Elderflower gifts

Literally picked last weekend, here is an old Slovenian recipe for elderflower cordial like my grandma used to make.

40 blossoms

3 L of water

3 kg sugar

2 lemons

60 g citric acid

Cook the water and melt the sugar and citric acid in it. Once it's cooled off, add the elder and sliced lemons. Cover with a cloth, let it sit on the counter for 48 hours. Sieve and - ready. If you're keeping it at room temperature, you might want to pasteurise it. Or bottle into plastic bottles and keep in the freezer. Yum!

She grew up near a forest in Japan, and you can hear it in her music.

Hatis Noit builds entire sonic worlds from her voice alone - no backing track, no instrument but her body. Her concert a few months ago was one of those rare experiences where you stop tracking time and start tracking something else entirely.

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Intelligence of dreams.

​Creatures of the Mind is a film about consciousness and dreams, told from an indigenous perspective, set inside the ecological richness of the soul’s inner world. I’m still digesting it. What I can say: it treats the dreaming life as serious intelligence - as a metaphor and a living system with its own logic and its own right to be heard. The inner world as wilderness. The soul as something that can go extinct if we stop listening.

Ecological consciousness.

Mette Grøngaard, my friend and my sister-in-law, makes beautiful art with and about nature. With her unique take on nature and exploration of human consciousness AS nature, not separate from it. She has been studying this relationship not just as an artist, but also as a nature therapist. Being so close to her, I’ve been privileged to be guided and transfixed by both. Her work is currently exhibited in a group exhibition at Galleri under Svanen in Roskilde, and I am particularly in awe of this piece - Nested. It captures the feeling I don’t have the words for, the entanglement of being a part of the web of relations and feeling complete safety, belonging and surrender.

Art that changes

Another art exhibition, Pareidolia is currently on at Demeter in Copenhagen - co-created by my friend, artist and coach Chuva Featherstone and artist Michael Sherman. It is a beautiful exploration of what we in coaching call the Third entity - the relationship itself - what emerges when two people or entities meet and how the thing that emerges in the space between changes both. In this case, the Third space between Chuva's and Michael's art, but also between their Third space and the one created with the viewer.

Still arriving

​Still arriving is the title of the report written by my friend Gus Guerrero, founder of Curious Neighbours - a neighbourhood exploration lab.

Gus spent a lot of time and effort interviewing foreigners in Copenhagen's creative industry about their experiences in Denmark. It paints a nuanced picture of what it is like to experience all the things that work so well, alongside the deeper longing to belong, and never quite arriving. From the reactions to it, I can understand that it's been a challenging read for the Danes. Regardless of the response, it is a lovingly prickly thing.

The report itself is put together with such care and curiosity - and Gus is now facilitating dialogue workshops in different parts of Copenhagen with the exploration of "How a neighbourhood becomes itself". I've attended the first one, hosted by Demokrati Garagen, and it was simply wonderful and connective.

I love Gus' definition of belonging:
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​"Belonging comes from shaping a place that is ready to welcome and value what you have to offer."

I think the report is a must-read. Give Gus a follow, and maybe I'll see you at a future gathering?

Norms that shape us

Another friend of mine, Ben Davies and his co-founder Sophie Johnson, just launched a project called Normdrop - an exploration of norms, and a co-created library of personal norms we carry with us, and it is also a beautiful exploration of our differences through this creative intervention. It is so carefully created and curated, and I can't wait to see what emerges from it over time. You can drop your own norm into it, and I know they also have some physical things coming. I was lucky to get a Norm hat from someone else's norm.

What I particularly love about the project is that it's "Rooted in neurodiversity.
Designed for everyone." - More of that, please!!!!

You can add yours here.
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Wildling

Chuva and I launched an in-person workshop - Wildling - the date was set on one of those rare super long weekends in May, where you get 4 days off for one day's holiday. Our gut told us it was a bad idea. We didn't listen and pushed through, and our own Wildling bit us. Point taken - date adjusted. We're still doing this in-person, embodied workshop, focused on the encounter with your inner truth, your insatiable hunger - the thing that refuses the boxes, the norms and control. August 28th, here in Copenhagen, with a preview experience on August 6th at Demeter. More info follows.

Foraged in the city.

I saw this on a random corner in Paris a few moths ago when I was there working on a client project.

It was the final moment of the day as we were getting back from the venue after a full-day workshop, when these three impossibly stylish, entirely present, unabashedly joyful humans found us. And it made me think that this is what life is actually about. This exact moment. This joy is what we are protecting when we protect aliveness.