i’ve always had a mild obsession with the Moon.

that same floating, glowing ball in the sky that illuminates our nights.

just think how much the Moon has seen.

it hung above the very first humans who looked up and thought ‘what the fuck is that?’.

it watched cities being built and destroyed, empires rising and falling. wars beginning and ending. people being born and people dying.

from the very beginning. it was there before electricity. when night time actually meant darkness. before clocks told us the time, and before calendars told us the date. before google maps and weather apps and streetlights and all the other things that have made it so we don’t really need to look at the sky for answers anymore.

people have fallen in love underneath it. people have prayed to it. worshipped it. feared it. people have blamed madness on it. planted crops according to it and created literal gods in its image.

do you feel weird yet?

somewhere, thousands of years ago, someone sat outisde their home and stared at exactly the same Moon that you could look at tonight.

there’s something about that. i love it. So much of the world has changed, and so quickly. nothing is the same - but the Moon is. it’s still there.

of course, it’s not actually glowing. moonlight is sunlight reflected from it’s surface. which somehow is both less magical and wildly more magical at the same time when you actually think about it.

and it’s not just sitting there doing nothing.

it’s pulling at our oceans. it’s helping steady the earth under our feet. animals time their lives by it. humans have built calendars around it. religions still use it to decide when their sacred days and celebrations begin.

and then every 29 and a half days, it seems to disappear completely from sight. and then slowly builds itself back up again into that enormous glowing circle again.

we’ve spent so many years giving those lunar changes meaning. from fertility, new beginnings, madness, abundance, death and rebirth.

some of these beliefs are genuinely ancient. some more modern.

some are backed by science. some are probably utter bollocks.

but during my moon research week, i’ve noticed something. the strangest thing about it all isn’t really that humans have spent thousands of years believing the Moon was powerful.

but rather that somewhere along the way, we stopped paying attention at all. we stopped believing altogether. and now somehow thinking the Moon holds any power over us is seen as woo-woo bullshit.

and when you do start paying attention, the Moon gets pretty strange quite quickly.

the Moon has a history too

for starters, it probably shouldnt exist. or at least, it didn’t always exist. what?

around 4.5 billion years ago, when planet Earth was still a little baby, something gigantic is thought to have smashed into it.

scientists call the object Theia.

Theia was about the size of Mars (not fat shaming the old girl) and the collission was so violent that material from the Earth and from Theia was blasted out into space.

some of that material came together and became the Moon, allegedly.

and don’t ask me how then it’s perfectly round. i don’t know and i’m not a scientist.

but anyway, go with it. that means that the cute little crescent Moon may actually be the remains of the most catastrophic events in the history of Earth.

and she’s been here ever since…

today, the moon is about 384,000 km away from the Earth.

that sounds really far away, until you realise it isn’t. not astronomically speaking anyway.

i read somewhere that if you could somehow put the Earth and the moon together side by side, the moon would be about a quarter of the Earth’s width. and despite it looking like a tiny glowing bouncy ball from down here; it’s actually a whole world.

the moon has mountains, valleys, enormous craters and plains of ancient volcanic rock.

the moon, like most people, has a dark side. although, unlike us humans, the moon’s dark side isn’t actually dark. it gets sunlight just like the other side does - but we just don’t see it.

that’s because the moon takes the same amount of time to rotate once on it’s axis as it does to orbit the Earth, about 27.3 days.

so as it travels around us, it turns at almost exactly the right rate to keep the same side of the moon pointed towards Earth. this is called tidal locking.

and i know there is a perfectly sensible scientific explanation for it (i literally just explained it lol)

but there is something wonderful and yet unsettling about the fact we’ve existed for so long, with the moon as our closest celestial neighbour - and yet we’ve only seen half of it.

we didn’t even have a photo til 1959.

imagine that.

people had been staring at the moon since before recorded history and, until our grandparents’ lifetimes, nobody even knew what was on the other side.

Galileo was one of the people who helped destroy another illusion that we had about the Moon.

in 1610, after pointing a telescope towards the moon, he described seeing its surface as “uneven, rough, and full of cavities and prominences.”

the moon wasn’t the perfect, smooth heavenly glowing circle that people had imagined.

it had mountains.

it had craters.

it had scars.

that made it feel more familiar, and although not a planet, a lot more like Earth.

and i think my favourite thing I found out is that the moon isn’t even staying put.

it is leaving us. it’s moving away from us.

really, really slowly. but it’s going.

some measurements that the space people have done have shown that the moon is moving away from earth by about 3.8 centimetres every year.

about the same rate at which our nails grow.

not exactly something we need to panic about.

but enough that the moon our very distant ancestors saw was slightly closer than the one we see now. probably looked alot bigger.

and the moon seen by whatever is living on earth millions of years from now will be slightly farther away again.

even our eclipses are temporary.

the total solar eclipses we get to see are possible because of an extraordinary coincidence:

although the sun is massively bigger than the moon, it is also massively farther away. so from earth they appear almost comparable in our sky.

eventually, as the moon continues drifting away, that will no longer be true. this boggles my brain.

there will come a time when the moon will be too small in our sky to completely cover the sun.

the last total solar eclipse will happen.

and nobody alive today will be remotely close to seeing it.

there’s something about that i find really poignant but also really beautiful.

we think of the moon as something that’s existed for as long as time itself. always been there. like the earth and the sun.

people change. countries change. coastlines change. we are born and disappear again, while the sun rises and the moon hangs above all of it looking reassuringly ancient and unmoved.

except it isn’t.

the moon has a history too.

it was born.

it has changed.

and it is still changing.

and all the while, it has been changing us.

the moon moves oceans

down another rabbit hole we go; the moon isn’t simply travelling around earth.

earth and the moon are caught in a gravitational relationship that has been quietly shaping our gorgeous planet for billions of years.

our days, our oceans, even the steadiness of the world beneath our feet have a lunar story hiding somewhere inside them.

which brings us to perhaps the most obvious evidence that the moon has never been merely decoration.

all you have to do, is go and stand by the sea.

the moon moves oceans

go and stand beside the sea and you’ll see it with your own eyes.

if you wait long enough, the water will move. and I don’t mean just the waves. the whole ocean will move.

the sea will creep up the shore, and a few hours, it’ll retreat. twice a day.

it’s almost like the earth is inhaling and exhaling. i find that thought so magical, and so deeply comforting in a way i can’t really explain.

i think that’s probably the biggest undeniable connector between the Moon and our Earth.

also, did you know the Moon has gravity?

Earth has gravity, but you knew that already.

but gravity works across distance, and the moons gravitational pull reaches all the way to our planet. that said, it does pull more strongly on the side of Earth than it does on the side further away… but it’s there.

and that difference is what creates the tidal forces, ie. the high tide and low tides in our seas and oceans.

the oceans respond.

water on the side of the Earth that faces the Moon bulges slightly towards it and the same happens on the other side. and then as the Earth rotates, our coastlines experience high and low tides.

the Sun gets involved too sometimes, but i won’t let the Sun steal the Moon’s thunder.

during a new moon and a full moon, the Sun, Earth, and Moon are roughly in alignment. and when this happens, their gravitational effects combine and we get spring tides - which means higher high tides and lower low tides (nothing to do with the season Spring, everything to do with water springing up)

and then, around the first and third quarter moons, the Sun and the Moon sit at right angles from one another from Earth’s point of view. and that causes a tidal effect called neap tides where the difference between low tide and high tide is smaller.

so those moon phases we talk about. the new moon, the full moon, the thin crescent. this isn’t the moon simply changing the way it looks.

the changes in the moon correspond to a constantly changing physical arrangement of our Earth, the Moon and the Sun, and that arrangement changes the oceans beneath them.

the fisherman have known it, sailors have known it. people living on coastlines plan their lives around it.

the animals know it too…

there are living creatures whose eating habits, movements and reproduction are tied to the tides and the lunar rhythms. even under the water, some coral synchronise mass spawning with lunar cycles. marine animals time their activities around the tides. and for creatures that live where the land meets the sea, getting the timing wrong can be a matter of life and death. between eating and being eaten.

the Moon isn’t just this big glowing ball that life looks at

life has evolved beneath it. life has evolved with it.

and the relationship goes even deeper than the water. the tides create a friction as the Earth rotates, which gradually slows down our planet’s spin.

billions of years ago, a day on Earth was shorter than 24 hours we now know. the moon has, very slowly, been helping make our days longer.

and if you‘ve been to school, you’ll know that energy cannot be destroyed, only transferred. so where does this energy go? it has to go somewhere..

well, some of it is transferred to the Moon’s orbit, which is part of the reason the moon is moving away from us (see above).

so let’s recap:

• the Moon pulls the oceans

• the oceans slow the Earth

• the Earth pushes the Moon away

everything is affecting everything else. there’s something deeply annoying yet poetic when you find our this is just boring old physics.

physics was never my thing, lets not get into the boring stuff.

but once you know the moon can move the oceans, you can’t help but think

hang on, i’m mostly water…

this idea is everywhere.

it’s used to explain people’s strange behaviour, why we sleep differently, why our menstrual cycles might synchronise with lunar cycles, why women give birth, why our moods might change, why emergency rooms descend into chaos during a full moon.

and i completely understand why. it sounds right. why wouldn’t it be?

it sounds magical.

the ocean is pulled by the moon, we came from the ocean, our bodies are mostly water. surely there’s some cause and effect there too?

some scientists disagree, but i don’t care about them. and i’m not a scientist. and this isn’t a science publication.

as far as i’m concerned, the math is mathing.

and my kids never sleep right during a full moon.

maybe i’m a lunatic (ha get it?).

the main question i’m asking myself is, our bodies know when we’re in nature. it acts differently in the forest, by the sea. our heart rate slows down, our breathing is slow and steady. my question is does my body know what the moon is doing in some primitive way?

does the body know?

so does it?

maybe.

one of the more interesting places scientists have looked is sleep.

there was a study that caught my eye. im 2021, researchers tracked sleep in people living in three indigenous communities in Argentina, some with full access to electricity, some with limited access, as well as students in Seattle.

they found something strange.

in the days leading up to a full moon, people tended to fall asleep later and sleep for less time on average.

and the pattern was the same across the board, even in the students that lives in a modern city filled with artifical light (and living their best student life lol).

again, some scientists agree, and some disagree. science hasn’t really established any tangible link between the two, or at least, not in a way that science can explain (yet). but it does make you wonder whether there’s some ancient relationship between the moonlight and our bodies.

and then there’s lunacy.

the word lunatic comes from the Latin luna, meaning moon. because humans have spent thousands of years blaming the moon for madness, violence, seizures and strange behaviours (hello warewolves).

ask someone who works in a the emergency room and theres a decent chance they’ll give you a good full moon story. ask a midwife. heck, even I have a few stories. my kids are feral during a full moon that even my husband is convinced.

and then we have periods…

the average menstrual cycle is roughly 28-30 days. the lunar cycle is about 29 days. so naturally, humans have been connecting the two for a long time.

the reserach is mixed (because what’s more irrelevent to the people with the big bucks than womens health?). so science can’t confirm it, but i’m not ready to dismiss it.

a month written in the sky

so what is the moon actually doing every month?

because despite what it looks like from Earth, despite what we see, the Moon isn’t actually changing shape or disappearing.

half of the moon is always illuminated by the Sun. what changes is simply how much of that we can see from Earth as the Moon orbits us.

one complete cycle is roughly 29.5 days, about a month.

new moon

this Moon sits roughly between the Earth and the Sun. so the illuminated side faces away, and the Moon seems to disappear - to us anyway. darkness.

and so traditionally, this has become a time for new beginnings and setting intentions. planting seeds, decided what to welcome in to your life.

waxing moon

the light starts returning.

a tiny crescent shape appears and grows night after night. crescent, then a quarter, then a gibbous. this phase is associated with building.

if the new moon asks what do i want? the waxing moon asks what am i going to do about it? how do i make it happen?

full moon

and then she arrives in all her glory. Luna.

she dominates the night sky. and we’ve associated an extraordinary amount of meaning to this moment. and rightly so, i think.

this phase represents completion, abundance, fertility, heightened emotions, revelation, magic, madness.

some cultures and traditions celebrate it. some warn against it.

werewolves ha.

spiritually speaking, the full moon is a moment to notice everything that has come to light.

what has changed since the new moon? what worked and what didn’t? what have you learned?

waning moon

and then the light retreats again. the moon becomes smaller until it finally returns to darkness once more.

this part of the cycle is associated with release. finishing things. clearing things out. resting and preparing for the next phase.

and this cycle repeats itself again and again.

now don’t get me wrong, i dont think the universe is sitting taking notes on my intentions because i wrote them under a new moon (although i will still do it ha - just in case!)

but there is something really beautiful about the rhythm of

begin. build. illuminate. release. rest

before clocks, we had the moon

humans didn’t just give those phases meaning. we used the moon as a calendar.

in fact, the words moon and month are related. which sounds so obvious once someone points it out.

civilisations around the world built calendars around lunar cycles. the Babylonians used the appearance of the crescent to mark a new month. the Chinese calendar is lunisolar. the Islamic calendar is entirely lunar, which is why Ramadan moves through the seasons over time and begins with the sighting of a new crescent moon.

the moon helped people organise planting, harvesting, religious festivals, travel and even just gave people an anchor for the passing of time.

it was measurable. you didn’t need to know the date, but you could look up and understand where you were in the passage of time.

we made her magic

of course we did.

give humans a giant glowing ball that disappears and returns, controls the tides and lights up in the pitch black. the obvious cause is magic. and it is.

our natural world is pure magic.

the Greeks had Selene, who drove her moon chariot across the night sky. the Romans had Luna. ancient Mesopotamia, the moon god Sin was associated with time and wisdom.

full moons became associated with madness, and werewolves. witches became tangled up in the moonlight, people planted according to lunary phases. performed divination under the moonlight, spells.

and we still do it.

many people charge crystals under full moons. make moon water by leaving water under moonlight. manifest under new moons, write things down and burn them beneath full moons.

some of these practices have really old roots. some are more modern witchcraft. and some probably came from someone on Tiktok - but i’m not sure that renders them meaningless.

because although on the face of it, it sounds woo-woo.

there’s so much the moon does that does feel like pure magic.

maybe magic doesn’t require actual magic

and after all this, i still don’t know what i actually believe about the moon.

science has come a long way, but i do think we’ve only just scratched the surface. and there are things so far beyond our human comprehension.

this is so much bigger than we are.

but the same moon that hung above thousands of people years ago, is the same moon that will hang above people long after we’re gone. the moon never stopped keeping time.

we just stopped looking up.

there’s a particular piece of advice given to mothers when they are tired or burnt out.

you need to get away

go somewhere by yourself, book a hotel, read a book, take some time where nobody needs you. it’s often said with the best of intentions. remember who you are outside of being someones mum.

and honestly, i said the exact same thing.

because when you are so burnt out and overstimulated, when a little gremlin has asked you for a snack seventeen times and theres laundry everywhere and someone is shouting MUM from another room and you’ve stood on a tiny Lego - escaping sounds pretty fucking good.

silence sounds good. a quiet hotel room sounds good. being responsible for nobody but yourself for a little bit sounds GOOD.

and so i did just that.

i booked to go away. i am away right now. and now i’m sitting here, by myself with all the things we’re told mothers need.

nobody needs anything from me

nobody is telling me they’re bored

nobody is asking for a snack

i can watch whatever i want, i can eat whatever i want, get in the car and drive wherever i want, WHENEVER i want.

and the funny thing is, i want to go home.

and i don’t mean that in a big dramatic GET ME HOME NOW kind of way.

everything is fine. i’m good, showered and in bed (at 6.30pm hello jetlag)

i’m only here for four days. and i am glad i came. i’ll make the most of it while i’m here and i’ll have a lovely time.

but since i’ve been solo, ive had some time to think. and i mean REAL time to think. seriously, if you have no kids - you must have SO many thoughts.

but i dont actually need an escape from being a mum. i don’t need an escape from my family. i don’t need ‘time to myself’ for days on end to feel refreshed.

i want to enjoy everything with them. i want to have fun with them.

i want slow mornings with them. i want to go somewhere beautiful and have them there to see it. i want to watch their eyes look at something with complete awe and wonder. i want to laugh at their jokes and sit next to my husband at the end of the day, pig out on the sofa and eat all the snacks.

those people are my people. my guys. and irritatingly, i quite like them.

and maybe that’s the strange thing about motherhood…

your life becomes SO intertwined with other people’s that ‘getting time away’ from it all is encouraged so you find yourself again. but here’s the thing, i don’t think the old version of me is sitting in a hotel room waiting to be rediscovered.

i’m here. my family didn’t erase me.

my family changed me, sure. and hopefully for the better. but i’m still here.

and of course mothers need time alone. GOD, yes. I will defend giving mothers breathing space to let their thoughts calm and quieten their brains - so they can show up for themselves and their families better.

we need to lock the bathroom door sometimes (how selfish, i know), we need uninterrupted coffees and dinners with friends and mornings where someone else gets up with the kids. sometimes we probably do need the hotel, a treat. sometimes we do need the flight. sometimes a 4-day solo trip to the Emerald Isle is exactly what a burnt out mum needs.

but, and here’s my point, maybe the answer to burnout isn’t always adding more distance from the people you love.

maybe the answer is just making the life you have softer. a full nights sleep, some help, less rushing, a day with no plans, someone else carrying the mental load.

because i’ve spent today thinking about Ireland and whether or not I could live here.

and the answer is yes, i absolutely could. with my family.

but that’s the important bit. i could also live in Dubai - with my family. and to be honest, i wouldn’t really like to live in either place by myself, or rather, away from my family.

and maybe that should have been more obvious, but it does feel profound when you're sitting alone in a hotel room thousands of miles away. i’ve been driving around, thinking about whether or not we should move our family. looking for somewhere that feels like home. imagining schools and gardens and what our weekends could look like.

almost like i was waiting for a magical geographical feeling of ‘oh this is it’

but i think i’ve been giving geography wayyyyy too much credit. because this place is stunning. like really fairytale stunning, but that doesn’t automatically make somewhere feel like home.

and an imperfect place doesn’t stop being home.

i’ve realised, home for me seems to be significantly less about physical coordinates than i had originally thought. its my people. it’s the sound of children laughing, its a lived in home, its full of excitement and happiness and fighting and bickering and love. SO much love.

the ordinary life that sometimes exhausts me so much that I fantasise about ‘time away’. and then when i take that time, i miss it terribly. and we’re only on day 1, i only just got here!

so anyway, bottom line is putting yourself first might mean identifying what it is that comforts you, and doing that.

and right now, for me, my comfort isn’t solitude.

my comfort is home. with them.

(now if only i had realised this before i booked non refundable EVERYTHING)

now, i’m going to go enjoy the rest of my trip. and maybe i will find myself and this whole essay will have been for nothing.

watch this space.

anyway bye! x

no, i’m not dead. i’m just in an airplane. which to my surprise, is connected to the internet via starlink (thanks Elon).

i am exactly 36,000ft high, and have about 884 miles to go. currently flying somewhere over Germany. i’m flying to Ireland, by myself. it feels really really naughty.

now, before i go on, there are actual reasons for this trip besides fresh air, a quiet mind, and side questing beyond belief (although there will be a lot of that).

but this is the first time i’ve gone somewhere completely solo. said goodbye to my husband and my boys and got on a plane.

naturally, of course, the universe decided to sit me beside two children exactly the same ages as my kids. so the flight is currently not much quieter than it would have been if they’d all just come with me (ironic). BUT at least it’s not me.

i did have a thought though. when i first sat down i did wish i wasn’t sat next to little kids.

listen, i love children. i make them! but i’ve done my time on planes OKAY. this was meant to be a calm relaxing flight.

but then i saw this mum, flying solo with her two kids. that’s normally me.

maybe this flight isn’t about me finally getting my quiet time. maybe the universe decided this mum needed another mum next to her. someone who would understand. someone who would help. who would ease the anxiety (that i know so well) of having little kids on a busy flight alone.

i do hope that’s the case anyway 🥰

but it is funny, you really couldn’t write it.

but anyway, the trip.

the mum guilt, the feeling you’re doing something you shouldn’t. the guilt for some time to yourself. the million things in your head.

THE INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS. when your brain runs through every possible catastrophic event that could possibly happen.

i almost refused to leave this morning.

god mum life is hard. physically yeah but that gets easier. emotionally… never.

but anyway, i’m really excited.

and i think i will document my trip on here as i go. not polished, or planned. just what i get up to, and hopefully with significantly fewer soft plays (although the way this is going, who knows where i’ll end up)

anyway - IRELAND NEXT.

i dont even mean to do it, but i’ll be doing something completely normal and suddenly ask myself: why do we do it this way? this seems wrong..

but here we go…

i feel like we’re been doing life all wrong.

why do we spend so much time indoors? why do we deliberately schedule time to move our bodies? why did my watch congratulate me for standing up???

the more i think about it, the more i feel like i’m constantly working against something. or maybe something in me is constantly working against this life we’ve created.

it’s almost like two lives are happening at any given time, fighting with one another. the modern life we live, and the life some much older part of us is still expecting to live.

the human world has changed unbelievably quickly. mobility, electricity, wifi, connectivity, mobile phones, convenience. everything is faster, easier, ‘better’.

but our bodies haven’t. our brains haven’t. we haven’t changed.

we’re just animals.

(sorry)

stay with me here.

forget what a normal day looks like. forget your alarm, forget your commute to work, forget the school run, traffic, supermarkets, phones and gyms. forget the elaborate morning routine or the 147326487236 step skincare routine.

imagine none of it exists. no cities, no taxes or inflation or rent. we’re starting from scratch.

someone hands you a human being and they say “design a life for this thing".

weird task but as someone who spent 75% of her childhood on the Sims, not far off the dream task.

not the most productive, not the most optimised, not the richest.

just the kind of life this creature was actually made to live. a life where this human being would thrive. assume we have the basics. we have our earth, our human has shelter, food, water.

what would you give it? what would your human’s life look like if it was designed to help it thrive.

let there be light…

so our human wakes up. good morning.

for most of human existence, morning was hard to miss.

the big round fireball comes up out of the ground and you can see things.

the sky gets lighter, birds start singing, world gets warmer and other animals start moving around (night shift animals are a different breed - no thank you).

now, so many of us sleep in rooms specifically designed to convince our bodies that morning just isn’t happening.

we wake up when a small machine on our bedside tables makes an absolutley HORRIFIC noise at 6am.

and then, before we’ve even seen the sky, or felt the temperature, or even sat upright… we pick up our phones. and bam. messages. emails. work. war. photos of old school friend you havent’t spoken to in 20 years laying on a beach. here’s an advert. parenting advice. investment advice. price of oil has gone up. someone’s dog died.

that’s a fucking insane way to introduce a human to a brand new day.

even for us, that’s absolutely wild.

for my human, i’d want them to see the sky first.

they’d wake up, rested and stretch. no rush. they’d open a window or a door. they’d know whether it was hot or cold. bright or overcast. sunny or rainy or windy. maybe they’d hear birds singing. they might walk somewhere, go outside.

they might just stand there doing nothing particularly useful.

and you know what? nobody would call any of that wellness. nobody would even think about it. it’s literally just life??

that’s the thing that’s been circling in my mind.

we’ve removed so many normal, natural aspects of being alive that we’re now adding them back and giving them names, and prices. what?

morning light exposure. grounding. forest bathing. digital detox. sleep hygiene.

all things i am, for the record, EXTREMELY susceptible to. stick the word ‘ritual’ on anything and watch me foam at the mouth.

we buy lamps that imitate sunrise because we’ve stuck blackout blinds over the window to cover the actual sunrise.

we have apps that help us sleep onto the glowy little rectangles we take to bed with us.

we wear watches and rings that tell us whether or not we slept well, whether we’ve rested properly. we even get a little score. because apparently waking up and just feeling fine is no longer enough evidence.

i’m not mocking any of this. i’m not speaking from any moral high ground.

i just think it’s funny, and also kind of sick.

i think the strange thing isn’t that we need all of these things to feel better.

i think it’s that we built a life where we’ve somehow managed to turn just being a regular fucking human being into a wellness practice.

bodies are for moving

so our human is awake.

now we need to figure out what our human is going to do all day.

our human has a body. so i guess they should use it?

they should walk. carry things. bend down. reach up. maybe they’d climb something. use their hands to make things. build things. play. prepare food. laugh. hug. love. they should dance. when they feel tired, they’d rest. sit down. their body would just be doing normal things.

what i don’t think we’d do is put them in a chair for most of their waking hours and then allow them an hour at the end of the day to go to a special building where they can pay to move around for an hour. and pay monthly for the privilege.

and yet… that’s exactly what we do.

we’ve somehow managed to remove movement from every day life SO WELL that we now have to add it back in as it’s own activity.

have you gone to the gym today? did you get your 10k steps? lol what??? how is any of this normal??

we drive somewhere we could have walked. we take lifts instead of stairs. we have people bring us food to our doors. we sit down to work. we sit down to travel. we sit down to eat. and then at the end of the day we sit down because we’re so exhausted from sitting down all day. make it make sense.

how can we expect to thrive and live full lives like this?

and then of course our watches start buzzing because we haven’t stood up enough. ironic isn’t it. even the technology made to make our lives ‘easier’ is telling us to move.

and again, i’m not suggesting we abandon our cars and start carrying buckets of water home from the river for cardiovascular purposes. these are all things that made our lives easier and for good reason. i’m personally very grateful for modern plumbing. i’m not interested in shitting outside to prove a point.

but i do wonder whether somewhere along there, we confused easier with better.

none of those things are better for us. the human body needs to be used.

not trained. not optimised. not punished for eating a donut. just used.

maybe walking was never supposed to be exercise. maybe carrying things was never meant to be strength training. maybe stretching and squatting and climbing and reaching was never meant to be something someone in a little matching activewear number to teach how to do…

it’s all a bit dystopian when you really look at it.

we would give them other people

we probably wouldn’t make this human do it all alone.

humans are social creatures. even those of us (myself included) who fantastise about moving into a quaint little cottage in the middle of nowhere and disappearing from civilisation. we need people around us. maybe not all the time. but we need people.

if we were designing a life from scratch for our human, i think there would be people everywhere. not hundreds of people. not followers on Instagram. not a group chat with unread messages. actual people.

community.

people you know well enough to go to them without making an appointment days or weeks in advance.

people you bump into.

kids around adults other than their parents.

old people around young people.

people who would notice you hadnt been around for a few days.

someone who can hold the baby while you shower.

someone who brings you food without asking just because.

i think this might be one of the strangest, most dystopian things about our modern life.

we’ve never had more access to more human beings, and yet we’ve never been so lonely.

i can speak to someone on the other side of the planet in seconds. i can know what a girl i haven’t spoken to since 2010 had for breakfast. i can watch a ‘day in the life’ of a complete stranger and know the names of her children.

but seeing someone i actually love requires us to compare calendars and find a day that works for everyone. a small window of time that doesn’t clash with all the other things we have going on. a lot of the time it requires travel, logistics, babysitters. all just to meet someone.

we have connection, but we don’t have community.

and nowhere does this feel stranger to me than in motherhood.

think mainly because the basic human machinery of motherhood hasn’t really changed. our bodies. the hormones. our biological needs. our physical needs. our emotional needs.

we’ve taken something so ancient and ordinary as birthing and raising children and somehow turned it into a job. where one or two adults get to perform by themselves. inside a closed house. while also cooking, cleaning, working, carrying the mental load of running a household… while also making sure everyone is having an amazing childhood.

all the while your glowing little rectangle is telling you you’re doing everything wrong. and showing you ways to optimise. how to save time doing xyz. how to make more money doing xyz. everything you’ve been doing is wrong.

and then we wonder why EVERYONE is exhausted.

i’m not pretending the past was some lovely village where everyone loved one another and sang kumbaya around the fire. humans are annoying. i imagine humans were annoying thousands of years ago too.

but i do wonder whether we were ever meant to be this self sufficient.

maybe needing people around us isn’t evidence that we’re failing to cope with the pressures of everyday life.

maybe we were just never meant to cope with all of it alone

mummy, i’m bored

good.

sometimes we’d leave our human alone. with nothing to do.

horrifying, i know.

i’d leave moments in my human’s life where nobody was talking to them. nothing was playing in the background and there was no new information constantly being fed to them. (did i mention my human wouldn’t be allowed a smart phone?)

maybe they’d have to wait for something.

maybe they’d take a walk. maybe they’d sit for a bit.

and then eventually, because the human brain is incapable of just being idle, it would start doing things.

thinking things, remembering things, imagining things, noticing things.

without putting a label on it. our human is suddenly practising mindfulness, meditation. the art of noticing. all things being monetized now.

maybe this is where all the best ideas used to come from. because boredom is suprprisingly difficult to come by these days. it’s treated like a problem we need to solve.

not so long ago, there was all this dead space built into every day. waiting for a bus. standing in a queue. sitting in the waiting room. walking somewhere. cooking dinner. laying in bed before you fall asleep.

little pockets of absolutely nothing.

in today’s world. the second nothing happens, we reach for something.

i do it without even noticing.

thirty seconds for the kettle to boil. phone.

walking up the stairs. phone.

someone goes to the toilet in a restaurant. phone.

even a red traffic light presents such an unbearable expanse of nothing that i have to actively stop myself from checking my phone, all because of cameras lol.

i wish i could say that all of the above was hypothetical. but it really isn’t.

we’ve managed to full almost every single crack in the day.

and i’m starting to wonder what used to grow in those moments of nothing…

maybe boredom wasn’t this flaw in human life that technology finally came to fix. maybe we needed boredom.

maybe our brains need somewhere to wander without immediately being handed somewhere to go.

there is something quite unsettling about the fact we can now live a whole day without being alone with our own thoughts.

even just typing that, being alone with our own thoughts sounds like a scary place to be.

so i think i’d give my human some time. some nothing.

no productivity hidden inside nothing. no mindfulness exercises. no pressure to produce.

just a patch of the day when absolutely nothing is required of them. and then i’d see what my human does with the nothing.

no watching yourself live

i wouldn’t give my human a mirror. or at least, not very may mirrors.

i saw this thing online that said, we were never supposed to see ourselves. and it’s been bothering me since i read it.

it’s true. we were never supposed to know what we looked like this well.

for the majority of our existence, our faces were something other people saw.

we would catch our reflections in still water. later on, polished metal. and eventually mirrors just became part of every day life.

but the versions of ourselves we have now… the versions we can inspect from every angle. notice and fixate on every imperfection. we spend our lives feeling self conscious over. we photograph endlessly. we zoom in. edit. watch back in HD. citicize. that’s all very new.

and i do wonder just how much damage this has done to us.

i know from personal experience there have been entire days where seeing one bad photo of myself has changed how i felt about myself. how i went about my day. which is ridiculous when you think about it. that i was perfectly happy until i saw a weird photo of my face, or my hair. or thinking i was too fat, or too thin.

i probably see my own face more times in one week than some of our ancestors did in months

but it goes further than that… we’ve become good at imagining ourselves from the outside.

how do i look doing this? how does my house look? what does my relationship look like? am i showing people i’m a good enough mum? how does my life look? is it aesthetic enough?

i think thats also probably one of the strangest things we’ve done to ourselves…

we’re supposed to experience life from behind our own eyes, experience other people around us.

instead, we spend far too much of our time looking back at ourselves.

i don’t think i’d take our human’s reflection away completely. i’d quite like them to know if they had something in their teeth. i’d want them to see and appreciate their beauty.

i’d give my human a very analog camera to photograph the things they love, the moments they want to capture and look back on.

i’m not a monster. they can have photos.

but i think i’d want them to forget what they looked like sometimes. long enough, at least, to remember what it feels like to just experience something.

and then i’d let it get dark

eventually, the day would end. actually end.

the sun goes down, the light changes. my human watches the sunset. the world gets quiet. the birds stop singing. they start to yawn and realise it’s time to stop doing things.

then it gets dark.

i think it’s absolutely wild how darkness is now optional.

we can turn day into night with the flick of a switch. we can work at midnight. we can shop at midnight (from our fucking beds). we can speak to someone on the other side of the world at midnight. we can binge watch episodes at night and then (as if that wasn’t enough stimulation) we lay in bed and scroll the lives of strangers until our eyes physically can’t stay open.

think about it. there’s not really very much we can’t do at 11.59pm.

it’s a little bit mad.

for most of human history, night put a limit on the day. you couldn’t just keep going , not in the same way anyway. things slowed down because they had to.

and somewhere along the line, things got convenient. too convenient. and we figured out how to override the limit of night.

and i’m not sure we’re very good at stopping.

one more email. one more episode. one more message.

we’ve made the day indefinitely extendable…

and of course, we invented entire industries to teach ourselves how to wind down. something that’s so rooted in our biology, now has to be taught to us. and sold.

sleep routines. blue light glasses. magnesium. meditation apps. special lamps that mimic our sun. we need to reset our circadian rhythms. we need special teas. special noises to help us switch off. special mattresses.

again please understand, i’m writing this with magnesium spray for my feet by my bedside. i own many of these things. but there’s no denying... it is a wee bit Black Mirror.

but for our imaginary human, i would want our them not to need so many instructions. they would see light slowly disappear and they would get tired. and eventually allow the day to be over. to switch off.

not because they had finished everything. not because they had ticked off everything in their to do list. there will always be something else to do.

but because it was night.

and then there is the life we actually live

so now we’ve made our human.

they wake with the light. they move because life needs them to move. they see other people. they use their hands. they help people. they love. they laugh. they connect.

they have moments where nothing is happening. they spend most of their day looking out at the world rather than looking back at themselves. eventually, the day ends. it gets dark.

nothing groundbreaking has happened.

which i think is kind of the point.

because then i look at the life we actually have…

we wake to a blaring alarm.

we look at a screen. probably while having a wee..

we sit in a car to go somewhere where we can sit in a chair. and look at another screen.

then we sit in another car, going home.

we sit on the sofa …

and then because our bodies have barely moved at all. we might go to a special building where we run on a machine that takes us nowhere.

and then we come home. we turn on a bigger screen to relax from all the smaller screens we’ve been looking at all day. and then we take our smallest screens to bed.

and somewhere in the midst of all this, we wonder why we feel a bit weird. why we feel off. why we feel like our bodies and minds crave a different life to the one we’re living.

we’re tired, but we can’t sleep.

we’re lonely, but constantly connected.

why we feel restless. why we feel lonely. why our minds are never quiet.

why a walk in nature makes us feel better in a way we can’t quite explain.

and this is the bit i’ve been thinking about lately… the more i realise how incompatible we are with the life we’ve created.

maybe we’re not failing at modern life. maybe some smarter part of us is simply resisting it.

and i’m not saying modern life is bad. i have no desire to die from a papercut or wash my clothes in a river (could be fun for a day ngl).

i like antibiotics. i like convenience. heck i’m typing my thoughts out on my laptop. staring at a screen as we speak.

progress has given us some really cool shit.

but perhaps the issue is assuming that because we can make life more convenient for us, that we can somehow rewrite our needs as human beings. because regardless of all the innovation and connectivity and convenience - we’re still the same strange creature underneath it all.

we respond to light. we need movement. we need other people. we need stillness and quiet. we need sleep. we feel better when we go outside. fresh air. nature.

and maybe some of the discomfort we keep trying to fix isn’t evidence that theres something wrong with us at all. maybe it’s a sign. maybe it’s just the friction of the modern life we’ve built and the life our bodies are still expecting.

maybe it’s not a cottage in the woods or deleting all your socials, or starting a homestead (although this still sounds cool). maybe it’s a lot less dramatic.

maybe it’s just that every once in a while when modern life gets too loud, something in us remembers.

i’m not sure anyones ever written a love letter to the Royal Mail. but hear me out…

picture this, you need to send a card.

you write someone’s name and address on a piece of paper. you stick a little sticker on the corner with a picture of the King or Queen. you stick it in a random red box in your area.

and then you just… walk off and get on with your day.

and you trust that the system just does it’s thing and your granny gets her card. the system knows. it’s wild.

listen, i’m a bit of a history nerd and it really wasn’t all that long ago that we were on horseback sending messages and letters that took weeks to reach the person they were meant for.

and now you can literally drop a letter into a box in Aberdeen and somehow, through a series people and machines and little red vans, it ends up through the right letterbox in Cornwall two days later. how does this happen??

because for me, once my letter has gone through that hole in the postbox, as far as i’m concerned it has entered another dimension. but it hasn’t, apparently.

someone comes to collect it at a set time. i knew this bit, it says so on the letterbox. and i’ve seen it happen.

but then your letter gets thrown in with thousands of other bits of post and somehow the whole thing starts sorting itself out. machines read the address.

crazy but okay - i get it. machines can do all sorts of things these days.

but here’s the bit that boggles my brain. it gets sorted again. and moved again. and sent to another part of the country. and then sorted into increasingly smaller and smaller geographical piles until eventually there’s a postman is standing on the your granny’s street in Cornwall, holding the card you casually abandoned in a red box miles away.

then he puts it through the right door.

your granny gets her card.

and nobody involved in this process knows you. nobody knows your granny. nobody particularly cares about the card.

they just all do their tiny part and somehow it works. the system knows.

and the craziest thing is in my head, a process like this should take weeks if not months. but if you’ve paid a bit extra to have a first class stamp, it’s usually there the NEXT DAY.

that is absolutely mental to me.

and honestly, how is this any less magical than Harry Potter getting his Hogwarts letter delivered by owl?

at least the owl makes sense. it can fly. you can physically watch it arrive with the letter in its little beak.

the Royal Mail is somehow more mysterious.

how unbelievably efficient the whole thing is now. and we just don’t care. it makes me want to cry.

millions of letters. houses. streets, flats, villages, tower blocks, farms in the middle of nowhere, houses with names. and somehow the post just… gets there.

we barely even acknowledge how insane that is.

we get annoyed when something is delayed. we complain when a parcel disappears. but i think the reason we get so annoyed is that the system works so reliably that we have started treating this wild efficiency as the bare minimum.

and then there are the posties.

i’m sorry, but i just love them so much.

there is something so wholesome about the fact that every little area has a person wandering around delivering everyone’s tiny bits of life in a little red outfit. in a little red van.

sometimes with a black and white cat.

they know the streets. they know which houses have dogs. they probably know who gets approximately seventeen ASOS parcels a week (hello, me). they see your Christmas wreath go up and your moving boxes appear and suddenly there’s a new name on the envelope.

they’re just quietly woven into the background of people’s lives.

and don’t get me started on the fact that you can send a letter to Father Christmas.

an actual letter. addressed to Father Christmas. in Reindeerland. and the Royal Mail goes, yep perfect, we know where that is.

but it gets better. THEY REPLY

somewhere inside this enormous, highly efficient national postal system (DURING CHRISTMAS) is an entire operation dedicated to making sure children who write to Santa get a letter back. if you aren’t crying by now i’m going to need you to see a therapist.

they could very easily say not a valid address and get on with the serious business of delivering all the letters.

but they don’t. The Royal Mail maintains its whimsy.

i think maybe bit that gets me most is the trust of it all.

you don’t know any of the many people involved in the process of getting your letter to your granny. none of them know you either.

and yet all of these random strangers are doing their tiny little part so that something you wrote in your kitchen ends up in someone else’s hands.

that is so cute. it feels wholesome in a way that’s quite rare nowadays.

like, this is society working.

not in the big dramatic way we normally think about civilisation. not governments or skyscrapers or major technological breakthroughs.

just thousands of people quietly agreeing that yes, this little envelope needs to get over there. granny needs to get it.

and everyone just gets on with it.

i know that’s their job. i know they are being paid. i know this is not a charitable act of national goodwill. but still.

there is something really lovely about how much of ordinary life relies on strangers doing what they’re supposed to do. and most of the time, they do.

we trust it so completely that we don’t even think of it as trust anymore. it just exists.

i think that’s probably the weirdest part of it all. the better something works, the less impressed we are by it. if the post only worked once a year, we would think it was witchcraft.

but because it works every day, we just shrug. its normal.

of course the letter got there? of course the postie knew which house? that’s literally his job.

of course the whole giant invisible system did exactly what it was supposed to do in 2 days and your very same physical letter ended up on the other end of the country because you put a sticker with a head on it.

and that’s kind of how we are with so many things

water just comes out the tap. light just happens at the flick of a switch. internet and bluetooth (lol because what the fuck are those)

we stop seeing the magic the minute it becomes reliable.

and i think that’s a shame, because ordinary life is absolutely full of these tiny systems that should still blow our minds a little bit.

the postal service is just one of them.

and maybe that’s why i find the whole thing so weirdly comforting. we live in such a now now now world. everything has to happen immediately. everything’s automated and optimised. next-day delivery somehow feels slow. birthday messages pop up because our socials reminded us. invitations arrive on Whatsapp.

and don’t get me wrong, i love all of that. i am not volunteering to go back to waiting three weeks for a courier to send a message on horseback, and then another 3 weeks to hear back.

but there is something about the post that feels like a tiny leftover from a slower world. a more connected world (ironically). to one where community mattered.

you write something down with your actual hand. you put it in an envelope. you trust another person to collect it, and then another person, and another. and then you wait, but not very long because the Royal Mail wizards are fast.

there’s something so wholesome about it. it feels really human in a way i feel so many of us have been craving.

it feels like society doing what society is supposed to do at its absolute best: lots of people who do not know each other, quietly cooperating because everybody has their little part to play.

and nobody needs applause for it. nobody needs to know the whole story. you just do your bit properly, and pass it on, and trust the next person to do theirs.

and eventually your granny gets her card.

maybe that’s why i love it so much.

in a world that keeps trying to remove the human from everything, the post still feels strangely human.

i’ll be honest, i left the cinema thinking… that was way too long, and far too loud. i liked it, i definitley didn’t love it.

there were battles, fighting, monsters, lots of shouting and plenty of sudden noises. i also think this was the first time i realised just how much i rely on subtitles when watching a show or movie (i NEED them).

i was thinking i’d have a cinema date with my husband. watch this movie and head back. that it would be over.

i thought i had left The Odyssey at the cinema.

but somehow it came home with me.

not immediately. but for the rest of the week, i found myself thinking about it more and more. not in a dramatic, life changing way - but i wanted to understand it. really understand it.

i started reading about homer. i started wondering whether i was too hard on the cyclops. who were the sea peoples? i kept wondering why odysseus shouted his name after he had escaped? how did the cyclops milk those poor sheep? who was the real villain? the other animals on that island with the pig lady, who were they? what role did each character play in the story?

and perhaps the most important question of all, WHAT WAS MIA THERMOPOLIS PRINCESS OF GENOVIA DOING THERE?

and i couldn’t explain why. i was never THAT into Greek mythology.

the movie did make me realise that maybe the best stories aren’t the ones that overwhelm us immediately. maybe they’re the ones that quietly rearrange the furniture in our minds after we’ve left. this one did that for me.

i became introspective, turned into a philosopher of sorts.

i think it’s the first time i’ve truly appreciated film making and storytelling as an art form. it really was a piece of art.

i realised afterwards that it wasn’t the battles i kept thinking about. it was the questions.

every character seemed to leave me with one.

so here’s everything that came to mind.

i need to brain dump this so i can carry on with my regular life.

first of all. i hope Homer had some good mental health support when he wrote this 3000 years ago.

odysseus

respectfully sir, at what point do you just ask someone for directions and go home?

i didn’t like him all that much. don’t get me wrong, i wanted him to get home. mainly for Penelope, because at multiple points in the movie i started to question whether he actually wanted to get home.

why did he shout at the cyclops? prick.

the cyclops

this guy stayed with me. i’m not quite sure what that says about me. i think maybe he was just unexpected (i’ve never read the Odyssey or seen previous films).

i felt sorry for him. i can’t really explain why. but he was basically living my dream. he had his livestock, he was making artisanal cheese, having little naps.

how did he milk the sheep?

when he called out for his father, it made him seem vulnerable. childlike.

i don’t know i feel like i could change him.

maybe that’s the point. perhaps the best stories don’t tell you who the monster is.

they let you decide.

the lotus eaters

the greatest distractions rarely look dangerous. they don’t chase you. they don’t threaten you. they just make you forget where you were trying to go.

maybe that’s why they’re so effective.

you don't notice you've lost yourself until you've forgotten what you were trying to get back to.

circe

right, what the fuck was this? what drugs was homer on? also, the fact they didn’t use CGI for this is mind-blowing.

but underneath all the creepy pigs was another question. how much of who we are is our choice? how much can be changed by the people around us?

poseidon

you’re never bigger than the forces around you. nature doesn’Ht care or give a fuck who you are, Odysseus. there's something oddly comforting about that.

the sirens

that song makes me feel something and i’m not quite sure what.

curiosity isn’t always harmless. sometimes the things we’re desperate to know are the very things capable of destroying us.

calypso

comfort can be your captive. paradise isn’t quite the same as home. not every beautiful place is somewhere you're supposed to stay. maybe not every prison has bars.

penelope

needs to get back to Genovia immediately; her people need her. and that throne is a lot more pleasant than this one.

antinous

i hated this guy so much that i’m now considering switching my allegiance to team Jacob. which means he did a great job.

and then there was me

a 32-year-old woman who has suddenly made this her entire personality. i’ve been in deep thought for 7 whole days. maybe that’s what great stories do. they don’t give us answers. they quietly leave us with better questions. i left the cinema thinking i’d watched a film. a week later i realised i’d started a week-long conversation with myself.

also, can we all just take a moment to appreciate just how much talent it takes to create all of this?

i’ve never really understood people who say things like, “the cinematography was breathtaking.”

but this was the first time i understood that films can be art in exactly the same way paintings are. it wasn’t merely entertainment. heck it wasn’t even that entertaining. and i don’t think it was intended to be.

it was art not just because it was beautiful, but because every choice seemed to be saying something.

it was like an English teacher’s wet dream. everything meant something so much deeper.

maybe that’s why stories like The Odyssey survive.

not because every generation sees the same thing. but because every generation brings different questions.

the story somehow becomes about us. the story stays the same.

we don’t.

i took the kids to Total Ninja today, perhaps the world’s most overstimulating place. probably just as stimulating as it sounds. trampolines, obstacle courses, soft play, climbing walls, bouncy castles. sensory overload in the best possible way.

they loved it. i loved that they loved it.

i spent most of the afternoon in the café, coffee and laptop. and noise cancelling headphones, essential for a place like that.

i watched children climb, run and jump, and it struck me that not one of them was doing any of it for exercise.

not one of them was trying to get their 10,000 steps. none of them were chasing a personal best. they weren’t trying to get fitter or stronger. they weren’t counting calories (i sincerely hope not) or tracking their heart rate.

they climbed because climbing looked fun. they hung upside down because they could.

they jumped before they’d worked out exactly how they were going to land. they fell, laughed, and immediately tried again.

i had two hours to watch them. long enough to notice that they weren’t just moving differently. they were moving through the world differently.

and now that i’m a writer, i’m all deep and introspective so naturally i found myself wondering when we stopped.

we spend so much of childhood talking about everything we have to learn.

how to read. how to write. how to count. how to share. how to wait our turn.

but nobody ever talks about the things we slowly stop doing.

because somewhere along the way, growing up stopped feeling like adding things to ourselves and started feeling like quietly putting parts of ourselves away.

not all of them, obviously. i quite like living in a society where people queue and don’t just bite each other when they’re annoyed.

but watching those kids today, i couldn’t shake the feeling that becoming an adult isn’t just a process of learning.

it’s also a process of forgetting. forgetting to listen to ourselves, to our bodies. to what it means to be a human being.

children don’t climb because somebody told them it’s good for their core.

they don’t swing because it’s improving their vestibular system.

they don’t run because their watch buzzed and told them it was time to get up.

they move because their bodies ask them to. they feel the need to move, so they move. there’s a beautiful simplicity in that. something that feels like it should just come naturally to us as adults - and maybe it does? maybe we just forgot how to listen?

and it’s not just movement we forget. it’s how to trust ourselves. our bodies are consistently communicating their needs. children know how to listen to them.

when children are hungry? they eat.

when children are tired? they fall asleep in the car.

when children are excited? the entire room knows about it.

when children are sad? they cry.

they haven’t yet learned that some feelings are inconvenient. they haven’t yet learned to ignore their hunger because it’s nearly lunchtime, or to push through exhaustion because they still have work to do.

their bodies speak to them.

and for a little while at least, they still listen.

almost as though children are living the true human experience. and we, as adults, are living some diluted version of it.

and maybe that’s why children seem to notice all the little things we don’t.

they’ll stop in the middle of a pavement because there’s a cool-looking stick.

they’ll crouch down to watch an ant and just observe.

they’ll ask why the moon follows the car, why birds sing in the morning, where rain comes from. why? why? why?

they’re endlessly curious. its amazing.

and the funny thing is it’s not because they’re trying to be clever.

it’s not because they’re hoping the information will be useful one day. or that they need the information for an exam.

simply because the world feels endlessly worth paying attention to.

somewhere along the way, we start asking a different question.

not “i wonder?”

but “what’s the point?”

we also forget how to play.

not just games.

actually just play.

the art of just doing something fun. as adults, joy has become something we feel we have to earn. not something we just get to do.

we’ll relax once the emails are answered.

we’ll read the book once the house is tidy.

we’ll go for the walk once we’ve finished everything else we have to do.

children don’t seem to have that bargain with themselves.

they don’t justify their joy. they just live it.

of course, it’s not all bad. growing up gives us things too: perspective, patience, empathy, responsibility.

i’m not suggesting we should all quit our day jobs and start crying because someone cut our cucumbers into rings and not sticks (we’ve all been there).

but i do find myself wondering if we gave up too much of what it meant to be human. whether in becoming responsible adults, we left behind parts of ourselves that weren’t causing us any trouble in the first place. things we’d have been better off keeping.

maybe because they weren’t efficient, maybe because we got caught up in surviving that we forgot what it meant to live.

maybe that’s the strange thing about growing up.

we spend so much of our lives trying to become more.

more organised, more responsible, more knowledgeable, more successful, more efficient. we’re constantly trying to improve and learn.

but maybe becoming fully human isn’t only about collecting new lessons.

perhaps it’s also about remembering a few old ones.

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it’s easy for us to imagine that the people who changed the course of history somehow experienced life any differently than we do.

as if they were born with the certainty that they were living a life that would one day be printed in our textbooks and taught in schools and universities all over the world.

but history doesn’t feel like history for people living in it. it just feels like today…

even for those people who suspected they might be remembered. kings and queens, rulers, warriors, inventors… they still had to live today before it became tomorrow. they watched the seasons change as we do; they wondered if they were making the right decisions as we do. they loved and they lost, as we do. they hoped for things, feared things. they lived the universal human experience.

history has a habit of flattening people into their achievements (or failures. or misdeeds)

the first man on the moon.

the queen who ruled.

the scientist who discovered.

the explorer who crossed.

but in reality, and much to my parent’s disappointment, nobody experiences life as a series of their own accomplishments. nobody experiences life as a series of bullet points going from one major event to the next.

history completely edits out the act of being human. it remembers the speech, but never the nervous walk beforehand. the planning and the preparation. it remembers the discovery, but not the years of doubt and failures. it remembers the crown, but not the years of loneliness, guilt, and responsibility. it remembers the victory, but not the thousands of uneventful evenings that made up the rest of that person’s life. the family dinners, the laughs and everything else that made that person, human.

i wonder whether they would recognise themselves in the versions of them we learn about today.

whether Van Gogh would believe that people from around the world queue for hours to stand in front of paintings that he couldn’t even give away. that his paintings would be recognisable on a global scale.

whether Anne Boleyn would mind that she’s now remembered almost entirely by the way her life ended. that she would forever be rememberd for what happened to her, as opposed to who she was.

whether teenage Anne Frank ever imagined her personal diary would be translated into dozens of languages and read around the world (as a former teenage girl, i can’t get my head around that). and that her secret annex would be visited by millions of people around the world. that they’d stand where she once wrote.

whether Napoleon Bonaparte imagined that his name would eventually describe a psychological complex when apparently, he wasn’t even that short.

history is a really strange editor. it cuts away almost everything that makes a person a person. the conversations, the fears, the hopes and dreams, the loves, the losses. the ordinary days and the quiet struggles. all the moments that, to the person living them, probably felt far more significant than the ones we remember.

instead, we’re left with the headlines. in many ways, yes they were extraordinary. but history often leaves out just how ordinary they were.

maybe that’s slightly freeing in a way. comforting.

that after some time, our ordinary days disappear with us.

because while we spend so much of our lives worrying about whether we’re doing enough, achieving enough, becoming enough. whether we’re productive enough. kind enough.

but history only ever gets the final draft.

and if even the people who changed the world couldn’t hold on to the ordinary parts of themselves… then maybe we can stop believing that our worth is hidden inside the e everyday worries.

because i think what i realised is this:

extraordinary lives rarely feel extraordinary from the inside.

they just feel like today.

when we think of the ocean, we think of blue.

waves, holidays. beaches. boat trips. maybe a whale breaching the surface.

but that’s a bit like judging the earth by looking at its rooftops.

because the ocean isn’t its surface.

in reality, the largest habitat on earth has never even seen the sun. the blue ocean we picture is more akin to a middle ground. the blurred lines between our world and the one under the water. a transitory portal. the true ocean begins when light ends.

that vast blue body of water covering more than seventy per cent of our planet is literally just the beginning. it’s only the thin upper layer where sunlight still reaches.

the ocean most of us know is only its roof.

beneath it, it grows darker. and then darker still. until eventually, light disappears entirely. and that’s where the real magic begins.

the largest habitat on earth has never seen the sun.

just sit with that again for a second.

the single biggest place where life exists on our planet, exists in permanent darkness. we so often associate the sun with being the source of abundant life on earth, and it is for so much of what we know. but in the depths of the ocean, there are no sunrises, no sunsets, no little flickers of sparkly light filtering through the water. just darkness.

just imagine, if aliens landed on Earth tomorrow and asked us where the majority of life exists on our planet, i don’t think any of us would a place we’ve never seen. a place we instinctively associate with emptiness. a place that has been overflowing with life all along (however terrifying).

but darkness doesn’t mean emptiness. not this kind anyway. this darkness might be one of the busiest places on our planet. in the absence of light, life doesn’t just die out. it adapts. theres a beautiful metaphor in there somewhere, although i’m too excited to type it out for you

countless creatures in the darkest oceans adapted to create their own light. light comes from life.

maybe you remember the little anglerfish that captured the internet a while ago. the tiny black fish that somehow made millions of people cry (myself included). she had risen from the depths of the ocean to the surface. to this day, no one knows why. not even the scientists. perhaps she was ill. perhaps she was injured. perhaps changing currents carried her there.

but the internet decided she’d come to see the sun.

and whether that’s true or not, i hope she found what she was searching for.

like the angler fish; some creatures dangle a little light in front of their mouths and simply wait for their prey. some creatures use light to identify species, some for mating.

some (and this one truly blows my mind) use light to hide. they can adjust their specific glow to hide their shadow, completely erasing their silhouette. they essentially make themselves invisible.

light from bioluminescence can also function as a language. animals can flash particular lights and patterns to identify themselves, warn of danger or simply to communicate. like morse code. they can flash warnings, signal to one another or release puffs of light as a distraction while they escape.

entire conversations are happening in little flashes of light.

here’s the mind-blowing bit…

every, single night, those animals leave. every evening, those animals start swimming upwards. and then before sunrise, they descend back into the deepest ocean.

the worlds biggest animal migration. and it doesn’t happen every year, or every season. it happens every. single. night.

honestly, I don't know how we're all expected to carry on with our days after learning that. and somehow, it gets stranger..

we grow up believing that life on Earth needs the sun, and that’s, for the most part, true. plants need the sun, animals eat the plants (or the animal that eats the plant), and somehow everything traces back to the sun. as far as we were concerned, the plants breathe out what we breathe in. the forests are the earth’s lungs. we were missing a whole other part of that equation (or at least i was). the oceans are keeping us alive. while all this is happening, the oceans are quietly sustaining life itself. around HALF of the oxygen we breathe doesn’t come from the trees and the forests we touched on in our last article. it comes from the oceans.

the biggest contributors to the air we breathe aren’t giant whales or coral reefs. they’re tiny microscopic organisms we’ll never see, plankton.

and then we go deeper. deep beneath the ocean, the earth cracks itself open. and from those cracks, hot water pours out from hydrothermal vents. it's so rich in minerals and chemicals that it would kill most life on the surface. and yet somehow they are so surrounded by life.

on land, plants use sunlight to convert light into sugars and it sustains life, in one way or another. but here, in the absence of light, tiny bacteria use the chemicals pouring from the hydrothermal vents.

then, other creatures eat the bacteria; bigger creatures eat those creatures. a whole food chain appears where there really shouldn’t be one.

this feels like some kind of cheat code.

giant tube worms taller than people, white crabs. shrimp with no need for sunlight. octopuses wandering between underwater volcanoes.

an entire civilisation, hidden beneath our waves. like ours, but different.

i thought i was researching the ocean. it turns out i was researching an entirely different planet that’s been sitting right next to us all along.

i knew oceans were important; i knew about plankton and all the funky animals in our waters. I shed many a tear over that lonesome angler fish as many of us did.

i think that got me was that even in nature, in our naturally occurring world, life always finds a way to thrive. it has never needed our permission to flourish. we may not always be at the centre of it, we never were. but life finds a way.

perhaps that’s why we’ve always been drawn to the sea. it feels like another world entirely. it makes us feel so small. perhaps somewhere deep down, we’ve always sensed there was another world beneath the surface.

so next time you find yourself looking out to the sea,

remember you’re only looking at its roof.

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we seem to gravitate towards trees without even so much as a thought. we sit beneath them for shade, gather under them for picnics and build our homes and lives around them. they are so woven into the background of our existence that we rarely stop to wonder what they actually are.

we treat them almost like scenery. as though they are simply there to make the world more beautiful.

but a tree isn’t just scenery. it is a living, breathing world.

we were all taught about photosynthesis in school. trees take carbon dioxide from the air and, using sunlight and water, create the sugars they need to grow. in the process, they release oxygen back into the atmosphere.

it is one of those facts we learned so young that it stopped sounding miraculous and started just sounding like a complex biological process to memorise for our exams. but have we ever actually stopped to think about how fucking wild it is?

the forests breathe into the atmosphere that breathes into us. life is continually passing between us.

we are not separate from the natural world, despite our very determined efforts to behave as though we are. every single breath we take is a reminder that we belong to it. we are part of the natural world.

because trees cannot walk, speak or turn their faces towards us, we imagine them as these big passive things. stationary objects standing quietly while the seasons happen to them. leaves fall in autumn. buds return in spring. the tree repeats this little performance year after year until eventually, it dies.

all of that is true, and amazing in itself, but stillness isn’t the same as silence.

trees can talk to one another. i don’t know about you, but this feels like information they have been deliberately withholding from us.

when a tree or plant is attacked by insects, it can release chemical signals into the air. neighbouring trees and plants can detect them and start preparing their own defences. it’s basically one plant telling the others “prepare for war”.

and beneath the soil, things become even stranger. tree roots form relationships with fungi, exchanging sugars for help accessing water and nutrients. these fungal threads can connect multiple plants, and resources can sometimes move through those underground relationships.

an entire hidden economy is operating beneath our feet and nobody has so much as issued us a receipt. they’re negotiating and trading?! sorry, was anyone taught this?

all of this wild natural magic and we haven’t even touched on the entire ecosystem that is one single tree. the birds in its branches. the insects beneath its bark. the fungi woven through its roots. the moss spread across its trunk. the little animals living inside its hollows. the unseen microorganisms getting on with whatever secret microscopic business they have. the trading routes?!

a single tree is a world within a world within a world. and quite frankly, i don’t know what we are supposed to call that if not magic.

and then: tree rings. trees keep a diary.

the rings of a tree can preserve evidence of droughts, fires, bitter winters, volcanic eruptions and years when everything was apparently going rather well. every year it adds another page, the good years and the bad.

trees have memory and an immune system.

not necessarily memory in the way we experience it, but their bodies can retain traces of what has happened to them.

after drought, extreme heat or an attack, a plant may respond differently when the same stress returns. changes in its hormones, gene activity and physical structures can leave it better prepared for the next time.

the tree doesn’t remember the event as a story. it cannot tell you where it was when the drought happened or which beetle started the whole thing. but its body remembers that something happened, and it adjusts accordingly.

which, when you think about it, is not entirely unlike us.

and after a tree dies? we assume the story is over.

it isn’t.

sometimes, a fallen tree becomes what is known as a nurse log. which is exactly as lovely and heartwarming as it sounds.

as the trunk begins to decay, it holds water, releases nutrients, feeds fungi and becomes shelter for insects and tiny animals.

a nurse log becomes a nursery. an actual nursery run by a dead tree. moss spreads across it. seedlings take root in its softening wood. the old trunk becomes a place for the next generation to grow on the fertile ground an old tree gave its life for.

in a forest, death isn’t the opposite of life. death is how life continues…

and when you really think about it, maybe that’s why we’ve always been drawn to forests. maybe we don’t need to know about fungal networks or chemical signals to feel that something extraordinary is happening there.

maybe some small part of us has always known.

maybe that’s why children instinctively climb trees, why we walk through forests. why we sit beneath trees. why we build benches beneath old oaks instead of facing empty roads. maybe we’ve always recognised life when we see it.

so next time you walk past a tree, or wander through a forest, remember that almost everything extraordinary about it happens quietly, hidden from view.

and somehow, that makes it all the more magical.

the older i get, the more i find myself striving for a life that feels like it was supposed to. away from the noise of capitalism, sales, social media, cultural expectations and the relentless pressure of trying to keep up with the next best thing.

humans have always created. we built the wheel that made life infinitely easier, we created steam engines, discovered electricity, created the internet and now we’re creating AI. i think curiosity is one of our greatest gifts. we solve problems, we imagine things that don’t already exist and we bring them to life.

but somewhere along the way, we stopped creating lives that feel GOOD to live. lives that feel human. creations, inventions and craft got faster. we started focusing on efficiency, and speed instead of creativity and community. we got more and more disconnected from the natural world. we learned how to optimise everything except our humanity.

we’ve become so busy building the future that we’ve forgotten to stop and notice the miracle that is the present.

maybe we’ve been looking for magic in all the wrong places.

we talk about getting back to nature as if its something removed from us. as though it’s a destination. we put on our hiking boots and outdoors clothes to go and “spend time in nature”.

we were never separate..

we talk of ourselves as though we are separate from the forests, the plants, the animals and the oceans... but we’re not. we’re just another species that happened to get a little too big for our boots.

we’re made of the same materials as the trees, we breathe because oceans and forests do their job every single day. we still wake and settle with the sun. the sounds of birds singing and running water still calm our nervous systems in a way that is so deeply instinctual it feels like magic. birdsong tells some ancient part of us that the world is safe enough for the birds to be singing. running water means drinking, washing, fertile ground. replenishment. our bodies recognise these things before our minds even try to explain them. how is that not magic?!

we (myself included) spend so much of our time looking for magic and awe as if it exists only in fantasy books. we spend so much time escaping to fictional worlds because ours seems basic, ordinary. narnia, middle earth, hogwarts, pandora, atlantis.. maybe the irony is that we’ve just forgotten to notice the magic we’re already living in.

it exists all around us. we write these amazing stories about escaping to other worlds when ours gets too loud. maybe all we need to do is observe what we actually have?

so, every week, i’m going to pick one tiny part of our natural world and DELVE DEEP. i’m going to go down the rabbit hole. trees, mountains, oceans, birds, mushrooms… whatever catches my attention. i’m going to learn about it deeply, understand it, and share it with you.

i think this is probably as much for me as it is for anyone reading. i’m not coming to you as a scientist, or anyone with professional knowledge of the natural world (although this newfound awe makes me want to study everything i can).

i miss feeling connected to the natural world and my true curious self. i was literally the connoisseur of the art of noticing things until life got busy and felt like i was on a conveyer belt of unfinished tasks, shopping lists, schedules and the stress of whatever crisis the internet decided we had to stress over that day.

because when you find out that trees can warn one another of danger…

that whales can sing across oceans…

that honeybees dance their directions…

that some birds can literally see the earths magnetic field…

that rats can laugh…

something shifts. you realise that you were never standing outside nature looking in. you were part of nature all along. you ARE nature.

suddenly the things we convince ourselves are important begin to feel a little smaller.

so here’s to paying attention, and i do hope you’ll join me on this journey of discovery.

love you, magical wildlings x

🦋✨☁️🌈🌳🪵🍀🍃🌞🌸🔥🌊

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It all started with a mandoline

The finger guillotine. Never again. Granted, I wasn’t using it properly. It did come with a protective glove, but I didn't have time.

I was so happy to have found a dinner that EVERYONE loved that wasn’t bolognese or chilli con carne. If you’re a mum, you’ll know how much of a win that is.

Gochujang meatball rice bowls.

I had done all the heavy lifting, I had made enough for 2 days - winning. All that was left was the cucumber salad. Easy work. JUST A FUCKING CUCUMBER. An evil little man in my brain whispered, “why would you use a regular knife like it’s 1842, try this nifty little gadget all the kids are using on Tiktok,” and I listened.

To be clear, before we start I didn’t actually lose my thumb (lol can you imagine). I was very lucky to not have touched any nerves or any bone. But there was alot of blood… my poor husband fishing bits of thumb out of the little pile of perfectly sliced bloody cucumbers. In sickness and in health. We got into the car with the kids, there was fainting, screaming, throwing up and eventually the ambulance was called.

It’s been three weeks since the ordeal

Warning: A mildly graphic photo follows.

The last three weeks have been a thumb-centric conveyor belt of drama. We went from horrific dressing changes, talk of surgery, and finally settled on the most bizarrely anticlimactic solution.

I would wear a blue medical glove over my thumb, secured by some tape and wait for it to grow back. Like a lizard or a starfish.

The doctor said it would leak and smell as it grew back. As you can imagine, I oozed sex appeal. (And wound exudate).

Turns out, thumbs are pretty important.

Somewhere in all the drama, I realised something. My thumb had been quietly doing an extraordinary amount of work without ever asking for any credit. Your index finger is essential for pointing. Your middle finger is important for telling people to fuck off. Your ring finger gets all the jewellery. Your pinky is cute (and was probably invented solely for propping up your phone)

But nobody talks about your thumb.

Cooking became deeply ironic

I love to cook, but I wasn’t too mad about the enforced break until takeout started coming out of my ears. I got a break from the constant feeding over the Summer holidays, and I didn’t feel bad about it. My hands were tied (well, hand). After a week or so, it stopped feeling like a break and started feeling like another little piece of my independence I’d lost.

Then the kids started asking for their favourite meals.

I started making little reliable meals that required no cutting. The sort of meals where you dump everything in and just hope for the best. I bought pre-cut onions and garlic. No cucumbers though, fuck the cucumber.

I couldn’t even use a knife. If I were a disgruntled mandoline, that’s exactly what I’d want. The mandoline had won.

Eating became an extreme sport

Is this what baby-led weaning feels like for babies? No wonder they throw food, kick, scream and get upset. My left hand has never done this before. As a 32 year old woman, I can confirm there have been tears, spilt food and I’ve missed my mouth on multiple occasions.

Opening a can, buttering toast, trying to hold anything more than one utensil at a time (and badly at that). Eating one-handed sounds manageable until you find out the food has absolutely no intention of cooperating.

Turns out hair has no respect for injury

Tie your hair up without a thumb, I challenge you. Shampoo, conditioner, serums. Try to hold your hair dryer, try and work a claw clip. IMPOSSIBLE.

Daily essentials

I already felt like an absolute ogre but as it turns out, the world doesn’t stop when you accidentally circumcise your thumb. Getting dressed and brushing my teeth took twice as long. Fastening a bra became a two person job, much to my husband’s delight.

Couldn’t work the coffee machine, couldn’t write, couldn’t wear jeans, no jewellery. Nobody was allowed to wear any shoes with laces.

I never understood (and still don’t) why left-handed people need special scissors but I can confirm they absolutely do. Scissors favour the right hand. You have to almost trick the scissors into pretending the left hand is in fact, a right hand.

Then the algorithm found out

I’m generally quite proud of my algorithm. I really did build it brick by brick. I had trained it ruthlessly and social media became a positive corner of all things whimsy, beautiful writing, forests and people making pottery to classical music.

Somewhere around the 7 day mark, the algorithm found out I had lost the use of my thumb and absolutely fucking lost its mind. The algorithm had decided this was my new personality.

There were women doing their makeup with their feet, someone painting intricate watercolours one-handed. One that particularly hit home was a woman cutting an onion with one hand, while using her foot to stabilise it.

There’s an audience for everything. Oh, and every third video started with a mandolin.

I had no idea what I had until it was gone (for a bit)

I am very lucky. This wasn’t a serious injury, but it affected my life in the most profound way.

It did make me think..

How many other parts of our body are just quietly working in the background without us ever noticing? How many people are? How many ordinary things quietly hold our lives together?

Our ability to breathe, our sight, the hands we use to hold the people we love. In day-to-day life, the postman, the binmen, the farmers, teachers. Our parents, partners, our health, the ordinary things that quietly make a life.

Maybe that’s the tragedy of being human. We don’t notice the quiet heroes until one of them clocks out.

My thumb is growing back slowly. Still wrapped in that bright blue medical glove. It’s ugly; it absolutely stinks, and it has really cramped my style this summer - but every day it reminds me that there are countless things quietly holding my life together that have never once asked for applause or recognition.

I thought I was writing a love letter to my thumb. It turns out I was writing a thank you note. Never again will I take you for granted.

All this… over a cucumber.