Rejectamenta

I’ve just placed an order with my suppliers for a selection of botanical ingredients I’ve never worked with before. In the spirit of layering fragments, next week I’ll be experimenting with more complex blends — using more ingredients than usual, but in the tiniest of quantities, to see whether the threads of scent can be woven into something really beautiful and intricate.

Since launching this newsletter, so many of you have reached out with kind thoughts and reflections, and I’d love to invite you into this part of the process. Tell me: which scents hold meaning for you, and why? Do you find yourself drawn to florals, resins, or citrus notes? Does your mood shape the fragrance you reach for?

Nature’s rejectamenta is endless: leaves, stones, flowers, feathers... Each is part of a cycle, a story bigger than us. To collect a shell or a stone feels like we're borrowing a fragment of that story for a while, rooting ourselves in the vastness of time and tide. Perhaps this is why we can sit for hours among the rocks; because in those broken, scattered pieces, we glimpse our own place in the pattern.

My Notes app on my phone is filled with unfinished poems, lists and thoughts and there's a piece I wrote over a year or so ago, from a particularly challenging time personally, that has a section that seems to ring with this idea of nature allowing us to see ourselves as part of something bigger, and in so doing, providing us with a sense of beauty and (re)connection:

...Swaying forever to a greater hand, Shifting and moving and bubbling with life, Rolling over broken shard and empty clam, Made prettier somehow through strife — Will seeing the sun pull stars onto its peaks Shed a light also on my heavy heart,Sway me, stay me…Make beautiful too, my broken shards.

That idea of light and layering also brings to mind the work of Severine Godissart, who describes herself as a photographer of"cosmos et coquillages". If observing, collecting and displaying is the amassing of fragments in motion, Severine's photographs are its transmutation into still life. And nowhere do I see Mary Oliver's becoming a"needle in the haystack of light"more acutely than through Severine's lens.

So, whether you feel happy or sad, lost or found, this week I recommend creating your own little altar to nature, with whatever you find on your path. Arrange it by your desk, bed or bookshelf as your touchstone to a greater understanding of what beauty really is.

Walking along the shoreline, stooping, stretching, balancing between rocks: there’s a rhythm to beachcombing that is almost like a moving meditation. We don’t notice how many times we bend, reach or clamber, but at the end of the day our bodies feel that wholesome ache of having moved with purpose. You can apply the same to foraging in the woods. Roaming the fringes of nature makes us supple, not just in muscle but in how we approach the world. It's a great way of taking the discipline out of exercise and treating it as a joyful rummage.

Sustaining ourselves over the long haul isn’t just about sheer endurance. It’s about finding something that gives us joy and returning to it, again and again. Doing something you're truly passionate about, and love, can heal us, even if only for a moment.

Actor James Van Der Beek, who is currently navigating cancer treatment, spoke recently about his childhood dream of singing on Broadway and how he sidelined it to strive, instead, for a "Matt Damon" career. Last week, he finally came full circle on that dream and said that while he was singing in the rehearsal room in New York, in the flow of creativity, his pain momentarily disappeared. 

He asked: how many of us are still chasing goals set by our less wise selves? And how much lighter, happier, freer would we be if we let them go — if instead, we gave our time and energy to what has always lit us up, from before?

In a way, these passions are our personal rejectamenta: the scraps and fragments of dreams we thought were lost or discarded, but which, when picked up again, feel life-giving. So, I think the long haul isn’t about clinging to rigid goals. It’s about sifting through what remains, salvaging what still sparks joy, and letting that creativity sustain us.

Sometimes the fragments we gather aren’t shells or stones but words and ideas that shift the way we see the world. One of the most beautiful companions I’ve found recently, thanks to a recommendation from a very dear friend, is Maria Popova’s The Almanac of Birds. It gathers poetry, myth, science and art, all circling the lives of birds. For me, it feels like a more naturalistic, feasible form of tarot. Each day, I “turn a card” by opening to a new bird, and what I find there often lands with an almost eerie precision,offering wisdom that feels perfectly attuned.