All paths lead here | part two.
on creativity, seasonal living and community, and a summer gift for finding your story.
Hello, I’m Lyndsay, I am so glad you have found your way here…
Welcome to Story & Thread. — a home for writing, gathering, and storytelling through meaningful PR. This is a cosy, welcoming place to come home to yourself, to tend to your creativity, and to notice the quiet power of beauty and wonder as the seasons turn.
All subscribers will receive regular thoughtful posts about creativity, mothering, home and garden, woven through with the rhythm of the seasons. You are invited to become a member of The Beauty Thread. — a creative community for seasonal gatherings, co-working spaces, and a home for finding your voice and shaping your story, including the Find Your Story guide and the Your Story Starts Here workshop (coming autumn 2026).
"Attention is the beginning of devotion."
—Mary Oliver.
Dearest reader
How is July going for you? This month always feels like a combination of holding on and letting go to me — so much happening at once, a kind of exquisite, exhausting momentum that carries us all the way to the end of term, before finally breaking, like a much-needed thunderstorm.
July so far has been full to the brim and I have been entirely consumed — with birthday parties, school assemblies and concerts, meeting new teachers, reuniting with old friends, and last week, a school trip to the seaside with ninety little ones for big skies, seaside fun, and of course, ice cream. Despite the gloriousness of summer in full swing, I am craving the quiet moments in the shaded corners, and today for just a short time I have found them…
All paths lead here, a two-part series is a re-introduction, a laying of foundations and a weaving of values and themes throughout my words here, and in life. It explores the seven threads that run through Story & Thread. Part one covered storytelling, homecoming, beauty and softening. Today, Part Two explores creativity, seasonal living and community, and it ends with a summer gift.
I hope you are able to find a cool, shaded corner too, to sit with me for a while…
All paths lead here — part two.
On creativity, seasonal living and community, and the story that runs through all of it.
If you missed Part One, you can find it here — exploring storytelling, homecoming, beauty and softness as the first four threads that run through Story & Thread.
Join me to continue weaving the Story & Thread. tapestry…which thread will you follow?
CREATIVITY | we express our full selves.
The word create is thought to have come into use in the early fifteenth century, meaning “to bring into being.” It comes from the Latin creare — to make, bring forth, produce — and is related to crescere, meaning to arise, to be born, to grow. It shares its root with Ceres, the Roman goddess of farming, fertility, nourishment and maternal relationships, honoured for releasing the creative and regenerative power of the earth.
I love the idea that creativity, the earth and mothering are, at their root, the same impulse — the urge to bring something into being, to tend it, and to let it grow (and often, at some point, to let it go).
Living creatively is important to me. I fill the quiet moments with words, colour, scent, sound, taste and texture. I write to reclaim space for my thoughts, to explore the things I am intrigued by — to notice, feel, make sense of, and tell the everyday stories of our life, in the hope of framing a fragment of time, before it slips away.
After optimistically buying a set of paints in the final days of January 2020 before my daughter was born, I soon learned that the time I had naively envisaged for my creative pursuits was to be absorbed wholly by the millions of micro-moments that make up mothering. And so over the next months (and years), creating in the edges became very familiar to me — snuck into pockets of time when babies slept; sometimes words gathered into the Notes app., but most of them dropping in as I walked the same paths with a baby strapped to my chest.
As Louise Erdrich writes in The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year, bringing children into the world and pouring yourself into their care is itself a profound creative act — one that “rapturously sucks up whole chunks of life.” The act of mothering is not the thing that happens instead of creativity, it is the most creative act there is.
For me, living creatively is when I am noticing the details, though it can be easy to get caught up in the whirlwind and forget, especially as my children grow older and we begin to manage various external routines. The act of noticing is also one of remembering and for me, is the most direct route to feeling all the way alive and fully immersed in life. I try to remember that modelling this curiosity, this way of paying attention, is itself a form of teaching and guiding my children, and that it is more than enough.
Living creatively in this chapter of life is simultaneously feeling wonder when the stars align to find spells of flow, and softening to the snatched moments, the inevitable interruptions, the imperfect and the unfinished.
I loved hearing these words from Lisa Olivera,
“Do not dismiss the power of creating something amid so much destruction. To build beauty from your own heart and choose to share it is no small thing. It is what the world needs. A tiny act that becomes a seed for more. A gift that will regenerate beyond what you might ever know. And, perhaps most potent, is that the choice to create will widen your heart and change you first.”
I am learning that creativity is not something to be saved up and returned to once the other things are done. It is the thread that runs through everything — the way we make sense of the world, express who we are, and leave something of ourselves behind.
How we live most creatively.
Creativity is not separate from our lives, reserved for an unexpected quiet hour or a rare stretch of alone-time; it is woven through the whole of life, running beneath the surface of even the busiest, most ordinary days. It is in the noticing — the way you take time to arrange things on a table; the path you choose on a walk in the woods; the flowers that catch your eye; the story you tell your children at bedtime.
At Story & Thread., you are encouraged to come back into relationship with your own creativity — to make space and honour it, however small and imperfect that space might be. To join a community of others writing and making amidst it all, and to discover that the margins are often where the most meaningful work happens. Here, creativity is not something to return to once the other things are done, it is already here, waiting to be noticed.
**Where is creativity already living in your life, and where might you make a little more space for it?
You can read more about creativity here…
SEASONAL LIVING | we honour the wisdom in every season.
I remember hearing the words “a flower doesn’t bloom all year round” from a yoga teacher one cold, winter morning around ten years ago. It was so simple, but somehow the words landed in a way I hadn’t appreciated before.
Of course it should have been obvious, and yet I had been living my life as though I should be ‘in bloom’ all of the time — as though constant availability, consistent productivity, and an endless summer state was required, and was actually possible. That simple phrase unknowingly became embedded within, and began a slow unravelling and homecoming. Gradually, the wisdom of the seasons started to trickle into my sense of knowing, and I began to soften my gaze. I slowly began to value the rest and receptivity that comes with winter and the inward seasons, and stopped resisting the darker, quieter chapters, and started to look for what they were offering instead.
In the hazy early days of mothering, which stretched out during the incongruously bright spring of the first lockdown in 2020, I found that paying attention to the seasonal rhythms was a way to orient myself as the days passed in a blur of holding, feeding, rocking and tending. I am unable to recall dates from that time, but I remember the colour of the sky, the feel of the air, the way the light fell when certain things took place. The sound of birdsong in the woods; the slant of the sunrise through the window, the framing of the light. All of these things became my compass. We are not separate from nature — and in that strange, suspended season which in many ways felt like my very own winter contained within a beautiful spring, nature reminded me of that more clearly than it ever had before.
The seasons continue to teach me that time is not linear but rounded and full; with ebbs and flows, light and shadow, layers and depths. There is a feeling of coming full circle each time we witness the turning of the leaves in autumn, the bare branches against the cold sky in winter, the luminescent snowdrops emerging in early spring, the strengthening of the sun and softening of the air in the long summer days.
Even now, in my writing, creativity and work, I find prompts and nudges from what is taking place in the season beyond my window. There is comfort to be found in the small, sometimes imperceptible daily changes that mirror our own cyclical way of being. Things are always shifting and growing, even when it is not yet visible. And when we let go and allow things to unfold, they often do, in their own time, exactly as they are meant to.
How we honour the wisdom of the seasons.
At Story & Thread., you are invited to slow down enough to notice what the season beyond your window is offering, and to let it guide you. We create time and space to observe, to take creative cues from the natural world, and to mark the transitions and thresholds that punctuate the year. By weaving together seasonal reflections, poetry and prose, flowers and folklore, moon wisdom and the intelligence of the earth, we craft a sustainable container for creativity — a place to shape our stories, tend our inner landscape, and remember that we too are cyclical beings, with our own ebbs and flows, our own seasons of growth and rest.
Here, you are encouraged to value every season of the year and every season of your life — to find the gift in the fallow as much as the flowering, and to trust that even when growth is not yet visible, something is always becoming.
**Which season are you in right now, in the world beyond your window, in your creativity, and within yourself?
You can read more about seasonal living here…
COMMUNITY | we find comfort and strength when we gather together.
There is something that happens when women come together with intention. Something shifts; stories surface that might otherwise have stayed buried and creative energy moves more freely. In the company of others, we remember things we had forgotten about ourselves, we see things in a way we may have never previously seen, and we recognise feelings that feel instantly familiar.
Early human communities gathered around hearths that served multiple purposes — warmth, light, nourishment, protection, but also something less tangible and just as vital, the intimacy of sharing that happened in the firelight. Historically, the hearth was a place for the exchange of stories, and the reinforcement of connection and belonging across the long, dark nights.
Harvard’s longest longitudinal study on human flourishing tells us that the people who live the most fulfilled lives are those with a sustained thread of meaningful connection running through their lives. Yet we live in a society that over time has dismantled the structures of community; that asks us to prioritise self-improvement, self-care and self-regulation, when what we often need is kinship and co-regulation, the sense of settling when being held by others. We are so often expected to navigate and process our experiences alone, when the architecture of our nervous systems was built for connection.
A dear friend and fellow writer, Amy May, whose work and way of being has been important to me since the earliest days of my own mothering, writes about this with great clarity; the idea that so many of the things we seek in healing and self-improvement are things that community was always meant to provide. That being truly seen, held and witnessed, is not something that can happen in isolation, that it requires others.
My own understanding of this became visceral in the first months of my daughter’s life, which unfolded during the pandemic. The usual anchors of new motherhood were not available after the first few weeks — the family visits, the meet-ups with friends, my NCT group, or indeed any baby classes, all dissolved before they had really begun.
Alongside my daily walks in the woods, what held me were small, luminous circles of connection — online mother and baby courses, daily meditation and creative gatherings with women, many I had never met in person but whose faces I grew used to seeing in the little squares of their lives. It taught me that although gathering together in person carries a special kind of medicine, connection does not necessarily require proximity. That a small group of women gathered with intention, even through a screen, can be a source of warmth and steadiness.
How we find comfort and strength in community.
Story & Thread. exists as an act of resistance against the culture of solitude and individual striving — a place where gathering itself is understood as a creative and restorative act. Through A Softer Space, our in-person gatherings in North London; our online seasonal creative community spaces including Gather & Tend, and the new Your Story Starts Here workshop, we come together to tend to our creative work, to find, and to share our stories.
There is more to come in the seasons ahead — more ways to gather, to be in community around storytelling and the seasons, and more ways to be seen and to witness others in fullness. Watch this space…
**Where in your life are you craving more connection — and what might it feel like to be truly seen?
You can read and experience more community here…
Find your story with me.
As a summer gift and to thank you so much for continuing to be here weaving the Story & Thread. tapestry with me, I wanted to share something with you — Find Your Story is a gentle guide for makers, writers, creatives and visionaries who are quietly doing something extraordinary, and are ready to find the words to share it.
Your story is not separate from your work. It is the thread that runs through everything — the thing that connects you to your community, to your creativity, to the season around you and within.
The workbook moves through three simple steps: Finding (who you are and what you stand for), Shaping (your story and your voice) and Telling (your first next step in sharing your story with your community, and beyond). You can find the full PDF of the guide below…
You are invited to begin where you are, and whenever the time materialises. I hope it is something you will be able to immerse yourself in, mull over when life takes over, and return to again and again. We will be delving into this in more depth together in The Beauty Thread. community with the Your Story Starts Here workshop in autumn.
I hope you enjoyed reading the second part of All paths lead here. I would love to hear which thread resonates with you most, and whether anything surfaced as you read. Do share in the comments, I always love hearing from you.
With much high summer love,
P.S. Find out more about The Beauty Thread. community by clicking the link below…
Introducing The Beauty Thread. by Lyndsay.
Tending and telling our stories inspired by the quiet power of noticing beauty & wonder.
*creative gatherings | co-working | considered space | crafted PR*.
I hope you will join us, you would be so welcome…
Love You sis
I love this series, Lyndsay. Honestly, all the threads you’ve teased out tug at me but I think storytelling, softening, and community feel particularly important to me right now. I’ve been pretty absent from Substack in recent months but I so treasure spaces like what you’ve built here to return to. Thank you.❤️