Hey Reader,

Hope you’re having a good week.

A lot of my emails over the past few months have brought stories that I got from my walks in the fells, stories that I brought back down to share with you guys through our weekly email.

Because of the time of year, it’s getting colder and wetter, and some of the paths up there are getting trickier to walk. With the seasonal change as well, some things have shifted in terms of having the time to get up there as much as I like. It’s been a few weeks now since I’ve been up into the hills, and this often frustrates me, because if it was honestly up to me, I’d probably try and get up there every day. Many times I feel that pull to go up there and wander off for a couple of hours, get lost in the wild landscape, get lost in the wilds of it all.

Then I come back to myself with the 'shoulds', the “I should be doing this”, and the other priorities that always seem to take the front seat above keeping my soul satisfied. The priorities of everyday life. That’s probably something I’ll explore a bit deeper in next week’s email: the differences between 'shoulds' and 'wants' and 'needs'.

Something else has taken a bigger front seat now, which is tapping into this general unease that we’re all feeling in the world right now. There’s a real internal need in me to go back to basics as much as possible, and I keep getting this pull to experience life as I did when I was a child. I want to see things with that childlike worldview - like it’s brand new and you’re seeing it for the first time.

When you’re a child and you discover a new plant growing in the hedgerow, or go somewhere there was something you’d never seen before in your day-to-day world. It just seemed new and exciting and curious, and I feel like it’s a time when I really want to lean back into those ways of experiencing the world. Maybe to counteract the general feeling of doom and dread and fear that seems to be an undercurrent through everything at the moment.

I invite you, where you can, to lean into that childhood curiosity, seeing things with new eyes and this experience of being alive right now. So many facets of it are difficult, hard, frustrating and overwhelming, but equally, so many moments are beautiful, and if we’re truly present in them, moment to moment, we can see it. For me, that is always in nature.

Maybe you’ll go on your own walks this week or find your own wonders outside. If you do, see if you can look at everything around you with fresh eyes, almost like you’ve never seen anything like it before:

• Looking at the way the trees grow
• Looking at all the patterns and shapes you can see within nature
• Looking at the way a blade of grass moves in the breeze, or the way a flower’s petals grow

I hope that, like me, you can find a little bit of joy in the little things this week.

Big love,
Sarah