Love letters to the seasons of my life.
making sense of my world with words.
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.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
— Joan Didion.
Hi everyone
I hope you are finding your way into the quiet magic of October…how is it feeling for you?
The September shift left me feeling slightly scattered, eager to find ease in the overwhelm and a rhythm to my week. Still a work in progress but after writing about trusting in the unseen expansion underground as we head into the darker part of the year, I feel a little more anchored and a little less unmoored. I hope this thought is helpful to you too…
I have been thinking about what my roots mean to me — they take the shape of my family, my home and its history, familiar surroundings, my ancestry, spending time in the woods, memories and nostalgia of growing up, which led me to think about how I make sense of my thoughts and where my stories are held...
Finding a rare journal entry from within the otherworldly mists of my early mothering days led to me retrace the path of my stories…
It seems that I have a complicated relationship with journaling — I love the idea of sitting down with a notebook and witnessing my thoughts unfold as they spill and condense into inky shapes on the page, yet in reality, there seem to be endless ebbs and fleeting flows in my practice.
An enduring love letter.
Since childhood, I have adored the beauty, form and tactility of notebooks, journals and diaries but my fondest memories are of cushioning my thoughts in the form of a letter — in the back and forth of conversation with another, of finding likenesses and differences in what we think and how we live; and of course the joyful anticipation of finding a handwritten letter addressed to me on the doormat.
I spent many childhood years writing to penpals - I don’t remember exactly what we wrote to each other, but I do remember sensing the outline of a person and the subtle shading of their life emerging from the page as they wrote from addresses that thirty years later, I still remember by heart.
As a teen, the details of everything from my day-to-day to the depths of my dreams would find their way onto lined school paper in letters to close friends — the pages then painstakingly folded into an elaborate origami-style envelope in an attempt at privacy.
As we outgrew the high school versions of ourselves, we lent on the first iteration of Facebook which at the time was a university network — writing brazenly on ‘walls’ and more quietly in private messages to stay firmly connected as we moved to different cities around the country, and travelled the world.
‘Work email’ became the way of telling the stories of our twenties, crafted in the in-between moments of our first jobs — a world of busy commutes, office politics and after-work drinks, as we forged our paths in careers that we sought out, or that found us.
Words in the earth and in the air.
In contrast, my days of early motherhood (which coincided with the worrisome weeks leading up to the Covid pandemic), left me with no time, space or ability to find the words to describe the all-consuming metamorphosis I was experiencing. As my exquisitely sensitive baby daughter pulled me into her, I was unravelling and discovering layers of myself but the new shape of me was a blur on the page.
Instead, my early mothering experiences were absorbed by the roots of ancient trees during long walks in the woods with a trusted confidante; babies cocooned in slings. Words of reassurance, encouragement, solidarity and extraordinary epiphanies were shared under the shelter of leaves as we found our feet in our new roles, and on the earth.
Walking and talking in the woods had a reassuring sense of aliveness — a balm for the body and a salve for the soul. Each time doing so reengaged my own senses and I felt a small homecoming.
During the difficult days, I could sit feeding my unsettled baby on a log, finding support from the fallen tree and the thought that I could be inhabiting this moment at any time in history — leaning into the strength of all the generations of mothers who had been there before me.
As well as deep in the ground, the musings of my motherhood exist in the ether — via the unexpectedly affirming medium of voicenotes. They offer an often spontaneous, uninterrupted insight into a new sort of life; an internal monologue and stream of consciousness, much like the uninhibited letter writing of my childhood.
From my notebook.
As mentioned, I did recently come across one journal entry from the end of April 2020, when my daughter Lila was three months old and so nearing the end of the official ‘fourth trimester’,1 though in reality that level of intensity seemed to last around one year. The entry is a list of general, sometimes contradictory, observations in the style of practical list (to myself…?!) which was perhaps my way of trying to contain and rationalise the swirling nonsensical experience…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Story & Thread. to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.