Category Archives: Grace

Extraordinary Voices, Grace, Reflection

Beyond the Fairytale

Inspired by Emma Watson’s heart-to-heart with Jay Shetty on his On Purpose podcast, I penned this blog post. Her courage in sharing her journey of challenging societal norms struck a chord with me. Emma’s insight into how we often reduce life’s complexities to rigid binaries—this or that, black or white—resonated deeply. Her story of soul-searching and inner work inspired me to explore these themes further. Join me as we delve into some nuances that make life so beautifully unpredictable.

I highly recommend listening/watching the whole thing through

Love. It’s a word soaked in romance and adorned with fairy tale endings, yet its essence often eludes us. We’ve been fed a steady diet of Disney romances and Hollywood love stories, where the ultimate goal seems to be “falling in love.” But what happens after the credits roll? What about the journey beyond the first kiss or the wedding vows? In the real world, love is far more complex and dynamic. It’s a dance, a partnership, and sometimes, a battlefield where the stakes are high, and the rewards are profound.

For many of us, the concept of love was shaped by childhood fantasies—those sweet, letter-writing romances that seemed so perfect. But as we step into adulthood, reality hits. Real love involves navigating through misunderstandings, learning the art of conflict, and finding someone willing to dance the intricate dance of life with you. It’s about making someone feel safe—not just physically but emotionally. It’s about the little things, like responding to a text promptly or knowing when to give space. It’s about compatibility and vulnerability, the willingness to make micro-adjustments in the relationship dance.

In my own journey, I’ve come to realise that love is more about the everyday choices we make. It’s not just about the initial spark but about finding someone who is willing to engage in this never-ending dance of checking in, adjusting, and evolving together. This understanding is far removed from the binary notion of love many of us grow up with.

Jay Shetty and Emma Watson delve into this topic beautifully in their conversation on the “On Purpose” podcast. They explore how love is not about one person leading and another following, but about both partners engaging in a mutual exchange of teaching and learning. It’s a dance where humility is key—a humility that allows one to be taught without feeling led or misled. This kind of love is deeply fulfilling, as it challenges us and makes us grow.

Emma’s reflections resonate with many of us who have grappled with societal expectations, especially the persistent question, “Why aren’t you married yet?” This question often carries the implication that one’s worth is tied to their marital status. Yet, Emma’s insights remind us that marriage and partnership are not the ultimate markers of success. They are not benchmarks that validate one’s existence. Instead, love and partnership should be choices made from a place of wholeness and understanding of oneself.

In a world that often pressures us to conform to traditional timelines and milestones, it’s crucial to remember that love isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience. Real love respects the individuality of each person involved. It’s not about forcing a relationship into a predetermined mold but about nurturing it in a way that honors both partners’ purposes and visions.

Jay shares a poignant perspective on this: love is about learning from the other person and being open to change and growth. It’s about respecting what your partner values and how they evolve over time. This mutual respect and understanding are what make a relationship sustainable.

One of the most profound lessons from the podcast is the importance of truth in love. Real intimacy requires constant truth-telling, even when it feels risky. It’s about revealing deeper truths and being courageous enough to risk vulnerability. True connection thrives on this honesty and openness, setting both partners free to be their authentic selves.

As a society, we often romanticise love, overlooking the real work it takes to sustain it. We need to move beyond asking why someone isn’t married yet or why they haven’t followed a conventional path. Instead, we should hold space for people to live their truth, whatever that truth may be. Love is a deeply personal journey, one that should be respected and celebrated in all its unique forms.

Ultimately, love is not about fitting into a societal box. It’s about finding a partner who complements your journey and respects your individuality. It’s about creating a shared vision while honoring each other’s dreams and aspirations. So, let’s celebrate love in all its diversity, and let people’s hearts and choices be their own, free from judgment or expectation.

Grace, Nature, New Year, Reflection, Ritual, Storytelling

2025 – a year of Magic

In the depths of my soul, a wild spirit beats in rhythm with the earth. My heart pulses to the primal drum of nature, creating a symphony that balances strength and sensitivity. It’s a dance of the divine masculine and sacred feminine within me, reminding me that raw beauty lies in our imperfections. As I wander through life, I embrace both courage and vulnerability, guided by intuition and a commitment to conscious love. Each step I take is painted with the wild hues of authenticity, reminding me that growth flows as naturally as the changing seasons.

2024 was my year of Rewilding—a journey illuminated by the wisdom of trees. Each tree became a mentor, offering unique insights that guided my path. The enigmatic Pomegranate led me into the depths of my unconscious, encouraging me to interpret dreams and unearth hidden truths. The Horse Chestnut taught me the importance of weighing my decisions, balancing wisdom with caution. The Olive tree whispered of peace and harmony, while the Sugi tree called me to honor the sacredness of nature. The Scots Pine nudged me to step beyond my comfort zones, paving the way for a healthier, more fulfilling life. The mighty Oak instilled strength and self-belief, while the Ginkgo tree kept me anchored in the eternal present. The Ash tree guided me in mastering my relationships, and the Hazel tree imparted the crucial art of setting boundaries. Finally, the Yew tree, a symbol of regeneration, encouraged me to nurture new growth and practice self-care in moments of stillness.

And now, as we step into 2025, Magic becomes my guiding star. It’s a wondrous concept, weaving an enchanting tapestry of mystery and mysticism that invites me to connect with the magical beings that inhabit our world. I’m drawn toward mystical landscapes, yearning for the ancient wisdom of fairies, witches, and druids.

Learning to embrace new labels – a WayFinder and a Lightworker, I celebrate the power of authenticity. This journey into Magic encourages us to stay present, cherishing our unique paths and revelling in our wildness. The playful spirits of fairies remind us of the joy and creativity that flourish in nature-connected experiences.

Magic transcends mere transformation; it’s a sacred art of healing. Witches reveal the secrets of herbal remedies and natural spells, teaching us to tap into the Earth’s energies to restore balance and wellness. This healing magic mirrors the untamed beauty of the wilderness, inviting us to reconnect with our wild spirits. As we delve deeper into this magical realm, we are guided by the druids, who remind us of our intricate bond with nature and the human experience. They teach that we are part of a larger tapestry, woven with vibrant threads of life, energy, and enchantment.

This year’s Celtic Compass reading – from a delightful angels and ancestors oracle deck – has illuminated my path and deepened my connection to ancestral wisdom. Each direction shines a light on my personal growth and spiritual alignment. The Eagle, reigning from the center, encourages me to rise above limitations and embrace new possibilities with love and healing energy. In the North, the Winter Wolf fosters resilience and inner strength, grounding me amid winter’s energy of introspection. The East, represented by the Snake, invites renewal, urging me to shed old skins and reveal my true potential. The South, with the Mirror Guardian, calls for self-reflection, reminding me of my inherent beauty and strengths. In the West, the Traveller signifies new journeys—both external and internal—encouraging emotional growth and ancestral support. The Northeast, guided by the Witch, emphasises choosing light and positivity amid challenges. In the Southeast, the Seer invites me to envision a brighter future, harnessing my intentions to shape my destiny. The Southwest, with the Water Guardian, encourages me to dive deep into my emotions, recognizing them as soulful messages. Finally, the Northwest brings the Peacekeeper, a reminder of harmony and the power of choosing peace over conflict. This reading is a magical journey of self-discovery, healing, and transformative power.

Words can barely capture the mind-blowing signs and synchronicities that unfold as I align with this wild path. My Celtic Compass reading this morning left me with goosebumps and brought tears to my eyes. Just last year, I embarked on the journey of having my birth chart done for the first time. This deep dive into my soul’s story, alongside incredible energy healing sessions, has been restorative. I’m healing childhood wounds, breaking ancestral patterns, and learning to be fully present in the magic of each moment. I’m manifesting my dream life while leaving space for wonderment, spontaneity, and, of course, a whole lot of Magic.

If you look a little closer at my journey of the past few years since coming across this whole concept of a Word for the Year, you can’t help but notice a connection, a tapestry as my story evolves weaving all these spectacular threads together…. and more especially still as I learn surrender and letting go of all the no longer serves…… Magic, I tell you…

Reclaiming Wild
Light
15 Years Later

P.S. #odysseyofmywildheart – I have been teasing this on my social media in the latter part of last year…. an explanation coming soon!

Beginnings, Creativity, Dreaming, Grace, Gratitude, Reflection, Ritual, Storytelling

2024 – My Year of Wild

‘Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it is about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you.’

Paul Coehlo

It started a couple of years ago and a deal made with the benevolent Universe that I would learn to Trust my intuition. It would be a journey to recognising and reconnecting with that calm, clear voice of authentic Me as separate from ego. But what a journey it has been! My Year of Trust in 2022 brought me dreams come true and an indelible lesson in how to balance what I can make happen and what I invite to let happen.

2023 has been My Year of Light and Love, the next steps on my growth journey. To find balance in how I love, but also to embrace the ‘who I am inside’ and finally allow her to be loved just as she is – Sunshine Reflected. Another incredible year of synergy and alignment and abundance, living my Dream Life. Choosing the way of love over fear always.

In this Love Lightly space, I found a muse with grace and wisdom beyond his years. He has a mind and heart wide open, paying close attention to each one of my details knowing how to take me to my very limits. He has actual depth and insight, resilient, and with a bite that keeps the world in check. So I have finally started writing the book I somehow knew was always in me. I am being pushed creatively and that is showing up in my art too.

At this time of reflection and setting intention for the coming year, some words are showing up in my journalling repeatedly….

If you have read any of my other writing, you will know that I have a firm belief in the energy that connects All that is. I have found that tapping into this energy at a cosmic level is what drives intuition and instinct. Overwhelmingly this energy is good and benevolent, in my experience. So part of my reflection time involves looking for guidance and wisdom from Nature and Universe:

The tree wisdom card I pulled from my oracle deck as I thought about my word for 2024 was the energy of Regeneration from Yew.

I used the wonderful energy of the recent full moon in Cancer on 26 December as a focus for this end of year reflection. The last full moon of 2023 brought an invitation to come back to our hearts as we prioritise nurturing ourselves to become the safe space we long for.

Venus is in Sagittarius at the moment until 23 January, with a clear energetic shift that inspires a celebratory approach to life, love and relationships, moving closer to authentic self. Sagittarius inspires us to recover our connection to our authentic, undomesticated self, to Natural Laws, and to our intuition, being drawn to freedom, authenticity and honesty. During the upcoming days, chances to recognise how freedom and connection aren’t mutually exclusive, discovering how to nurture both the need for intimacy and the desire for independent exploration of life.

A few months ago, I wrote about Reclaiming Wild, all about taking back the concepts of  Wild, Wildness and Wilderness as part of my Soul’s vocabulary – a way of expressing true nature-connectedness, a pattern of my Soul, my Soul Maker and the season I now find myself in living my Dream Life.

What a lovely concoction of Cosmic and Nature energy to feed mind and heart and set intention!

So, on the foundation of two previous words for the year, a journey back to authentic Me has begun. A reclaiming of Wild and Untamed Me, a fully reconnected back to Nature version of Me. Embracing my Wild Heart. Empowering a balanced sacred-feminine, divine-masculine essence of Me. So I am better able to live wholeheartedly and fulfill my Great Purpose.

Me empowered, rewilded, reclaiming my Wildness means pure space is open for empowering Other, empowering Wilderness. I hope by reclaiming my internal Wild, I will be more in tune with Nature. This spiritual rewilding enabling me to better serve the Conservation Collective I am part of. This Collective is all about the job of physical rewilding as a Nature-based Solution for the environmental and social ills of our time.

Rewilding. It is messy and real and imperfect. A bit like Nature really – wild, messy and full of imperfection but Nature knows how to embrace her magic. Understanding more deeply what it means to be human, to be beautifully imperfect, to be wonderfully lost at times. I am excited about embracing my magic and my happy wanderer ways in 2024 – My Year of Wild 🖤

Dreaming, Extraordinary Voices, Grace, Gratitude, Human Wildlife Coexistence, Joy, Nature, Reflection, Storytelling, Travel, Values, Wildlife Conservation

Reclaiming Wild

Wilderness

Have we forgotten
that wilderness is not a place,
but a pattern of soul
where every tree, every bird and beast
is a soul maker?

Have we forgotten
that wilderness is not a place
but a moving feast of stars,
footprints, scales and beginnings?

Since when
did we become afraid of the night
and that only the bright stars count?
or that our moon is not a moon
unless it is full?

By whose command
were the animals
Through groping fingers,
One for each hand,
Reduced to the big and little five?

Have we forgotten
That every creature is within us
carried by tides
of earthly blood
and that we named them?

Have we forgotten
that wilderness is not a place,
but a season
and that we are in its
final hour?

Ian McCallum

It was a very cold August morning as we set off before sunup on our routine morning drive around the reserve. I grabbed my favourite merino wool blanket scarf at the last minute before the vehicle left base. It was only when we got back to camp I realised the scarf was gone. As the sun rose and the morning warmed up, we all slowly delayered. I had folded up the scarf and tucked in behind me on the seat but it must have slipped out as we negotiated the bumpy dirt tracks of the reserve. It had been a risk to take the scarf along, I knew it at the time.

Two days later, on another morning drive, this time in the middle of my wildlife track and sign test, we rounded a corner and there on the side of the road was my scarf! Not all in one piece though. I had a little help gathering up all the damp scraps of wool, dirt and vegetation encrusted and smelling distinctly wild. Back at base I laid them all out trying to put the wool scarf puzzle back together. Turned out only one small section was missing!

Hyena tracks were all around the scene of the scarf wreckage so the conclusion was that younger members of the reserve’s clan had found my scarf and had a good old play. Some of the holes in bits of scarf look very much like bite marks and the centre of the scarf was ripped by claws.

The pieces of my favourite scarf were carefully packed away as my year of adventure and wandering continued.

As I have settled into my homecoming these past months, I have found time to stitch the hyena-mauled scarf back together. It as been a soulful experience and given me pause to reflect and meditate on Wild, Wildness and Wilderness.

Recently, my mom reminded me about the incredibly inspiring words of Ian McCallum. I started this post with his poem, Wilderness. I can’t express just how much his words resonate with me. I have such a Wild Heart and consider myself a bit of Wildhearted Revolutionary.

In the world of biodiversity conservation, Rewilding has become the latest in a long line of buzz words. We associate this concept as a good thing – a nature-based solution for tackling the environmental and social ills of our time.

But Wild, Wildness and Wilderness are terms very often having negative connotations such inhospitable, lack of discipline or restraint, lack of sound reasoning, neglected or abandoned or a position of disfavour, badlands or wastes.

Today I reclaim Wild, Wildness and Wilderness as part of my Soul’s vocabulary – a way of expressing true nature-connectedness, a pattern of my Soul, my Soul Maker and the season I now find myself in living my Dream Life. I claim my Wildheartedness. I claim my Wildness. I claim back Wilderness for me and all my Soul Tribe.

Stitching my hyena-ripped scarf back together has become a symbol for me of my connection to Wild and Wilderness. My own metaphor for the journey I am on, connecting me to where I have been and where I am now.

A little bit of encouragement today to reclaim your Wildness 🖤

Find your peace in true Wilderness 🖤

Africa, Birth Place, Blessings, Extraordinary Voices, Family, Girl Empowerment, Grace, Gratitude, Ordinary Women, Reflection

August in Mzansi

August is Women’s Month here in South Africa and we have just celebrated National Women’s Day on 9 August.

Finding home again in this land of my birth, I have spent a little time reflecting on why the need for a day, a whole month even, to celebrate women. My bestie reckons every day should be women’s day and he is right. But then I do wonder if these ‘days’ provide a good time to pause and consider the theme of that ‘day’. For example, we acknowledge Lions on 10 August and Elephants on 12 August. Actually I love that these two species’ ‘days’ fall in Women’s Month. A chance to champion Matriarchs and Lionesses in all their wisdom and fierceness!

My ponderings this August have largely centred around my femininity and how I feel about being a woman in the world today. I realise this is an incredibly personal experience and I am only speaking for myself in what I am relating here.

My femininity is something I have never struggled with. I am innately feminine despite many interests perceived as more masculine in nature.

Feminism, on the other hand, is something I have struggled with over the years. I should not struggle with the concept of Feminism, right? With the definition as ‘the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of gender equality’, what is there to struggle with?

I suppose part of it comes down to that human failing of taking things to extremes. Our quest as a species for equality and balance seems a constant challenge. So, where perhaps many others have been faced with toxic masculinity in their early life experience, I have come into contact more with toxic femininity labelled as feminism.

Not in my family, please understand. I have the most phenomenal of female role models amongst my relatives and I could not be more overwhelmed with gratitude to my mom, sister, grannies, great grannies, aunts and cousins for their love, support and ‘sisterhood’.

Female friendships are what I have found difficult over the years. Being part of a group of girls always seemed complicated with lots of mind games I was not cut out for. That stuff utterly perplexed me, still does. I wear my heart on my sleeve and so was totally out of my depth in this ‘mean girls’ world. As a result, most of my closest friends growing up were male.

What I am learning is that much of the negative experience around female friendships is born from trauma and disillusionment with society’s expectations of us as females. I think many of us have repeated, unconscious societal messages that pit us against one another instead of fostering kindness and compassion and embracing each other in our shared feminine experience. More recently, as I have started to delve into the concept of ‘Sisterhood’, I am beginning to realise the magic that lies here. The first time I was really intrigued by the Sisterhood concept was in reading The Awakened Woman: remembering & reigniting our sacred dreams by Dr Tererai Trent. I am currently working through the book again, this time as an audiobook which is read by the author. The beautiful African lilt of her voice makes experiencing this book an extra special experience. Dr Tererai has a whole section of her book talking through the power of female friendships and forming a sacred sisterhood.

Sisterhood
the feeling of kinship with and closeness to a group of women, an association, society, or community of women linked by a common interest

I have become aware that my strong bond with the females of my family is a form of Sisterhood. I have also become aware that I have stumbled into a Sisterhood of women in Conservation – our love of Wild truly connects us. I think to some extent it is that shared trauma and disillusionment with society’s expectations of us as females that I mentioned previously that connects us. I started trying to list the names of these phenomenal women I recognise as part of this Sisterhood. I lost count. Wow, what a privilege! How is this my life!? To be aligned with these ecowarriors, to know their names, to have shared the road, to have spent time fireside under starry African skies, to have belly laughed and ugly cried together in our shared Sisterhood is a beyond-words honour.

And on top of all this, I have my Anam Ċara (Soul-friend) Sisterhood….

“Anam Ċara is a Celtic phrase that loosely translates as “soul friend.” It describes a sacred relationship that is founded in connection, authenticity, trust and respect….. a Celtic philosophy….. that two souls that experience a unique and deeply personal connection will be stronger together than they are apart.”

So this month of August here in Mzansi, I am full of love and gratitude for all the amazing women in my life – my Sisterhood. I am thankful for what it means for me to be a woman in my world. It is safe and full of love and care unlike the female experience of so many other women in this world. I am also aware in appreciation for the wonderful men in my life and how they are just as much a part of this celebration as my Sisterhood. I see you all. I am because We are.