Sowing seeds and shaping days.
learning to unfurl and thrive from a garden in May.
A warm hello to anyone new here, 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...
"May is the month of expectation, the month of wishes, the month of hope."
—Emily Brontë.
Hello my dear
How are you getting on this week?
I am feeling fully landed in May here in the UK and our trip to Greece feels like a distant, yet very sweet memory. Thank you for reading my postcards from the trip and my reflections about what opened up for me — I loved hearing more about your own relationship with the travels in your life and the places you hold in your heart.
Being back home for the foreseeable is both bringing me out into the garden and to shaping my days in the weeks, months, possibly years to come. I hope you enjoy reading my experience of May in the garden that feels deeply entwined with creating my own ecosystem to thrive…
A garden in May.
May brings me outside — I go from being curled up inside with candles, to being happiest on the bench beneath the soft pink climbing rose as it unfurls fragrantly. May holds softness underfoot and in the air; fullness in the abundance of lush green leaves; and a luminescence as the light grows — and there is still the potential for much much more.
As always in the garden there is a list of things I have intended to do and for various reasons I have not quite got around to — there are pots and beds that need tending, there is some clearing, tidying and feeding to do. I need to turn my attention to planting out the sweet seedlings that have thrived bravely thus far.
And yet there is also a lot that I need to leave to its own devices. For now, I must leave the straggling stems and browning leaves of the ‘gone over’ daffodils and the fading tulips to absorb as much sunlight as they can in hope that they will flower again next year. And of course the bluebells must be left well alone — remembering the message that their spells will be broken and future growth lost if they are disturbed.
As well as intentionally sowing seeds into seed trays indoors, I scattered handfuls of poppy seeds into the ground — I hope that by leaving them undisturbed some will make their way forth without any intervention from me. And amongst the wayward remnants of spring flowers, there is much unintended beauty to be found, as unexpected, self-seeded foxgloves reach their stems of towering tubular bells into the sky.
Feeling a shift in time.
Just as I have looked out to the garden to check in with myself through the seasons before, I feel my body entwined with my experience of the garden in May. As I am drawn outside, I am also called to shape my days, turning myself outwards, to create a more familiar rhythm with a loose structure, intentionally bringing in all of the aspects I want and need to fill my days with.
Sowing seeds and shaping days feels like one and the same.
I have mentioned a quiet call to gently move out of maiological time (a concept I discovered via
, the word itself derived from Maia, the Greek goddess of motherhood and who incidentally gives her name to the month of May), a time in early mothering “of mutuality, inter-relatedness, interaction and reciprocity. It is a slower time, closely connected to bodily rhythms”.1Prising myself out of maiological time means moving from a place solely of responsiveness in orbit of my young children, to a place of proactivity in creating a life of fullness, grounded in creative career aspirations that light me up from within, underpinned by my role as a mother and tied intrinsically to the spinning wisdom of cyclical, seasonal time.
Tending the soil.
And yet I don’t have it all figured out quite yet…
Before sowing seeds of intention, taking steps towards unfurling, and eventually blooming, I want to turn my attention back to the soil, to laying the foundations for lushness. Like in the garden, there is a delicate balance between tending and nourishing, and leaving time and space to create receptive conditions for ideas to germinate and flourish.
I nourish the soil by resourcing myself — by softening to rest and help with childcare, with grounding practices in my alone-time that lead me back to my centre, with gentle movement from the inside out and by orienting myself towards an artful life by living as creatively as possible.
I am moving from the place of ‘not enoughness’ woven into the story of being ‘just’ a mother for the past four years, to nurture my subterranean foundations that remain unshaken. I am realising that the next pages in my story will bring together all of the chapters that have gone before, knitting together the fragments to make a whole.
Growth is spurred on not only by newness but by tending to the existing and ever-evolving pieces of me. There is no rush, I am learning that the task of crafting a meaningful, sustainable life is worth doing slowly, poring over the details and falling in love with the process of becoming.
speaks to this idea of ideas forming whilst immersed in mothering in ‘Twelve Moons: A Year Under a Shared Sky’ where she describes the ‘domestic reverie’ of dipping into work and words whilst attending to the home — “Someone watching from the outside might see a mother tidying a home, but they would be missing the point. Thoughts are forming, germinating amongst the dirty plates, and they hold more power than people realise”.
Creating an ecosystem to thrive.
I made space for the visions and inward dreams of winter and to sit with the discomfort of growth in winterspring, together creating a fertile ground for a gradual unfurling.
Moving into late spring, I am leaning into the energy of fullness as I remember all of the parts of me are of equal importance and deserve to be seen. I am slowly crafting an ecosystem that entwines all of me with the deeper experience of everyday beauty and storytelling as a guiding force.
Speaking and writing into reality all that I want (and need) to fill my days with forms my weeks, and ultimately shapes how I live, whilst leaving space for spell casting and the emergence of unexpected beauty. I am giving myself short bursts of time to fulfil what I need to do, followed by moments of stillness, otherwise I am either drawn so deeply into the task I am doing that I forget the confines of time, or I succumb to a spiral of distractions.
At the same time, I am resolved not to feel frustrated by not managing to accomplish my ever-expanding vision list within the allocation of time I currently have. Instead I remind myself of the non-linear, cyclical experience of time and that we need the right conditions and space to thrive. I know that things will unfurl in their own time, perhaps with some surprises along the way. Here in May, there is still the potential for much much more.
If your body/mind were a garden what would you sow this spring?
And what can you leave alone to flourish undisturbed?
Thank you so much for reading — I hope we can chat more in the comments, or of course feel free to send me an email with your thoughts.
Lyndsay xx
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As quoted by Joanna Wolfarth in her post ‘Mothering Time’.
Such lovely musings on the seasons, Lyndsay. The spring experience is so different in Europe compared to the springs of my childhood and large part of my adult life in Australia. The explosion of life is so marked, here. There's a softness that is so soothing. I'm always surprised by the array of flowers that bloom suddenly from the ground, even in forests and fields. Thank you for a lovely read on this sunny Thursday in Finland.
Love the Emily Brent's quote 🌸🩷