Weaving everyday magic: a reimagining of my creative motherhood.

taking lessons from Mother Earth to reawaken creativity.

I’m Lyndsay, mother, creative and storyteller with a background in interiors PR. Story & Thread. is a weekly letter exploring the intersection of creativity, mothering and the living world, with a home and a garden at the heart...

Please feel free to share parts of this newsletter that connect with you — here on Substack, on social media or I would love you to send it on to someone special to you.

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“There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter”.

— Rachel Carson.

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Hello dearest readers

It feels strange, difficult and in some ways pointless to write at the moment — the world feels as though it is hardening around us, cementing into opposites, awash with lies, rigid with hatred and so much loss. I have no answers but am trying to feel my way in the darkness by opening my heart to feel more, softening my edges, finding truth and tenderness in the small things and holding my little ones tightly…

As always I am finding it helpful to anchor myself in the midst of the season we are in and to notice the reassuring, familiar changes unfold around us. I wanted to share the beautiful words of

Asia Suler

about the passing and lingering of the seasons, and the depths and layers of feeling in motherhood,

Visitors

I particularly loved these words,

“There’s grief, and then there’s the grief of a mother who knows what it means to love with her entire being. Who can look at every person on Earth and remember that they were once a child who needed to be held. Who cannot look away from the preciousness of life, not for a single moment”.

I also loved the prompt from

Luisa Skinner

to create A Tiny Poem about the seasonal shifts around us,

Here are the words that came to me,

Sun shards and light puddles glimmer on the earth

The wind shakes out the bronze rust of ethereal grasses

The rains come to drench and heal us, we are renewed.

I highly recommend taking a couple of minutes to close your eyes and feel into what comes through for you.

I have spent the last few days thinking about how different creativity looks in this chapter to how I once imagined. Though in many ways there is less opportunity to be immersed in inspiration; thoughts and ideas appear in the scenery of everyday life, often taking root below the surface and finding their way to emerge in the rare moments of quietude…

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My painterly plans.

Most days I glimpse the prismatic pot of paints that I optimistically bought from the local art shop during those liminal weeks before my daughter was born on the last day in January 2020. Yet the paints have remained in the pot on the shelf, since unopened, gathering dust.

My visions of calm creativity in motherhood melted away in the early days, weeks and months as my exquisitely sensitive baby required constant contact — holding her in the container of my being for hours on end. Any successful attempts at ticking off a to-do list or really doing anything else, were left at the door when we arrived home with her, bundled up and cocooned from the chill of an inky night in early February 2020.

This unexpected intensity was amplified by a fresh and fierce all-consuming love, alongside a shattering of everything I thought I knew — thus leaving my life as I knew it (and the creative plans I had conjured) quite firmly on the shelf for some time.

I see now that it was part of learning to cultivate the most everyday version of presence, to tune in so deeply that I could recognise what was needed in the moment, without trying to change it.

Late afternoon light on our living room wall.

Taking up space.

We were navigating our ‘new normal’ in the weeks leading up to the first lockdown of the Covid pandemic. As those strangely silent spring days of 2020 unfolded, my daughter very tentatively began to turn her face towards the early warm sunshine of that year — just as the world’s doors closed, rendering us all as individual islands left to navigate our tender, precious lives in isolation. 

And yet, amongst the hush of emptiness, the birdsong grew louder, kaleidoscopes of butterflies danced in the sunshine (much to the delight of a small baby) and an abundance of green foliage seemingly with gold in its veins, reclaimed its rightful place — Mother Earth began to take up space, reconnecting with her ever-evolving expression of creation. 

Cow Parsley scattered along our daily walks in spring 2020.

Reorienting myself.

It was during this time at home that I was learning how to simply be — whether the moment required feeding, rocking, walking, comforting, holding, I was unable to do any of the usual things I used to do. Time also passed in a blur — memories of the endless days we spent alone (together) dissolving into a dusky haze, and I began to pay attention to the reassuring familiarity of the seasonal shifts and rhythms in our corner of the world as a way to anchor and orient myself. 

Once again, my local ancient woodland became a place of solace and the backdrop to many minutes, hours and days in lockdown. Each day, I left our home with my daughter cocooned in the sling, walking past the rainbow-adorned windows in the now-familiar front gardens offering seedlings of tomato plants, once-loved household items and boxes for food bank donations. We made our way down through the allotments that had a reassuring sense of aliveness whilst the usual signs of local life had been forced to shut up shop, into the shelter and sustenance of the woods.

Light and leaves in the woods.

A maze of daily restrictions played out on a canvas of warm spring days frothy with candyfloss blossom that became a sun-filled summer watching cotton wool clouds shapeshift across a glazed blue sky. Summer slipped into autumn with its antiqued hydrangeas and pools of light on an earthy carpet of fallen leaves. Winter arrived with charcoal silhouettes of leafless trees against a powder paint sky.

Winter trees and a powder paint sky.

It became clear to me that we are not separate from nature — noticing the way the light falls, what is growing in the garden, the sound of wildlife in the woods and the feel of the air became a compass. With the seasonal shifts as a point of reference and reminder of my own internal rhythms, I immersed myself in the metamorphosis of matrescence, going gently as my body and mind repositioned themselves in orbit of this sweet, sensitive soul. 

Creative imaginings.

I soon learned that the time I had envisaged for my creative pursuits was to be absorbed by the millions of micro-moments that make up mothering — at the same time honing my intuition and tuning out external noise. Creativity unfolded in different ways including an unexpected and fruitful collaboration with a friend to create a design framework weaving meditation and elemental wisdom in order to craft homes as places of nourishment, joy and comfort.

As the months passed and I was able to carve out some time on my own, I felt drawn both to my creative projects and by the invisible thread pulling my heart to my daughter’s — needing space but wanting closeness. There, evolved a dance of stillness and movement, creating with her in my arms and resting when I could.

I leant into this time to adopt an imaginative mindset in which I intended to inhabit the power that the mother (archetype, in its many forms) holds in shaping the energy of the home. It was not necessarily about creating a daily masterpiece but rather, becoming aligned with myself, my family and the beauty that surrounds us — often found in the in-between moments like lighting a candle at breakfast-time and soaking in the garden at dusk

Breakfast softness.

Sensing magic.

Despite finding ways to live creatively, it is only really three years (and another treasured baby) later that I feel I am beginning to find my feet in a new phase of self-expression. As my children grow, I spend incrementally longer spells in solitude, allowing space to enter my thoughts, which are now seasoned with a stronger sense of intuition as I feel everything more profoundly and embody everything more deeply. 

And just as the world fell silent in the days of lockdown and Mother Earth reclaimed her space inspiring our surroundings with her magic — my own pockets of quietude too, are paving the way for the pieces of me to come back together, rearranged, and maybe there is a touch of magic to be found here too…

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I would love to hear what living creatively means for you…

How do you layer moments of creativity into your days?

In which season do you feel most inspired?

Thank you so much for reading. I look forward to chatting more about the stories of everyday creativity in the comments.

Lyndsay x