What's enchanted you this week?

buzzards, tomatoes, poetry and a different kind of power

Welcome to another inspired week, and to new subscribers who have joined our merry band. And thank you to all of you who keep on reading and supporting me. I deeply appreciate you!

What’s been enchanting me this week?

photo: Megan Clark @unsplash.com

We have several pairs of buzzards in our locality and I love to watch them soar on the air and catch the thermals. I have seen them several times this week on my walks. Somehow I feel a huge sense of peace and awe in their presence.

I’m also enchanted by my tomatoes. They are a whole new variety that I’ve never grown before and the fruits are just starting to swell. They are about the only thing I am watering at the moment as we have had no rain to speak of in our corner of England for several weeks now. I use as much ‘grey’ water from the house as I can.

And this…

This gift of a post from

Poetry Notes from Pelle

(my lovely Hubby sent it to me).

The Most Enchanted Version of You

So many beautiful lines like this:

“…start measuring your day
not by what got crossed off,
but by what made you feel a little more alive.”

and this:

“Maybe the most honest version of you
was never the most efficient,
but the most enchanted.”

It’s one of those pieces of writing that ripples over you like a clear stream flowing over a pebble. Every time I read it, my soul whispers ‘thank you’.

A different kind of power

This may seem like a spurious link, but I hope you can follow my thinking around the idea of being ‘the most honest version of you’. I mentioned last time that I had been to see Jacinda Ardern (former PM of New Zealand) speak in London as part of her book launch. I’m yet to finish her book, A Different Kind of Power; I’m on chapter two. So this isn’t a review of the book, it’s a sharing of my impression of the woman who was on stage on that day in June. What struck me was that, in that moment at least, Ardern was the most honest version of herself.

She didn’t shy away from talking about the realities of leading a country and the bear pit of politics, but she did so with humility rather than hubris. She presented herself as a very real and ordinary person who grappled with an extraordinary job, for which she never truly felt prepared. She spoke candidly about her ‘confidence gap’ and ‘imposter syndrome’, and reframed it as a strength rather than a perceived weakness, leading to humility around not having all the answers and a willingness to bring in experts and advisors with greater knowledge and experience.

She posed the question: “What if we focused on what imposter syndrome can bring to us, instead of what it takes away?”

She had initially regarded herself as too sensitive and thin-skinned to survive in politics, and yet when in parliament she made the decision that she was unwilling to change who she was (a crier, a hugger and a worrier) and ‘armour’ herself against the challenges of political life.

She spoke about the realities of being only the second woman in history to have a baby while being in office (the other was Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto), and described how she was waiting for the results of a pregnancy test in the same moments she was waiting to hear if she would be the next PM. She spoke of how she kept the pregnancy secret for the first twenty weeks of her premiership (largely to demonstrate that her priorities had not shifted) and her fears that her morning sickness would get the better of her as she was sworn in. And even though she had a ‘village’ of support after baby Neve arrived (her partner, Clarke, became a stay-at-home dad, her mother helped out, aides often did the baby-sitting), she still was not immune from the parental guilt.

Sadly, she was also not immune to a campaign of hatred and misogynistic vitriol, including repeated death threats to her, her young daughter and family, which seemed to be way beyond the bounds of normal and reasoned political debate and was unprecedented in New Zealand political history. She acknowledged that leading her country through three years of crises (including a pandemic, a massacre and a volcanic eruption) had called for challenging decisions, some of which made her unpopular despite the achievements of her government. Still, one wonders how she faced the vitriol with equanimity and the toll it must have taken behind closed doors.

If anything it seems to have galvanised her belief in the potential for empathetic leadership in politics, and she did not flinch in her focus on a different kind of power including more kindness and compassion coexisting with strength and courage.

My lasting impression of her was of a down-to-earth woman, still full of hope (and boy do we need some of that right now) for a more compassionate, kind and empathic world where we are focused more on what brings us together than the othering that divides us. And her steely determination to not give up on that ideal, even when the world seems to be going in the opposite direction. This quote from the end of the book gives an insight into her conviction:

As a child I remember wondering why my dad [a police officer] saw any good in the world at all, when he saw the very worst of it. And when I was prime minister, I saw moments of true darkness too. But there’s an inverse feature to seeing the world at its most brutal, because those are also the moments that show people at their most humane. Those are the moments when I saw that it was possible for people to galvanise behind their collective humanity. Sometimes those moments are small. Other times, they create a ripple that sweeps across a country.

When reflecting back on that afternoon with Jacinda Ardern, I am reminded of the words of Dr Pippa Grange (British applied psychologist, author of Fear Less, and former Head of People and Team Development at The Football Association):
"You don't have to choose between being wholehearted, loving, kind and soulful, or winning. You can do both, but the bridge that you must cross is vulnerability."
Jacinda Ardern is the embodiment of that.

I’ll leave you with an image of my enchanting tomatoes. Until next time…