I have the answers

How to live a good life at the end of a world.

A cartoon

A thought

Hello friends,

L’il Bean and I are emerging from a long winter hibernation with a slow stretch. The mornings here are still mostly silvered with frost that crunches underfoot, while the wattle has burst with highlighter yellow - seemingly overnight as a promise of spring.

Eighteen months ago, when I started sharing drawings here, it was with the burning question;

How do we live a beautiful life in a burning world?
How do joy, care, and resistance weave together into something wild and precious?

Back then, my mind was knotted around the climate and biodiversity crises. I still hold that grief, but the rise of AI, geopolitical chaos, and the general mess of the world has gate-crashed my reflections. Somehow, the Gordian knot grew bigger and uglier, and my question seems even more urgent.

So I went underground for a while. My hibernation was longer and deeper than I expected, shaped by my sister’s sudden, unexpected death. My sister, who more than anyone in this world shaped me, who I love fiercely, if not always easily. I've found comfort in writing to her most mornings. Each day, a chime of Superb Fairy Wrens flits about outside my window, feeding. They feel like messengers between worlds, carrying some reply from a place where lightness is the only thing that matters. In the conversations we have had (my sister, the Wrens and I) about grief - personal and global, I realised that L’il Bean and I have the answers. We have been diligently collecting them over the past 18 months. They are embarrassingly simple, yet will take me a lifetime to work out how to live. Old friends, take a journey with me? Across the territory we have covered, new friends, get to know me a little better :)

This is a time of gift and grief. Both are true. My heart has been broken over and over again, and it still soars with love and joy. Love and joy are not luxuries; they are part of the resistance and resilience of being human.

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.

What a time they have, these two

housed as they are in the same body.

Mary Oliver.

We are miraculous, and we are utterly insignificant. I cannot save the world. The hubris of ever imagining that I could. Instead, I am a small, beautiful node in the web of life, interconnected in quiet, ordinary ways across time and space. My personal magnificence ripples out in tiny ways, as does yours.

We need to decentre the noise. Be aware but not overwhelmed. Create more than you consume.

“Yes, the world is sick, and yes it can be cruel, but it would be a whole lot sicker and a whole lot crueler if it were not for painters and filmmakers and songwriters – the beauty-makers – wading through the blood and muck of things, whilst reaching skyward to draw down the very heavens themselves.

Create like your life depends on it, because, of course, of course, it does!” Nick Cave

To live well now means learning to be in right relationship with all that is more-than-human.

We need to be patient; we are but a blip in time. Somehow, extraordinarily, miraculously alive at this pivot point in human history, we must do what is right and what is ours to do and trust that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice” (MLKJr).

The system will not change overnight. The vision I hold will not appear overnight. Time is strange, and the past, present, and future live inside us all at once. The change I can make is grounded in the present moment. I advocate, create, imagine, and find my people. Not because I expect an immediate outcome, but because it is the right thing to do. The system is sticky and powerful, but once we see it clearly for what it is, we have the power to make different decisions each day.

Decisions that decentre the extractive and reconnect us with each other within reciprocal webs - so we don’t navigate this alone.

We need to simplify, pre-emptively. Not as a grim sacrifice, but as an act of freedom, making room for what matters.

And we need to slow down. Not because the times are gentle, but because they are urgent. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. In a culture that equates worth with speed, slowing down is a quiet rebellion, a way to keep our bearings.

Is there hope? Yes, of course, but hope is not a gift or a right. It is something we each earn through our actions. It is an orientation, a stubborn belief that a better world is possible, and a daily practice of living into it.

I will carry grief with me into this next season. But I will also carry the gift of being alive at all. Here, now, in this brief, bright moment of time, we get to call ours, in a turning of our species. I continue to find my glimmers these days - suddenly, and weirdly extra luminous because of my extra grief.

I look forward to sharing the next part of the journey with you. Where I live more and write slightly less, if I drew you a Venn diagram of my life and the truths of our time, the centre would be aliveness. That’s where I want to reside, bringing my daily actions into closer alignment with my rhetoric. Speaking truth is one thing. Living it is another. I’m setting out to do both, imperfectly but wholeheartedly. I hope you will keep journeying with me.

Glimmers and sparks*

My glimmers for today are:

• The light flitting of Superb Fairy Wrens.

• The thawing warmth of a clear day after a frosty morning

• The friendship of my elderly Mareema doggo, who is turning 15 this week and is very much an old lady. Each day, I hold her paw and wonder at the magic of sharing some of my life with her.

Li’l bean is your reminder to pause and ask: What are your glimmers for today?

From your friend and your small, steadfast companion,

*Drawing Li’l Bean helped me navigate out of a period of depression in 2023. A good friend 13, 595km away, helped, too, through a ritual of swapping daily glimmers via text.

A glimmer is a tiny spark of hope, enthusiasm or joy that lifts your heart. By helping me find three glimmers each day, she gently helped me see the joy and beauty already around me.

I’d like to share this practice with you and invite you to reflect on your glimmers for the day when you read this. Think of Li’l Bean as a reminder to notice the glimmers and sparks in your life. We’d love it if you would like to share your glimmers in the comments or by hitting reply (if you don’t like sharing publicly).