Following Dr. Jane Goodall's passing and the softness of her femininity that was felt and projected, I decided this week to pick up Mary Magdalene, The Way of the Rose by Ishtara Ammuna Rose. It’s a spiritual meditation on the sacred feminine — on softness as strength, and on how love, compassion, and presence can become radical acts in a world that often prizes noise over nurture. It echoes the same quiet but powerful femininity with which Dr. Jane Goodall led her teachings; an invitation to return to tenderness, to intuition and to the kind of power that doesn’t need to shout to be felt.

Art Work: On the Creative Life by Sally Mann arrived in the post today and just a few chapters in, I know I've stumbled across something special. This is a field guide to the inner terrain of the artistic life: the hazards of early promise, the sting of rejection, the unpredictable role of luck and the stubborn necessity of showing up, even when nothing seems to be turning out right.To be truly creative is, we're told, to follow a series of small, daily acts, to take risks and to say "yes" when it scares you. Mann's prose hooked me from the start. It's spell-binding, honest, humble and generous...and woven withphotographs, journal entries, letters and stories. If ever there was a book to help you back yourself creatively and be brave, this is it.

I started reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell on the weekend and am now savouring the last few pages. It's a life-breathing novel steeped in the elements of the natural world. At its centre is Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, portrayed as a woman so attuned to plants, animals and the rhythms of the land that she is seen as a kind of forest witch. Her knowledge of herbs and healing, her instinctive reading of people and places, root the story firmly in nature’s cycles of birth, growth and decay. Against this backdrop, the sudden death of her son Hamnet becomes not only a profound personal grief, but also part of a larger meditation on the inevitability of loss woven into the fabric of life itself and the transformative power of creation through grief.

All week I’ve been pulling from Maria Popova’s Almanac of Birds, and it drew me back to The Book of the Bird: Birds in Art — a gift from dear friends in 2017, when I was living in Singapore, which I hadn’t properly opened until now.

The book reveals, through stunning artworks both old and new, how birds are emblems of knowledge, messengers of mysticism and symbols of risk. The breaking of the egg is the first step into life; the leap from the cliff, the terrifying necessity of flight. Across cultures and centuries, artists return to birds as metaphors for what it means to begin, to trust and to launch into the unknown. For me, this is a meditation on freedom and fragility and the power to cross worlds with courage.

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.

Here you go, my life-affirming, plane journey read: All The Beauty In The World by Patrick Bringley. Don’t leave it on the shelf like I did. I hope it inspires you to observe and appreicate beauty in a slightly different way, and I hope, of course, that he inspires you to head to an art museum now and then to stand in silence and bathe in the life, light and vibrancy that the world’s greatest artists have left for us to enjoy.

Cleansing the mind can be as powerful as cleansing the body. In Rich Roll’s conversation with Jennifer Pastiloff, she speaks candidly about losing her father as a child, how that grief distorted her sense of identity and how she slowly began to rewrite that story. One of her most resonant phrases is: "Your inner asshole is not telling you the truth."That voice in your head that criticises, doubts and undermines you is just noise. And cleansing the mind is about daring to silence it.What if the most radical act of healing is subtractive? A return to remembering who you really are.

I binge-watched Lena Dunham's Too Much this week. As chaotic, brilliantly funny, and whip-smart as the show is, what lingers most isn’t the raw real or the frenetic pacing; it’s the quiet ache beneath it all, the longing to be truly seen, to be held — not just metaphorically, but literally. It's a show about disconnection in the age of hyper-connection, and it's an impeccable portrayal of the emotionally-constipated British!Underneath all the glam and mess is the most basic human craving: real connection.

I’ve been dipping in and out ofThe Pivot Yearby Brianna Wiest over the past year, and it’s become something of a handbook for me. There’s no pressure to read it in order — just a page or two is often enough to shift perspective or lift the weight of a day.

I listened to Brianna on a podcast recently and was struck by how grounded and sincere she is. She came across as incredibly humble, warm, and clear. That same tone runs through every page. Somehow, whatever you’re going through, the words seem to meet you there. It’s a book I keep close.

To quieten racing thoughts and anxiety at night, I love Beyond Anxiety by Martha Beck — it’s a book I come back to time and again.Martha is a Harvard-trained sociologist and life coach who blends science with spiritual insight and deep compassion. Shereframes anxiety as a sign that something within us is asking for attention, not suppression.The mistake we make sometimes is trying to shut thoughts down, when actually, justunderstanding what they’re trying to say can help us stop a thought-spiral keeping us awake. 

I’m still readingThe End of Timeby Julian Barbour that I mentioned in last week's newsletter, but this week I’ve also been absorbed byThe Rich Roll Podcast, particularly his conversation with Craig Mod: Walking As Medicine.Craig speaks openly about his childhood, describing it as a time shadowed by the absence of light— warmth, connection, and safety. His story is about his deliberate pursuit of light: moving to Japan, creating mindful rituals, walking as daily medicine, and building brightness into his life where it didn’t naturally exist.It’s a powerful reminder that light isn’t always something we inherit; it’s something we can choose to seek and consciously create.

I’ve just started readingThe End of Timeby Julian Barbour — a thought-provoking book that challenges the way we understand time itself. Barbour proposes that time doesn’t actually exist as we think it does; instead, the universe is made up of a series of ‘nows’ — individual, complete moments that don’t flow but simply are. It’s already making me reflect on how we experience change, and how much of our energy is spent moving towards some imagined future rather than fully inhabiting the present. It's a powerful invitation to slow down and really notice the now.