An invitation: The Art of Noticing (AoN Fall/Autumn edition) ~ we begin on Tuesday, October 21, with the New Moon š
OCT 01, 2025
Your energy is contagious. Your emotions are contagious. Your dreams are contagious.
The way we show up, in a room, on the page, or in our lives ripples outward, touching others in ways we rarely see.
Itās why I believe writing is more than just words. Writing is noticing. Writing is tending your inner garden. Writing is how we share our light.
Iāve been thinking about how people are not drawn to us by our perfect plans, or our tidy timelines, or even by the things we say weāll do.
People are drawn by the feeling we carry. By the glow of possibility in our eyes. By the way our dreams make them imagine something more for themselves, too.
I feel lighter and have given myself permission to write simply because I want to. The AoN gave me the final gentle push I needed, without pressure, but through many small, inspiring nudges. ~ Franziska
This fall/autumn, Iām gathering a small circle of writers, dreamers, and noticers for six weeks of writing together.
Itās called The Art of Noticing It begins on October 21, with the New Moon š
And itās for anyone who wants to write more: not perfectly, not necessarily professionally (though a lot of business owners take The AoN) but more honestly.
Weāll explore:
How to build a writing practice that fits your real life
How to write with trust, rather than self-doubt
How to share your words with confidence
And most of all, how to find beauty and meaning in the details you might otherwise overlook.
Since participating in The AoN, my style of writing has evolved, and I hope to keep carrying this forward. I secretly wish it could go on a bit longer :) xx ~ Dee
This is what I return to, again and again, in my own writing: the art of noticing.
Noticing how the light hits the side of a building. Noticing how a conversation lingers in your chest. Noticing what feels alive, even when it doesnāt make sense.
Because when I notice, I connect. I soften. I remember that life is not a list to check off but a story to live, and to tell.
I specifically liked hearing about your process for writing. I have taken lots of writing classes before, and it sounds like other participants have, too – and my favourite part was you sharing with us YOUR style. :) ~ Solveig
If youāve been feeling the pull to write againā¦ If you want your voice to feel alive in your own mouthā¦ If youāre ready to notice the world with more tenderness, and write from thereā¦
Since taking The AoN, I feel expansive, like an enormous seed has been planted and everythingās building in energy. I need to be patient, create the space and allow it all to come through in the divine timing in which it was meant. ~ Amy
Thatās the thing about noticing. It changes everything.
It reminds us that life is not lived in the big milestones, but in the small, fleeting glimmers: the golden edge of a cloud, the warmth in someoneās laugh, the courage it takes to share a piece of yourself on the page.
Thank you, Vienda! Iāve really enjoyed this space. The daily voice notes.. all of it. It has me excited about the next phase of my writing journey. ~ Ashleigh
Some previous essays that might inspire you to join us for The Art of Noticing:
and let myself be seen. As a woman in the world who is a creator/writer/founder etc…
Miss Jemima Kirk with the core wisdom
To answer the title, how I did it is:
I decentralised myself. I realised itās not about me. Itās about every womanās experience, waiting to be seen, heard, and sharedā¦
But letās begin with today.
At this very moment, Iām writing to roughly 10,000 eyeballs, the kind, curious readers whoāve joined me on this email list. On an average day, about half of you open these letters and video stories.
In the 12 years Iāve been writing publicly, Iāve been met with so much kindness. One of my dearest friends is Japanese. Our friendship has lasted nearly two decades. She sent me a voice note this morning: āIām so glad you write your stories and share them. You remind us about the sparkly parts of life. Itās a scary world out there. And you make it better.ā She makes my world better too.
There have been a few sharp replies over the years, comments that sting or arrive laced with judgment. I chalk them up to this simple truth: how someone responds to me tells me more about them than it does about me. This wisdom holds in every area of life. People are projecting whatās happening inside them, and remembering this makes compassion easier. Boundaries too.
Thatās the thing about putting yourself out there. You become a mirror. You invite people to see themselves in what youāve shared. So itās vital, imperative even, that you learn not to take it personally.
I started this piece over a week ago, knowing it would be the last chance to invite you to join me in the club.
Thatās often how my writing begins.
I have an idea. I pick it up and write it down. Often I pop things in Notes š because the thing will land just as Iām heading out the door. Or in the shower. Or on a walk.
Sometimes Iāll start a new page in Pages or Substack, type a few lines, give it a title Iāll recognise later, then leave it alone. I let the idea breathe. Sometimes I return to it. Sometimes I start again. I let things percolate until theyāre ready. And when they are, the words come quickly.
My boyfriend often says it looks like I can just sit down and write something fresh in an hour or two. And yes, sometimes I can. But what it looks like is rarely what it is. I spend all day every day, noticing. And that noticing forms thoughts, translated into words, becomes written.
Most of my writing has been quietly forming in some hidden partition of my mind for days, weeks, even years. Itās been composting. Gathering weight. Waiting for the moment it wants to emerge.
I remember a night, many years ago now, sitting cross-legged on the floor of my living room at 2 AM. Around me were teetering stacks of notebooks, filled with observations, essay fragments, and moments Iād never shared. Pages and pages that had never made it past my own eyes.
I was always the friend who urged others to write publicly, to submit to journals, to start a blog, to hit post on Instagram. āYour voice matters,ā Iād tell them. I meant it every time. Meanwhile, I kept my own work in the shadows.
Every time my finger hovered over the āpublishā button, a surge of anxiety would rise up. Who do I think I am? What if I reveal too much? What if itās not good enough? What if itās too much?
And so, again and again, I saved instead of sending.
I kept my words locked away in journals. Safe from judgment, yes. But also safe from connection.
This quiet resistance followed me for years.
What changed?
One day I stopped making it about me.
I realised I wasnāt writing for self-expression alone. I was writing to remind, to reflect, to connect. I was writing because somewhere, some woman, exhausted or elated or cracked open by life, might see herself in what I shared.
The words werenāt mine to keep. They never were.
And so I started thinking of my writing as a garden. Not a blog. Not a platform. A garden.
A living archive of stories, insights, and scraps of beauty that others might stumble across when they need them most. Something worth wandering through. Something that grows.
It helped to think of the silent readers, the ones who never hit reply or leave a comment, but who return again and again. I write for them too. You never know whose day or life your words are shifting, even if you never hear about it.
If youāre building a body of work, this also matters.
Anyone considering working with you or publishing you will need to read your writing multiple times before they know if your voice is a fit. If your writing lives out in the open, they can find it. Trust it. Choose it. But if you only publish once every few moons, what are they choosing from?
Your writing is not self-promotion.
It is an offering. A window. A breadcrumb trail back to some deeper part of the human experience, for others and for yourself.
Everything youāve learned about shaping a sentence, translating emotion, and distilling clarity from the chaos of daily life is not meant to be hoarded. Itās meant to be shared.
This matters more than ever.
In a world increasingly flooded with synthetic, AI-generated words, human language crafted with care and shaped by hand becomes sacred again. This is the new counterculture, intimate, real, nuanced expression. Writing that makes someone feel less alone. Writing that notices. That names.
So if youāve been waiting to share something, a piece, a post, a half-formed thought in your Notes app, consider this your gentle nudge.
~ Write for the version of you who once needed the words you now carry.
~ Write for the person out there whoās waiting to feel understood.
~ Write even if itās quiet. Especially then.
~ Your writing might be exactly the permission someone else needs.
Your voice is not the point, but it is the portal.
The morning sun is drawing lines across the wooden floor and the cheap white Ikea rug. From the bedroom, I can hear my boyfriendās soft snores. Further down the hall, the washing machine is whirring with his dirty clothes.
I snuck out of bed an hour ago. Love is to let him sleep in peace when I am restless and full of words that want to pour out of fingertips. Love is to want his clean clothes to be hung out to dry while the sun is still out after weeks of deluge.
When I got up I pulled on my Ā£4 vintage Pink Floyd sweater that layed crumpled on the floor and picked up my laptop to hug to my lap while I lay on the sofa and write.
Now that I am here the many things I had wanted to put down evade me asking to be rearranged in my mind, to find a storyline, a thread to hold them together.
Two weeks ago we were in London. The day we arrived it was sunnier and warmer than in Portugal where we had come from, and we walked from London Bridge to Colombia Road Flower Market. A favourite ritul of mine, to meet one of my best friends and drink coffee and eat crossaints and hear the flower sellers shout their prices.
Twenty years earlier when I lived in Hackney Iād go every weekend. Back then the streets were shabbier, speciality coffee shops did not yet exist, and you could buy bouquets of flowers at ātwo for a fiverā. (Imagine that in an East London cockney accent.)
We were in London to renew my passport due to an inexplicable bureaucratic quirk: the Austrian embassy in London would accept the very paperwork that the Passport Office in Austria had rejected when I’d flown there weeks earlier.
I often joke that I thrive at the fringes of existence, belonging nowhere in particular, my official residence a mystery even to myself. An inconvenience only once every 10 years: when I need to get my passport renewed.
When I think about it London is the closest thing I have to a home. Itās the place I have resided in most often in my adult life. Itās the only country where the passport control officer says āwelcome homeā when I pass through. It melts my heart a little.
On our last morning we ate cinnamon buns in Sloane Square cutting through the pillowy sweetness with sips of bitter coffee. Standing in a slice of sun pouring between buildings we watched the corporate working world rustle and bustle their ways into their offices.
When I stand and observe mass humanity as I did that morning, I’m struck by the humbling realisation that each hurried figure represents an entire universe of hopes and struggles.
Strangers ā clutching coffee cups, checking watches, muttering into phones ā all orchestrating their complicated lives with the same earnestness I bring to mine. At the core of each life, beneath the professional veneers and morning routines, pulses the same fundamental need for connection and meaning.
Love, in its countless expressions, remains the gravitational center around which we orbit. This truth makes the artificial structures we’ve built ā the endless pursuit of productivity, status, and material gain ā seem profoundly misaligned with what actually sustains us.
The day after we returned, my friend Hannah arrived like a gift.
After weeks of relentless rain drumming against windows and seeping into spirits, the clouds parted. For two precious days, we traced paths along the wild, rugged coastline that embraces the little village I’ve called home since autumn.
The sea air carried the scent of salt and possibility as we navigated rocky outcroppings and windswept bluffs, our conversations flowing as naturally as the waves below.
This landscape, in its raw, untamed ways, has become my sanctuary. Despite an unexpectedly brutal winter ā longer, wetter, and colder than I had prepared for ā I’ve made it my ritual to seek out nature’s company whenever possible, finding in its rhythms a counterbalance to life’s uncertainties and a reminder of what endures.
Today, I have three weeks left here.
The past two days we, and two friends, helped my boyfriend dismantle the home he has inhabited for four years. Box by box. Bag by bag. We hauled his life down flights of stairs. Until nothing remained. On Friday, he leaves with just a 40-litre backpack. Nothing else.
His devotion to non-attachment is both inspiring and daunting. I’ve promised to follow with carry-on luggage, but I can’t match his minimalism. Some outfits and useful treasures must join me in my journey.
I’ll document this bittersweet sorting soon.
My deepest heartache is leaving my cat behind. I scroll through our six years together and grief floods my body. There’s wisdom in the saying “your new life will cost you your old one,” but knowing this truth doesn’t soften its sharp edges.
I had found what seemed a perfect family for him, but their recent hesitation has sent me into a desperate search for someone who will cherish him with the same devotion I’ve offered. He has been the steady heartbeat at the centre of my existence; love incarnate in fur and purrs. This is the most painful sacrifice I’ve made in years.
But there is a new life waiting for me out there. I expect the energy of New York to lift me up and reinspire parts of me that have gone to sleep. I anticipate the world showing me what is possible for me in a way that I had not known.
And with all of this I have had to shed various versions and identities of myself that I had created. Many of them more self-protection than authentic. I am learning to let go of them to be replaced by something new, alive, real, responsive.
A huge piece of my growth recently has been learning to observe, not absorb.
Iāve promised myself I am finally going to start writing a book. Starting on the flight to New York.
Cringe! I hate even writing that.
My biggest fear is that Iāll start and never finish. Or that Iāll say I am going to write a book and not do it. But I promised myself I would and I try to always keep my promises to myself.
I’ll write for an hour each dayāmorning or night. Whatever emerges. These words, unlike my private journal entries, are meant for strangers’ eyes. Same practice, new purpose.
Then I thought: What if we wrote together?
A group of writers: would-be/could-be/want-to-be established, aspiring, curious writers and we all wrote together.
Every day. For 6 weeks.
Not necessarily an hour. Maybe 10 minutes for you. A sentence. A page. A journal entry. A poem. Whatever meets you at your edge.
I’ll help you find your achievable aim.
Science says 21 days forms a habit. We’ll do twice that. Together.
so, let me invite you to: the art of noticing ~ a 6-week writing club š
There are creaks coming from the bedroom. My boyfriend must be waking up now. The morning sun has shifted, no longer drawing lines but flooding the room with golden light. The words I’ve poured onto this page can go and live their own lives out in the world now.
Observations are made in the living, not the writing.
I close my laptop and set it aside. The washing machine has gone quiet; Iāll hang his clothes in the sun. In a moment, he’ll emerge from the bedroom, hair tousled with sleep, and we’ll begin our final Sunday ritual in this place that has been, however briefly, our home.
The thread I was searching for earlier reveals itself. Love is the storyline that holds everything together.
