Hi Subscriber First Name,

I hope you enjoyed the bank holiday weekend. As I land back at my desk, I’ve got a mix of cool things to tell you about but I’m also reflective about an anniversary today.

Firstly, I recorded a podcast with Anna Lundberg a little while ago and it went out yesterday. I often find it difficult to listen to myself speak so I was relieved when I nodded along to what I said.

The theme of Anna’s podcast is about our measures of success. It’s a huge body of work and Anna is a very talented podcaster. So it was a joy to navigate what success actually means when you strip away the salary and the status and instead, work backwards from what you genuinely need. It’s also the story of what happens when you stop fighting the parts of yourself that may no longer be needed.

I’m feeling proud of finding my voice and being brave enough to share what I’m finding on my way. Lots of the threads in this newsletter were covered so I’d love you to check it out.

It’s called ‘Reimagining Success with Anna Lundberg’ and can be found:

On Spotify here

On Apple Podcasts here

Listening back it made me think about how much has changed for me and recently, the momentum that’s building in my work. But I was also reminded of big changes in my life with one of those being marked today - the anniversary of my nana, Mary, passing away one year ago.

Mary was 104 when she died. And lots of what I said on that podcast - the enough-ness and the instinct for what actually matters, she seemed to just live. She didn't use a framework or read any self-help books she just got on with listening to her own voice and dancing to her own beat.

On the surface, Mary was unassuming. She didn't build anything you could point to - no company, no body of work and no public legacy but her magic was that she was just always there and that’s what I needed when I lost my mum at such a young age. My mum was an OG feminist hippy so maybe it’s cool that I can now recognise a longer lineage of people who trusted their instincts, thought freely and didn't need the world's approval to know what mattered. Maybe it’s not such a surprise that I found my path to where I am today.

What’s struck me recently is that Mary never needed to reframe success, she just never got distorted in the first place.

It’s one of the reasons I loved her so much. Here’s one of the last photos I have of us together:

For the last years of her life, I would do lots of things to help nana including her weekly food shop. And one of the things I found most interesting was that she used to ask me when she could get things like strawberries or tomatoes. In other words, when would they be in season?

She couldn't quite believe you could have them any time of year and wondered where I was getting them from! They had a vegetable patch in their garden and lived the rhythm of the natural world so for her these weren’t lifestyle decisions, it was just how things were.

So Mary would probably laugh at the idea of a ‘slow living’ Instagram account (if she’d have known what that was). It wouldn’t have been unkind, just with the amusement of someone who never stopped living that way and couldn't see what all the fuss was about. She fixed her own clothes, only bought what she truly needed and when it came to making decisions, relied on her own intuition.

So today, I would like to use Mary’s memory to remind us all that we haven't lost access to this ancestral wisdom.

We've been pulled away from it by convenience, by consumption and by a world that profits from our disconnection and then sells us the reconnection. But the knowledge is still there. The sense of season and cycle and the instinct for what's enough - none of that has gone anywhere, it just needs remembering. And remembering, it turns out, isn't that hard it just requires us slowing down long enough to notice.

This is what sits at the heart of my work and remembering our connection to nature. It’s not a treatment or a trend but the recognition that humans are nature and when we lose contact with the living world we lose connection from ourselves. Mary never needed a name for it, she just never forgot it in the first place.

Mary could also see cycles where the rest of us saw only chaos. The fractured politics, the sense that something is off and the disconnection as she'd seen versions of all of it before. Wars, pandemics, economic crashes. She seemed to know, not theoretically but in her bones, that things balance out. She kept a gentle hand on my back through some of my hardest years and a steady presence I couldn't fully name at the time but can see clearly now.

A lot of what I'm building is an attempt to offer something of that to other people. Places to slow down and spaces to zoom out. A reminder that the long view exists, even when we can't see it ourselves and that we already hold more than we think.

That’s why I’m so excited by the new events we’ve been building. We have the monthly gatherings at Patch in Bournemouth (with the next one this Thursday), the seasonal workshops at Four Acre farm aligned to the wheel of the year (next one on June 26th) and now we have the longer table dinners starting on the 5th June…

I’ve loved the idea of the longer table for many years. At one point, it was going to be the name of my business but it never felt quite right as I didn’t have all of the ingredients. But since meeting Kate at Four Acre Farm and becoming part of that community, I can now see that the idea needed grounding with deeply nourishing food in the most amazing settings.

So that’s what me and Kate are launching in to the world on 5th June (more details and tickets here). These monthly will be loosely facilitated by us to explore themes that seem to be sitting below the surface of our lives but we might be struggling to make sense of without other perspectives and experiences.

I think it’s something Mary would approve of and I’d like to think she’ll be sitting with my mum at the end of the growing table watching me find my way back to myself.

Upcoming Events

There’s so much on that I’ve brought back the events calendar. This is a place on my website where everything I’m involved in can be found.

So here it is, click here or on the image if you’d like to go and have a look at May and June.

Our closest event is on Thursday when we have:

The Natural Network at Patch

28th May: 10am - 12pm at Patch. Tickets here

This month our guest speaker is Dr Sukanya Ayatakshi-Endow from Bournemouth University, whose work on inclusive entrepreneurship asks exactly what we’ve explored today - what would it look like if we designed our business communities the way healthy ecosystems work?Rather than around one dominant species thriving at others' expense, but around diversity, reciprocity and the invisible relationships that let the whole system flourish?

We’d love you to come and join us.

Wrapping up

The remembering of who we are, doesn't require much. Noticing a season, enjoying a meal made from scratch or maybe even a conversation that goes somewhere real instead of staying on the surface where it's safe. We don’t need grand gestures, we need small returns to self and they're closer than we think.

Mary didn't have a practice or a philosophy, she just had a life, lived attentively, with love, a steady hand and a refusal to be pulled too far from what she knew to be true. I think that's available to all of us, not as a retreat from the world but as a way of moving through it differently.

That's what I'm trying to build with others - imperfectly, incrementally and one gathering at a time.

Until next week. Keep tending to those roots with compassion and curiosity,

Nick

Well that’s it for another week. But we don’t have to stop there.

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