies life as it crosses them, and moves us from one world into the next.

This piece is the first in the Mythic Women series, a year-long storytelling project exploring twelve archetypal figures whose stories illuminate the leadership codes I believe our time is asking for. It is part of my wider mission to activate women’s leadership to re-story, regenerate, and re-enchant the world.

The long-form explorations will live here. The real-time side of the project, including reflections, conversations, and glimpses behind the stories, will unfold on Instagram.

If this touched something in you, you are invited into the old tradition of passing stories along. Forward it to a friend.

Thank you for being here.

With love,
Holiday

In the far North, the Sea Woman sinks into dark waters and rises carrying the sea’s power.

In Greece, Persephone crosses into the underworld and returns changed by what she has seen.

In West Africa, Oya steps into the storm and rises with its strength in her hands.

Different lands.
Different centuries.
The same story moving through them all.

This repetition is not coincidence but archetypal, ancient patterns of human experience that resurface across time because they speak to something essential in us.

Mythology is one of the core technologies through which these archetypes are carried forward, enlivening these patterns into forms that can be felt and recognised. Myths have a resilience and universality that is hard to explain, surviving for generations and appearing across cultures that have never had contact. Their endurance is not accidental. They last because they hold something essential, something people return to when other forms of knowing fall away. And when they surface again, they have the power to transform, widening what we can imagine, reopening old pathways, and changing how we understand ourselves and the world. Like music or art, myth carries a power that ordinary language cannot transmit. Some might even call it magic.

When this idea for the “Mythic Women” series first arrived, I thought it would be a fun storytelling project, a chance to get creative and make an impact. But when I began sitting with these women and their stories, I could feel it was something far deeper.

I felt how the threads of my mission to re-story and re-enchant the world through women’s leadership had already been woven inside their stories.

So much of what we inherit today about womanhood comes filtered through a narrow frame, a small set of acceptable roles, a limited idea of what a woman is allowed to be. But in the older myths, we meet an entire lineage of women who have been almost written out of modern storytelling: the bone-deep crone who sees what others refuse to look at; the warrior who stands at the edge of chaos; the fierce mother who protects with teeth as much as tenderness; the world-breaker who destroys so something truer can begin; the trickster who slips between forms.

This study is a way of returning to these women and the wisdom woven through their stories and offering them back into a time that needs them.

My hope is that in retelling them, something in us stirs, codes that may have been dormant waiting for their moment. And I hope to be a good steward for their stories.

We begin next week.

Love,
Holiday

I love the mythology of it all, the drama of good and evil, virtue and vice.

Back in early 2025, I started a small series on Instagram called loving no matter what. The plan was to explore what it means to love wildly, unreasonably, as medicine for these times. I made two episodes, then stopped. It felt out of integrity, like I was speaking from a place I couldn’t yet inhabit.

I decided that kind of love belonged to saints, not to me, an ordinary, inconsistent human.

Then one day, I discovered that the word sin comes from an archery term meaning to miss the mark.

That changed everything.

Far from being an evil, shameful stain or some original flaw written into us, sin simply means to miss, to fall short.

Who among us doesn’t miss the mark many times a day? We raise our voices at our children, lose patience in traffic, gossip, judge, promise ourselves we’ll do better and don’t. None of us go to bed planning to be lazy, unkind, or small-hearted, yet life has us falling short of who we wish to be, again and again.

In this sense, we are all sinners, not as moral failures but as participants in the ordinary, accidental practice of being human.

It’s a radically generous way of seeing the concept of sin, and through that generosity we open up the possibility of something that once seemed impossible - sainthood.

Saints throughout history were granted their sainthood because they lived lives that did more than seemed reasonable. More forgiveness, more mercy, more peace, more love. Their lives stretched the limits of what was imaginable.

The invitation of sainthood, then, is not to become perfect but to respond to our missing-the-mark with something proportionate, to develop within ourselves a capacity for unreasonable goodness.

When I look at the “sin” of the world, the cruelty, the violence, the abuses of power, I can understand it in the sense that I can trace the roots. So much of what we call sin, the inflicting of pain, is the result of pain that has never been healed.

And yet, even with that understanding, what we are seeing out there feels disproportionate, more than a reasonable response to pain. The harm has grown larger than the hurt that caused it, multiplying as it moves through generations, institutions, and systems.

If that’s true, then the only proportionate response is saintliness, a forgiveness that exceeds reason, a mercy that refuses cynicism, a peace that doesn’t wait for the world to be peaceful. The greater the missing of the mark, the greater the love required to meet it.

These, then, are the everyday adventures in sainthood, the practice of being human, again and again, with intention. Missing the mark, yes, but daring, in our own small ways, to do more than seems reasonable to correct course.

And maybe that’s what my old Instagram experiment was really reaching for. Back then, when I began loving no matter what, I thought I was studying something outside myself, trying to get to the final destination. When actually what I was really doing was setting out on a quest.

Lately, I’ve become re-enchanted with one of my great childhood passions - mythology. I’m particularly enchanted with the Greek pantheon. What I loved back then, and love still, is the epic sense of adventure that runs through those stories. The hero or heroine sets off on a quest, full of passion for reaching their destination. Will they make it? Probably not. Most will meet a profoundly tragic end (not before, of course, marrying their brother, sister, mother, or father 😆).

Still, they set off with hearts full of courage, wildly, ridiculously, without reason.

I’ve started to think of sainthood like that. Not as a fixed or polished state of goodness, but as a great adventure of the heart - the kind that asks for the same reckless courage, the same willingness to begin without any guarantee of arrival.

To make this life an adventure in sainthood we surrender to the lifelong quest to throw ourselves at the practice of loving no matter what, wildly, ridiculously, without reason.

Some contemplations for you below. I’d love to hear your reflections, share in the comments!

• If loving anyway was the quest, where would you begin?

• Where have you already been a quiet saint without noticing

Alas, that’s not what happened.

But I did learn a lot. Here are 13 things I actually learned during my 13 months off social media.

1. As Taylor Swift said: I’m the problem, it’s me.
I thought the issue was Instagram. Turns out, the issue was me. I assumed deleting the apps would free me from the grip of my phone. Instead, I just replaced Instagram scrolling with YouTube rabbit holes of The Voice auditions and entirely unnecessary dives into celebrity gossip. Let’s just say I could now write a dissertation on Nick Cannon’s family tree.

2. I am, in fact, addicted to my phone.
I once read that if you take your phone to the toilet, you have a problem. Well - Houston, we have a problem. Deleting Instagram shone a light on where my relationship with my phone has got to and where it needs to change.

3. I’ve lost the ability to do nothing.
Years ago, I spent three weeks in silent meditation, just sitting and watching my breath. Now? I can’t make it five minutes without reaching for something to do. Partly it’s the phone, but partly it’s the rhythm of motherhood - the constant motion, the mental lists. Going from changing nappies and making dinner to stillness feels jarring. My phone has become the bridge between doing and nothing. I have a lot of compassion for myself here and I know that I can be more intentional about making that bridge something healthier.

4. I’m starving for casual connection.
I noticed that most of the times I reached for my phone, I wasn’t actually bored - I was lonely. I’d open WhatsApp just to see if someone had messaged me, or scroll hoping for that little hit of connection. I don’t just crave deep conversations - I crave casual connection. The kind you get chatting in the post office queue. We’re village creatures living village-less lives.

5. Instagram friends are real friends.
I missed my Instagram friends. Some of them I’ve met in real life; others I haven’t. But they’ve been part of my world for years - people I laugh with, cheer for, exchange comments and DMs with. When I wasn’t online, it felt like a few of my people had gone missing and I’ve been so happy to see them again.

6. Social media reshapes the possibility of kinship.
Online, we often connect through shared values and curiosities rather than proximity. Some of the most natural and meaningful relationships now begin in that space - built not on geography, but on resonance and belonging.

7. Social media has changed the world - for better and worse.
It’s both a miracle and a mess. It’s connected us, given outsiders belonging, given creatives platforms, and given ordinary people power. It’s also turned many of us into dopamine-driven zombies. Whether it’s net positive or negative, I’m not sure - but the invitation for me is to stay aware. To consciously amplify the good and dial down the bad.

8. Social media amplifies polarisation - it doesn’t create it.
The division we see online isn’t born there; it’s just magnified. Those fractures exist in our families, our politics, our dinner tables. Leaving social media doesn’t fix polarisation - healing does. As with all things, the work is in our hearts, not our feeds.

9. Social media is a tool for contribution.
When I wasn’t online, my impact became smaller - more local, intimate, beautiful in its own way. But I also realised I want to be of service in a bigger way. Platforms like Instagram let us share what we love, what we’re learning, and what we care about. That’s powerful. Used consciously, it can be a fantastic tool for contribution.

10. Humans - including me - are born creators.
There’s a creative current that runs through all of us, and social media gives it somewhere to go. Whether it’s a photo, a post, a video, or a poem, the act of creating and sharing is deeply human. I missed that current.

11. I have agency.
Social media is neutral. It’s not inherently good or bad - it’s how we use it. Simply deleting it doesn’t change the underlying behaviours that made us misuse it. That’s my work now: to engage consciously, not compulsively.

12. My kids will not have social media until they’re at least fifteen.
And then, slowly and with support. It’s a tool, but it’s also a drug - engineered for dopamine hits. If I, a fully grown adult who didn’t even grow up with it, struggle to manage it, how could I expect a child to?

13. People are really trying.
When I went back online, it wasn’t the noise or outrage that stood out - it was the effort. So many people creating, connecting, contributing, loving in their own small ways. Beneath all the noise, the human spirit keeps reaching for something good.

After thirteen months off social media, I didn’t return as a perfectly present earth goddess. I came back a little more humbled, a little more aware, and - hopefully - a little more intentional.

I was reminded that my goal isn’t to escape the world. It’s to learn how to be in it, awake.

When he gifted me these words, it was like he cracked a window open in a dark room and a tiny sliver of sunlight slipped in.
Things were still dark, but I knew there was light out there.

They carried the current of hope in such a simple but deeply true way.
No matter how heavy life felt, these words reminded me that there would be sunny days ahead.
I would smile again. I would laugh again, often far sooner than I could conceive of in the heat of the pain.

I’ve carried those words with me ever since, one of my most trusty companions.
Whenever life gets tough, I reach for them, and like a loving friend they remind me that no matter how painful or permanent things feel, this too shall pass.

Today we celebrated Ocean’s fifth birthday.
We gathered on the beach with a big group of his friends and ours.
The sun was shining, 24 degrees in mid-October, the water crystal clear.
The kids ran around like free wildlings, splashing and shrieking with joy, while we adults shared food, hugs, laughter, and cake.
It was a perfect Ibiza day.

As we watched our kids run and crawl along the sand, one of Ocean’s best friend’s mums and I, with tears in our eyes, shared how deeply grateful we feel to watch our children have such a magical childhood.
I sent my parents the photos, sharing the joy with them.

When we got home, I lay in bed with Ocean while he told me about his favourite parts of the day, his little hand in mine.
Then he nuzzled his curls into my chest and said, “I’m so glad you’re my mummy,” before drifting off to sleep.

As he fell asleep, those words visited me again: this too shall pass.

But this time, instead of easing the feeling in my chest as they usually do, they did the opposite.
I felt as if my heart might break.

“Oh no,” I thought. This too shall pass.

One day, sooner than I can bear, his little hand won’t be so little and he’ll be living his own life.
My son forever, of course, but the feeling of his curls against my chest, his laughter without a care in the world, this too shall pass.
One day I won’t be able to message my parents and receive a reply.
One day my body won’t carry me so freely across the sand.

It’s all so impermanent.
We can’t will the painful days to go quicker, and we can’t hold on to the ones where everything feels perfect, no matter how hard we grip.

In the end, all we are left with is the truth that it’s all going, sooner or later, and the invitation to simply feel it all while we can.
The pain, the joy, the exquisite tragedy of being human.

For those interested in the writing process,
I often write these pieces as I’m lying in bed with Ocean and Zemi as they fall asleep.
The idea visits me, the words rush in, and I hear the full piece almost complete.
The minute I know they’re asleep, I rush to my computer to try and capture it as closely as I can to how I first heard it.

In this instance, that last paragraph was where it ended, feel it all.
But as I sat down to write, I saw there is a deeper invitation than to feel.

That is to feel, together.

Feeling all of it attunes us to the human heart.
But feeling together is what heals the human heart.

And feeling together isn’t just sharing how we feel with words.
Although that might be part of it, I suspect it’s a far smaller part than many healing or therapeutic spaces would suggest.
I sense that feeling together is most powerfully achieved through gathering — in ritual and ceremony, to celebrate birth and death and union, to honour the changing of the seasons.
It’s dancing in ecstasy at a music festival, or crying together at a sad film.

The act of gathering with intention - to feel together - is core to being human.
We need it to thrive.
It’s why we choose to live in Ibiza, where gathering like this is still woven into the fabric of daily life.

And those moments when we feel it all together - this too shall pass.
But what a thing, to have shared it.

Happy birthday, Ocean.
I love you.

I’d love to hear what “this too shall pass” means to you. Feel free to share in the comments.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, I feel a brewing in the collective. Battle lines are being drawn along red and blue, and the temperature is rising in the rampant polarisation that has come to define this century. I sense we are buckling in for a long winter of adversarial discourse and heightened us-and-themism, last felt in the wake of George Floyd’s murder back in 2020. I will write on what I see coming, and how those of us devoted to loving across lines of difference might position ourselves in this moment. But this piece of writing is more personal, though I believe still relevant.

This year I have been traversing my own map of us-and-them, grappling with the impulse to make other belief systems and ways of living wrong in order to make mine right.

So within, as without.

I am in many ways your quintessential seeker (I know many of you are too, that is why you are here). For as long as I can remember I have wanted to live a meaningful life, searching high and low for my answer to Mary Oliver’s haunting question: “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

In this search I have ventured onto many paths, but there has always been this underlying sense within me that I need to find the right path. And that when I finally find this right path, my life will start. And with this, throughout my life, in search of the right path, my mechanism has been to make all other paths wrong. When I quit my corporate career to become a meditation teacher travelling the world, I told myself that the corporate world was empty and soulless. When I ventured back into the organisational world as an entrepreneur years later, I told myself that being a meditation teacher was ungrounded and escapist. For one to be right, the other had to be wrong.

Something shifted this year, shortly after my 37th birthday. I felt not old, but certainly not young anymore. I felt confronted with the truth that I was nearing, or entering, the second half of my life. And with that came the crystalline truth: this life I have been looking for is here. I am already in my life. Deep in it.

I have often thought of the many sliding door moments that could take my life in radically different directions. I sometimes find my mind wandering to the endless possibilities of what life could be.

When we are born we are bundles of possibility. We could be ballerinas in New York, lawyers in London, wandering poets with nothing but a backpack. But at 37, I felt those infinite branches narrow. Some futures became implausible, others impossible. I will never be a prima ballerina. I will never live a life untouched by motherhood. I will never walk away from the spiritual thread that has always run through me. Certain doors have closed, and in closing they have fixed the shape of my life in ways I cannot undo.

One of the greatest sliding door moments of my life has been mine and Jack’s move to Ibiza three years ago. Our lives changed in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Me, a city girl through and through, now live deep in the countryside; my children speak Spanish; I spend my time with people from all over the world I would never otherwise have crossed paths with.

Travelling back to London, where we both grew up, carries this dreamy sense of nostalgia, not only for what was, but for what could have been. On this particular trip we did a house swap with a dear friend who had just bought a place less than a mile from where I grew up. Walking to the corner shop I passed the hospital I was born in, my first school, the high street where my friends and I drank Bacardi Breezers (remember that era?), the first club we blagged our way into. Every corner was steeped in memory and life lived.

For me, this area not only represents the life that was lived but also the life that could still be lived. One night, looking out over London, I felt it strongly: this could be my life. If Jack and I had chosen to root here, we’d probably be raising our kids in this neighbourhood, surrounded by parents and familiarity. In the past I would have found a way to make that wrong, too city, too familiar, too small. But in that moment I could just admit: it would have been pretty alright.

And in that quiet clarity, I heard a phrase, whether from within or beyond me, I do not know: All paths lead to God.

By “God” I do not mean the figure in paintings or the God of one tradition. I mean what sits beneath all our names for it: life itself, truth, awakening, contentment, the mystery that holds us. Whatever language we reach for, it is the same current.

We seekers spend so much time searching, only to discover that all paths are, in their essence, the right path. They are just different versions of life living through us.

When I returned to Ibiza, I kept turning these questions in my heart. What are these paths anyway? I began to explore the paths I have danced with in my search for meaning and began to trace a certain archetypal map of meaning making.

There was the path of living: the path that says “life is here to be experienced, we are here in a human body to dance, to feast, to suffer, to rejoice, for it is in living that we find meaning.” A path followed by hedonists, artists, mystics alike, the ones who believe we are here to taste the fullness of being human.

There was the path of understanding: the path that says “we are here to understand why we are here, for only in making sense of life does it become meaningful.” The path of philosophers, scientists, spiritual seekers. They may disagree on frameworks, but their impulse is the same: to understand what is happening here.

And finally there was the path of making things better: the one that says “the highest expression of life is to be of service to others.” Saints, activists, healers who live to leave the world better than they found it.

Of course, most of us are a mix of all three, and we might move in and out of them over a lifetime or even in a single day. There are surely many other categories (if you see some, share them with me; let’s flesh it out together!). But at the point I arrived in my exploration, these categories helped me make sense. For my fellow Potter-heads, you might recognise Hufflepuff (living), Ravenclaw (understanding), and Gryffindor (making things better). Different perspectives, same school.

As I looked at my own dance with these different archetypal paths, I felt the ghost of something else, different but deeply present, in my own life and in the collective. Sadly for literary continuity, it is not an expression of Slytherin.

The path of drifting: not choosing, not living deeply, not seeking, not creating, but being swept along, often dissatisfied, restless, resentful.

In modern cultural discourse this might be described as living from a “victim mindset”, in spiritual circles “unconscious” living. But it too is still life living through us.

It is still valid and held inside the great mystery. Perhaps it too has its own magic my mind can’t grasp. And yet, it felt different. Less walking, more drifting down a lazy river. Valid, yes. But perhaps not worthy in the deeper sense of the word. The word worthy comes from Middle English worthi. Its root can be traced back to Proto-Germanic werþaz and the Proto-Indo-European root wert-, which originally meant "to turn" or "to become". There is an inherent sense of movement, of engagement in its coding.

The path of living says: life is happening for me.
The path of understanding says: life is happening, and I must make sense of it.
The path of making things better says: I am happening to life.
The path of drifting: life is happening to me (often accompanied by the feeling that I do not like it and can’t do anything about it).

And so to return to these times, which path is the most meaningful? Which is the most worthy?

It has long been one of my gripes with activism that it seems to me that the primary activity of much of modern activism is telling other people that the way they are choosing to live their lives is in some way insufficient, or that the things they believe are good and true are in fact not good and true but bad and false. I have long felt that a truly sacred activism, where the primary imperative is to be in service to life itself, wears many faces, and that we are each here to walk our own paths.

But walk we must. All our seeking leads us here, not to the perfect path, but to the simple, courageous act of walking with life.

And in a world that feels like it is burning, and at the very same moment we are growing more divided, perhaps this is what matters most: that we learn to deeply honour the paths of others and commit to walking our own, whatever that may look like.

It’s been 13 months since I last wrote to you. If you follow me on IG or Facebook, you’ll know I’ve been completely off all social media in that time.

By far the most important thing that’s happened: the birth of Zemi Hawk! I’m now mama to two beautiful boys with my husband-to-be, Jack.

I’ve learned a lot in this year - motherhood of two has been a big initiation.

Stepping away from the online world gave me space to pour my presence into family life. There were benefits I didn’t expect… and things I missed. One of those is writing. Having this space to connect with you feels like a gift.

I’m thinking of writing 13 things I learned from 13 months off social media. Would you read that?

For now, just a quick note to say hi and share what’s ahead. I’ll be using this Substack to share personal reflections as well as the longer essays you might be used to -spanning philosophy, spirituality, metaphysics, mythology (a big study area for me this year!), with the occasional dip into politics and society. I’ll also share ways to work with me and some exciting in-person events Jack and I are building through Human Work.

This week I’ll send an essay I’ve been working on called All Paths Lead to God.

Many of you have been here since the “30 days of meditation” days (nearly ten years ago!), and others are newer. I know how precious attention is in this day and age, and I’m so grateful you choose to share some of yours here with me.

How are you? I see and chat with some of you often, while others I only know online -to my online friends especially, I’ve missed you. If you feel like it, hit reply and tell me how you are.

Thank you for being here. Loving you ❤️

My last essay “Silence, violence and the death of civil discourse” was, at its heart, a lament on the current state of public discourse and a call for us to move beyond the repetitive cycles of polarisation and cancel culture, to civil, restorative and generous ways of navigating difference and conflict. 

Whilst I didn’t say it directly, one of the assumptions underpinning this essay was that this is ultimately about choice. That the bridge from the nightmare of polarisation to the dream of healthy dialogue is each one of us choosing to do things differently. 

But perhaps not so.. 

The evening that I published the essay, I was at a team dinner for a project I am working on when one of my colleagues said something racist that really hurt my feelings. It sparked a whole process of  unravelling within me that led me to hypothesise that our ability to have civil discourse about challenging topics may be far less about us making the choice to do so, and far more about us having the skills and capacities to have better conversations. 

To explain this hypothesis, I’m going to unpack this encounter in detail and then explain what I think this very personal encounter can teach us about the collective. 

This actually feels really difficult to write, and I’m quite certain it’s not my clearest piece of writing, precisely because it’s so personal. But I wanted to write it while I am still up close and intimate with my own process so I can share it honestly. 

So what happened?

There were around 30 people at the dinner and the people at my table were mostly people I was meeting for the first time. We were getting on well, and having lively discussions about many topics. Everyone on my side of the table was white, and indeed almost everyone in the room. As the main course arrived, the topic of conversation turned to what it’s like living in different areas of Ibiza. The man sitting opposite me, let’s call him R, told us that he loved his area but he didn’t like that there was a nudist beach in front of his building. Now with Ibiza, being Ibiza - the home of free lovin’ hippies who enjoy nothing more than a naked swim - this was met with some jovial resistance at the table. The woman next to him jokily prodded him saying “this is Ibiza! What’s wrong with a naked beach?”. Then he said, “yes but come on, you don’t want your children walking out to see two black men naked”. 

Now to some people, this whole interchange might have passed them by, but there it was, that one tiny extra word “black”. That rolled off his tongue habitually, unconsciously even. For me, though, it held so much power and turned his statement from a stuffy personal view into something much more painful. 

 It’s interesting, because in the moments where someone has said something directly racist in front of me, I always have the same physical experience. It’s like everything goes blurred and I can’t really hear what’s going on around me, I turn my eyes to the ground and I retract totally into myself. I feel humiliated. And alone. And so awkward.  After a few moments I gathered myself and even though I really really didn’t want to, my internal voice said “you have to say something”, and so I mumbled under my breath “I’m not sure what the colour of their skin has to do with it” and the (white) woman next to me turned to me and said “the size!” and laughed. She was referring to the trope that black men have big penises. 

I want to share why all of this was a problem, and why, I think, it had such an effect on me. Not in some patronising attempt to  “educate” you but to give you the opportunity to walk in my shoes, just for a moment. 

The inclusion of the description of the men as black, is something that I think was unique to them being black. I believe that he would never have said “two white men”, had the men been white, he just would have said “two men”. In truth I doubt that he would have included “asian” or any other racial category. But to him, them being black, was pertinent to why he wouldn’t want his children to see them naked. Why? Whilst this is my assumption, it is an assumption founded in countless pieces of research and my own lived experience. The underlying implication that black men are more dangerous, the deeply held collective belief that black men are aggressive, sexually predatory and unsafe. This is the same thread alive in the woman who crosses the road when she sees a black man walking towards her, but wouldn’t if it was a white man. It’s the person who grips their bag a little tighter when a black boy sits down next to them on a bus. It’s the woman who called the police on the black kids selling lemonade on a street corner. And here - it’s these black men with their big penises, scaring our children. 

But I don’t think it was the invocation of this well worn stereotype that hurt me. For me it was something deeper and more imperceptible. It was contempt. This underlying feeling of “how dare you?” be here, doing something that I don’t like, when you are black and I am white. And I know none of this was said, and I have no doubt that this is deeply buried in the unconscious, but I felt it. And the thing is, in that moment, my reaction became not just about that statement but about every racist statement I’ve heard before. I felt the fear I felt when I was 11 walking home from school nd a group of men shouted nigger and threw a can of beer at me. I felt the heartbreak I felt when my first boyfriend told me he’d been to our mutual friend’s house for dinner whereupon he was asked by their parent with distaste “are you still dating the negro?”. I felt the pain of my ancestors, the mammies and the maids in my own lineage, who would have been scorned and scolded for getting above their status. 

And this is what I feel is really important. Even if this is all a misinterpretation and overreaction on my part. Even if there was no contempt, no implication of danger. Even if this was a genuinely irrelevant inclusion and he would have said “two white men” - I felt it. And that matters. 

It matters because it disconnects us. If one person feels something, it exists within the relational field. And if many people feel something, it exists within the collective field. 

That’s why the approach of “they didn’t mean it, just get over it” simply doesn’t cut it. It ignores the very real human emotional experience in these seemingly insignificant moments, which are the tip of the iceberg on top of hundreds of years of history. It’s why I think there was such a volcano of black rage after George Floyd’s murder that actually didn’t have all too much to do with the murder itself.  Each instance like this had been a drop of lava just simmering under the surface waiting for its moment to erupt. 

Back to the dinner. I made my excuses and left. And as I sat in my car, I had this weird feeling that’s hard to explain, but I get it every time I hear a racist comment - it’s like this super alone feeling. I want to cry and it’s confusing because I love my life, I feel so happy and privileged in so many ways. And yet there’s this thing, this aloneness, this fear, this underlying feeling of just not belonging. And it’s weird because even though cognitively I know that people experience these kinds of moments of exclusion and prejudice everyday a million times over, and there is nothing unique about this experience for me, in that moment, sitting in my car, I felt like the only person in the world. By the time I got home, I just felt sad. 

Here’s where it gets relevant. 

The next morning I woke to a message from the organiser saying that R had contacted her for my number, that he’d felt terrible about what had happened and he wanted to contact me. A few hours later, I received a message from him saying that he was so sorry he had offended me and that he deeply regretted that the conversation had gone that way and that what he had said had made me feel I needed to leave. It was a sweet and genuine message. To which I honestly replied that I appreciated the message and to consider us all good. Later that day, I received an even longer and more heartfelt message from the woman who had made the comment about the size of their penises, saying how sad she felt that she’d said that, how she always wants to educate herself and she’d love to have a coffee with me to talk about it further if I was willing. I messaged the organiser and said my piece on why those comments weren’t acceptable to me. And that was that. Done. 

And in truth to part me, it was - done. Someone said something unconsciously offensive. They realised. They felt sad. They apologised. I accepted the apology (genuinely). What more is there to be done? It’s done. 

And why shouldn’t it be done? Because the reality is that this man and woman meant no harm. Whilst that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be good for them to take this experience and learn from it. It’s really not their fault. We are all the consequence of our history. Just as my reaction to the comment is conditioned by hundreds of years of black oppression, so too are theirs conditioned by hundreds of years of white supremacy. In this we are equal. And both faultless. 

But there was another part of me, and this is where the awareness really comes in. 

To this part of me - it was not enough. Sure they apologised but that doesn’t take away that he said it in the first place. It doesn’t take away the reality that the belief is still in there, ready to surface the next time he sees two black men taking up space in a way he doesn’t like. And so, no, it is simply NOT ENOUGH. 

As I sat with this part of myself, observing it without judgement, I asked myself  “ok, Hols, it’s not enough, then what would be?” 

And the truth is what that part of me wanted was revenge. Him to suffer, because I did. Him to be removed from the team. Humiliated. Ostracized. 

It’s fascinating - because even by the time I finished writing that word “revenge” - my conscious mind has kicked in to say “of course I don’t want that!”.  But something underneath, this deep, young, maybe even primal part sings a different song. I can feel the energy of it - it’s wrathful, vengeful - out for blood.

Being able to track this in such painstaking detail (because believe me it is painful for me to see these parts of myself) is such a gift. I get to feel this “out for blood” energy in my own body, I get to become the personal embodiment of the energetic pattern that lies under all the polarisation, the cancel culture that wants to shame and blame the other side to hell. It is not justice., it is vengeance, and it says, ultimately, “I am in pain and I want you to pay for that by sharing my pain”.

It’s so important for me to write this out and share it publicly. To show that even I, someone who teaches and practises love and forgiveness, who is deeply diplomatic, whose whole career has been and continues to be about peaceful justice and harmonious coexistence. When it gets personal, I feel these things.  

Recently my 3 year old has adopted this habit of getting really frustrated when I say no. In fact he’s beyond frustrated. He’s outraged. And sometimes, when he’s really pissed off, he hits me in the face. And the truth is, I don’t mind at all, in fact it makes me want to hold him even closer. Because I know that what’s happening is that he’s feeling something that he doesn’t know how to feel, some sadness, or disconnection or fear. And so he lashes out at me as a way to be with the feelings and regain some control because he doesn’t yet have the skillset or capacity to feel these feelings. Underneath the anger is just his tender little heart. 

As I sat with the experience at the dinner, I allowed myself to feel into it. I journeyed through the fiery layers of wrath and vengeance, to the watery layers of sadness and despair, until eventually all that was left was just my tender, little heart.

If I look at the experience of feeling victim to a racist comment and I strip away all the critical race theory and the historical context and the problematic stereotyping, what it really comes down to is - it hurt my feelings. And it’s not that all the other stuff is irrelevant, it has its part, it’s just not the deepest thing. The deepest thing, the crystalline truth is, they hurt my feelings. I’m not being flippant here - feelings matter. And these are deep feelings, of fear and shame and grief entrenched in our lineages over centuries. But they are feelings. 

And it is so important to me, to acknowledge that. That at the deepest level, this is about feelings. 

Because it allows me to feel much more confident when I say:

Cancel culture - or indeed any of the moralistic and shame based tactics used in public discourse to pressure behaviour change around race (and other identity categories) - is masquerading as a sophisticated and justified response, when it’s actually just the lashing out of our collective inner toddler. It is the consequence of one big culturally co-signed unwillingness to feel our collective grief and process our own feelings. 

And when we consciously journey below our instinctive reaction to find what is truly underneath, we grow up, from the toddler that lashes out to the adult who gets to choose how they respond. 

Back to my own process. It took me two days of bitterly recounting this experience, lamenting about the unfairness, and muttering fuck you under my breath everytime I thought about it, until I arrived at a new plane. 

I reflected on what people have been told to lead him to believe that black men are more dangerous or there to be objects of our sexual fetishisation, I thought about it within the wider context of power and oppression and how we are all somebody’s victims (and somebody’s perpetrator) in the story of our tragic history. And I thought about this man with his kids, taking his dog for a walk, crying, going to the loo, doing the normal - very human - things that people do. I took them out of “villain” into my mind and into “humans”. 

I was able to fully receive the truth that I had understood cognitively but hadn’t truly felt in my body. That we are all the consequence of our history. 

And when I felt that, in my body, I let it go. Mostly. 

I say mostly, because the truth is if I look deep enough there is still a tiny echo of fuck you. There is still a thread of victimhood asking why the world is so unfair. There is still a deep sadness. Maybe I’ll never fully integrate that residue. But what I can say for sure is that I don’t want anyone else to suffer because I feel bad.  

And all of this gives me so much compassion for the collective. 

I see where I’m at with my humanity. How I hold emotional maturity, empathy and deep forgiveness as my guiding lights and when met with something that hurts my feelings my wounds still get activated and thrash about in a sea of the opposite of these ideals until I find equilibrium within myself. 

What if as a collective we were in this too, midway through this process? 

Whereas in my micro example it took me a couple of days to move through this process, perhaps as a collective it will take us a couple of decades. Perhaps that’s exactly the location we are in right now. We now have some level of permission to feel and speak all the things that have been suppressed for centuries as we emerge from under the boot of oppression. But we don’t yet know how to do that.

We’re still growing up. 

So why does this all matter for civil discourse? 

Ultimately civil discourse, truly generous and restorative dialogue, is about staying in connection through disagreement and repairing where there is rupture. But staying in connection through disagreement and repairing when there is rupture is actually a pretty refined skill. 

And this is the location where many of us find ourselves. We have woken up to the futility of circular conflict, but we haven’t yet fully grown up by building the emotional and relational skills to do something different. And if we don’t have the actual skills for restorative dialogue, we may no longer be toddlers throwing punches, but we become toddlers dressed in our parents' clothes pretending that we are civil and respectful when inside we are not. 

As I moved through this process, I began reflecting on what capacities were at play in this encounter that allowed us to move from disconnection to connection and rupture to repair in this instance. And I identified the following: 

• The ability to feel my feelings. And importantly to let the different parts of myself have their full experience. And enough regulation to be able to move through these emotions without lashing out at others in order to avoid feeling the icky things. 

• Perspective taking and reframing. To be able to come back into connection with the people who I felt had hurt me, I had to be able to see the world through their eyes, and from their vantage point. And ultimately to acknowledge that if I had had their biology, their upbringing, their experiences, I would be the same. And vice versa for them to be moved to apologise to me, they had to be able to see the world through my eyes and reframe an ostensibly harmless statement into something that had the power to hurt. 

• Compassion for myself and others. Compassion for myself to not berate myself for being overly sensitive and bypass the experience; compassion for the part of me that desires vengeance and wants to dress it up as justice; compassion for the people who said something that hurt me. 

• Accountability and action:  The willingness and the practical action needed to repair. On both of their ends the accountability and integrity to say “I’m sorry, please forgive me” and on my end the generosity to say “I forgive you”.  

• Vulnerability and humility to share it forward. This is actually the step I feel least skilled in and is what I am attempting to do with this piece of writing. To say, this is what happens for me in these instances, it’s not pretty but here it is, maybe you can relate and maybe this helps. Let’s grow together. 

There are probably many more. But this feels like a good start. 

And so when I think back to how we even start civil discourse about some of the most disconnecting topics of our time, I wonder - what would happen if we started at the top, with our feelings. 

As I write this, I find myself smiling about all the gymnastics we do in public discourse to locate these situations in fancy critical frameworks of oppression and liberation - and I wonder, if at least some of this is just a big convoluted way of avoiding us simply saying  “this really hurts my feelings”? 

Discourse has always seemed to me a discipline of the mind. But what if we saw it first and foremost as a discipline of the heart? 

What if we just started here.. 

Our histories are tragic. Our feelings are hurt. Can we talk about it? 

PS: A special thank you to my friend Katie who helped me with the final edits of this essay. I was due to publish it last week but I became really insecure and worried it would land as petty and overly intense. I wrote to her and said “would you please read this for me and give me your reflections? I'm worried it seems petty and random”. To which she replied “it is neither petty nor random” and offered some beautiful refinements.

Civil discourse - respectful conversation between people who share different perspectives. A dialogue aimed at fostering understanding and constructive communication. 

It is not blind agreement, insincere politeness or conflict avoidance. 

Quite the opposite - it is the ability to communicate across lines of difference without casting the person/s sitting on the other side of the ideological divide into the role of idiot or enemy. It is the ability to disagree while maintaining humanity - yours and others’.  

It is one of the fundamental building blocks upon which functioning groups, communities and societies are built. It is perhaps the only way that a group of people existing across many lines of difference achieves harmony and peace without force. In times when difference appears heightened, it’s our life raft. 

Many people have commented that this art form is dying, particularly online, so this idea is not new, but this is my own meandering reflection on the looming death of civil discourse and why it matters to me. 

In recent years I have noticed a decline in civil discourse in two equal but opposite directions. On the one hand in person - with the advent of safe spaces, I find myself having less robust dialogue about polarising topics with friends, family and colleagues. Workplaces are adopting “no politics chat” policies, schools and universities insist pupils adhere to an increasingly narrow set of speech principles, families and friends afraid to lose eachother in the sea of polarisation avoid certain topics altogether. And with this our ability to tussle and disagree and then come back to love, becomes less and less practised. Online we see the opposite - freed of the responsibility of looking someone in the eye, digital spaces become the wild west full of name calling, cancellation, cruelty.

As far as I see it - civil discourse depends on three key things: 1) our ability to accept that there are perspectives different from our own 2) our ability to maintain our humanity in the face of this difference 3) that the parties involved to be at least somewhat informed on the topic we are talking about. The current meme of silence is violence threatens all three of these aspects of civil discourse. 

I was the target of the silence is violence accusation just a few weeks ago. In the wake of the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7th, and the early murmurings of an  unprecedented IDF response, I posted a small note on Instagram stating that whilst I know that many people followed my page for social commentary or words of wisdom, in this moment I didn’t have any, that I was confused and grossly uneducated on the matter and that all I knew at this point was that I prayed for peace and I cried for the children. 

I had a sense that to many of my followers who joined me in the wake of George Floyds death and my unflinchingly vocal advocacy for black lives, this would be seen as a lukewarm response that was disappointing at best and violent at worst. 

And so it was. Whilst many people commented and messaged to say that I had put words to what they were feeling, unsurprisingly I was also met by a small but mighty onslaught of criticism. That my silence on the matter of colonisation was violence, that “if I had a bit of humanity in me” I would be speaking up for Palestine and against Israel. That the nature of my post made me complicit in genocide. One woman entered my inbox to tell me I was a self-centred, virtue signalling narcissist.

The truth is I could have immediately put a #ceasefire meme on my stories, reposted horrors as a way of “waking people up”, joined the condemnation. But this would have been so deeply inauthentic (and self-centred, virtue signalling). Because I didn’t know enough. Until recently I knew little to nothing about this geographical region or the history of its people. 

Over the past 3 months I have spent hundreds of hours pouring over historical essays, watching commentary from all sides, and seeking to educate myself on the history of this geographical area, the conflict and potential ways forward. So that I can speak, act and make a difference.

Recently I have found myself lying awake at night turning this criticism over in my head - have I got this all wrong? I find myself drawing a comparison in my mind to slavery and asking if I am equivalent to white people who didn’t clearly come out in opposition to slavery, confused by the “moral ambiguity” of the situation. I remain open to the fact that I may be. Maybe I am exactly those people, cowardly, heartless, firmly on the wrong side of history in my lack of clear action. And I accept that if this is true my soul will pay the appropriate price. 

But the truth is - to me, clear, this is not. What is clear to me is that - Killing civilians is wrong. The rape and torture of women and children is wrong. Stealing land is wrong (although I do get stuck on the selective application of this one - because almost every inch of the globe has exchanged hands, most commonly by force or coercion aka colonised) Ending war of any kind is right. All these pieces are clear to me. And yet as I piece them together on the map and weave in complex history, religious fanaticism (on both sides), psychopathic governments (on both sides), black ops involvement of multiple global powers - it is devastatingly unclear to me what the way forward is. And the piggy backing of multiple other movements like the anti-racism or decolonisation movements on to this particular situation feel to me like unhelpful and distracting co-options of a tragedy to further a particular political agenda.

It is my view that in the situation of Israel-Hamas-Palestine - whilst every reasonable living person must surely be against the death of innocent civilians and children - when it comes to the politics of this, we have to (surely we have to?!) collectively admit that whether we like it or not, there are millions of people who hold perspectives on both (multiple) sides of the issue. 

And as much as this may seem incredulous to people who are so certain that their position is unfalteringly morally correct and that the situation is not complex or requiring of any additional knowledge or discussion - that simply is not the reality. If it were there would be no need to convince people of their idiocy, heartlessness or indeed violence for not agreeing.

And this is where the silence is violence position troubles me. Because the essence of the position bypasses the stage of trying to listen and to understand why someone else might see or experience the world differently to you and becomes a judgement about the other person’s moral character. If they don’t speak up in your language and your terms and to your timeline, they are dangerous. Because silence is violence isn’t really about silence - it’s about the refusal to allow for different perspectives to that which is seen as the “right” perspective

In the current situation, from what I have seen, it tends to be the #freepalestine position that employs the silence is violence meme - and I would hazard that in these circles anyone adopting a pro-Israel position is likely to be seen as just as immoral as someone not speaking on the issue at all. And so it becomes not about the virtue of engagement but the “rightness” of your position.

The silence is violence meme emerged into mainstream consciousness in 2020 amidst the wave of BLM movements. The sentiment at its heart was powerful and important. It in a sense meme-afied Martin Luther King’s, call to action when he said “there is such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.” But in the context of BLM, “speaking up” very quickly became not so much about genuine engagement but about following the correct script. 

For many it became trotting out the same old playbook of posting black squares, and acknowledging your privilege at the start of every sentence. It meant people saying things they either did not believe or were grossly uninformed on. This in itself is a threat to truth. But that’s not what really concerns me here. What really worried me at the time was the war like mentality with which the silence is violence meme went after people who were reading from a different script or acting in a different play altogether. People who held different perspectives or were still trying to figure things out. People who were existing in a myriad of different realities with a host of their own unique challenges and priorities who for whatever legitimate reasons were not suddenly racial justice activists. 

It showed up as social shaming, cancellation and calling on people to divest their attention and custom from people who weren’t advocating in the right way. And here lies another problem with the silence is violence position - which is one of consciousness. When we attack people for holding a different position or holding no position the unspoken message here is - if you’re on the other side you’re dangerous and I will fight you, if you are on no side you are equally as dangerous and I will fight you. And so the very consciousness of war it seeks to fight takes root at the heart of the movements for justice. 

People shout at other people to speak to change the course of a physical war in the world, and in the process wage an ideological war, where the casualties are not bodies on the ground but the social relationships and unspoken agreements of civility that sustain our societies. 

When I get to this point I have to stop myself from venturing into conspiracy, sci-fi theories. That on some sub perceptual level, the consciousness of war and separation has infiltrated the very movements as a trojan horse. That we are living in an Orwellian nightmare where both terrorists and activists are The Party. So convoluted is it to me that we have ended up in a place where our everyday activism mimics the thing it’s fighting that sometimes it feels like the only logical explanation. But I will leave that there. 

What this ultimately comes down to, in my eyes, is this - the solutions to almost all important human problems lie in working together, negotiation, compromise. All of these practices require us to be able to speak to eachother, even when, especially when, we see things differently. They require us to be able to say “I see things differently, I may even think you are wrong, but that doesn’t make you a bad person”. They require us to allow people to be different without making them immoral, criminal, disposable - which is exactly what the silence is violene position does. 

It says “if you don’t vocally agree with me you are a bad person, dangerous, not even worth talking to”. Perhaps the saddest thing about the whole situation, is that the the intolerance of the position breeds a culture of fear such that people who might otherwise desire to engage in conversations about complex issues, bow out altogether. 

This is the tragedy of the death of civil discourse -  a situation where the respectful co-existence of different perspectives in the quest of finding a way forward together becomes impossible. More than that it villainies the very art of discourse itself - where listening, reflecting, arriving at a considered perspective becomes seen as inherently dangerous. Where anything less than an instant and correct alignment with a certain position becomes worthy of the term “violence”.  

I myself deeply desire to have deep, respectful and honest conversations with people from all sides of the conversation on this issue and all others. So I can be shown where I am under-informed, where I am wrong, where I can grow. Or where we can disagree and still co-exist, where we can find common ground and work together for the good of all. I wish this for all of us.

In times of great upheaval we must remember the life raft that is civil discourse. Our future as a functioning society, literally depends on it.

PS: A quick ps on saintliness and the spiritual perspective for people who follow this newsletter. As I continued to try and find my footing through this conflict, I believe that I temporarily found refuge in the high spiritual perspective of “loving no matter what”. The idea that some of us are here to hold the pole of love for all beings, forgiveness, mercy, acceptance. I hold this idea so dearly because I believe in it and there is great value in holding it as a possibility.  I started recording a series of videos exploring the applied response of love in times of conflict. I had intented to start with a sermon on forgiveness and mercy, but instead spoke on grief, then gratitude, then generosity. But each week, as I continued to sit down to try and record a video on forgiveness and mercy, and continually failed to do so, I realised that I couldn’t. I came to the truth that, as I am now, if someone had murdered a single member of my family, I’m not sure I could forgive. And so as I explored this aspiration in myself, I concluded that whilst I continue to hold it as an aspiration to evoke the saintliness within me. But is it mine to teach.. no (at least not yet 💙) So I’m discontinuing this series and currently shifting my research focus to look at relating across lines of difference. 

Love, H x

This essay is really a letter to my seventeen year old self. Because it answers a question I asked nearly 20 years ago, sitting on the roof of my parents house, smoking a spliff and talking to God. 

I was a deeply troubled teenager. I was extremely introspective and philosophical. I was consumed by the big questions of existence like - Why are we here? What’s the meaning of life? I was also deeply insecure, I mostly hated myself and felt constantly inadequate. The combination of this meant that at a spiritual and emotional level I was in deep pain, most of the time. 

At the same time, I was really alive. I wanted to experience everything. I was pretty fearless. I travelled the world. I partied. I dated. I had friends from all over. I explored everything I could find to explore.

It was both a deeply painful and extraordinarily full time of my life. Adventure, experience, pleasure, deep existential pain - I think I really lived out the possibility of the teenage experience, all the way. Sex, drugs, rock n’ roll (except it was more Drum & Bass and UK Garage).

At night I used to crawl out of my bedroom window to sit on my roof, look at the stars and speak to God. I would ask questions like “what is reality?” and “what happens when we die?” and then I’d listen. 

One school holiday, my friend Dave had just got his driver's licence. He used to pick me up from my house and we’d drive up to Hampstead Heath, sit in his car, get high, listen to Drum and Bass super loud, bop our heads, laugh, generally have the best time - then he’d drop me back to my house a couple of hours later. One night after he dropped me home, I climbed out onto my roof just to look at the stars, and I remember feeling the profound polarity of this strange dichotomy that was my life -  the simultaneous dance of deep pain, punctuated with regular moments of extreme pleasure. How it could be so ecstatic and so deeply painful to be in a human body. And I remember looking up at the sky and thinking “I wonder if the gods pity us or envy us?” 

Nearly two decades on, for my sweet seventeen year old self, here is my best answer. 

-

The time is 3rd century BC, the place, Ancient Greece. 

In an unnamed kingdom, a king and queen had three beautiful daughters. The youngest, Psyche, possessed a beauty so great that people began to compare her to Aphrodite. One day some began to whisper that she was even more beautiful than the goddess herself.

Psyche's beauty attracted people from all over distant lands to give gifts and offerings. People began to worship her as if she herself was the goddess of beauty, and over time Aphrodite's temples became neglected. 

On learning of this, the goddess was outraged. That a mere mortal was being worshiped over her. Unacceptable. In a jealous rage Aphrodite, ordered her son, Eros, who had the ability to make anyone fall in love with the strike of his arrows,  to travel to earth and make the girl fall in love with a vile and hideous monster. Unfortunately for Aphrodite, as Eros shot his arrow Psyche awoke, and Eros accidentally wounded himself with his own arrow and fell in love with her.

I love this story (and it’s equivalent from the Roman canon - with Venus in place of Aphrodite and Cupid in place Eros). But I have often asked myself, how a mere mortal could be more beautiful than a goddess, the goddess of beauty herself. Recently I have concluded it was actually Psyches imperfection that made her even more attractive than Aphrodite. Some small flaw or unusual trait a unique mark of her humanity, that made her inexplicably beautiful. 

Let’s not forget in the early '90s, there were plenty of teen girls who drew Cindy Crawford-esque fake moles on their faces in effort to look sexy and do Beyonce’s chubby ankles not make her even more perfect? 

In our imperfect humanity,  the gods envy us. 

Rewind back 500 years and in Lamentations 3:22, Jeremiah tells us “it is because of the Lord’s loving-kindness that we are not destroyed for His loving-pity never ends.” (Lamentations 3:22)

As the Old Testament would have it, so fragile is our humanity, prone to sickness and sin, that if it were not for God’s love and pity we would be damned. 

In our fragile humanity the gods pity us. 

-

To go deeper into this inquiry, I need to explain what I mean by “god” and what I mean by “us”. 

It is my view that the allegory and mythology of our great historic and religious texts point us towards (capital T) Truth - as in that which actually is. They are hugely valuable and I am not sniffy at all, like some spiritual seekers, about conventional religion. 

That being said, in my view, these texts are not to be read literally and certainly not as a set of instructions to outsource our sovereignty to. Instead they are maps of meaning enshrined with codes that point us back to the Truth that is already within all of us. 

Which is..? 

Well since this is a devotional letter to my teenage self, who so desperately wanted to know the answers to questions like - why are we here? and what is reality? - for her pleasure, here’s a seriously abridged version of my perspective on what is actually going on around here. 

This understanding is abstracted in part from my study of the world’s wisdom traditions but mostly from my own direct experience with what I can only describe as the everything that is. I have experienced this deep and transcendental is-ness repeatedly over the past decade, through my work with sacred plant medicines like ayahuasca or during deep states of mediation.

Let me prepare you here that this is about to go pretty far out into the cosmos and far deep into the centre of my knowing. If you’ve journeyed with plant medicines or touched altered states of consciousness through meditation or other spiritual practise, I am sure you will recognise your own direct experience in my words. If this is all new to you, let’s ride!

I will tell it as story, because that’s the only way I can translate it from the deep knowing in my soul that has no words, into words that can be understood whilst retaining as much of the Truth as is possible when things move from soul to mind and then from mind to pen. 

Here goes. 

–

In the beginning there was only one - Source. Source was everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. It was time and space; gravity and electricity; animals and plants and humans; body and mind, kindness, love, jealousy. It is this word and this word and the eyes you are using to read this or the ears you are using to hear this. It is every thought you’ve ever had. Literally anything you can conceive of and then everything that you can’t. 

It is the energy that runs through everything. The one that runs in each of us and runs in every single one of our ancestors and will run through every descendent for infinite time to come.  

It is the spark that creates the first cry of a newborn baby, the seed that sprouts into a plant, the breath of life that animates everything that is. 

It is everything, everywhere, all at once. 

I call this energy Source, because that is how it has presented itself to me. Some might call this The Universe, Consciousness, God, Prana, Life force energy, or simply Life. It’s all the same. 

Source is everything. And it is perfect. Eternally harmonious, balanced, whole. 

It is pure bliss. Nirvana. Totally complete in every way, because it lacks nothing. 

One day Source desired to know itself more deeply. In order to do this it had to forget that it was - everything. Because everything cannot know itself more deeply because its knowing is inherently infinite. And so it fragmented into different parts. It incarnated as mineral, plant, animal and of course human. 

In human it incarnated as mind so that we could have the conscious experience of being separate and unique, and as body so we had space to house our separate consciousnesses. To be, individual little selves, living individual little lives. 

And it created this human reality - the realm of contrast. For it is only through knowing what we are not that we are able to know what we are. Day exists because we have night. Life exists because we have death. We can feel cold because we know warmth. We experience love because we know apathy. The human realm (that which we you and I are experiencing) is the realm by which we can know ourselves, because every single possible expression can be experienced. And it can only be experienced because it exists in polarity to that which it is not. It literally needed to split, to know itself. 

But of course Source was still whole, and forever knew itself as whole. But it fragmented a part of itself that forgot. 

Think of it like a dream. When we go into a dream we have no sense that we will wake up the next day, in that moment the dream is all there is. But we always wake up and come back to “real” reality. 

We will eventually wake up from this dream - the one that I am me and you are you, and we are separate. Whether we wake up through death or through the practise of awakening in this life, we will eventually return to the remembrance of who we really are - one unified, energetic. Or for the scientific mind identical, vibrating strings of energy. 

But while in this dream, because each person alive on this earth today is infinitely unique, Source gets to experience every possible manifestation of what it means to be human through each of our lives. Through each of our lives the whole knows itself more fully.

Whilst I have told this as a linear story for ease of understanding, this is not happening over a linear time span but simultaneously in the eternal Now. Everything, everywhere, all at once. And there are undoubtedly multiple other realities and “realms” running parallel to this human reality that we know of that we have no understanding of (aliens, angels, spirits and beyond). What we might call the multiverse, but all of these universes run on the same principle - Source experiencing itself more fully. 

And what is the difference between Source as I conceive of it and the “gods” we find in the Greek, Roman, African, Norse, Hindu etc pantheons or in classical religion.  It is my view that these many gods are the many ways the human mind understands Source, it is the way we can grasp on the bigness of it is by separating it in our mind into aspects. So whilst we might say that there is a “god realm” in between the human realm and Source, this realm really only exists in the human mind. The many gods are not actually separate from Source, they are not even the dream. They are just Source looked at from a different angle. Like how on certain nights the moon appears to be partial (half or crescent) but it is of course always the same, full, moon, we can just only see part of it. 

—

So back to my original question - do the gods pity us or do they envy us 

Look at the world that we have created as humans based on the belief that we are separate. That we are these separate little selves who need to “get ours”. The war, poverty, hatred. The separation within ourselves from the insecurity and inadequacy and constant need to be better because we feel we are less than the other. And bodies that are literally engineered for self destruction in, if we’re lucky, 100 years.  

Humanity is enormously fragile. It is this fragility Jeremiah refers to when he tells us that if it were not for God’s pity we would be destroyed. 

Of course the gods pity us. This fragility, this confusion, this separateness, this forgetting of who we truly are makes the human condition a deeply tragic plotline. 

But it is actually the fragility and the messiness of life that makes it worth living. 

The fragility - without death, life would not be the precious experience that it is. It is our very knowing that this is not forever, in fact not very long, - that makes each day matter. 

And the messiness. The brilliant teacher Carolyn Elliot, has described the human realm as the red light district of the multiverse. It is the place where we can come and do and be anything. It’s where we get to experience every crazy, funky, messed up thing that could possibly exist. It’s where we make mistakes, and struggle to learn lessons, and trip and fall and feel pain - oh so much pain! Over and over again. 

And on the flip side we also get to experience the ecstasy of the very very “good” stuff, which *remember* only feels very very good because we have an experience of what very very bad is. We get to experience a piece of music that blows our mind for the first time, we get to have sex with someone we deeply love, some of us get to create life in our bodies then birth it into the world through a magical portal between our legs. I mean - literally wtf. This level of bizarre beauty only exists in contrast to that which is not that, the mundane, everyday that is also this life. 

The very fact that we get to come and experience (and be) all this extremity and polarity is the whole point. The fact that we get to be imperfect and flawed and in agony is deeply enviable to that which can only experience perfection. The fact that we get the privilege of knowing that we will die, is something that the infinite longs for. 

This is humanity. A totally messed up, painful, beautiful temporary experience that we will never have in this way again. So profoundly precious, most of the time we can’t even conceive of just how precious, when we are in it. 

This is the tragic irony of the spiritual path. We are here to remember that we are all One. We dedicate our lives to this remembrance. And in the end, the whole reason we came here in the first place, was to forget. That we are and have always been - whole, perfect, infinite. And to experience the messy, confusing, gross, delightful, ecstatic, separated experience of being in a human body. It’s basically a Shakespeare tragedy! Such tragic irony that I have no doubt the trickster gods get a delicious kick out of.

I had one of the most human mornings a few days ago. I woke up to Ocean screaming as he woke up from a nightmare, he promptly smacked me in the face and said “no crocodile” then proceeded to insist we got out of bed at 5.30am because “morning mummy, ge-up”. Later that morning, I could smell this sour smell from his room. I eventually found a rucksack with three rotting bananas and an accoutrement of flies and maggots. And I thought - being in a human body is so gross. After disposing of the bananas and maggots I put on some jazz music and a few seconds in, the bassist hit this chord that was so gorgeous and dirty it made me involuntarily screw up my face into what we used to call a bass face, a face that only seems to get invoked by a certain timbre of soulful bass, the type you hear all the way through your body and it just feels like warm honey on a summers day in 1970s New York. And I thought - this feeling, what an incredible privilege to be in a human body. 

And I remembered that question from my seventeen year old self and I laughed because I had an answer for her. 

And it is funny because as this essay has been percolating in me the last few days, I’ve been feeling so close to my seventeen year old self. And I realise that part of me envies her. 

I look back on that time of my life with, if not pity, so much sympathetic compassion for this sweet, vulnerable and totally lost younger version of myself. 

But now, I see that I also kind of envy her a bit. 

She was so raw, open, chaotic, messy. She felt everything, so much. Everything was new and intense. Now here I am approaching my forties, with all the wisdom of a woman and mother and of someone who has spent a decade in deep spiritual practise. I have all the tools I need to meet any situation in life with a degree of grace and acceptance (although of course I’m not always able or don’t always choose to do so!). And truth be told that is a beautiful way to live. But… part of me misses the rawness of that teenage period. How ungraceful it was, how unrefined. It was just a crashing rollercoaster. And that is just so… human. 

And I see this beautiful parallel between the Gods and Us and between my Elder self and my Younger.

Ageing is literally the process of walking back to Source. And for those of us on a path of awakening in life, as we get older and wiser, we realise we are both human and divine. Spiritual beings having a human experience. And as we get closer and closer to the home that is waiting for all of us, in death, to walk with Gods again, we remember that we are and always have been - perfect, whole, infinite.

And that is so beautiful. But there’s something about that pure humanity, that complete forgetting of our youth. It’s something so special.

It’s why we came here in the first place. 

So to my sweet seventeen year old self - my answer for you,

The gods pity us and they envy us. 

Just as I do you. 

I love you. 

PS: Of course Beyonce doesn’t’ actually have chubby ankles! (I don’t think) - but how many of you checked? Ha! When I invoke the Gods, Anansi (a trickster from African folklore who was a main feature in my childhood bedtime stories) always finds his way to me. 😜

I feel really honoured to share with you my TEDx talk which is titled - Grief as activism: Learn to grieve, create a world without racism. 

You can watch it below.. And if it moves you, please do share it with your people - it’s such an important message that I really want to share with those who are here to hear it. 

And I want to share with you a little more on how it came to be. 

Earlier this year I got the opportunity to give a TEDx talk here in Ibiza. Yesterday Jack and I were watching it for the first time and he asked me if I was so excited to share this with the world. And I was like actually not entirely!

Soon after we moved to Ibiza Jack mentioned to me that they were doing a TED here. I went onto the website to apply, there was only 30 minutes before application close and the whole talk just came to me in that moment in a single download. The funny thing is the last time I had this experience was when I wrote my article performative allyship is deadly back in 2020. 

The morning I wrote that article - I literally sat down one day, picked up a pen and wrote it in one. I have no idea where it came from, I hadn’t been thinking about it. I didn’t really write before this. It just came from somewhere beyond me. And that piece hit on something in the collective that was wanting to be expressed and just happened to express through me at that time. 

The difference is then I was writing to 4 subscribers on an unknown medium blog, now I’m sharing with my online community of 50 thousand or so people. And so when I watched the talk back and I saw how directly I’m pointing to a truth that will definitely offend some people, my personality is like - umm no thank you! Be responsible for the personal consequences of saying what’s true? People unfollowing or thinking I’m mean or dangerous. I think I’ll pass! Can’t we just be diplomatic and safe and not rock any boats? Are we really going to put ourselves out there like this? And the answer from my soul - yes. Because I’m pointing to something I see in the collective which I can’t not.

Which is - that modern social justice has lost the thread. Activism, in many locations, isn’t about the cause at all anymore but a way for us to feel significant, or like we are good people, or like we belong to something - and importantly to express the (often unrelated) pain we are in. I see this everywhere in the anti-racism movement, the gender dissolution movement, climate even. 

I noticed it first in myself back in 2020 when I was really campaigning for racial justice. But at a point I realised that a lot of what I was calling desire for justice was really a desire for vengeance, the socially acceptable expression of unprocessed pain I was carrying around my race and other things. It was all super entangled and not at all clean but dressed up in a morally good “activist” outfit. And like many other people of colour at the time, expressing my pain was getting me validation and significance online - a super addictive cycle that feels like power but is actually very disempowering. If you were here in 2020 and remember, I spoke about this whole exploration in my live with Ester Perel and my friend Jeremy Goldberg and I got slammed. I literally got hate mail from people calling me an uncle tom and a minstrel. Someone even wrote to me to say it was “people like me” who got Trump elected 😂

But I was pointing to something true that I saw which was why people got so rocked. That this kind of activism, wokeness, cancel culture, that whole thing - comes from an immature part of the collective consciousness. I don’t mean immature as in bad, just that it is young. I see it as like the toddler part of us thrashing around expressing its pain and outrage and sadness just to get it out. Looking for love and belonging and identity. But this toddler is dressed up in its mummy’s clothes, masquerading as an adult with big words and fancy frameworks. But really it’s a young part of us that is in pain and doesn’t know how to be with that.

That in itself is not a problem, the problem is that our culture has created a set of social incentives for us to stay in this toddler phase and it has convinced us to believe the fancy dress. It’s a distortion that has calcified in our social structures. And that is actually quite a big problem. Many people have pointed to this. But what I see happens at this point is another distortion. In noticing the problem of this kind of activism people go on the attack - “these people are entitled víctims just wanting attention”. Perhaps true. But it misses the thing too. It has no compassion for our humanity and why people express in this way (which in my view is that the toddler part of us doesn’t know any other way to be with that pain).

And then it just picks up the same useless approach. The war on wokeness. Same sh*t. Different war.

We need a way out. A trapdoor. Out of this endless cycle of warring. I believe grief is one of those trapdoors. I actually think it’s the first one. The gateway to all else. 

I feel many people are waking up to this. Myself included. 

This talk is my contribution to that awakening. And I feel really honoured to share it, especially with you - people who have been with me along the road. 

If it moves you, please feel free to share it with your people. 

Thank you for being here. 

I love you, 
Holiday

In the last month or so, as we settle into our new lives in Ibiza, the words that have followed me everywhere have been these five - life is the tenderest thing. 

This morning I took Ocean to his new Spanish nursery for the first time, and I felt wholly and completely the essence of every word, life is the tenderest thing. 

As we walked hand in hand down the road, I felt my heart so full of… I don’t know what else to call it, but motherly love... I felt that, in that moment, it might explode out of my chest. 

Someone recently asked me what motherhood was like, and I explained that for me, it is like the most exquisite heartbreak I could ever have imagined. In fact, it goes further than heartbreak. For when Ocean came into this world, a piece of my heart left my body and implanted itself forever in his. I will forevermore walk around the world with a piece of my heart living outside of my body. And this little piece of my heart is exposed, raw, unprotected by the soft flesh of my body or the hard shells I have built to protect myself. This little part is eternally tender. 

One of the ways I promised to honour the life of my darling sister Sushi is to carry forward her love of words. In the dual meaning of the word tender, I find a mischievous gift offered to us by the trickster gods of the English language. On the one hand, meaning soft, delicate, and easily injured. And on the other, meaning to offer. 

This tenderness I speak of is not just reserved for mothers. Anyone living in connection with anyone or anything beyond themselves lives this dual meaning. Both delicate and prone to injury and in a constant posture of offering. To live in connection is to offer a part of your heart to life itself. Out of your body and into the world. 

I have spent so much of my life pondering its big questions, questions that traverse time and space - why are we here, what’s it all for, what does it mean to live a good life. The past two years have, for me, as I know it has for so many of you, brought these questions into sharper focus. The tragedy - the pandemic, the painful global awakening to the history and reality of racism, new and old wars. And the ecstasy - new life, new love, the community and hope that arises in the face of adversity. Not to mention the many personal joys and losses that have coloured the tapestry of our collective history. We have all felt so much. Recently I have had moments where I feel like I am awakening from a dream. Did all that really just happen, I ask myself? Sometimes I wish I could go back to sleep, as it has been as much nightmare as it has been dream.. It has been, in many moments, simply too much to feel. 

But what I know is that there is nowhere we can run or hide to escape the truth that, for whatever reason, there is so much to feel in this life. 

The game, if we might call it that, then becomes this - to expand our capacity to feel it all. To stretch our personal range of tolerance for pain, joy, fear, mystery and everything in between. So that we don’t miss a beat of this life. 

My deepest desire is, I think, to taste the marrow of life. To suck every last drop of what it is offering up. And to do that requires the capacity not just to withstand it, and not even necessarily to welcome it. But to be able to feel it without turning away. 

As I think back to how I wrapped my arms around Ocean as he walked with me through the gates, I think then about what was asked of him as he left my body and came into this new and curious land, so exposed and raw and vulnerable. And the parallel becomes so beautiful to me. Even in their most tender state, each one who is born is asked to open their arms to life and to offer up a part of their heart. And as we grow, we are asked to open wider and offer even more. And so, in moments when I wish it could all simply feel... less, I remember that to open to life like this, it can be nothing but tender. This is what it’s supposed to feel like. And to taste the marrow of life, we must offer ourselves up as willing participants on the ride of life. 

Love,
Holiday xxx

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But as Queen Gertrude told us, perhaps the lady doth protest too much. 

Yesterday, I came into my living room to find my partner Jack watching Lion, and uncharacteristically settled down to watch it with him. Without giving away too much of the plot, the film is a biographical drama that tells the story of Saroo, a five-year-old Indian boy who becomes accidentally separated from his family and ends up alone and lost on the streets of Bengal. The first part of the film is a heartbreaking tour through - poverty, loneliness and child abuse. We are exposed to the most devastating parts of our humanity. 

As I watched and was reminded of the ways that we as humans hurt and desert each other. The violation. The cruelty. As I reckoned with the reality that this is happening, in varying forms, all over the world right now, I broke apart. This film took me down to the depth of the heartbreak that is always there. The part of me that cannot make sense of a world where these things can happen. I spent the rest of the evening in floods of tears. I found myself, at one point, lying on the floor, crying, and quietly repeating to the world “how?”. “How can we do this to each other? How can we do this to our children?” 

I reflected that perhaps the real reason I turn away from these kinds of films and prefer to immerse myself in intellectual studying of “the facts” is that whilst my head can digest the reality of suffering, my heart cannot. You see, armed with a higher spiritual perspective, I can accept that suffering is part of existence. I can posit that this is what we are capable of as humanity right now, and we must have approval for that. I can even make a case for the fact that each unique soul chose its life path and that there is mystery far beyond what I deem to be right and wrong. Yes, my head can get it. But my heart breaks. 

In previous years, I would have finished the film, stirred by the confrontation of human suffering, and jumped to action. How can I fix this? What can I do? I would have turned on my computer and searched for children’s charities to donate to, groups to campaign with, and someone to blame. I would have tried to save the world. The first two have their place. And yet, in recent years, I have realised that I cannot save the world. And with this realisation, I find myself in a deep and painful process of unpicking the threads of this pattern. Of activism. Of rescuing. Of believing that I should and can save the world. 

This process of unravelling the rescuer within me has been deep and complex work, fraught with guilt and shame and constant questioning. And yet I sense deep within my bones that it is true. I know that many people who journey with me and follow my work, grapple with this very tension, and so I felt called to try and unpack where I find myself so that it might meet you with open arms. But I ask you to hold this unpacking with gentle hands, these tenderest parts of me that are very much in the process, not tied up with a bow, but unravelling as we speak. 

I am not here to save the world from suffering. It seems so obvious as I write these words. That it is, in fact, so deeply egoic to believe that I could. But deep deep in me, has been a belief that somehow I could, I should, I must.

But we aren’t. 

For one, it is simply not pragmatic. The ice caps melt. Wars wage. Children are abandoned and abused. Freedoms we long thought were sacrosanct, gone overnight. Forests are falling. And oceans are crying. Not to mention the historical injustices like slavery and colonisation that live in our bones, in the tears of our ancestors, whose souls surely cannot truly rest while atonement and reparations remain unmade. There is no shortage of things to want to rescue the world from. The heartbreaking truth is that there is only so much that one person can do. Could I find my own little corner of the world to make better? Absolutely. But I suspect that the framework of “if we all just did our bit..” is too convenient for a reality filled with twists and turns and trickster gods. It seems naive to think of suffering as a finite block that can be chipped away at, and I suspect we would be wiser to think of it as the natural consequence of a set of conditions that while unchanged will continue to generate ever more creative ways of harm. 

And even if we could attend to all these issues, the damning truth, as far as I can see it, is that we simply do not know-how. We fight. We campaign. We blame. We lock bad people up. We lock good people up. We change our cars. We buy reusable water bottles. And yet still ice caps melt, wars rage, children are abandoned and abused, freedoms fall. This is not to say that these things are not worthy. But perhaps, they are limited. I believe that the root of these tragedies lies in the myth that we are separate from each other and the earth. We try with all the good intentions, to save the world, but we do so using the same level of consciousness that created it, a consciousness of separation. And though we try, as each day a new tragedy emerges, finally we cannot but ask, are our solutions to the problem part of the problem? To truly turn the tide, will take something, we don’t yet have. Something most of us cannot even see. That it will take us becoming something fundamentally different. And that when it comes to alleviating suffering, we must admit that we are totally and completely lost. We do not have a map for healing a deeply complex and interdependent world in crisis. And it remains unclear how we topple the very systems that both harm us and sustain us, ones that we both hate and love. It deserves to be said here, that the distorted view that runs through some neo-spiritual circles, that we can ‘ohm’ our way to higher consciousness in sweatshop-bought leggings, is certainly not the answer here. This is clear to me. And yet, the fight, the division lines, the waiting expectantly for the big daddy state to create systems that serve all, the Thoreauvian fantasy of removing ourselves from society altogether. This is also not it.  

And finally (and this is the most unprocessed piece, so bear with me), I hear a whisper that tentatively suggests that many of our traditional forms of activism may not just be a manifestation of love, but also an aversion to joy. This sense, that while others are suffering, I too must suffer. I find myself lost in the maze here, at once recognising that the interconnectedness of life means that while others suffer I too will suffer. And yet with the knowing that my ancestors, torn from their land, brought across Oceans on death ships, whipped and beaten, would have fallen asleep fingers blistered and backs broken and dreamed of a day, that one of their children could have lived a life without suffering. A life of joy and freedom. And I wonder, if suffering is part of reality, is immersing myself in the suffering of others actually less altruism and more ego. A way of denying the most human part of me. The part that can wake up in my comfy bed, and hug my child close in the knowledge that today he is safe, and I can do all this, knowing that others will wake up cold and afraid and alone. That perhaps all this hand-wringing, heartbreaking, and rescuing, is a way of denying my humanity. A veil obscuring the truth that I do live a life of relative happiness and ease, despite the full knowing of the horrors that exist for so many. And if I were to let myself have this all the way, the joy, I would have to reckon with the reality, that the ills I see out there, that at least in part finds their roots in selfishness, greed and apathy, live in me too. 

And so here I am. In the deep knowing that I cannot save the world from suffering. And in the truth that I also cannot turn away from it. 

Many of us sense that we are existing in a world that is dying, both in the literal sense of our mother earth and in the social structures that appear to be crumbling before our eyes. Forests burn. Oceans cry. Rights we thought were absolute, gone overnight. The great goddess covid who descended upon us with fury, bringing blessing or curse. I have no doubt that we are in a death process. That we are at the pinnacle of what the Vedic scriptures call the Kali Yuga, the epoch of death and destruction that precedes new birth. 

And yet in an age of death, we do not know how to grieve. 

When my sister died last year, I threw myself into work. I deconstructed and reconstructed my business. I redesigned my website. I wrote. I gave talks. Busied myself in all ways that I could. And I felt grief for sure, she was always there lurking in the background until I would hear a song or recount a memory and she would come forward like a great wave and pull me under. In other moments, I would feel grief as a portal, something that I could use for my expansion and growth. In either manifestation, wave or portal, grief lived outside of me, something I had to withstand or something I could use. 

But as I come to know grief more deeply, I have come to see that grief is not something to be withstood or used, but is, in fact, the process of digestion. The taking in of something fully, and letting it transform you. 

And so I take myself back to this thing I have of avoiding these depictions of human suffering. The things that whether I want them to or not, penetrate my skin and permeate my every cell with sadness. And I see that this is a turning away from suffering, but not because I don’t want to see it. But because I fear that I cannot digest it. 

And I sense that on a macro level, this pattern I have is playing out for humanity at large. In the way we turn away from suffering, busying ourselves or numbing ourselves in the name of living. Or we swallow it whole, and spit it back out as activated pain, in the name of fixing.

I see it in the way we are able to scroll from murder of the day to meme of the day, in a matter of moments.  

Or in the way, we gather to march and shout, but we don’t gather to sit and cry. 

Whichever way we turn, lost in both of these processes is grief. Absent is the holding of the suffering in our bodies for long enough that we might actually digest it. 

To find a hand to hold, take it in our own and say, this breaks my heart, and I know there is nothing I can do about it, and I am not asking you to do anything about it, but can our hearts break together for a little bit? 

This is grief. And we have forgotten her ways. How to wail. How to rage. How to gather in circles and cry. How to dance it through our bodies.  

And we must remember. Those of us who wish for the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, must remember. 

To birth a world born of new stories of love and hope and connection, we must first create space for the old stories to die. We must hospice them. We must hold them as they take their last breaths. 

We must become the compost heap. 

For without a place to rest their heads, these stories will continue to run through us. And we will continue to either turn away from them, allowing them to become more rotten, or we will recreate them in ever more complex forms. 

And I know that in some ways, it’s a conceptual leap; it lives in the world beyond logic to believe that suffering can be digested by simply attending to the truth of it and letting ourselves feel the all of it. But I sense that this very process, the feeling the all of it, is the thing that will transform us into the ones who can birth the new world. That we must go through it, become one with it, in order to move beyond it. 

This is, I feel, one of the deepest calls of our generation, the ones of us alive on mother earth right now, to learn how to truly feel and truly grieve. 

To see grief as responsibility. The ability to respond appropriately to what is there. In a way that both stands in reverence to the truth of its intensity and seeks not to create more harm in the process.

I read today the story of a 10-year-old girl, six weeks and three days pregnant from rape, who was forced to cross state lines for an abortion. And instead of wincing and turning away or taking to social media to condemn and lament, I sat, and I cried. Felt the agony of all parts of that story, and my body flooded with a thousand tears. I took it all the way in. This is my responsibility. 

And in my grief, I changed. In what small way, I can’t yet say, but I know that I am changed. 

I’ve long thought of myself as a midwife for a more beautiful world, one that can steward new stories into being. But I see now, that perhaps I have missed a step. That I must first inhabit the role of a death doula, one that can hold our old stories through their death process. 

My mother held my sister as she took her last breaths. I held my son as he took his first. These moments seemingly opposite, now feel so alike. To hold life in birth and in death. To bear witness to the cycle. Without turning away. 

In our society, death is so much less revered than birth. Pushed to the corners. Out of sight. Whereas birth is so celebrated. So visible. And so it follows that when we think about the birth and death cycles of new worlds, we would be more drawn to the birthing of the new than holding the dying of the old. So much more glamorous. But as I enter the mother phase of my life, that glamour somehow feels less important. What I feel is being asked of me is altogether quieter, slower and closer to the ground. 

It is to become the compost heap. 

And how beautiful it now seems to be able to create soil that is fertile enough that my children and my children’s children might one day birth the new stories I went to sleep dreaming of. What better to do with this life, than that. 

It was magic and I’d never felt so much love, so much connection in my life before. I spent the next 12 years trying to find that connection again. On dancefloors, front rooms, basement raves, fields. I never considered myself a “drug addict” even though I was using consistently for over a decade, because I didn’t fit the “image” of destitution I associated with addiction. I was a party girl, we felt fabulous and everyone was doing it. And I was a good girl, got straight As, went to Cambridge university, had great jobs. As high functioning as it gets - and honestly, it wasn't all bad, I had some of the best nights of my life while high and met some of the world's weirdest and most wonderful people.

But I was also in pain.

That’s the thing with addiction - it is the promise of something you want so desperately.To fill the hole and to feel whole. And it gives you just enough to keep you coming back for more even though every time you do, the hole gets bigger.

We're all addicted. How can we not be in a society so devoid of humanity, connection, truth, love. Even the most law abiding of us addicted to something - food, love, approval, phone.

And yet the ones whose addictions don’t look so “normal”, we criminalise + shame. If we as a society are to reclaim our humanity, this must be one of the places we start.

‘No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones’
- Nelson Mandela.

When I was 17 I was arrested for possession of class A drugs. My parents were furious, but they loved me and they had money and got me a good lawyer. I was let off with a warning. The maximum sentence for this crime in the UK is 5 years. ⁠
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I think of this story every time I remember that children from bottom tenth of the income distribution are 20 times more likely to end up in prison than those in the top tenth. Or that 2/3 of African American men who didn't complete high school will serve time at some point in life. That 65% have an active drug addiction and 70% a mental illness.
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Much of the prison system is tantamount to the criminalisation of the intersection of poverty, mental illness, addiction + race. My class privilege likely saved me from a very different life.
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And there’s more. The legal cannabis market in the US is set to be worth $70.6 billion by 2028. While 40,000 people (mainly black men from low income families) rot in jail for the very same. I’m not saying it’s ok to break the law, but when laws a) don't work in eliminating the “threat” b) are policing a "threat" so tenuous that the minute corporate profit is on the table governments are rushing to change them - there's something wrong.

I think in 100 years we’ll look back on some of the ways we lived now with grief. How we treat the earth and non-human beings one. How we treat the mentally ill and those addicted to substances, another.

We need the radical revolution of values Martin Luther King called for. Away from a corrupt system that punishes the vulnerable then allows or worse rewards the elite for the same. To a system that centres our humanity, acknowledges trauma and focuses on healing.⁠

What can we personally do? Let our hearts break for a world that is dying. Keep talking about what a more beautiful world looks like. And there’s more. I sense that it’s time for a new dawn of activism. One that is embodied. Where our very existence become a living rebellion.

More to come…