The Women Whose Windows I Once Looked Through

My dear Mermaid Darlings,

I have had something upon my mind of late, and I thought perhaps we might sit with it together for a little while.

There were women I admired many years ago; women whose books, homes, gardens and artistic lives seemed to possess the very feeling I was longing to create in my own. I would look at the rooms they had fashioned, and the work they had made, and something within me would whisper, There, you see; it is possible to live that way.

I did not know these women personally, although I sometimes felt that I did. That is the curious intimacy of reading another woman’s books and being invited, through photographs and stories, into the small domestic corners of her world. You come to recognise the chair beside the fire, the flowers upon the table and the view from the kitchen window; and, after a while, it all begins to feel rather like visiting someone you have known for years.

I was a different woman then. The life I wanted was already alive inside me, but so much of it had not yet appeared in the physical world. I knew that I wished to write and paint. I knew that I belonged amongst old houses, weathered garden gates, embroidered linens and all the dear little remnants of another age. I knew there was a mermaid within me and an author too; although neither had yet claimed quite so much of the shore.

These women seemed to have arrived there before me. One lived in a beautiful old house that appeared to hold an entire world within its walls. Another had arranged her life according to an earlier time and seemed entirely untroubled by whether the modern world understood her. I watched from afar and admired what they had made; perhaps more deeply than I realised at the time.

Many years have passed, and their lives have changed. The old surroundings I once loved are gone or altered. The rooms no longer hold the same enchantment for me; the gardens do not stir anything within my heart. What they find lovely now is not always what I find lovely, and there is nothing wrong in that. They are quite entitled to live in whichever manner brings them comfort.

Still, if I am being perfectly honest with you, I have felt disappointed. It sounds almost foolishly personal when I write it down. These women did not promise to preserve their lives for me. They never agreed to remain forever inside the pretty picture in which I first discovered them. Yet when I see what became of those lives, I feel the oddest little sinking in my heart; rather like returning to a house one adored in childhood and finding that the old trees have been cut down and the windows replaced.

The house belongs to someone else; nevertheless, one grieves a little. I have wondered why it should matter to me at all.

I believe it is because I was never looking only at their houses or their gardens. I was looking at a possibility for myself.

Without quite knowing it, I had asked these women to keep a little piece of my dream safe for me. Their lives held the outward evidence of things that were still waiting to unfold in mine. When I saw the books, the artwork, the old rooms and the unconventional choices, I felt less peculiar and less alone. Somewhere in the world was another woman who understood that beauty was not frivolous; that a home might be part shelter, part storybook and part declaration of who one had chosen to become.

There was another little sorrow tucked amongst all of this. One of the women I admired was once terribly discouraging to me about my own art and my hopes of becoming an author and artist. I was younger then, and her words found a tender place to settle. She may not have remembered them for more than an afternoon; I remembered them for years.

It is a painful little thing when someone whose work helped you believe in your dream appears unable to recognise that same spark when it begins glowing inside you.

I do not dwell upon it now, nor do I wish to make her unkindness the centre of the story. It simply belongs there as part of the truth. Perhaps I had given her opinion such weight because I had already given her life more authority than it ought to have possessed.

That is the part I understand differently now.

I thought I was admiring these women; in some ways, I was recognising myself before I had fully become her.

The longing I felt when I looked through their windows did not belong to them. It belonged to the woman within me who already knew what she wanted. She was gathering clues wherever she could find them; an old house here, a painted page there, a woman brave enough to live differently. She was quietly collecting the pieces of herself.

Perhaps we all do this for a time. We find someone who appears to possess the freedom, beauty or confidence we desire, and we place her a little above ourselves. We begin to imagine that she knows something we do not. Yet she may only be showing us what our own soul has been trying to say.

When her life changes, or when she disappoints us, we feel as though something beautiful has been taken away. But perhaps nothing has been taken at all. Perhaps the beauty had already done its work.

I can be grateful for what those women once awakened in me without pretending that I still wish to follow them. I need not criticise the lives they have chosen; neither must I convince myself that I find those lives beautiful. Their tastes are their own, just as mine are mine.

There is a freedom in admitting that.

I once needed to see another woman make books, create art and build a life around the private language of her imagination. I needed to know that such a woman could exist. I no longer need her to remain unchanged in order for me to continue.

I have my own painted pages now. I have written my own little books. I have my Scarlette Rose Cottage, my old-fashioned dresses, my animals, my peculiar treasures and a life that could not have been designed by anyone but me. It is not yet every single thing I see in my mind; but it is mine, and it is becoming.

I have been thinking that perhaps disappointment is sometimes how we quietly return to ourselves.

The women I once admired were little lanterns along my road. I am thankful for the light they gave when I needed it, even if one of them was not especially kind when our paths briefly crossed. Their part in my becoming need not be perfect for it to have mattered.

But I no longer stand outside another woman’s window wondering whether my own life is possible.

I have come home and lit my own lamps.

Most affably yours til my next enchanting swim, Lady Raquel

You Are Not Behind

“Perhaps you are not behind at all. Perhaps you are simply in the middle of becoming.”

My sweet mermaid darlings and dear Stillwater ladies,

I have been quietly tucked away behind the scenes of late, tending small matters with patient hands and allowing my knees the slower sort of healing I confess I never imagined would require quite so much time. Yet perhaps there is something rather humbling in being made to move gently again; to sit more often beside one’s own thoughts; to curate quietly whilst the world rushes noisily onward without us.

I have still been gathering lovely things all the same; little thoughts; little hopes; candlelit notions for the settlement and the tea room and all the tender corners yet to come. And last week, the tide remained kind, therefore i left several small sweet messages upon the YouTube channel, which I hope may bring comfort to any heart presently wandering through its own unseen season of becoming.

I have also recently shared a rather long and heartfelt live conversation there, wherein I spoke candidly about exhaustion, perseverance, healing, and the curious business of continuing onward even when one feels somewhat weather-worn by the journey. Alongside it, I left a channelled reflection concerning the future of social media itself; a subject which seems to occupy the minds of so many creators presently navigating these ever-changing digital seas. If either finds its way to you, I hope it arrives as a friendly lantern rather than a lesson.

There is a peculiar sort of sorrow that settles upon the heart when one watches others arrive whilst she herself still appears to be travelling; and I do not mean the shallow sort of envy spoken of so freely now, but the quieter ache known mostly to women who have tended a vision for so very long that it has become stitched into the lining of their spirit.

I have known this feeling well, my mermaid darlings.

One woman opens the tea room; another publishes the book; another gathers the audience; another moves into the old house she dreamt of when she was scarcely more than a girl with ribboned hopes and flour upon her sleeves. Meanwhile, there you sit beside your own little life, wondering softly whether the tide has forgotten your name entirely.

Yet I have come to believe something rather different.

I do not believe our lives unfold according to punishment, favouritism, or abandonment at all; I believe they unfold according to readiness, alignment, and the peculiar intelligence of timing that very few souls trust whilst standing within it.

A seed does not apologise for remaining unseen beneath the earth.

It allows the dark to perform its holy work.

It softens; it breaks; it yields; and from the outside, one could very easily mistake the entire affair for failure. Nothing appears to happen for such a long while that the impatient observer assumes the thing has died entirely. Yet beneath the soil, a thousand invisible rearrangements quietly prepare for the precise moment the tender green shoot may rise without collapsing beneath its own becoming.

I think many women abandon themselves in this season.

They dig endlessly at the earth to check whether the roots are forming; they compare their unopened garden to another woman’s harvest; they decide the dream must not be theirs because it has not arrived quickly enough to soothe the nervousness of waiting.

And still the seed remains below; not dead, but occupied.

I have manifested extraordinary things in my own life; some so improbable they would sound almost fanciful if spoken plainly aloud. Yet even now, whilst living faithfully within the end of my desires, I find pieces still arranging themselves with a wisdom far older than my impatience. The cottage, the tea room, the settlement, the beautiful gatherings I see so clearly in my mind, all of it continues moving toward me in exact proportion to the hour appointed for it.

Not late; not withheld; not forgotten.

Merely unfolding.

We speak often now as though manifestation means immediate appearance; yet nature herself has never behaved in such a hurried fashion. The rose does not burst forth the very afternoon the seed is pressed into the garden bed; the tide does not rush inland because we stamp our slippered feet upon the shore and demand it come at once.

The old world understood this far better than we do.

Women once quilted hope slowly into their lives; they planted orchards whose fruit they might never fully enjoy; they stitched linens for homes not yet built; they trusted continuity more than spectacle. There was less panic in becoming because a deeper trust in seasons remained.

And perhaps that is what so many weary hearts truly hunger for now; not merely the manifestation itself, but permission to trust the unseen portion of their becoming without feeling left behind whilst it ripens.

My sweet Stillwater darlings, if your life appears quiet just now, do not mistake quietness for absence. The roots often labour hardest where no applause can reach them.

You are not behind.

You are beneath the soil for a little while longer, and strange though it may seem, that hidden season may prove the very making of you.

Most affably yours ‘til my next enchanting swim,

Lady Raquel

On Becoming Before Being Seen

My Dearest Mermaid Darlings, and you, my gentle Stillwater Petticoat Society,

Pray sit with me a moment, for I have been thinking upon numbers — those curious little digits that flutter about the modern world like moths at a lantern — and how easily a woman might mistake their glow for warmth.

There was a season, a good while ago, in a former chapter of my life, when I observed the grand parade of Instagram with a wondering heart, seeing certain ladies garlanded in adoration, their photographs strewn with hearts and exclamations as though they had been crowned in laurel before a Roman crowd, and I, in quieter corners, felt the tremor of comparison tap politely upon my shoulder. Yet Providence, in her most instructive kindness, allowed me an experience so singular that it altered my sight altogether.

You know that I was once invited into the drawing rooms of a most notable production, interviewed not once but thrice, and placed before a board of executives who regarded me with steady eyes and measured speech; one gracious woman, with composure befitting her station, told me repeatedly that I was, in her estimation, “a superstar,” and she spoke it not with frenzy but with certainty, as though remarking upon the colour of the sky. At that time, my Instagram following was scarcely two hundred souls, and yet there I stood, considered, evaluated, and chosen — not because a crowd had applauded me, but because I had already become, within my own heart, the woman who belonged in such rooms.

It was then I perceived something of great consequence; visibility is not born of numbers; it is born of identity.

The opportunity itself proved lucrative and instructive, and though the show did not continue in the manner first imagined, it did not fail; it revealed. When the glitter quieted, and the announcement no longer danced upon feeds, several acquaintances slipped away as autumn leaves detach from a branch, and I saw, with a clarity that felt almost bracing, who had loved the ascent more than the woman ascending. It was a gentle sorrow, yet also a gift, for one cannot build a village of beauty upon the shifting sands of borrowed enthusiasm.

In those days, I learned two truths that now rest peacefully in my keeping. The first is that manifestation is no frivolous enchantment, no airy “woohoo” whispered beneath a crescent moon, but rather the sober art of becoming; when one so thoroughly inhabits a belief — when one dresses, speaks, labours, and thinks from that conviction — the world rearranges its chairs accordingly. I did not conjure a reality show with smoke and incantation; I aligned my life so wholly with story, heritage, and cottage-laced charm that those who dealt in stories recognised me as their own. Identity first, reflection after.

The second truth is this: Instagram may applaud you, yet it cannot complete you.

Numbers may rise like a tide and recede with equal swiftness, and if one’s sense of worth floats upon that tide, she will forever be at the mercy of the weather. To seek visibility as proof of value is to place one’s heart in a hall of mirrors, where every glance asks, “Am I enough now?” and never quite receives an answer. The app is not wicked, nor are followers foolish; it is merely a lantern, and lanterns are meant to illuminate what already exists, not to fabricate substance where there is none.

When I look now upon those accounts adorned with admiration, I feel neither envy nor hunger, but a curious tenderness; for I know that free parcels and flurries of praise are pleasant trifles, yet they are not the marrow of a life. A woman must be rooted more deeply than applause, or she will find herself performing for crumbs of affirmation whilst her truest work waits patiently in the wings.

If you believe in manifesting, believe it in this mature and measured way; become the woman, and the stage will find you; cultivate the garden, and the bees will come of their own accord; steady your nervous system in the knowledge of who you are, and the world’s recognition will be a by-product, not a necessity. What is sought from insecurity can never satisfy, but what grows from wholeness bears fruit in due season.

I remain, in my own quiet breast, entirely content to know that I am capable of grand rooms and candlelit corners alike, and if the world should choose to look upon me, let it be because I have built something worthy of being seen, not because I have pleaded for its gaze. And if ever the numbers falter or the algorithms grow temperamental, I shall still be here, stitching, writing, restoring, and loving the life before me — for that, my darlings, is where true fulfilment resides.

Take Joy, and do not surrender your worth to a tally.

Most affably yours ‘til my next enchanting swim, LR