Returning to the Long Form

I would like to start by diving into the whole concept of me, not really being pro fast-consumption information and the modern-day pressures of algorithms and all the rest of it.

I’ve decided that I will keep creating content for Instagram as much as I can, but I will strive to provide quality over quantity from my own personal view and my own reality. I’m sure it is more meaningful for people to connect to something like that, opposed to bait hooks, highly edited content, or even artificial intelligence generated information that does not come from me, my soul, or really from the earthly experience itself.

There can be truths within that kind of information, but I often feel it lacks the depth that a human can offer.

The challenge is that depth comes at the price of content being too long, too elaborate and too wide to fit neatly into a five-second reel or even a thirty-second reel. (Like seriously??? How much of that information do we even attain)

So instead, I would like to share some of the themes that are currently very alive in my life and explore them more deeply. My hope is that through these experiences, musings and observations, I can connect with people in a more meaningful way.

The first theme that feels very alive for me right now is food.

Particularly with some of the political outcomes we have seen lately, I feel we need to rethink our relationship with food, what food actually means, what it should be and what we should know about it.

In many ways, I see parallels between modern food and modern social media and media. Just as social media encourages quick consumption through endless doom-scrolling, our food is often becoming increasingly obscure, less transparent and more of a mystery. It is not something I particularly enjoy or appreciate.

I often wonder how that affects our health.

How much of our health is connected to our lifestyle?

How much is connected to our daily choices, our priorities, our goals and the way we choose to live?

As part of exploring this theme, I will be sharing more about the seed collection I am curating, the crops currently growing in our garden, and the projects happening here at The Rock Ballymacavany. I hope to give regular updates on where we are at, what is happening, and what seems to be working particularly well within our Irish climate.

The second theme that is very alive for me is women.

I find myself diving deeper into questions around what it means to be a woman.

All the gifts and all the curses that can come with having a womb.

What is our relationship with our womb? Do we even have a relationship? Do we truly understand what it is?

I would like to explore sexuality in the most caring, beautiful and life-giving way that it can be.

But equally, I want to acknowledge the horrific things that can happen when sexuality is exploited, invaded, not welcomed, and how deeply traumatic those experiences can be for women and men alike.

A huge inspiration for me recently has been the book Vagina by Naomi Wolf. It is an incredible book and absolutely not what you might expect from the title. It is deep, heavy and at times difficult to digest.

In many ways, I am still digesting it.

I am still processing it in my head, in my being and in my heart. It has made me reflect on how much hurt exists in this world, how wounded we are as a society, and how much healing remains to be done.

This theme naturally extends into our life cycles as women, from maiden to mother to crone, and the plants that have traditionally accompanied and supported women through these different stages of life.

The third theme is grief.

Grief is something I have encountered many times in my life, as most of us have, and more recently through the passing of my grandmother.

I am very accepting of the fact that everything has an expiry and that nature is cyclical. So are we. We are not separate from nature; we are part of it.

What surprised me this time was not the grief itself, but the whirlwind it created within my inner landscape.

It brought to the surface so many things that did not seem directly connected to the person I was grieving. Instead, it illuminated other places within me that needed attention.

I feel I am currently in a state of processing and,

as we all seem to do every few years,

recycling myself and upgrading into whatever comes next.

Alongside grief, I want to explore emotions more broadly. The emotional field itself. How we process emotions, how we support ourselves through them, and how we learn to navigate them.

It is something every single one of us deals with daily, yet none of us are handed a manual on how to do it.

So perhaps these will simply be my musings on that journey.

The final theme that feels very alive for me right now is heart resonance.

For me, this is all about dropping down into the heart field and living from that place.

What happens when we act from there?

What does it unlock within us as humans?

This is something that has actually been heavily researched and studied over the past few decades, and it is gradually becoming more visible. Yet for me, it is also something deeply personal and intuitive.

When I take the time, dropping into that space comes quite naturally.

I often think it is something we all knew as children.

It is that feeling of walking outside, stepping into nature, and immediately entering a state of awe and wonder. You are simply there, fully present, soaking it all in without needing to explain it or analyse it.

You may not even know what information is being exchanged between yourself and the natural world around you, but something is happening.

Because we are nature.

We are not separate from it.

We are part of the same thing.

By dropping into the heart field, I feel we become more attuned to our environment. We become capable of receiving insights, nudges and understandings that help bring us into greater balance.

Nature has its own cycles, energies and emotions, just as we do.

There is a relationship there.

A correlation.

And perhaps remembering that relationship is one of the most important things we can do.

These are the themes that have been alive for me over the past few months. They are the things I find myself returning to again and again.

Food.

Women.

Grief.

The heart.

So this feels like a good place to begin.

A slower place.

A deeper place.

A place where I can share not just information, but the thoughts, experiences, questions and observations that sit underneath it.