A small note: This is a place for reflection rather than perfection so please don’t mind typos, spelling mistakes or places where my mind meanders without always being concise, they’re part of the mess that I’m creating here.

I’ve recently been thinking about camouflage and how it presents itself not just in the natural world, but in the plants and animals that can morph, shift, mimic and play with light, texture and scent in order to become invisible to predators, deceive prey, or blend seamlessly into their surroundings.

Many creatures can do this by shapeshifting, manipulating light with microscopic structures in their skin, scales, feathers, or shells so that they can become completely unseen in their environment. It seems that the creatures of the sea know how to do this well. In a recent post to be soft & strong like water, I wrote about spending a day snorkelling in the ocean, watching schools of fish with their silvery scales shimmer and refract light until they seemed to become the ocean itself as they shifted with movement of water.

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I love the ways animals interact with light; by reflecting, refracting, or interfering with its waves through pigments and layered lattices that change colour and appearance.

Another camouflage technique is countershading, animals that are darker on top and lighter underneath, helping them blend with the shades and depths of the ocean. Others, such as chameleons, adjust specialised skin cells to change colour and texture, becoming rock, coral, or sand. Grass frogs and some jellyfish species can become transparent, allowing light to pass through them, making them as invisible as the water itself.

Above the sea, on land, butterflies flutter with iridescent wings layered with microscopic crystal-like structures that interfere with light. Their wings catch, reflect, and scatter colour in a shifting spectral display that changes with the slightest movement. Other animals, such as zebra’s use stripes and patterns to confuse their predators in a technique called ‘dazzling’.

Whether animals are matching the colours and textures of their environment, breaking up their outlines, or becoming translucent, I believe we have much to learn from them. Both predators and prey often rely on the same technique: concealment, disguise, and adaptation.

Capoeira teachings

I was recently in a capoeira class (a Brazilian martial art and dance form) where we were learning how to transform a defence into an attack - a movement that appears to withdraw but can suddenly roll into a kick that catches an opponent off guard. I love how capoeira draws inspiration from animals in particular - to stalk like a cat, crouch like a frog, spring like a monkey, glide like a stingray, or strike with the precision of a scorpion.

It was in this class that the idea of shapeshifting, morphing, and constantly rolling from defence into attack that first inspired this reflection. There is something that intrigues me about the way we react when we feel threatened, whether by an individual or by a wider system, and how quickly we can become either prey or predator in disguise.

There have been many moments in my professional life when I have felt attacked and responded instinctively. In capoeira, there is a similar impulse to strike back immediately when threatened. But what if, instead, we withdrew like an octopus moving into the rocks?

What if we paused to feel the textures of our emotional landscape and responded in a way that was cool, calm, considered, and intelligent, rather than purely reactive?

I have also learned what it means to appear “normal” in situations where my true feelings and beliefs are at odds with my surroundings. In fact, I survived school a child by blending in in this very manner. I grew up in a muslim household during 9/11. I hid my background from everyone I knew because I wasn’t safe in the predominantly white, racist environment that I grew up in. These were perhaps the earliest, most prominent memories where the instinctual camouflage was a survival tactic.

Blending in

The use of this survival tactic didn’t end when I was a child, but has carried me through multiple scenarios where I’ve found myself as the outsider incognito. 

Just last year, I found myself sharing a lift with some of the richest mining CEO’s in the world. As someone whose actively written and spoken out about the harms of mining and our over-reliance on fossil fuels, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at this situation in which I had found myself in.

And in that moment, I wasn’t wearing the leopard spots of my activist self. Instead, I wore the translucent, invisible jelly-fish-grass-frog disguise of a babysitter, invited by a friend who worked in the mining industry to care for her three-year-old daughter during the conference. The job aligned well as I was already in Spain and about to go travelling and the extra cash was welcomed. Without paying too much attention to the details, I had no idea what kind of conference I was walking into.

The hotel was large and marble-floored, cool despite the heat outside, and scented faintly with lilies eventuated from the floral display in the middle of the lobby. While waiting for my friend to arrive, I sat surrounded by mainly white, suited businessmen meeting and greeting one another.

I overheard conversations drifting around me, business deals were already taking place, very frank conversations about this mine and that, and “Yes, we’ve secured the deal in Congo, gained more land access, and we’re doubling the size of the mine by 2027.”

I sat there in disbelief, feeling as though my entire realty had been flipped on its head. I felt like a chameleon adjusting its colours, blending into the background of the beige hotel lobby despite my shock.

How could they speak so casually about taking land in other parts of the world, as if it were theres to take? With no concern about the harms or consequences of their doings.

When my friend arrived, we exchanged hugs and hellos, she showed me how to care for her daughter. We went over toys, feeding times, and routines, and the handover was difficult; the child cried and cried. I eventually distracted her by walking with her outside in the grass and helping her climb the small trees in the garden.

One afternoon, after she woke from a nap, I couldn’t console her, so I ended up having lunch in the dimly lit conference restaurant so that her mum, whose job was to advice mining companies on how to be more environmentally efficient breastfed her daughter. I remember eating sea bream and fluffy potatoes while nearby delegates discussed finding an Indigenous speaker for their next conference.

“We don’t want someone who’s too activist,” one of them said. “We want someone who can talk about nature and their way of life.”

In other word we don’t want someone who will tell the truth. We want an Indigenous person who will make us look good, who will create the appearance of inclusivity, and who will help convince other Indigenous communities that mining is beneficial for them.

I could feel my blood heating in the dim room, the walls closing in around me. How could these polite, smiling, seemingly friendly people be disconnected from what this meant for real humans, real lives, real love, real blood, real flesh and bones and bonds to the land that would be inevitably broken.

I had another similar experience when I was invited to a fundraising dinner hosted by literal billionaires who had started a philanthropic foundation that had recently started a project in the Amazon.

I’m still not entirely sure why I went, but when the invite came out of the blue, perhaps it was sheer curiosity that had led me to accept the invitation. For some reason I’d been the chosen journalist they wanted in that room, and I wanted to know why.

At an elegant members’ club in Mayfair, South American-inspired dishes were served and whisked away almost as quickly as they appeared. Cocktails circulated around the room alongside heartfelt speeches about helping the communities involved in the project, embellished with images of shiny, bottoxed, white-toothed billionaires feeding little brown children.

An acclaimed photographer had been commissioned to exhibit black-and-white photographs of the community: children playing in the water, people taking part in rites of passage, relaxing in hammocks, hunting and fishing - the kinds of scenes outsiders have come to expect of Indigenous life. What was absent were the images of death, of children born with birth defects caused by mercury poisoning, and of communities living with the consequences of mining. Only the fetishised images were displayed.

At each place setting there was an elaborate gift box containing a bracelet woven by hand by members of the community. The ornate over-the-top packaging felt wrong matched with the delicate intricacy of the beadwork I held in my hand, and I felt both admiration and guilt. What had I done to deserve this? What had this weaver hoped for in return for this beautiful gift, that they most probably wouldn’t receive?

After that dinner, I woke in the night to vomit. I’m convinced that there was nothing wrong with the food, but it was a deep disgust that I needed to purge. I felt, however briefly, that I had become complicit by participating in the event. I didn’t say anything, or question anyone, I just blended in, and quietly slipped away towards the end.

Silence as survival

In both of these situations, I went into instinctive camouflage. There are so many more situations I cannot even list. Perhaps I could have been bolder and spoken out more directly, but in both contexts I was overwhelmed, and perplexed, by the inversion of my reality.

In a way, these experiences were useful, it reminded me how much of an echo chamber I had been living in and reminded me that environmentalists and activists often stay together, hang out with each other, agree with each other and pretty much think the same things. When we’re faced with those who think differently to us, we’ve forgotten how to open up a conversation with curiosity and care.

It’s not about being right, but about being comfortable and rooted enough in our truth that we can hold space to challenge without shutting down or creating further separation between our own reality and the ones in which we disagree with.

Sometimes I understand the instinct to survive. At other times, I wonder whether it’s time to step out of hiding, to become a little less tepid and a little bolder in what we stand for, and in how we show up for the causes we care about. Not from a place of being right, but opening up a conversation and standing our ground.

Other times, it’s about learning when to blend in, when to counter-shade, when to withdraw, or when to refract.

And then, sometimes, it’s about knowing when to reveal ourselves; to sting like a ray, to pounce like a wildcat, or to move like a school of a thousand fish, becoming so shimmering that we confuse or diffuse the intentions of our predators. To shine our light, dazzle with our stripes, become so firm in our truth and so strong in our collective defence that we’re too elusive to be caught or singled out. I think that’s what any collective movement is all about.

After all, collective defence is what can eventually become collective resistance. Right now, we’re swimming against powerful currents and cross-currents. Dangerous ideologies around race, gender, immigration, and nationalism are gaining quit solid ground. At the same time, we’re living through record-breaking temperatures, ecological collapse, economic hardship, and wars unfolding across the world. It can feel very bleak, but I’m tired of feeling so tepid, so hesitant and weak.

If there’s anything camouflage can teach us, it’s that it can be used both by the predator and by the prey. The question is not whether we hide, but why. Are we hiding to protect life, or to preserve power? And when the moment comes to step out of concealment, which will we choose to be?

Thanks for being here fellow curious soul! Feel free to subscribe for more offerings or buy me a coffee to continue supporting my work.

Creative prompts:

1. Journal on what parts of yourself have you learned to camouflage? What do you hide, soften, exaggerate, or reshape in order to belong, survive, or feel safe?

2. Journal on where in your life are you currently blending in, and where are you longing to be seen?

3. In a sketchbook, draw your own camouflage pattern. Include symbols, colours, plants, animals, memories, or places that represent the layers of yourself you show and hide…

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When I think about all the avenues of life, and how they reach out like streams or veins, sometimes separating and then joining together again, I think about how the textures and experiences of our lives can weave tapestries that only make sense when we take a step back, like an artist examining a canvas, and see why things happened the way they did. Somehow, it feels that things can only make sense by looking backwards, time understood like a boat person who faces what they are moving away from.

And yet there are moments in life when I feel I’ve become swept up by a flow that carries me exactly where I need to go, and other moments when I feel I’m losing control, finding myself in waters too deep, needing to cling to the solidity of the nearest rock, the nearest bank, the nearest plant that can anchor me, even if only for a little while.

It often feels that there’s such a fine line between letting go, between reaching out towards and grasping, to clinging on for dear life rather than the soft kind of searching, the type we do when walking down a shoreline looking for rocks and pebbles that we may carry for a little while before returning them back to the sea.

Or the kind of searching our fingers do on an instrument for a particular sort of note. It’s searching from a place of joy and abundance, knowing that whatever falls through our fingers was never meant to belong to us anyway, and there will always be another little rock, or shell, or piece of sea glass glimmering in the not-too-distant horizon. It’s not a hungry or lonely searching, but one done from a place of knowing that there is always enough for everyone.

Often as writers, artists, and those who have decided to live life outside of the margins of what was “expected” of us, it’s easy to become hungry. This hunger certainly drives us, and at times is necessary when we need to put food on the table, but it means we end up settling for whatever catch is available, accepting scraps or going without entirely because that act of creating becomes more important than the bounty itself.

Recently I’ve been thinking about and admiring how wild cats hunt, conserving their energy for the moment to strike with swift and decisive action. And their hunting is not to fill their own bellies, but to feed their family and perhaps other hungry scavengers. What if we could become this type of hunter? To be able to rest and play in between the catch.

To rest in between, to lie in the arms of a loved one, beneath the shade of a tree on a hot day, are moments that feed and nourish, and yet, for me, are so hard to enjoy without the bitter taste of guilt in the background of that sweet, soft surrender. And yet I feel it’s in these moments, when we are most at ease, that we can become porous to the guidance and messages of our own innate wisdom, or that come from somewhere outside of us, soaking up the magic of our existence like sponges.

These blissful states are what attune us to the thoughts and actions that are conducive to more bliss, more love, more totality, perhaps in the same way as water will always find more water, conjoining and merging, becoming a force so strong that it will not be reckoned with, it will not be compromised.

Moving into bliss

I was recently asked to recall in a hypnotherapy session a moment I felt completely joyful and at ease. I was taken back to a moment on the Caribbean coast of Colombia at the sweet age of 23, completely alone, lying beneath a palm tree, its luscious green leaves moving against a pristine blue sky, rattling a gentle leafy song. My body held by the soft sand as if I was a rock that belonged in that very spot, and I had nowhere to be, no one to see, nothing to do. In that moment, I was nothing and no one, I melted into everything.

When I eventually emerged from a deep, lucid nap, I went snorkelling and encountered a giant school of tiny fish. They darted from one direction to the other, shimmering in rays of sun that cut through the water in perfect unison. I’m not sure how long I followed them for, but I felt captivated watching their tiny, separate-yet-together-bodies move in such perfectly timed twitches and tugs, this way and that.

When being in most places immersed in nature, particularly by the sea, and spending time with the creatures that dwell in the currents of waters and river flows, I feel I am brought back to this sense of deep, turquoise, glistening sense of crystal clear clarity and calm. I love to open my eyes beneath the water and look up towards the sun dancing on the surface, or to jump into a wave and let it ripple across my body from head to toe, removing any unnecessary weight that I was not even aware that I was carrying until I emerge from the water, my body alive, light and tingling.

It’s in these encounters that my worries melt away, released back to the soil, dissolved into the salt and sand, and to become once again subtle enough to feel inner-well become once again nourished and revitalised. Being in the water cleanses, like being under a big waterfall that hits your head, each patter the water knocking on the door of your skull, a little “wake up, wake up, you’re alive, you’re here, you’re beating, you’re breathing, you’re being, you’re cleansed, you’re free”, tap tap tap, “just be be be.”

Rivers are a perfect example of this balance between remaining soft yet strong enough to carve out a direction that is unique and enduring, that is both holding and held by valleys and mountains and deep-seated ravines.

Some rivers will make it to the sea, others will merge with other rivers, some will go underground for a while, finding their flow in the dark depths of the underworlds, others will puddle and pool, becoming ecosystems and habitats for a while before evaporating to the sky, to then be rained back down onto thirsty plants or to return to the body of the ocean from which they were birthed. Becoming family again with creatures of the sea who are adapted to live, to love, to travel with the flow of the multitude of currents that haul vast amounts of water across the Earth’s surface.

Turtles, eels, jellyfish and plankton, barnacles and crabs, coconut palms, mangroves, sea grasses are some of the plants and creatures that move with these currents. Even entire floating ecosystems like the Sargassum ecosystem (a floating mass of life) move with these drifts. They also carry with them sand, sediment and seeds. A recent curiosity of mine has been seeds that travel by water, especially ones that travel through the sea.

I was amazed to learn that one of the plants that I had encountered in the Amazon, known as Monkey Ladder, or Entada gigas, produces seeds known as sea hearts that can travel down the Amazon River, into the ocean, sometimes for years, where they can root and grow on lands across the Caribbean. Many of these floaters and drifters have evolved to become buoyant enough to navigate ocean currents back to land. Hibiscus seeds are also sea travellers, something I wrote about in a recent Plant of the Week post.

Whilst in Colombia, I also remember paddling around a mangrove forest, witnessing an entire ecosystem of interlocked roots and webs entangled in one another, with just a few pathways that we could steer the boat, using our oars to gently push ourselves around the interlocking network of water-dwelling trees. Mangroves distribute their young into the water by dropping their propagated seeds into the water in structures known as propagules. I’m not sure at what point a seed decides to drop, and whether it’s at the mercy of gravity or when the parents feel ready to let their young go, surrendering their offspring to the mercy of the ocean, the salinity of the sea, to the ebbs and flows of the currents that will take them to where they need to go.

Remaining Buoyant

To be lost is to remain buoyant, to be soft like the water and strong enough to endure the storm, so that when we do arrive on the shores, naked and afraid, we will have perhaps already started sending roots down, becoming ready to merge with the land and other fellow drifters so that we can find the nutrients that can sustain us. One of the beautiful things about mangrove dispersal is that they often establish cohorts of drifters that will float and merge together, populating a new island together.

So I guess these seeds of the sea, and other creatures that utilise the water’s flow, can teach us about how we move with one another to ride out storms, cross currents and whirlpools that can move us into uncharted territory, that can stretch us to become broader than we had imagined. Flow is an act of survival; it’s a way of meeting mates, nutrients, of finding partners that sustain us far beyond the lands in which we were born.

Recently flow has looked like softening to what I cannot change, and darting like a fish, or a wildcat, when I feel a big “yes” “pounce” in my gut. It has meant drifting and encountering fellow drifters and moving towards our imagined futures together, roots entangled in roots, not in competition but in finding security in a shared sense of stability.

Flow has meant allowing myself time for my words to pour from my heart to the page, with no idea as to whose eyes they will land on, and if they do land at all, but writing anyway, breathing anyway, being anyway, because there are so many ways, so many swells and sways, and like a river, I have rooted and re-rooted, at times feel like I’ve completely evaporated but somehow remained whole in the form of a giant fluffy cloud, waiting to be received by the hungry earth, to by thirsty leaves that anticipate my becoming like arms big, open and embracing.

Or perhaps, back to the ocean where sweet and salty bind, finding time to reside in the tides and let time wash away all that I’ve been holding, knowing that it was never really mine, anyway.

Write in flow with me…

Imagine yourself as a celestial water-being, able to shape-shift at will. Maybe take a few breaths, close your eyes, and embody the feelings and sensations of becoming this being. When you’re ready, gather a pen and some paper, and consider the following:

• How do you move through the world?

• Where do you dwell - deep ocean trenches, sunlit shallows, or drifting liminal currents between realms?

• What kinds of allies do you form in this underwater universe - what creatures, forces, or intelligences do you connect with?

• Which currents do you choose to ride, and where do they carry you?

Sources & seasoning

• Discover more about artist, photographer and poet, Mohini Kaur, here.

• A Flowering Furnace Essay: Hibiscus (Plant of the Week). A hibiscus flower may only bloom briefly, yet its roots run deep through medicine, myth, tropical ecology and human migrational histories.

• Research on Mangrove seed dispersal: Biological Strategy, Seeds Float to the Best Conditions

“You have to wear a big bra with a kaftan,” my auntie-in-law tells me, holding up a bra almost three sizes too big for my humble, (not to be confused with mountains) breasts. We’re shopping because I didn’t realise that Algerian tradition implies that women should change to at least three different dresses to complement the various proceedings that take place throughout the night. I’d brought with me a vintage Moroccan green, orange kaftan hemmed with golden grey plaits that I’d found on Etsy and had fallen in love with. Could this not be enough? I asked. But since weddings are long affairs, going on until the early hours of the morning, I was told it’s kind of expected to change at least two or three times throughout the night.

“People here would die to wear dresses from England”, my auntie said, wondering why I hadn’t brought more. I couldn’t help but feel irritated. How was I meant to know? No one had told me and the last time I went to an Algerian wedding I was a child. I could feel the judgment raining down on me like a damp, dark cloud. In the end, I piggybacked onto a last-minute shopping spree with my auntie-in-law and my two cousins since they were doing a last-minute accessory run to accompany the many different dresses that they’d stuffed into their suitcases and brought over from France.

We squeezed into taxis, zipping around the busy streets of Oran, wading through crowds, moving from shop to shop. The dresses overwhelmingly vary in shape, colour, and design. Some are floral printed, others gem-studded, some more modern, clingy, revealing, and others longer, with layers of fabric flowing. It felt like a maze, wading through the various patterns and textures.

I think about my mum on her wedding day, how she said that the weight of the gold on her head had almost made her faint. She recalled how the hairdresser was sweating because her limp, straight hair refused to behave like coarse North African curls. I, on the other hand, get the full Algerian hair treatment - my curls blow-dried, straightened and then curled, again, into looser, crispier, burnt-smelling locks.

“Everything must look different for a wedding,” my cousin tells me. “Your hair, your makeup, it’s just the way it is.”

Beauty standards in Algeria lean toward the Western ideal; perhaps this is the residue of French colonial rule. My cousin often swaps her deep mahogany gaze for dull, doll-like blue contact lenses. My aunties dye, and blow-dry their bouncy black curls into blond, straight bobs and buns. Women are often categorised simply as beautiful or not beautiful, chaba, or michi chaba, a very binary line that leaves little space for beauty to exist outside of those very narrow margins, which I guess has always made me feel slightly insecure in a sense of being considered the “hippie” of the family with wild hair and always being slightly unkept.

When I was younger, on holiday, my dad would scold my sister and me for the clothes that my mum had packed for us for being “too western”, “too revealing”. This was a head fuck because when I was younger, I was never really thinking that my shoulders or legs could be seen as seductive; to me, they were just parts of the body, like hands, or feet, or noses. What was the big deal? He never made me wear a Hijab, though, although I loved the idea of wearing one when I was much younger, because it hid my hair, which I didn’t like at the time.

As I grew older, and my sister stopped coming to Algeria with us, my experience changed a lot. I was the only female member to join weddings and gatherings since my brother would go along with my dad. I sat alone and didn’t speak Arabic, no one spoke English so conversation beyond formalities was impossible. I was truly an outsider and so learned early how to listen without understanding words, to let sentences melt into sounds and sounds into tone, tone into touch of a hand or to a subtle body movement.

We’d also sit for hours sipping tea over conversation and eat from the same plate like a constellation of planets around a warm, cinnamon-spiced couscous sun. In these moments, I would feel a deep sense of wholeness that could not be found in any other corner of land or within my life in England. My great auntie proudly refers to me and introduces me to others as "My sister’s great granddaughter from England”. I would smile and say hello, and then run out of words to say after the usual merry go round of courtesies and kisses. I often got asked with surprised expression about why I couldn’t understand Arabic.

In an effort to help us learn, my dad sent my sister, my brother, and me to Arabic school on Saturday mornings. We hated it. The inner-city classroom was run by volunteer mums, overwhelmed by kids who also didn’t want to be there on a weekend. Attempts to quieten us usually ended in more laughter and chaos. So we never really learnt Arabic, or much French, but Algerian is very familiar to me; I can catch it instantly if I overhear someone speaking Algerian Arabic in public.

Between worlds

To be both inside and outside a culture is something people not born between worlds don’t understand. You carry the blood of your ancestral line, feel the bind of the family tree like vines or a river through your veins. Yet your bones are born to a different land. It’s like being a tree rooted in one soil, while your taproots search for another kind of water, digging deeper and deeper, never quite finding the sap of the motherland. You are both rooted and unrooted at the same time.

I remember having these intense feelings of longing as I was growing up, and I was never able to understand what I was longing for; it felt like a deep, unquenchable thirst. I later realised it was a kind of strange pull to leave this green foggy island that is England. I wonder if this the same experience so-called “alien” plants have when their parent plants are born onto lands far from their ancestral earth? Perhaps a bit like an outcast Prickly Pear cactus that I recently explored in a Plant of the Week post.

I recently learned that to belong is etymologically linked to an old Germanic root, “langen”, which literally means to be long, to stretch towards, to fit in. I love how, in this etymological sense, longing is not a fixed or permanent sense of being; it’s actually a reaching out, to fit in, the same way a tree root can extend and wind itself around other roots and rocks. Or vines that bind themselves by stretching, twisting and existing to that which they hold, and are held by.

After all, I think it’s no coincidence that both belonging and longing (as in to yearn for) derive from the same root word.

Over time, belonging and longing branched off in different directions. Whilst belonging became more about fitting in and longing became more about emotional yearning towards something, they both share this common ancestral thread of reaching towards.

I guess it’s this sense of reaching towards that led me to the South of Spain, where, on the shores of Cádiz, I dip my feet in the cool Atlantic Sea and peer beyond the distance to the twinkling lights of the Rif Mountains of Morocco. Not far from those mountains, tucked away out of sight, is Algeria, the same coastlines where I would spend summers playing on the beach, rolling in waves with my cousins, whilst my dad would stand nervously on the shore as we howled with laughter as we rode the waves back to shore, we called this game ‘taxis’. We’d make cakes from the sand and “save” washed-up jellyfish by collecting them with sticks and throwing them back into the sea.

In a strange, turn-around way, a decade later, I find myself gravitating towards the South of Spain like a moth towards the moon. Interestingly, the landscape is very much Algerian in the sense of the plants and the earth, dry and breaking apart in my hands as it falls through my fingers. When tracing North Africa and Spain on a map, you can see how the land once fit together like two pieces of one of those friendship necklaces with heart charms that can be slotted together. But in this instance, have drifted apart with time and tides. Now it’s only the birds and the seeds that they carry that tie the land together on the routes of their migration: swallows, bee-eaters, and subalpine warblers.

As someone who is still searching for “home,” I find comfort in animals that migrate, their belonging not bound by borders but in the long-distance journeys they take to nourish themselves and their future offspring throughout the winter months. It’s not a “bailout” but a necessary act of survival. I’ve never been in a position where I’ve been forced to move, which I guess makes me privileged. Privileged enough to hold a passport that some would risk their lives for, but not the papers that would allow me to live in Spain (just yet).

In some ways, I’ve been forced back to belonging to this island of England. And whilst I continue to gravitate towards ancestral lands, I have warmed to spring and the smells that have brought me back to moments in my childhood that I thought I’d forgotten. It’s in these very brief moments, of sticky sweet and nostalgia, caught between a fertile future and a fleeting past, both longing and belonging at the same time. And whilst my taproots have not reached that sap yet, and perhaps never will, I have enough water and nourishment to survive, to be without belonging, to long for without reaching too far beyond the lands of which my bones were born (for now).

I first encountered prickly pear in Algeria, in the hands of street vendors who set up along busy roads, selling freshly peeled fruits. They were neatly packaged for takeaway or eaten on the spot, their bright colours cutting through the dust and heat of the streets.

Just across from the Mediterranean Sea in Southern Spain, where the prickly pear also grows, the fruits and flowers stand like jewels against the muted desert earth. Tempting as they were, I couldn’t resist. While hiking, I tried to harvest a few using a scarf for protection - though it did little to shield me from the fine spines that lodged in my fingers. The sharp pain lingered, but it was ultimately worth it for the sweet, vivid mouthfuls that followed.

Plant of the Week is a collection of stories about plant encounters that have stayed with me through my travels. Each week offers a reflection, alongside invitations to deepen our relationship with the teachings these plants hold. On April 22nd, I will be holding an Earth Day Plant Circle - an open space to sit with, draw, and share the plants we feel drawn to.

Originating with the Aztecs in Mexico, the prickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica) is the most widely cultivated cactus pear species across the region. The plant was considered sacred, used in medicine, dye production, and as a nourishing food source. According to legend, it also played a role in the founding of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City). It is said that the wandering Aztec people witnessed an eagle perched on an Opuntia cactus, devouring a snake - a sign from the sun and war deity Huitzilopochtli that they had found their new home.

This legend is preserved in codices and remains symbolised in the Mexican coat of arms. From Mexico, prickly pear has travelled far beyond its native range, spreading across the southern United States and into the Mediterranean.

In Europe, several Opuntia species were introduced between the late 15th and early 16th centuries by Spanish colonisers for fruit production, livestock forage, fencing, ornamental use, and the cultivation of a red dye derived from the cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus). Today, Opuntia is particularly widespread in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, especially along coastal and island ecosystems.

The cactus also became entangled in colonial economies through the cochineal insect, a tiny organism that grows on the cactus. This tiny, white insect produces a deep crimson dye that became highly valued and is still associated with Spanish cultural aesthetics today. I recently explored cochineal dye more specifically in my recent post, The Alchemy of Colour.

Now, across parts of Andalusia, the cactus, no longer widely used for its former economic purposes, is often left unmanaged. Meanwhile, the cochineal insect, once carefully cultivated, has spread freely, feeding on the cactus and leaving behind clumps of weakened, dying plants. With prickly pear now classified as invasive across much of the Mediterranean, little effort is made to control this decline.

And yet, even in this shifting context, the cactus continues to play a role. Its fruits provide nourishment for birds and mammals, particularly during dry seasons. Its dense growth offers shelter and nesting spaces for insects and birds, even as it outcompetes other plant species. In degraded landscapes, its nectar becomes an important resource for pollinators, offering a bridge where few other flowering plants survive.

The seeds of the prickly pear are encased in a hard, durable shell, designed to withstand drought. Anyone who has eaten the fruit will recognise how resistant they are, nearly impossible to break between the teeth. Instead, they are meant to pass through the body.

As seeds move through an animal’s digestive system, their outer coating softens. They are then returned to the earth, dispersed according to the movement of the animal -locally by grazing animals such as goats, or across much greater distances by birds. Humans, too, are part of this dispersal network, carrying a cactus native to the Americas across continents.

While prickly pear is often labelled “invasive” or “alien” in the Mediterranean, due to its tendency to form dense thickets that reduce plant diversity, its meaning is not fixed. In places such as Palestine, it is known as sabr, an Arabic word meaning “patience.” There, it is honoured as a symbol of resilience and is often used to mark the boundaries of ancestral lands.

Prickly pear is a survivor, a plant that exists where it has not always belonged. Sweet and prickly, it lives along margins and borders, offering shade, nectar, water, and sustenance in environments where such resources are scarce. It reminds us that a plant may be considered foreign in origin, yet still become woven into the fabric of an ecosystem, blurring the lines between sacred and invasive, belonging, and not belonging.

Join me…

To mark the closing of this Plants of the Week cycle, I’ll be holding an Earth Day Plant Circle on the 22nd of April, in collaboration with Eternal Forest, which offers a creative space to gather with fellow plant lovers; to write, sketch, reflect, and meditate in communion with the plant world.

Join us as we celebrate Earth Day in reciprocity with our plant and tree allies!

Register

Sources & Futher Reading…

• Impacts of the invasive alien prickly pear, Opuntia stricta (Haw.) Haw., on natural communities of Mediterranean insular habitats

• Yasmin Dahnoun: The Alchemy of Colour

• Orion Magazine: A Prickly Pear History Lesson

• Kew Garden: Prickly pear

Hibiscus is a flower that grows across the tropics and manifests in many different shades, shapes and forms. Its flowers bloom from blood-red to peachy-orange hues, usually for just a matter of days. Some hibiscus grow dense and shrubby, while others hang loose from plants that lean into coastlines and riverbanks, their seeds carried by water, wind, and human hands - drifting between lands and taking root in sometimes very distant places from their parent plants.

Plant of the Week is a monthly series of reflections and encounters with plants that explores these living, breathing beings through the lens of ecology, mythology, folklore, and medicine. If you’d like to delve a little deeper, our live Earth Day Plant Circle will take place on April 22nd; more details are available here.

While hibiscus is thought to have originated across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, it can be found across the tropics. For this reason, hibiscus has taken on many different shapes, names and forms. In the Caribbean, where it grows in abundance and has multiple uses in food and medicine, it’s known as sorrel.

In North Africa and other Arabic-speaking countries, it’s called karkadé (كرکديه). In some countries, such as Sudan, this refers to both the plant and the infusions, served either hot or cold, sometimes with a tint of mint, citrus or rosewater. Drank daily as a soothing, healing and cooling beverage, hibiscus in Sudan is a culturally emblematic plant and national drink. I love how Marwah Mohamed writes on Afrika media platform:

“Across Sudan – from the vast and quiet fields of Kordofan and Darfur to the bustling Khartoum tea houses – karkade weaves through the fabric of everyday life. This flower blooms in the rain-fed soils of western Sudan, where it is often planted with sesame and sorghum, adding diversity to a landscape that has long relied on its resilience.”

Sipping on a cup of warm, honey-sweetened, yet tarty hibiscus infusion is both invigorating and calming at the same time. Hibiscus is also antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory. Multiple clinical studies show hibiscus tea can lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure in people with mild hypertension. The effect is believed to be due to anthocyanins and other flavonoids that help relax blood vessels.

When considering the medical benefits of Hibiscus, it’s no wonder that this plant ally has travelled around the world with us, where across continents, petals are often steeped in teas, medicines, jams, and cocktails.

Botanically speaking, hibiscus are a type of mallow, shared with marsh mallows and other types of Malvaceae flowers. In the deeper web of the plant’s ecology, hibiscus is both a generalist plant and a very generous one, too. Unlike, say, fig and wasp relationships, or other pollinator flowers that have evolved with specific insects, hibiscus shares its sweet nectar with a variety of pollinators.

Beneath the surface of the soil, hibiscus is in constant conversation with the fungal world; its roots are connected with mycorrhizal networks that extend its reach into the soil, exchanging sugars for minerals and water. Through these unseen alliances, the plant becomes more resilient and nourished, not only by what it can gather alone, but by what is shared. In this way, hibiscus is both adaptive and collaborative, able to thrive across climates and conditions, always in dialogue with the life around and beneath it.

Other relatives of the hibiscus include a surprising variety of plants, such as cotton (Gossypium) and okra (Abelmoschus esculentus). Like many of its relatives, hibiscus’ history is entangled with deeper, darker currents of the past. This plant would have been cultivated, harvested, and carried across the world through colonial expansion. Whether intentionally or simply due to its proximity to these highly valued crops, hibiscus has become a traveller, or perhaps a hitchhiker, across time and trade routes.

Certain species, such as Hibiscus sabdariffa, spread to the Caribbean and Americas via African diaspora and colonial trade, while other species were distributed globally as ornamentals. Although I haven’t found any clear evidence about this, some research suggests that hibiscus was originally brought to America by slaves who carried the seeds with them across lands.

According to social anthropologist, Andrés Triana Solórzan;

“Both the [hibiscus] flower and the people who have long cared for it found their way to the Caribbean as a result of transatlantic flows that accompanied European imperial expansion. Upon their arrival at the Antilles, hibiscus and its original cultivators found ways to make a home in the unfamiliar landscape.”

Under colonial systems of classification and trade, however, knowledge that accompanied the plant was often marginalised or dismissed. European botanical tradition frequently prioritised taxonomy, collection, and aesthetic display over lived, embodied plant knowledge. In this process, hibiscus, like many other plants, was reduced to its beauty, while its medicinal and cultural significance was rendered secondary or invisible.

Kaleidoscopic symbolism

In India, the vivid blood-red hibiscus is traditionally offered to the goddess Kali, whose fierce, untamed energy moves between destruction and creation. The flower’s saturated red, so often likened to blood, is associated with life force, death, and rebirth. Offered over chants and incense in ceremonies, in India, hibiscus ties together physical and invisible worlds.

In the Caribbean, where hibiscus (often as sorrel) is brewed into deep crimson drinks shared at gatherings and seasonal celebrations, it becomes a plant of community. In North and East Africa, as karkadé, it is both everyday and ceremonial: a drink of cooling, healing, and hospitality, but also one that carries stories of land, resilience, and inheritance.

In Hawaiʻi, a variety of species grow across the islands, including native varieties such as the endangered yellow hibiscus (maʻo hau hele), which is also the state flower. From what I can gather online, hibiscus is often worn behind the ear as a quiet signal of relationship status and personal expression. It’s also used in gathering to celebrate joy, community and respect.

Across these contexts, hibiscus is never only ornamental. It is lived with, drunk, worn and offered. It’s kaleidoscopic in the sense that, depending on where it grows, its uses and meanings shift, forming a layered symbolic ecology that goes beyond any single narrative. Adaptive, generous, resilient, and steeped in rituals and ceremonies, hibiscus is forever, opening, closing in all its colours, shapes and forms, rooting, re-rooting whilst becoming continually re-imagined depending on the land in which it has landed.

Join me…

To mark the closing of this Plants of the Week cycle, I’ll be holding an Earth Day Plant Circle on the 22nd of April, in collaboration with Eternal Forest, which offers a creative space to gather with fellow plant lovers; to write, sketch, reflect, and meditate in communion with the plant world.

Join us as we celebrate Earth Day in reciprocity with our plant and tree allies!

Register

Sources & further reading

• Karkade & the Living Story of Sudan

• Plant of the Month: Hibiscus

• The Radiant Red Hibiscus: Goddess Kali’s Beloved Flower

• A Comprehensive Review of the Antimicrobial Effects of Hibiscus Species

• Hibiscus: An overview

• Heavenly Hibiscus: Long-Lived, Easy-Care Beauties

• Say Aloha to Hawaii’s State Flower: The Yellow Hibiscus
  

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I’d like to kick off plant of the week with this very interesting, paradoxical plant - toxic, medicinal and magical - Brugmansia suaveolens. Known as Toé in Peru, Floripondio in Spanish, or more poetically referred to as Angel’s Trumpet. Brugmansia is closely related to Datura, which is commonly known as the Devil’s Trumpet.

Plant of the Week is a monthly series of reflections and encounters with plants that explores these living, breathing beings through the lens of ecology, mythology, folklore, and medicine. If you’d like to delve a little deeper, our live Earth Day Plant Circle will take place on the 22nd of April; more details here.

Whilst visiting Peru last year, I came across Toé in both the Amazon and in the Andes, where it is commonly planted in parks and outside houses as an ornamental plant. Some are domesticated, and others are ‘escapees’ that have broken out of the borders of domestication and grow in the wild.

All parts of the plant are poisonous, and eating as few as ten leaves can result in death. And yet, Toé is used as a ‘last resort’ medicine in many Shamanic traditions within the region. Brugmansia is also used within modern pharmaceuticals for drugs that treat a range of conditions, from asthma, depression and nausea.

These flowers point downwards, and their smell is often more powerful at dusk. Perhaps this is partly the reason their entity is associated with darkness, witchcraft, and the underworld despite the European given name of ‘Angel’s Trumpet’.

Perhaps this name was given because, despite the death-inducing properties, the smell of these flowers is alluring and divine. When walking past a Toé flower, I cannot help but stick my entire face into this trumpet-like temptation, take a deep breath in, and become momentarily transported into a sensation of sweet, evening bliss.

Despite its descriptive beauty, with flowers that bloom in shades of sunset orange, soft purples, pastel pinks and tones of creamy white, Toé is described as an incredibly strong spirit that is not to be messed with. Whilst I’ve met some shamans who work with Toé in very small and considered amounts, most seem to stay away. I’m told that whilst some plants can be used for healing, others can be used for black magic, and Toé is certainly one of those plants that would be considered, when not used with the correct intentions, as very harmful.

A plant guide described it to me like this: “Much like humans, each plant is a spirit, and this spirit can be both good and bad at the same time”. Unlike plants such as ayahuasca, Brugmansia does not produce a lucid visionary state; instead, it can produce a true delirium where people cannot distinguish dream from waking life, which can also result in memory loss. Hence why Toé is historically associated with witchcraft, control, or spiritual domination.

And yet from an ecological perspective, Toé’s features are common to that which has evolved alongside nocturnal pollinators. Species of Brugmansia produce large, pendulous, tubular flowers that release a strong fragrance in the evening, a trait associated with moth pollination. These floral structures are thought to guide long-proboscis (long-nosed) insects toward nectar. In some ecological contexts, additional pollinators, including bats and hummingbirds, are also pollination partners.

These selective pressures have produced flowers that are both highly specialised and ecologically communicative, essentially “speaking” the sensory language of their nocturnal mammals and insects.

In essence, Toé is a flower that hangs between worlds: culture, ecology, folklore and medicine. This plant is a provider of night messages, evolved over millennia to communicate with moths, bats, and other nocturnal pollinators.

But also to humans, to those who have become lost in the dark, and in their desperation, have sought her medicine. It reminds us that even a single plant can hold complex ecological, cultural, and spiritual narratives, linking the threads of the visible and invisible worlds.

In observing Toé, we witness not only the beauty of evolutionary ingenuity but also how plants can exist between worlds: offering nectar, messages, medicine, and poison all at once. For me, one of the most beautiful aspects of the living world is that nothing exists as purely good or bad. In this case, the paradox is held within a single hanging flower, blooming its deadly sweetness in the breath of night.

Join me…

To mark the final round of this plant series, I’ll be hosting an online gathering in collaboration with Eternal Forest to celebrate Earth Day on April 22nd. If you’d like to learn more, you can find out here.

Journaling with Toé (Angel’s Trumpet)

• When was the last time you sat with your shadows, or felt safe enough to feel the depth of your true emotional world?

• What did you find there? What, if anything, was offered in return for your darkness?

• What has revealed itself to you through sadness, grief, loss, or despair?

• What in your life has become murky or ungrounded, left to fester in the underworld?

• What have you avoided turning towards? What is waiting to be unearthed, named, or brought into the light?

• Have you ever been caught in an illusion? What rituals have helped bring clarity, re-orientation or guidance?

Sources & Further Reading

• Coevolution Between Food-Rewarding Flowers and Their Pollinators

• Pollination syndrome and nectar protection in Brugmansia suaveolens (Solanaceae), May 2011

• Intoxication by angel’s trumpet: case report and literature review

• What You Need to Know About the Effects of Angel’s Trumpet Poisoning

• Toé (Brugmansia suaveolens): The Path of Day and Night

Both my grandmother and great-grandmother had facial markings, this was part of Algeria’s Amazigh cultural heritage. I am lucky enough to have a photograph of my great-grandmother (pictured below). I have often studied the tattoos on her face through this image, trying to decipher their meaning. I have read that different symbols marked rites of passage - marriage, puberty, maturity, or were worn for beauty and protection.

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Over time these markings became less common. During the 132 years of French colonial rule in Algeria (1830 -1962) Indigenous cultural expressions were frequently marginalised or reframed through colonial and religious lenses. In the 20th century, reformist Islamic movements gained influence and increasingly condemned facial tattooing as "un-Islamic”.

What had once signified identity, protection and womanhood slowly became something to hide or to even feel ashamed of.

I’m told stories about how my grandmother would try and bleach her tattoos away, but the soft edges remained on forehead and chin until the day she died. I always found these markings to be beautiful, and couldn’t imagine the pain of being marked with a tradition that became ostracised and even criminalised, how that would have felt for her. And yet I think the very act of criminalising anything means that it’s powerful.

Facial tattoos were only one form of adornment. Across Amazigh and many other cultures, the body was also decorated with materials gathered from the living world: cowries, seeds, shells and stones. Across cultures, especially colonised cultures, adornment is symbolic, it is language; marking identity, power and also offering spiritual and protective significance.

Cowries, seeds, shells and stones were often believed to carry protective, fertility-enhancing properties, tying the wearer to cosmological, ecological and ancestral networks.

The very act of adornment is an expression of power and authority. Amazigh jewellery incorporates glass beads, Mediterranean coral, and Saharan amber - materials that travelled across continents before becoming intimate, bodily objects. Intricate beadwork traditions are also central to Yoruba and Fulani communities in West Africa and to Maasai communities in East Africa, each with their own distinct techniques and meanings.

Seeds, beads, and shells have moved across empires and trade routes for centuries, gathered by hand along shorelines, riverbeds, and forests, then woven, braided, or threaded into hair and clothing. The making itself is often ritualised. Anyone who has become absorbed in weaving or braiding will recognise the slow, peaceful rhythm of handwork, as if ragged thoughts are gradually smoothed, patterned, and plaited into place.

Traditional adornment was often made from materials gathered from landscapes - shells from shorelines, seeds from forests, coral from trade routes. Today, however, much of what we consider valuable jewellery comes from gold extracted from deep within the earth. It is dug, often illegally, from communities that live far away from us. This is something I witnessed firsthand while visiting the Madre de Dios River in Peru last year.

I found myself wondering: how did we come to a tradition where love is symbolised by a gold ring on the finger, a material often extracted through mining that leaves mercury and other poisons in the water?

To think that the biggest use of gold is used for jewellery and decorative pieces (accounting for roughly 50 per cent of total global consumption) is literally killing people, and poisoning some of the most alive and abundant places on Earth for a metal that is worn as a symbol of power and prestige.

I love how Peruvian journalist Joseph Zárate, in his book, Guerras del interior, essentially asks: Is gold more important than water?

Sometimes it feels that status of prestige, as well as modern beauty trends have fallen into the pitfalls of complete out-of-control vanity, where one will want to look good no matter the cost, not on oneself let alone others.

When talking about power in the context of a more rooted, indigenous, form of adornment, I’m talking about what is raw, real, original: Intricately woven stories and histories worn like armour against colonialism, capitalism and commodification. It’s not tied to wealth but rather; craft, skill, kinship to one another and to the earth.

Adornment as a reciprocal act…

Yet not all adornment follows this extractive path. Seeds themselves have travelled the world as beads and jewellery for centuries. I find it fascinating how our love of beauty, rather than be an extractive pursuit for, say gold, can also become an inadvertent act of dispersing seeds - a way of becoming active participants in ecosystems rather than simply taking. Seeds such as rosary pea (Abrus precatorius) and Job’s tears (Coix lacryma-jobi) have long been used as beads for jewellery, travelling across oceans and trade roots to be gifted and exchanged. I was recently gifted a beautiful pair of earrings which feature Job’s tear’s beads (the white beads at the bottom) that came from Peru (Shout out majambo!).

Perhaps one of the most notable forms of seeds, traveling across continents in mass because of the value of their beauty, is Vegetable ivory, or tagua, which comes from the hard seeds of South American palms. Its smooth, ivory coloured seeds were carved into beads, buttons, and jewellery, prized in Europe and North America as a sustainable alternative to elephant ivory. So valued for its beauty and durability, tagua became Ecuador’s most exported product in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Strung, gifted, and traded, these seeds travelled in mass out of the forest.

The botany of beauty…

Whilst I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole of how the mass exportation of tagua seeds may have represented an over-commodification of these forest treasures, the fact that they were able to travel in bulk across continents, much like the Rosary Pea and Job’s tears - even if they could not easily grow outside tropical forests - reminds me of what Michael Pollan writes about in his book The Botany of Desire. Pollan explores how plants evolve to appeal to human desires; for sweetness, beauty, intoxication or control. And in doing so, humans become active agents of their dispersal.

If plants travel with us because they capture our attention, then beauty itself becomes part of that exchange between human desire and the living world. But I think beauty, in this sense, is not about confinement or adherence to a particular standard, but about raw expression; an act of curiosity, creativity and wonder. There is something powerful in that.

When I think about my grandma, I wish I could tell her she was beautiful with her face tattoos. And when I think about myself, the way I move through the world and express who I am, I sometimes wish I could be a little bolder in how I adorn myself. Choosing colours and tones that match my moods, or finding, even making, jewellery that feels meaningful to me - pieces that carry stories and memories, or small fragments of the ecologies that have carried me, and that I would like, in return, to carry with me.

Yasmin, The Flowering Furnace x

For those who loved “it’s earth, it’s mud, it’s love”… I’m so happy to be writing this piece, which feels like an extension of my love for using what can be found and foraged where we are, using colours that belong to the land, and creating art that feels like a residue of that love.

Last year, I completed my first art residency with Sachaqa Centro De Ar…

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Whilst sitting by the banks of the Cumbaza River in the northern Amazon of Peru last year, I noticed a flutter of colour in the distance. As I moved closer, feet bare in the warm sand, I realised that this was an interspecies gathering of butterflies, a behaviour that I later learnt is known as ‘puddling’. Clusters of butterflies and day-flying moths gather together to share minerals and moisture from the Cubaza banks.

Peru is home to more than 17,000 species of butterflies, the highest recorded number in the world, and here they were, congregating in abundance. I lay down beside them and rested on the ground; my friend, who was with me, was able to capture this magical moment on camera. Some were so relaxed that I could gently place them on the palm of my hand, or even on my nose. They would sit and lick the salt from my skin, flutter briefly, and then return to their puddling as if nothing had happened, joyful and at ease.

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Among them were Pamela’s Sister butterflies, white with broad black diagonal bands (as pictured below); Phoebis philea, pale greenish-yellow and luminous in the light; and the Green Urania, a migratory day‑flying moth marked by velvety black wings streaked with iridescent turquoise.

While a few butterfly species can live up to nine months or even a year, the average lifespan for most butterflies is only two to four weeks. As I lay, witnessing them gather, their butterfly souls fluttering in tandem within the space and time alignment of their short, flickering, beautiful existence, I wondered why they gather in such an intentional, multi-species way, whether, in much the same way as humans, butterflies simply find joy and peace in gathering. Something so alive that science cannot confine it within the limited scope of its binaries.

The magic science can’t explain…

In an attempt to learn more deeply about this behaviour through the lens of science, I stumbled across a couple of inconclusive studies. Of course, there is the sharing of minerals, the safety in numbers, but this is largely a male activity that remains a bit of a phenomenon. Even one of the most comprehensive studies that I found on my search couldn’t quite summarise any one particular reason that butterflies do this in the way that they do. Hypotheses range from nutrient acquisition to mating advantages or courtship “training,” yet the reasons these butterflies choose particular sites, and why they gather together in this interspecies way, remain somewhat of a mystery.

The most recent study from 2025, carried out by scientists from Fairleigh Dickinson University in the US, concludes: “The exact benefits of this predominantly male behaviour remain unclear. Furthermore, not all butterfly species exhibit puddling behaviour, suggesting that evolutionary and life‑history traits might underlie this taxonomic variation. Similarly, little is known about how seasonal and habitat variations affect puddling behaviour. Lastly, while some butterflies appear more likely to puddle in the presence of other puddling butterflies, the mechanisms by which they initially detect a suitable puddling source are still unknown.”

With this in mind, I wonder how science often tries to research these types of behaviour through the pure, mechanical, transactional approaches based on the narrative that animals act in these ways for the sheer purposes of production and survival. But what if there was something more magical than this, something undefinable, unquantifiable? What if these butterflies enjoy gathering in the same way humans enjoy gathering? What if witnessing eachother in the splendour of their irredent brilliance brings them joy, not just joy for sharing minerals, but joy of being alive, in this momentary act of kinship.

Migration over lifetimes

I often think of how Sophie Strand describes the monarch butterfly migration as something no single butterfly ever completes. She writes that an individual monarch will never arrive; it dies and “passes the baton” to the next generation. The journey continues through three to five generations, with one “suprageneration” that lives just long enough to complete the southern sprint. Migration, in this sense, is not bound by the movement of a single individual, but waves of lifecycles, carried by the currents of wind, across time and continents.

The Methuselah generation

The generation that completes the final leg of the migration is known as the Methuselah generation, a special, long-lived fourth generation born in late summer. This generation undertakes the multi-generational journey to overwintering sites in Mexico and California, living for 7–9 months instead of the usual 2–6 weeks, and initiating the next cycle in spring.

The Uranian day‑flying moth that I mentioned earlier (pictured below) also migrates across vast distances and feeds on toxic plants mainly from the genus Omphalea (spurge family). They sequester these toxins, which makes both larvae and adults distasteful to predators. Their adult lives typically last only a few weeks to a month, during which they must reproduce and continue the journey. It can take four to six generations, spanning over several years, to complete their full migratory cycle.

As these toxic host plants are consumed in one area (as captured in the video below), subsequent generations are compelled to move on in search of fresh, ungrazed growth elsewhere. Butterflies, dreaming of the lives of their future generations, don’t sit in one place but move and locate the best soils for their offspring, much like many of us whose parents have immigrated, continuing our lifecycles on the back of their own journeys across continents. Migration is, well and truly, an earth right.

Emergent intelligence

It is still a mystery how butterflies, in all their delicate simplicity, navigate their way across oceans to entirely different continents. Guided by their circadian clock, the arc of the sun, and the pull of the Earth’s magnetic field, they follow paths no single butterfly has ever known with perfect precision. Some call this a pure expression of emergent intelligence. This is when a set of very simple rules, e.g. follow the arc of the sun, can create very intricate patterns. We trace these patterns as best we can, assembling fragments of understanding, yet they stretch across the animal kingdom in ways that we are yet to understand. Ant colonies that discover perfect paths without maps, in flocks of birds that move as one.

I find myself returning to the act of puddling, the butterflies that first drew me into this deep, thought-filled research journey, the unexplainable joy of gathering and moving in tandem. When was the last time I truly celebrated, or felt celebrated? Do we not all crave to be witnessed, to have our shared survival acknowledged on the inexplicable planes of our existence? To revel in the minerals and the mysteries, as I once did on the banks of the Cumbaza, in total awe and admiration for these butterflies, whose lives have surely ended by now, but live on in the rhythm of their shared survival through future generations.

Sources & further readings

• Microchimerism & Migration, by Sophie Strand

• Puddling in butterflies: current knowledge and new directions

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Thank you for being here. If this post resonated, do leave a comment, I love to connect with readers <3

I’ve recently been contemplating hellebores and certain varieties of camellias that bloom in the dead of winter. These flowers aren’t actually roses, though they bear rose-like faces. True roses wait for spring, blooming when blooming is expected, whilst hellebores do not.

Every part of the hellebore is poisonous to humans and animals, a quite defene that carries it through the winter months of its bloom. I’m drawn to this plant because it’s a rebel rose - it’s moody, unpredictable, deadly, tender and untouchable all at once.

So inspired by the winter rose, I’ve written a poem I’d love to share, offered in celebration of the solstice, and in gratitude for reaching twenty subscribers this year. This feels like a small gift, especially for those who’ve joined The Flowering Furnace, helping me grow and turn my own dreams into existence….

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Winter rose

Soft, scentless white rose opening, 
in the dead of night, out of sight, 
Only the stars can see its heartbeat, 
leaping from the land,
rare as a white dear, 
a long-eared owl, 
or a mountain hare, 
breathing its evergreen dreams into being, 
into belonging in the unbelongable,
adorned with spider webs, and icy dew drop pearls 
protected with its poison, 
armed with claws, clasped firmly into existence
roots resistant, 
stood deep in the depths 
of damp and darkness,
surviving, 
and thriving, 
in the silent solitude of solstice. 

With Christmas, winter, and the lack of sunlight in general for those in the northern hemisphere, it can sometimes take its toll. I hope this comes as a reminder, you, too, are allowed to take space. You are allowed to bloom quietly, to work silently on your craft, to open in your own time, with a gentleness that only silence and solitude can offer.

While this season often centres on togetherness with friends and loved ones, let this be permission to turn inward. To sit with your roots. To rest in the darkness, to surrender or seed as you truly please.

Thank you for being here, feel free to like, share subscribe. This really helps the flowering furnace to truly flourish <3

Bodies of Water // 

Bodies of water

Born on salty shores,

Oceans and ovaries,

Oysters and embryos,

Serpentine souls

Bones of stone and coral

Shades of jade and jasper,

Seal skin and ocean kin,

Stirring from within,

The    turning

      Tides

Of time

            Tumbling

Back and forth,

Air flowing from our lungs,

Flowering seaweed,

A turtle hatching, an opal lagoon,

Sun echoing on the ocean floor,

Bodies of water,

Seashells and fish eggs,

Salt tears and watery words

Running from the page,

Urchin love,

Marine dreams,

Tender turquoise hear

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I’m currently in Urubamba, Peru, where the earth, soft, alive, and rich with clay, has shaped a culture of building with adobe - a practice that remains very much alive today in the Sacred Valley. The process of creating with earth is squelchy, alive, sensual, and deeply creative. There are rules, of course - and quite literally, structures - but beyond those must-haves and must-dos, your imagined home can be shaped and sculpted by your own hands (and feet!), to the delights of your imagination.

The subject of home feels especially alive for me right now. As I approach my 30s, it’s become clear that affording a mortgage in the UK is impossible. I’m also tired of handing over large chunks of paycheque to landlords just to rent a room - to sit in the place I’m paying for and work endlessly to keep the roof above my head - only to shiver through winter because of the crazy gas prices. I have felt deeply in my system for many years that something big needs to shift. I want to live and not simply survive.

breaking cycles

This vicious cycle came to an end in May, when I decided to leave London with a one-way ticket to Spain, and later to Peru. I found myself at a permaculture school called Refugio T’ikabamba in Urubamba, in Peru’s Sacred Valley as a volunteer.

Rather than spending my mornings caffeine-gripped and hunched over my laptop, I found myself in the garden, planting seeds, listening to the hum of bees and birdsong, and the river flowing softly in the distance. I prepared soil beds for vegetables, removing weeds and stones, tilling and aerating the rich valley earth. As I worked, I found myself contemplating the gardens of my own life - the parts that had been neglected, disconnected, or abandoned; the parts still rich and alive; and the ones that felt stuck, congealed, in need of loosening.

After years of feeling like an air plant, surviving on minimal resources, suspended and unrooted, it feels like time to lay some roots, to stabilise, to nourish.

So, it felt serendipitous that during my stay, a bio-construction course was taking place. I was hesitant to join at first; I have neither the money to build a home nor the land to do it on. But, being the curious person that I am, I couldn’t resist. I also believe that sometimes, there’s power in aligning yourself with what you desire, even when your bank account is saying “uhhh, I don’t think so” loool.

Maybe another niggly secret part of my resistance came from that deeply ingrained idea that hay, earth, sticks, and other natural materials are “weak,” or unsuitable for real, sturdy homes. I think of the children’s fairy tale, The Three Little Pigs, where the wolf easily blows down the first two pigs’ houses made from straw and sticks. It’s the final pig - the one who builds with bricks, whose home stands strong and proud, crowned with a fine chimney.

During the course, led by teacher and architect Javier Bonifaz, my pre-constructions were firmly broken down into the grit. I’m slowly reconstructing my ideas of home, of building and of living, in ways that do not depend on the theft of water, land, sand, resources that are not ours, and do not belong to the lands that we inhabit. I guess this was a realisation of how our uprooted ways of living have shaped the ground beneath us, which is, almost always, covered in concrete…

the concrete curse

I call this obsession to cementing over almost every living, breathing slice of earth, whilst also constructing roads and homes from this material, ‘the concrete curse’. In a the sense that it’s so easy and some ways, very practical (for capitalism), but its use also comes with some very high costs. Concrete sucks up almost a tenth of the world’s industrial water use, according to the Guardian.

“If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third-largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world… surpassed only by China and the US.”

This strains supply drinking and irrigation, because 75 per cent of this consumption occurs in drought - and water -stressed regions. It’s also wind-borne dust that causes silicosis and other respiratory diseases. “If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third-largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world… surpassed only by China and the US,” writes Jonathan Watts in The Guardian.

Despite the turn to concrete, some of the most iconic buildings in history have been made using natural construction techniques. One of my absolute favourite places in the world is the Alhambra in Granada, southern Spain - built between 1238 and 1358 - and was made using a mixture of tapial (also known as rammed earth) and adobe. It was designed to be bioclimatic, meaning its very form and structure regulate temperature and airflow.

What if I were to tell you that the Great Wall of China is held together by rice soup?

The primary natural building method for the earliest sections of the Great Wall of China was tapial, a technique that involved compacting layers of natural matter. The mortar was made by mixing sticky rice soup with slaked lime. Over the centuries, different natural materials were used depending on local availability, including quarried stone in mountainous regions, loess soil in plains, and reeds and tamarisk twigs in the Gobi Desert.

Bioconstruction is about using what’s available locally. For example, if you live in a place with little clay, water, or trees - more sand and desert - you would use tapial since it’s more about compacting dry material. In a place with less wood but plenty of clay, you would use adobe, and in a place where you have plenty of clay and hay, you would use cob. It’s about building with the earth, with the climate, and with the resources at hand.

Here in Peru, since the Earth is rich and deliciously full of clay, adobe is a very popular and alive building method, especially here in the sacred valley, where a lot of even modern-day construction still honours this tradition.

Quincha, or kincha in the Quechua language, is a popular technique here, which involves weaving pieces of wood, cane, or bamboo and covering them with a mixture of mud and straw. This structure is strong, flexible, earthquake-proof - hence why it’s popular in this region. It’s then covered on both sides with a thin plaster, often made from a mixture of clay, hay, sand and water.

I think the beauty of earth construction is that once you have all the proper support in place, you can allow your imagination to guide your hands, adding all the touches and details that bring uniqueness and beauty to a home or a collective space. This process really existed me, and have been inspired to some some of these unique, playful touches used in some of the places I’ve been staying here.

This tradition of personalising and embellishing homes and communal spaces has been documented across Africa for millennia. I came across journalist Margaret Courtney-Clarke’s book, African Canvas: The Art of West African Women is a pictorial survey of the various traditions of architectural decoration created by women in different regions of West Africa. Her work (pictured below) documents how these women, from Nigeria to Senegal, “transform objects from their daily world — a fish net, a cooking pot, a weaving, a calabash - into rippling patterns laden with cosmic significance.”

According to an article by Tinga Tinga Art, the role of African paintings in homes goes deeper than simple “aesthetic beautification” and encompasses a much deeper meaning:

“The artworks serve as a bridge between the ancestral past and the contemporary present, creating living spaces that breathe with the rhythm of African heritage whilst adapting to modern realities… African paintings in residential settings function as cultural DNA made visible, encoding within their forms, colours, and symbols the essential elements that define community belonging and personal identity.”

beyond aesthetic

What would it mean if we were to transform sterile, lifeless buildings with art, with life, with our own imprinted uniqueness? How would our cities and urban spaces look if they truly reflected the thoughts, culture, and mindset of those who inhabit them and not the mindset of building developers?

Perhaps street art is one way of partly reclaiming these spaces. Yet, I often look at the architecture of most modern-day cities - brutal and concrete, straight edges and lines - and wonder what that does to the collective mentality. Or perhaps, even more interestingly, what does it reflect about the collective human psyche?

I spent many years in London, living in abandoned buildings with my partner (at the time) through building guardianships. We inhabited mainly old, often listed, buildings - schools, banks, pubs, Damian Hurst's ex-art gallery in Notting Hill, a multimillion-pound mansion in Hampstead caught in a divorce battle. I remember how each place had a certain effect on my way of being.

One in particular that I can never forget is how living in the disused Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill made me feel like I was losing my mind. I wondered how a building for people who had serious mental health issues, with its squelchy rubber, hospital-smelling floors, the lack of light and the tiny windows would possibly ever make anyone feel better.

A study by Oshin Vartanian, a professor of perception, cognition, and cognitive neuroscience, found that when people viewed spaces with curves, they experienced a sense of safety and positive emotional responses. Straight lines and angles, on the other hand, convey clarity, order, and structure; it’s no surprise they’re used in institutional and commercial architecture. Yet, most modern architects still gravitate toward these styles of design because they are “clean”, practical and easy to work with.

earthen dreams

In bioconstruction, every mix recipe begins with understanding the relationship between some of the primary elements: sand, clay and water; how they move and negotiate with one another. Unlike concrete, earth-based materials refuse to be standardised. There’s no single “right” way, there’s no “just add water” formula. Because of this, regulating earthen architecture the way we regulate cement is practically impossible.

I think, like much of earth-based policy, it’s a question of how we regulate raw materials, a living, breathing, moving mass of molecules constantly interacting and at play. Perhaps that’s why we see this standardised, strategised, universalised monopoly of monocultures - of squares and lines, of order and borders, of constant control - imposed on the way we live, the way we eat, the way we manage so-called protected spaces. It’s evident in manicured lawns, in the skyscrapers and screens, within the boxes within boxes.

I love the idea of breaking out of these boxes, of reclaiming the power of human imagination and recognising that it is far greater than what’s imposed on us through rules and regulations. For now, I’m just dreaming of my earthen home: how it would look and feel, how I might play with the flow of light and water, how it would be built to last because it belongs. I’d love to invite you to dream with me…

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With love from the fireside x

It was a blessing to take part in the Radical Love retreat at Equisoain, a name that means “place of the Sun” in Euskara, the ancient Basque language. This renovated castle is steeped in history and stone-walled-stories, much like the forests and rivers that both grow and flow through northern Spain.

Stowed amongst these mountains, Equisoain is a sanctuary for reflection, surrounded by rivers and a diversity of trees: beech, boxwood, and oak, which artist Eliana Perinat took the time to explain on walks. I also loved the chance to ponder the intricacies of these natural formations, through looking and not looking, amongst the long grass in her guided drawing class.

“Sketch as if you're stroking the tree, plant, or flower itself,” Eliana would tell us, constantly encouraging us to shift our perspective and engage with attentive connection.

Equisoain lies near the Camino de Santiago Aragonés, a quieter but deeply storied route of the pilgrimage. I stayed in the medieval town of Monreal, where the air carries the scent of wood smoke and the layered history of comings and goings. This Camino begins at the Somport Pass in the Aragonese Pyrenees, on the French-Spanish border, and winds westward until it merges with the more well-known Camino Francés at Puente la Reina in Navarre.

Whilst I briefly considered spontaneously walking the Camino de Santiago (something I’ve always dreamed of), I instead opted for gentler walks and refreshing dips in the river. We spotted butterflies, vultures, and, though we only heard in the distance, a cuckoo and a multitude of different birds. I’m told that wild boar and roe deer also roam freely through these forests, even under the watchful eyes of the Basajaun (the wild forest guardian said to protect the animals and whisper warnings through the rustling trees in Basque mythology).

To follow Satish’s footsteps is to walk behind years of experience. “I put one foot in front of the other for two years and arrived in the States from India,” Satish laughed later that day.

Satish reminded us that this principle, of taking things step by step, breath by breath, can also be applied to our work as activists: for ourselves, our communities, especially in times of overwhelm and panic. Satish’s message came through clearly: the antidote to climate anxiety is to act. I think it was this that stood out to me the most:

Rather than unpack Satish’s words myself, I’d love to hand this worded offering to you, fellow reader, as a prompt, something you might take to pen and paper, or simply sit with in quiet reflection.

Throughout the weekend, we were guided through talks combined with movement, meditation, art, yoga, nourishing food, and our communally created holistic soup, hot with the spices of enriching conversation, smooth with the blend of grounding practices and root vegetables. (Since I put coconut milk in everything), It was also laced with the cool, coconuty, soothing notes of silent moments spent with the rivers and trees.

Beneath the canopy of lime-green light, like stained glass in the temple of the forest, I contemplated the history of this land.

I often do so in unfamiliar places, where the residue of the past lingers like a sensation - a taste you can’t quite place. Remnants of peoples and empires, of times that did not outlive the forests or the rivers that run beyond.

In Basque lore, the woods are watched over by ancient spirits; the oak especially is sacred to Mari, the earth goddess who moves through the mountains in shifting weather. And while Basque mythology and practices remain a winding root in the fabric of this region, the relationship to the land is one shared by many for those who live in Navarra, whether or not they identify as Basque.

Across the region, traditional ways of farming and settlement speak are attuned with nature, guided by the turning of the seasons and an enduring reverence for ecological rhythm.

This mindset of land as kin rather than resource may help explain why, even today, parts of northern Spain retain some of the most ancient and well-preserved forests in Europe.

The Basque people, Euskaldunak, have kept their language, identity, and ways of living through centuries of cultural suppression. They relate to rivers, trees, and mountains as animate, sacred, and alive. In this very spirit, I discovered a collective of artists who gather each year in Spain to host the Arbola Fest: “An undisciplined meeting space for all types of contemporary thinkers interested in tree and plant culture.”

Further readings, happenings & connections

• Equisoain
  Discover more about the retreat centre and its programs at equisoain.com, or follow along on Instagram: @equisoain.eki

• Eliana Perinat

  @elianaperinat

  Art therapy: www.elianaperinat.com/arteterapia-exploracion-creativa-y-personal

  @arteterapia_eliana

• La Asociación Cultural Despierta
  A collective of communications and sustainability specialists committed to addressing environmental degradation and cultivating active, creative responses to ecological and social challenges.

• Radical Love: From Separation to Connection with the Earth, Each Other, and Ourselves
  A new book by Satish Kumar explores how we can root activism in love, connection, and reverence for the Earth.

• Arbola 2025
  Taking place from June 11–15 in Labeo, this year’s Arbola Festival will bring together artists and educators from five countries. In the lead-up throughout May, the program includes artist residencies, gardening workshops, talks, and tree education walks.

A river that has burst its banks; water, golden brown and flowing fast, punctuated by objects that, too, have been carried by its vortex. The river, held by the land, can’t bear the weight of the sky. And so it runs beyond the margins of the border in which it was born, finding its way into the fallow fields, where it congregates; pooling into stillness. Water, patiently awaiting for the Earth - porous but unaccustomed to the weight of a changing climate - to absorb it, to eat it whole.

Perhaps, when the sheep and cows return, their hooves will be the mortar that moulds the Earth and the water together, creating clay structures, so that one day, the grass, too, can return. But in this moment, under a blue sky and a soft winter sun that dances upon the flooded plains, I appreciate this new and alien landscape, witnessing the past, the present, and an uncertain future merge as Earth, water, and the sun. To become acquainted with the landscape is to know it in all its seasons. To stand and bear witness when it’s in turmoil.

So I stood and sang to the river - the very river that cleansed me in the heat of the summer sun, with its prickly cold, strong-current-embrace. I would cling to its rocky bottom, planting my fingertips like roots into the stones beneath my body. Occasionally pulling up and inspecting tiny pieces of flint and the intricacies of the patterns, shapes, and storied forms safely stowed within its banks. Will they, too, be swept down to the ocean? Or will they remain, with firm determination, to belong to these soft waters, now running wild and wide, and whirling?

An inner vortex churns inside the pit of my own stomach. How will this river move beyond the depths of these downpours? The trees, among them a great, beloved oak, stand submerged, barely recognisable from their summer selves. Once lush and green, now stripped bare, clinging for dear life. Perhaps in the same way, I too am clinging - for a root, a thread, a vein. Or will I too, be swept away by a current that is moving so fast, so furiously, that to remain in this current state of being would be almost impossible?

Perhaps when I return in spring, I will find the river shrunken and shallow beneath the summer sun, flowing with a gentle yet fierce resistance to remain - to be here, to continue - with a graceful knowing that it will reach the ocean, that it will continue to move across the landscape even if, scientifically, it is already 'dead.' Even if cattle farmers dump raw waste into its waters, choking its ecosystem in broad daylight. Even if raw sewage is pumped directly into its veins.

It feels as though many of us are caught in the throes of untamed waters, stomachs churning with acidic anxieties, navigating hopes, dreams, and remorse in a spiralling vortex of toxic cultures and the plumes of decaying systems. Yet within the chaos, I find myself searching for something to hold onto, some kind of anchor in the seasonal rhythms of rising and falling. Or perhaps, becoming like the waters; untamed, unbound, moving beyond the margins, moving even if, even so…

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