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| These floorboards were once cattle fencing, reclaimed and laid by hand, and I rather love that the morning light falls on something built slowly. |
My Sweetest Mermaid Darlings,
and you, dear hearts of the Stillwater Petticoat Society,
This morning, before the kettle had even considered its gentle hum, I awoke with that soft, silvery awareness that comes only in the earliest hour — when the house is still, and the world has not yet remembered its noise.
I lay there a moment and whispered, quite simply, “Thank you for another day.”
And then, almost playfully, I asked, “What joy shall we discover today? What small delight has been tucked into the folds of it?”
It is a tender thing, this practise of greeting the morning before it greets you.
I have long believed — and not in a preachy manner, but as one woman confiding to another across a scrubbed pine table — that a lady must rise before her duties if she is to remain steady in her spirit. When my children were small, and life brimmed with timetables and lessons and sporting fields and church bells and casseroles, I would rise two or even three hours before the rest of the household stirred. The sky would still be indigo and the air cool and forgiving.
In those hours, I stretched my limbs gently, breathed deeply, prepared my breakfast in peace, and filled my journal with inked thoughts. At that time, I read scripture; now I sit in meditation. The form has altered, yet the devotion remains the same — a quiet tending of the inner garden before the outer world requests its share.
It was never about perfection.
It was about regulation.
When so many objectives were unfolding — homeschooling, driving to practises, managing the rhythm of a full household — I found that if I had first poured into myself, I was infinitely more capable of holding the day. Not rigidly. Not heroically. Simply steadily.
There is something profoundly anchoring about stretching the body before it carries responsibility, about breathing before speaking, about offering gratitude before answering.
I have learned — sometimes gently, sometimes through fatigue — that we cannot fill another’s cup from an empty teapot. A woman who waits until she is depleted before tending to herself begins to mistake exhaustion for virtue, and exhaustion is not virtue.
The morning ritual need not be grand. A few movements. A whispered thank you, a small notebook opened, or a cup held in both hands. Even five minutes of stillness before the world enters.
It is not selfishness.
It is sovereignty.
It is the quiet claiming of one’s own interior before the day asks for pieces of it.
I no longer wake to a house full of young voices, yet I continue the practise because it reminds me who I am before I become what is required. It makes me feel capable, even now — not in the frantic sense, but in the rooted one. As though my feet have found the sea floor before the tide begins to move.
If you are navigating many obligations, or even if your life appears outwardly calm, I would sit beside you and say only this: Rise a little earlier than the world expects of you.
Stretch your arms as though you are opening curtains in a small English cottage by the sea.
Breathe.
Give thanks.
Ask gently what joy awaits.
Then step into the day already nourished.
Not rushed.
Not striving.
Simply tended.
There is something rather magical about a tended woman.
She moves differently, speaks differently, and she does not spill over in agitation.
She pours.
Most affably yours 'til my next enchanting swim, LR
