And Still...
On finding peace in the midst of chaos.
I’ve been looking at images lately of what the world might look like if humans disappeared.
Tower Bridge swallowed by vines. Skyscrapers wearing forests like coats. Planes half-submerged in water, green and blooming, slowly becoming part of the landscape they once flew over. There’s something about these images I can’t stop thinking about. Not because they’re dystopian (though they are obviously) but because of what they say about nature.
Nature doesn’t wait for us.
It doesn’t consult us. It doesn’t check the news cycle or wait to see who wins the midterms or pause to consider what’s on the Epstein list. It just does what it does.
Relentlessly, quietly, without drama or ideology. The moon cycles. The tides move. The rain falls on Wales whether Wales needs it or not. The sun keeps shining above the clouds (even when we haven’t seen it in weeks).
I find this both humbling and, oddly, comforting.
I want to be honest about what I’m holding right now.
I care deeply about what is happening in the USA. It is not abstract to me. It lives in my body when I think about the young women I love and what the world is handing them. It lives in me when reproductive rights are treated as negotiable, when women’s health is still somehow a secondary concern, when the language of faith gets used to justify cruelty. I watch what’s happening with Reform in the UK and I feel it too. A creeping sense that the ground is shifting in ways that are hard to name and harder to stop.
The world feels, a lot of the time, like a dumpster fire.
I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Toxic positivity has never been my thing, and I’m not about to start now.
But here is what else I know.
Every single day, I get on calls with people. Real people, in the middle of their real lives. We talk about what’s happening at their job today. What their family is going through. What they’re struggling to figure out. What they celebrated last week that they haven’t told anyone else yet. What they’re afraid of. What they’re quietly, stubbornly hoping for.
That space — those conversations — feel sacred to me. Not because they exist outside of the world and its chaos. But because they exist inside it. Because the people showing up to do that work are doing it anyway. Despite everything. Alongside everything.
Like nature, they are still cycling.
I think about nature a lot as a metaphor for this. Not in a Pollyanna way — nature is not soft. It floods and burns and takes back what was always its own. Global warming is nature doing what it does in response to what we’ve done to it. There’s nothing gentle about a species pushed to extinction or a coral reef bleached white. Nature is not on our side. It’s just continuing.
And somehow that continuation is what I hold onto.
Because it means the world is still here. That there is still something to protect, to fight for, to tend. That the moon coming up tonight is the same moon that has come up through every human catastrophe, every dark chapter, every moment someone was sure it was all over. And it kept coming up anyway.
The world can feel like it’s falling apart and my home can feel like a sanctuary. The news can be genuinely frightening and my coaching calls can be genuinely full of life. I can grieve what’s happening to people I love and still feel the particular joy of a problem solved, a client who found their footing, a conversation that cracked something open.
I don’t have to choose which one is real. They’re both real.
I don’t know what holding this tension looks like for you.
Maybe it’s something different…a garden, a child’s laugh, a walk where you deliberately don’t check your phone. Maybe it’s sitting with the discomfort of caring about things you can’t control while still showing up for the things you can.
But I think the invitation is just to stay in it. To keep moving toward the things that matter. To let the dumpster fire be a dumpster fire without letting it be the only thing that’s true.
The vines are still growing. The tides are still moving. The sun is still up there.
And so, for now, are we.
xx Leah
Beautiful.