Make Love To Your Days #4
Welcome to another edition of the fortnightly series for paid subscribers, called Make Love to Your Days. A soft space for remembering the beauty in ordinary things, slowing down for long enough to savour them, and an antidote for the incessant shouting, and snark that floods our feeds. Here you’ll find musings on seducing your life, places I’ve been exploring, and things I’m cooking, making, smelling, listening to, and reading.
THIS WEEK: Unexpected beauty in toilets and train stations, my favourite place in London (hint: it sells food, obviously), drinks and more drinks, the spirit animal I’m working with, and the song that’s got summer written all over it.
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It’s all in the details
As soon as my shoes in whichever shade of brown I leave the house in, make contact with the pavement, there I am. There I am, wide-eyed, tingling in excitement about all that I know I will witness and observe. Even on the days where I rushed to get dressed, had a mirror meltdown funded by beauty standards, or just feeling the kind of sadness that goes unnamed; a current of expectation pulses through me. What I love about life, is being here for it all. Not just the highlights, or the spectacular stuff, but the ordinary details we often overlook.
Things like these tiles at Belsize Park Underground Station. Unnoticed. Passengers tapping their phones in a hurry, rushing to tin themselves into lifts to get to the platform. We sometimes miss these random nods of beauty because we weren’t expecting them. I had just come from an art fair, a place where beauty is expected to be seen. We don’t always expect it hidden in train stations perfumed by damp, but that’s what life does. Surprises us. Reminds us. There is always beauty to be discovered, just waiting for us to notice it.
Signs from the swan
I wouldn’t trade-in how I see the world and I guess everything beyond this world, for a damn thing. The magical interconnectedness and beauty of seeing the consciousness in all things. The spirit in all things. For this season in my life, which feels somewhat rebirth-adjacent, I wanted a spirit animal or totem to work with. A visual reminder steeped in mythology and mysticism to come back to. In a call as part of Becky Symes’ incredible strategy-meets-spirit group program, In-Vision, I made a mental note that I would love to be shown a totem to work with. I let it go, trusting it would come to me in its own time.
Just before the call came to a close, Becky pulled archetype cards for us all and I received The Lover card, which read, “The Lover appreciates and experiences the world through the senses, reveling in beauty, song, art, music, scents and sensuality.” Obnoxiously me. Later, she sent a photo of the card, with an illustration of a swan. Of course. I spent the night researching the myths and meaning of the swan, and knew deeply that this was everything I needed. A day later on my way to Tesco, there in the canal, two swans. A day after that, I walked past a swan painting. So here we are, the swan and I journeying together. My daily reminder of elegance, force and devotion.