A sailor whispered in my ear…
As I lie here in bed listening to the wind gently breathing it’s cool autumnal, earthy breath on my window, feeling increasingly anxious as my cat Lilith looks for new ways to attract my attention and stop me writing … (things tend to get pushed on the floor or plucked from the walls at this time in the morning… feet get attacked and treasure is stolen, all in an attempt to get me to leave my warm, cozy duvet and let her out.) I find myself astonished at how dark it is even at six thirty in the morning….
Already.
The year has flown by and here we are again approaching Samhain.
The breeze has a definite chill to it, the air sounds slightly different.. crisper.
The leaves in the trees are still green but when the wind catches them they sound .. dry, tired, ready to drop and become the forest floor once again.
This is my absolute favourite season.
We walk in the woods collecting rosehips, chestnuts and conkers, the elderberries are dried and stored for the winter ready to make immune boosting tonic and my phone is yet again full of magical mushroom photos.
In the workshop the fire is lit each morning just to ease the chill … tools and rocks are placed on top of it to warm them, the cold metal becoming more friendly to our achy hands and the rocks become pocket friends for a little heat boost throughout the day.
For me, the end of summer and the beginning of the darker months is a time to reflect, my thoughts tend to linger on the years events, achievements, and on my growth as a creator and as a human.
I can sometimes find myself wondering if I have made the most of every moment…
Does my year match up to other peoples? Have I experienced as much?
For me, this year has been a huge lesson.
It turns out … I literally can’t do everything!
Who knew?
It turns out that there are actually finite hours in the day and just because I want to do something doesn’t necessarily mean I can if I’m not prepared to sacrifice something else …
(Our regular blog for one… has it really been three months!!!)
… and I’m not great at not being able to do everything.
This year, we have been continuing to work hard on our business and in our spare time we have been slowly renovating our home… which needs a LOT of work!
This is new for us.
We rented our little Dorset cottage for 14 years before we were finally able to buy it in 2019.
It was love at first sight.
On a bright spring morning in 2006 we journeyed from my parents home in the New Forest, through the busyness of the tourist route to the the West Country and into the quiet North Dorset countryside. A rural agricultural area completely unknown to us and further than we’d hoped as we were still working in the forest at that time.
We pulled up to a small white cottage in a tiny narrow lane, with clematis growing around the front door and that was that. It felt like home.
The cottage accepted us.
Welcomed us.
Yearned to be loved by us.
Now, finally she is ours and we are able to care for her and make her our own.
And it’s taking the time it takes…
To return her from a ‘safe’, generic, ‘rented’ white walled, patched up, tired little house to her former Victorian self (Victorian gothic …. of course!)
The decor decisions are easy, like she’s telling us what she wants.
And it seems I’m astonished that I can’t simply continue everything I was already filling my days with, already not having time for… and add in a house renovation too??!
Shocker!
The summer came and went in a perfect haze of vintage festivals and antique shops, wallpaper hanging and floor laying with barely a trip to the sea, or even a walk in the woods.
We’ve learnt about the history and the fashion of the Victorian era and learnt how to tell the age of an antique bevelled mirror from a lovely man dressed as a 1950’s sailor who whispered in my ear that the Arts and Crafts mirror we were admiring was a bargain.. a kindly given piece of professional advice from an expert on holiday.
We’ve visited the Victorian colour revolution exhibition in Oxford and learnt about the Pre- Raphaelites and the Victorian fashion for poisonous wallpaper!
It has been a magical journey so far.
It is so easy these days to see a social media perfect view of other people’s lives, a filtered snapshot of their summer. Warm glowing skin and ice creams, daily dips into the ocean or mountains climbed.
And for a second, a fleeting moment I can find myself questioning why we haven’t climbed the three peaks or kayaked around the Cornish coast.
The discussion around the effects of the ‘perfect life’ Instagram feed that we are bombarded with each day is ongoing. We know how challenging it can be to see the absolute, curated best of someone’s world and compare to your own unfiltered reality.
As a business owner, I am interacting with social media a fair bit, and even though I am completely aware of the unreality… I mean, I can even see how even my own account depicts moments in time, with photos cherrypicked to find the best, most exciting or most flattering image… sometimes it can still be hard to remember, to put things into context and not to feel a sense of FOMO or inadequacy.
So, for me, I find it essential to stop.
Take a breath and remember, with gratitude the journey I have been on, the adventures I have had.
The wonderful reality of the actual world around me.
The paint splattered days ending in the glow of a job well done, the fires lit in the cooler evenings, the sense of achievement when I wander through our house as it begins, slowly but surely to feel like home.
We still have a long way to go… a lot of work yet to do on our little cottage but she’s beginning to come back to feeling like a loved place and that’s worth every moment.
I can’t do everything.
But I can make sure that everything I do counts.
Even …. maybe especially the moments of reflection and rest.
Breathing in the now… this very second.
With gratitude.
If you get a chance and you like a bit of Victorian aesthetic the ‘Colour Revolution’ Exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford UK is definitely worth a visit!!
Check it out here : Colour Revolution Exhibition
