Every single year on my birthday on the 27th November, I write myself a letter from older me to younger me. This year, I journeyed with my word of the year ‘courage’ and here I pour onto the page all the wisdom it has taught me straight from my personal journals. If you enjoy these explorations, I write exclusive monthly letters to my enchanted living community called ‘Whimsy World’ and I would be so deeply honoured to have you on my journey. You can sign up above this post or below. Meanwhile, there will truly never be words that fully sum up just how thankful I am to you for receiving this letter in your heart. Your support, encouragement, and friendship mean so very much to me and I celebrate this honour of writing to you in these letters so deeply. With love and infinite blessings, Georgie xoxo
Dear Younger Georgie,
As you celebrate another year around the Sun, let me hold our tender spirit and journey back on a year of evolution and embodiment of reclamation through our word of the year ‘courage.’
As Brene Brown says: “Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor – the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant “To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.”
Whilst the World tells us ‘courage’ is synonymous is bravery or heroic, here comes great profound historic wisdom that shows that it is no doubt that what is within our hearts is what we can think of as “ordinary courage.”
So, each day, we set to write to this courage deep in the heart. To dig deep into the layers of what it means to live a courageous life and uncover the richness of this word.
We started to ask ourselves: How can courage comfort us? How can courage expand us? What would courage do in this situation? How can cultivating courage strengthen our trust to surrender and to bring us with grace into the next thing that wants to flow?
Although it’s been a full year of journeying with courage, there are still so many layers and textures to this word that we just don’t know yet, and I expect we will continue to unravel these layers and journey with what it means to be courageous for the rest of our lives.
However, I think what we know for sure from 2021 is that, in many ways, to paint a life of courage is to pour liquid gold into every thread of our being, and to be more in tune with the whispers from the heart with everything we do.
For the heart pumps and flows blood around the body and without it we wouldn’t survive.
Moreover, Granny lived with a serious heart condition for most of her life, and even though when she passed last year a part of us went with her, we should still be sure that part of what it means to live a courageous life means that we are always holding her heart nestled close to ours.
And thus, ultimately, it’s imperative that we look after our heart with everything we have so that hers will always have a safe place to rest.
Our first test of courage in our year around the sun came with the arrival of the bitterness of an early 2021 Winter.
The bitter icy crust of the season swirled through our physical body with its usual fervency and expected intensity, and we allowed for the courage we sought to craft this year to hold us in the rest needed and gave ourselves permission to go slowly.
And then came a bitterness of a different metaphorical kind where deep reservoirs of shame tore through our heart and soul. And like the Hedgehogs we’ve come to so deeply cherish and nurture, we curled up against the internal and external bitterness and made a nest to hibernate deeply alone.
Sinking deeper into isolation, and truthfully, self-hatred, we cruelly cursed ourselves for unraveling all of the inner and outer nourishment we finally discovered last year.
And thus, rather than bathing ourselves in self-compassion and self-love in these moments of great urgency where, of course, these soul nutrients were so essential, here we were, drinking daily the poison of shame that was never ours to hold and allowing for it to nestle into every single crevice of our mind, body, and soul.
At this moment we truly thought the courageous journey was over. For the cocoon had truly become crystallised and had become our everything as it always does. Our greatest safety. The space that we feel most nourished in. And yet, what is courageous about wanting to hide away all the time?
With the arrival of the sweetness of Spring, here we were, still deeply ensconced in this self-made cocoon, clinging tightly to the silky softness that surrounded us, refusing to let go because let’s face it, this has always been like honey to the bee for us.
Sinking deeper and deeper into isolation through both self-cocooning and shielding as a vulnerable person in a global pandemic, courage beckoned us with her whispers and gently led us down an unexpected path of self-discovery.
For, with few people we could see, and far fewer places we could go, it meant that we were ideally primed and prone to giving ourselves the greatest courageous challenge of all: To go on a journey of finding out a lot more about who we really were and what we really needed in this life.
The first whisper and stepping stone on this courageous journey led me to us being guided to step back from social media.
We have always longed to be free of the shackles of these apps but equally held the very real fear of disconnection and abandonment from the world that had stopped us before as a multi-chronically ill being.
But we would tread gently: We would give this experiment 30 days and 30 nights and write daily about the experience as we surrendered to the act of pure flow of the cerebral friction of pen to paper and then look back and admire the process of becoming who we truly are. And then can keep it forever. For all our deepest truths, foibles, and discoveries along this path.
From the earliest days of our time away from a world with Instagram and Facebook, we learned to lean into the routines that helped us to feel settled and practiced all of the techniques we learned last year that could help to soothe us.
So, we spent our days alchemising pain by having the courage to truly feel it, and by also bathing ourselves in all the things we always find serenely magical.
To pour ourselves into art. To allow for music to transcend our being. To devote all our love to the birds and wildlife that surrounds us.
As time went on, once we were a month into our time away from social media we could really critically evaluate whether we, as fragile human beings, are simply built to be bombarded with so many different expressions of what it is to be human in any given day. Or to witness the copious ways of what it is to believe or to be alive. Isn’t this ultimately just too much for anyone to hold?
We soon realised that we dare to be known a little more deeply. Loved for both the great ecstasy of our enchanted heart and also to be loved by those who understand that we are also carrying immense grief.
The one-month experiment went from the intended one month to two effortlessly and before we knew it, here we were, nine months in with no desire to return to the digital world. Instead, we decided to stick to the routines that were helping us to feel so settled without seeking external validation or noise from the digital world.
Outside of healing a different sort of loneliness of the loss of some relationships and work opportunities changing with our time away from social media, we had more time than ever to focus on being human. And with this, to truly cherish the angels in our life who radiate their love to us in a myriad of indescribably magical ways that could never be encapsulated into words.
Moreover, we needed to hold onto the pearls of faith and trust from within, and accepting ourselves deeply for what was changing and being revealed within, and to love ourselves unconditionally as a flawed, feeling human, dealing with a period of transition in the best ways that any of us can.
This pathway courage took us down illuminated how uncomfortable, and yet how deeply needed this portal of self-discovery was as we learned to heal from feeling abandoned at our true core when we have come to realise that people can often love or admire a version of you in their head that isn’t the living, breathing, hurting, real you in the digital landscape.
Ultimately: By stepping back from social media we have recovered the person we were always intended to be. Just for us. Tears flow and flow and flow. Please realise how much of a deeply precious gift this is.
Furthermore, as a result of the above, we are now able to embody whimsy, wonder, and enchantment more deeply than ever before, and we continue to pour onto the online and offline spaces where it is wholly safe to show up just as we were divinely made.
May we remember to always place ourselves into places where we can thrive. When we are broken, allow us to question these environments and then allow for personal autonomy to remove ourselves. Let us remember to have a reverence for life and ourselves at all times.
In addition, we are also able to redirect this as fuel for deeper love and creativity in all we do. To be of love and service to the world with our wisdom and our journey. And above all: we have finally learned how to place our soul in our own hands.
How grateful we have been for this period of time where courage truly held us as we dug deep into the soil of the wounds we had, and how blessed we are to have had this period of deep introspection when we needed it most.
The beauty and serenity of late-Spring washed over us like a tender flower, and yet, a deep Prolactinoma and Gastroparesis flare cast a spell on us and left us bed-bound for the remainder of the season that continued to drift into the Summer.
The smog of grief and sadness of 2019 with haunting painful Prolactinoma flashbacks surrendered us in all the ways we feared it would.
As a result, it then meant that these sweetest Spring days were spent feeling tormented, bewildered, lost, and deeply, deeply alone.
Unable to work, to write, to type, or to use screens, our mind paced around and we pondered on these questions on a loop: What are we going to do now? What is to become of us and this swirling sea of creativity that we want to gift to the world? Could we have prevented this? Did we bring this on ourselves?
During this time, courage whispered a new path for us to discover: to allow for our imagination to make us feel refreshed, revitalised, and ready for each new day that greeted us where the blossom of our Spring tree-ripened into the abundant juicy fruits of Summer that we continued to wish would fuel the courage in our heart with the hopes, wishes, dreams, and opportunities that these seasons promise.
Through it all, we remembered the greatest lesson from battling that 2019 year: That feeling is alchemy and that these feelings that we expel can be the medicine that flows into our veins as the divine truth within your spirit. If only we have the courage and patience to be with it all.
Life was gently illuminating to us that hour after hour, and day after day, that our only work was to just be a vessel of receptivity that could let this period of time, and these courageous lessons nourish, restore, recalibrate and awaken our whole being.
Whilst we still of course took the time to sit with the grief of these flares we also allowed ourselves to embody our innate inner-magic that is our greatest source of personal solace.
To learn to memorise the sweet symphony of bird songs, to ask for help from those who love us, to escape into audiobooks, and to allow for the magic of curiosity to hold me with everything that came my way even, if, at times, I felt becalmed to constantly study this new way of being.
However, much like the first blossom that we glimpsed from our window, we sought to remind ourselves that each and every day something new from the day that has been, will then surely bloom into their next magnificent stage of being. And that as a mirror of Nature, that we are not separate from this.
With this, it really opened our hearts and mind to the fact that we will bloom when the time is right for us. Whilst the World seemingly opened up worldwide, here we were, in another forced lockdown of my own.
And yet, courage guided us one day at a time that we were still growing and blossoming in the most tender and gentle of ways these symbols from Nature were our constant reminder on our hardest days.
The ripened fruit of Summer had inspired and filled our soul with all the nourishment we needed to forage and store ideas for a series of Evergreen courses that could sustain us as we journeyed this period of the unknown with our health and work.
Birthed in the early Autumn, these e-courses would now guide creative Creatrix souls to start their own blogs and unique path of sacred creativity.
Together, we learned the value of stewardship and the resourcefulness of Nature that had truly washed over us from the seasons before. And we celebrate the profound beauty of the opportunity to cradle and witness those led to these treasured blogging creations where they can now allow for their own hearts to crack open with the reverent beauty of the stories and wisdom they hold.
On our least hazy days, we started a butterfly garden as a gentle recovery project to be nurtured as deeply as the garden birds. Placing butterfly feeders around the garden we then held onto hope that they would come. And like magic they appeared.
To quietly sit and watch these majestic creations felt indescribably special as they delicately sipped the sweetness of the nectar we had made for them and how they majestically weaved themselves from one flower to the next.
If life couldn’t gift us with even more magic, the late Summer greeted us with Hedgehogs that floated through the fiery orange leaves beneath the bird cafe and who have now made the garden their beloved base. Caring for them was the final jigsaw piece that welded together all our broken pieces.
In essence, the Spring and Summer taught us the power of continually seeking to be immersed in the sacred moments of the now, intuiting all that is sublime for us, and where we can remain open to the precious healing and magical significance of this very moment in time.
And now here we are in the Autumn and, for the first time in two years, we are set to quester into yet another pathway of courage as we tentatively pack our great comforts up and adventure to our beloved base of The Netherlands.
After all the trials, the tribulations, the sorrow, the grief, the pain, the frustration of the past few seasons, doesn’t stepping onto this particular path of courage just feel utterly miraculous?
Without a doubt, here’s what this year around the Sun has shown us so clearly: That there are truly innumerable rewards for a life steeped in courage.
For each and every pathway of our courageous journey has given us the blessed opportunities to grow and experience all the richness and meaning this human existence has to offer.
Next year the call for Simplicity is calling us so profoundly and let us waste no time in, together, sinking our soul deep into its wisdom.
But until then, let us always remember of this journey around the Sun that: ‘We built a home of courage inside our heart where we have everything we need and more.’
May we truly cherish the grand unveiling of the secret courage that has always been in our heart space waiting to be explored and made manifest.
Moreover, in those disenchanted moments where we cannot hear our courage roar immediately, may we also be reminded of all the ways we can ignite some magic within ourselves, and that we can always drown out the unwanted noise of life so that we can always taste the rapture and awe around us in whatever ways we are able to craft it from what we are given.
I’m so deeply grateful for this year of partnering with courage with you as a portal and quester into both human possibility in general and all the ways we sought it the most.
Now, younger Georgie, your one job is to try your hardest each and every single day to remember these courageous lessons and to always be in the most loving stewardship of your own being no matter what the days greet you with.
Please regularly slow down to taste the daily sweetness of life’s everyday heartbeat, start already to chase simplicity over complexity, compose a melody of all the things you find serenely moving, beautiful or comforting, and always be sure to delve into everything that makes you celebrate your very aliveness.
Above all: Take care of us. Take care of our heart(s). Take care of our spirit. Take care of our body. Take care of our mind. Take care of the hearts of those you so adore. Take care of the Earth. Take Care of every living thing. For we are all fragile living things exploring what it means to be human and on our own unique courageous pathways.
However, as well as the above, just know how wholly important it is to be you.
Don’t forever feel like a hermit who needs to float away in your unconscious when external life gets tough and make others wade through the mist to find you. It is safe to be seen, held, and loved in your own light, and also to share the tenderness of your inner world with others.
So, let’s please promise each other that we will never ever drink the poison of anyone again who tries to mold you to fit their ideal. Shame erodes the soul, yes, but only if you allow it to without checking in to bathe the wounds with love from time to time.
Just like those you cherish so much, you were also born as the magnificent being you were intended to be. It’s time to stop fighting that and remember this year’s courageous path to always seek the company of those who love you for the authentic essence you possess and then find all the ways to radiate that love and faith back out into the world as pearls of grace.
Holding you so very close,
Older Georgie xoxo
PIN ME FOR LATER….
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