Hey Reader,

Here under the Howgills, the land is starting to wake up.

The daffodils are out shining like beacons, not competing with the ones next to them (Admittedly many in my garden have flomped over due to the winds...) The polytunnel foundations are in, my baby Wild Rose hedge is budding, and the first seeds have sprouted on the kitchen windowledge.

In a world that seems so full of hopelessness, the land inspires me to slow down, look deeper. Notice the signs of hope that are around me.

I often feel guilt that I'm in a position to be able to, when so many are suffering. But if I look at it another way, tending to what is alive and thriving around me—nurturing the threads of connection, care, and memory—is its own quiet form of resistance and hope.

By noticing, honouring, and holding these small, living truths, I can offer something steady into a world that so desperately needs it.

This is a theme I'm exploring through lineage in my latest post:

Picking Up the Threads: My Maternal Lineage and the Dreams I’m Living for Them

Lately, threads have come to my attention. Threads running through life, through calling, through relationships.

If you’ve read some of my other writing, you’ll maybe know that I’ve spent a lot of time researching my own family tree. Within that, two threads pull strongest — the line of ancestors who lived in Sedbergh and Dent, the first being where I have rooted myself and birthed two of my children; and the maternal line, which is less tied to place, but deeply intertwined with why I feel so called to follow this path.

The maternal line follows the mother, her mother, her mother’s mother. Mine is an interesting tapestry. With the most recent generations hailing from Preston, many of the women in my family worked in the cotton mills. Weaving threads. There was fracture, poverty, and a pattern of women setting aside their own hopes and dreams to step into their role as wife and mother. The times they lived in didn’t offer much choice.

I’ll never know exactly what their lives were like at the looms. I can only imagine — the hard conditions, the women being ever-resourceful, sharing stories to carry each other through. Perhaps not realising that the weight of their unlived lives was shaping someone further down the line.

I never got to meet my maternal grandmother. She died a few hours after my mother told her she was pregnant with me. I know she had the chance to become a teacher, but relinquished it for family obligations. I wonder sometimes whether that had any bearing on the trajectory of her life — she passed at 52, my grandfather a few years before at 51. That’s just ten years older than I am now.

And while times have changed, still many women across the world find themselves in the same position — laying down their hopes, their desires, their dreams. Putting them on the backburner. Watching them catch fire, dissolve into ash. Some never even get the privilege of knowing fully what those dreams were.

This poem by Rupi Kaur has become something I return to:

“i am the first woman in my lineage with freedom of choice. to craft her future whichever way i choose. say what is on my mind when i want to. without the whip of the lash. there are hundreds of firsts i am thankful for. that my mother and her mother and her mother did not have the privilege of feeling. what an honor. to be the first woman in the family who gets to taste her desires. no wonder i am starving to fill up on this life. i have generations of bellies to eat for. the grandmothers must be howling with laughter. huddled around a mud stove in the afterlife. sipping on steaming glasses of milky masala chai. how wild it must be for them to see one of their own living so boldly.” — Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers

What a gift.

I come back to it when my own threads feel messy, tangled, arriving in the wrong order. When the work feels too hard or too slow or too uncertain. I think of them — at the looms, at the sewing machines, at the spinning wheel I remember from our house growing up — and I feel something settle.

They didn’t get to do this. I do.

I grew up believing I wasn’t good at making things with my hands. Cross stitch was manageable — small, neat, contained. But anything more complex came out wonky, and I couldn’t bear that. I needed things to be right or not at all.

Midlife is slowly working that out of me. The need for perfect is loosening its grip. And as it does, I’m finding something underneath it — not competence exactly, but willingness. A willingness to pick up the thread even when I don’t know where it leads. To weave something that might come out wonky and offer it anyway.

This work — this writing, this path, this slow invitation to women to come back to themselves — is my version of the loom. It’s what I can do that they couldn’t. Not perfectly. But with the full weight of their unlived lives behind me.

Maybe it’s time to pick up the threads.

Big love,
Sarah

PS. I’m having conversations with people who feel the pull to create their own business — one that’s flexible, meaningful, and serves the deeper human need for connection in our noisy world. If that sounds like you, just hit reply and let me know — I’d love to hear your thoughts.