Last night, I turned a quiet carousel of fifteen thoughtful, carefully considered slides into a 12-second reel. I did that for you. And I’ve been sitting with the uneasy feeling it left in my body all day.

Maybe I wanted your attention more than I wanted my integrity in that moment. Or maybe I hoped that it might slip past the noise and into your hands if I did it this way.

I wonder if you could tell that I was performing.

I wonder if you felt it, if you sensed the awkwardness—the way I slid down the pole just a little more clumsily than the slick Instagram girls who make it all look so effortless. I knew you probably wouldn’t appreciate the black-and-white stock footage. I also knew it likely wouldn’t land because it wasn’t front-facing and perfectly lit. But I made it anyway. And in doing so, I traded something I loved—something layered and slow—for something I hoped you would like.

Instagram, when your work is textured, unhurried, and nuanced, trying to shrink it into a seven-second trend can feel like cutting off your own limbs. You and your algorithm seem to favour bite-sized authority. But what if my authority is poetic? What if my wisdom is made of long, curved sentences and open questions, not bullet points and clever clickbait?

Do I still have a place here?

Because sometimes I feel like my work arrives wearing the wrong clothes. Like it shows up to a loud party in bare feet and linen, holding a thermos of tea when everyone else brought champagne. There is something tender, almost disoriented, about watching it try to belong in a space that moves so differently. I recognise art as needing breath and pauses and open skies. But your preference is a well-lit face, a punchline, and a quick return on attention, while I am here trying to hand you something that asks to be held with both hands and considered in silence. And on certain days, I find myself wondering whether anything I make, gentle, layered and curved around the edges, can ever be fully seen here without being asked to change shape.

It is an exhausting binary to inhabit, the sense that you must either be strategic enough to satisfy your appetite for clarity and control or else accept invisibility as the cost of staying true to my own rhythm, language and heart.

How do we remain true artists and stay visible in a system that rewards speed over depth?

I have come to know the intimacy of real work. The tenderness of the words or images, or sounds that come from the place beneath your thinking mind. When I bring this kind of work to you, it can feel like laying my bare, open heart on a scroll wheel. And some days, it feels like too much, too raw, too tender—to ask that kind of work to survive the flick of a thumb or the judgment of an algorithm that was never built to recognise intimacy as value. What lives beneath the thinking mind is not dressed for display. It is fragile, unfiltered, and wholly uninterested in performance. And yet, here I am, asking my art to hold its form inside a system that does not slow down long enough to listen.

I think I am mad. Can you sense I am mad, Instagram?

I don’t think your algorithm truly hates us (most of the time). It is not cruel. But it is indifferent. It was never built to recognise when something is real. It is a mechanism created to track. It does not trace the careful arc of a thought that took weeks to form, or understand why one image, placed just so, might bring a person to tears. Instead, it looks for the familiarity of what has worked before. It scans for patterns, repetitions, and pieces it can stack neatly, sort quickly, and send on their way. It is drawn to velocity, to the rush of movement for movement’s sake, and to the kind of momentum that doesn’t ask where it’s going, only how fast it can get there. And so the work we make from the marrow of ourselves, slowly, with reverence, and sometimes heartache, slips past unseen, because it does not speak in the language the machine has been taught to hear.

But Instagram, here is the thing that keeps me up at night. I worry that over time, you will become persuasive enough that we—the artists, the makers, the ones who once created from instinct and aliveness, will slowly begin to internalise your values as our own. I fear we will hear your voice start to inform our choices. Your subtle nudge that questions the length of our sentences, or the layering of our thoughts, or the distinct and personal rhythm of our natural voice.

So, we become quieter.

But now is not the time for the artist to retreat. We must not quiet our voice in deference to a culture that no longer knows how to listen.

Because when the world begins to spin too fast, when the noise becomes constant and the pace unbearable, it is the artist who remembers how to slow time down. It is the artist who can gather the scattered fragments of our attention and hold them in their hands long enough to show us what we’ve been too busy or too afraid to feel. In times when certainty is worshipped and nuance is lost, the artist returns us to the grey spaces, the subtle, the complex, the beautifully unresolved, and reminds us that being human was never meant to be so tidy.

The artist does not simply reflect culture; they tend to the undercurrent. They trace the emotional contours of a moment long before the rest of the world has found language for what is happening. They offer us new metaphors when the old ones no longer hold. Their role is not to produce content or to entertain or to optimise their work for a screen, but to stay close to what is real, to beauty, to truth, to wonder, to grief, and to craft from that place something that holds resonance in our skin and bone.

And so when the artist begins to go quiet, not in the holy, intentional way, but in the muted way that comes from being slowly worn down by a system that does not know how to value their rhythm, something precious is at risk of being lost. We do not just lose our voices. We lose a way of seeing. We lose a way of knowing ourselves. We lose the threads that tether us to meaning in a world increasingly built on momentum and metrics. And while the machine may continue without them, the soul of the culture begins to thin.

To remain an artist in a world like this, especially now, is not a gentle thing. It is a quiet defiance. It is choosing, again and again. A decision to keep making art. It is trusting that the beauty born of attention, of care, of inner reckoning, still matters. To create from this place is not to fall behind. It is to hold the thread. It is to become a keeper of what is quietly being forgotten. And there is power in that. Immense, necessary power.

I believe there is a place for beauty and depth in digital spaces, Instagram. I know we’ll never see eye to eye on that. But also, I am not willing to dance for you again. I am, however, willing to stay.

I will continue to write in long, unhurried sentences, to follow thoughts that don’t collapse into quick conclusions, and to let beauty and care lead the way. I will not give up on the possibility that this kind of work still matters. Even inside a system that so often forgets how to feel, there are still real human hearts listening. There are still people hungry for something that moves them from the inside out. So, I will keep making for them. For me. For us.

I will be the counterpoint.

The slower pulse.

The one trusting that even in a sea of noise, there are people still listening for a different kind of rhythm beneath it all.

Love,
Jody x

“Let my gardens speak of me when I am gone.

Let them speak in coloured whispers of all the beauty I have seen and felt and lived.

Let them speak of how much death had to find me and how many hard seasons it took to make me a living, breathing thing.

Let them speak of my seasons of growth and abundance, but let them also tell of my seasons of loss and decay.

Let the soft, wet earth be a reminder of hardness that didn’t win, or the sadness that didn’t calcify, or the surrender that triumphed over resistance—and let the glorious, fragrant blooms speak of my life and its greatest lesson: that the beauty we make never dies.

Come sit by my garden.”

Dear Rach,

Have you ever heard this song, my love? It is truly so moving.

It made me think of you. Of us. Of the gardens we’ve been quietly tending all these years, not the kind traditionally recognised with rows of roses or manicured hedges or those perfect cottage gardens you scroll by on Pinterest, but a garden built on the soft repetition of our care. A garden planted in devotion-dense soil, that holds memory and muscle and the sound of your own breath in the early morning dark. A garden with a root system as deep as the ocean, stretching beneath the surface, holding everything in place.

A bountiful garden of our mothering.

And for the longest time, I have happily and peacefully lived in the bounty of that garden. I lived in its rhythms, rooted in its soil, a native of its making. My days were shaped by proximity and presence, and by the countless invisible gestures that made up the architecture of my garden, of early motherhood. And it has felt enough—my gosh, more than enough—to be the one he reached for, the one who held the rhythm, the one who applied honey to his ribs, the one who offered stillness in a world that moved too fast.

To grow flowers in the garden of motherhood has been an offering unlike any other, my most favourite by far—tender, consuming, elemental. Every so often, I catch a glimpse of the soil still gathered beneath my nails, evidence of all the days spent tending, and sowing, and loving. I will always be the one who turns this particular soil, our soil. No one else could know its texture the way I do, the way it shifts with the seasons, the way it moves in the light. The roots that have grown here are not something I will someday pull up and carry elsewhere.

They are embedded.
Alive.
Permanent.

The bountiful garden of my mothering, and my life.

But babe, I’ve been daydreaming of sales funnels.

Somehow, nestled right there beside the dahlias, are sales funnels! And new ideas arriving unannounced, slipping in while I’m folding laundry, chopping carrots, or walking back from school drop-off with the sun on my face.

One of the things I’ve cherished most about our friendship is the way our lives seem to echo one another, like we’ve been walking different paths through the same season. And because of that, your mothering has always felt familiar to me, like a shared language spoken in fragments. Most of it passed back and forth through moment-by-moment voice notes. “Just in the car.” “Just ducking out for some groceries.” Or, most often, “Just on my morning walk.” These little windows into one another’s lives, stitched together in between everything else, that somehow allow us to feel known by one another in the seemingly ordinary and everyday moments of our lives.

So when I say I can feel something starting to shift and stretch, I know you feel it too. It’s a change that hasn’t come all at once, but rather in these subtle, almost imperceptible ways. I can sense a kind of spaciousness beginning to form around my mothering, a lightness at the edges of the day that simply didn’t exist before.

In those early years, I never felt that space was missing, at least not the kind that made room for ambition. It was as though it was never meant to exist in that season, and for the most part, I didn’t crave it. I wasn’t looking beyond the moment. I didn’t reach for anything outside the small, sacred world we were building. The closeness of that season was a whole-hearted response to the choice to devote, and I devoted willingly. I chose to be in it completely, connected to the daily rhythms and fully immersed in the sacred, exhausting, exquisite work of raising a small child.

But now, I can sense that the texture of my life is changing. And with that, space is beginning to arrive, not empty space, or space that pulls me away, but space that has been quietly asking what else might be possible now. And for the first time in a long while, I feel ready to ask the same.

You mentioned the other day that adage—show, don’t tell—and how, for so many years, it never really felt like it applied to this season. You didn’t feel the need to show your children anything beyond your presence. You were there. You were theirs, and that was the whole point. I remember feeling exactly the same. I wasn’t trying to inspire River through my action or achievement. Instead, I was building the entire shape of his world through my love, my constancy, and through being right there at the centre of it all.

But now, as his world begins to stretch beyond my arms, as his gaze starts to reach past me and into the wider world, I find myself wanting to live in a way that River can witness. I am not interested in impressing him or modelling ‘success’ as a metric the world defines, but more so to show him what it looks like to keep listening to your life. To show him what it means to be connected to your aliveness as a vocation.

To dream.

And yet, even as these dreams begin to stir, these ideas that feel true and real and fully mine, there is something inside me that hesitates. Something that folds its arms and whispers, but what if this costs you everything you love?

Because, my gosh, I love my life. I love our spaciousness, and how the boys play table tennis before school, and how both Jase and I can do school pick-up together, just for the extra family time in the car. I love the cosiness we’ve built into our everyday, the hum of our home, and the safety in the way it moves. I love being the one who knows exactly where the missing sock is, the one who remembers his favourite treats when I am doing the groceries, and the one whose presence informs the heartbeat of our home. And I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to trade the beauty I have now for some imagined version of what could be.

There’s a fear that if I let these dreams grow too tall, they’ll cast a shadow over everything that matters most. That if I move too far into what’s next, I’ll somehow unravel what already feels whole. It’s a delicate dance, this wanting more while still loving what is. And sometimes, I catch myself wondering if it’s even possible to hold both without something giving way.

But then I remind myself that seasons don’t ask us to let go all at once. They change slowly, almost imperceptibly at first. The light shifts. The air turns crisp. And before you even realise it, you’re standing in a different moment, though nothing has been torn away. It wasn’t revealed through force, only through the graciousness of time. And I can’t help but wonder if this unfolding is the same way. That it can all grow together, intertwined, and nourished by the same roots.

Our dreaming no longer pulls us away. Instead, it wraps itself around the life we’ve created, bringing a richer colour to the everyday. And in doing so, it becomes essential—part of the design that holds the whole family vision in bloom.

And suddenly, we are dreaming again, my love.

And it feels light.
Electric.
A magic returning to the soil.
Full bloom.

Love,
Jody x

Dear River,

Hey, my sweet boy.

Remember the other day in the car, when I screamed at you and hit the steering wheel?

Remember how I cried?

Remember how you gently asked me to, “Please stop yelling, Mummy,” and I couldn’t?

Remember how you watched the tears roll down my face into my lap the whole way home?

I am so sorry I let it all spill out like that, my love. In eight years of being your mum, I don’t think I’ve ever unravelled quite like that. And for that, I’m so sorry. But I want to tell you what was happening inside my heart that day, because as you grow, I see more and more how your kindness meets even my hardest moments.

You see, I really miss you. Even when you’re sitting right beside me. Even when your voice and your funny stories fill our home every day. Even when you stumble into our bed after a nightmare and press your warm, squishy face into mine—I miss you.

There are days when I feel the space between us beginning to shift. Like perhaps, to become more fully yourself, you need to step a little further away from me. And while I understand it, even welcome it, there’s a part of me still catching up, still learning how to stay close without clinging to a version of you you’ve outgrown.

I’ve often thought that if we had filled our home with more children, possibly the intensity of my love would have had more room to stretch out. Instead, all of it has landed on you. I didn’t plan it this way, life simply unfolded in its own mysterious ways. And I can see how that might feel overwhelming at times. It’s a beautiful thing to be loved so wholly, but I imagine it can also feel like a lot to hold. Maybe even too much, now and then.

You speak with more certainty these days, clearer in your opinions, firmer in your boundaries, and there are moments when your strength brushes up against my softness. Moments when something you say, without meaning to, leaves a small sting behind. You’re not being unkind, my darling. You’re simply learning how to become more yourself, and I’m learning how to loosen my hold while still staying close.

I think the intensity of that day came from something deeper that had been building over time. In the weeks leading up to it, I had started to feel it more and more—the quiet stings, the small moments that left a mark, the loneliness of your growth. On their own, they were manageable. But when they began to compound, they began to settle in. And when I picked you up from school that day, and you spoke to me in a way that brushed right up against the part of me already feeling tender, it was as though something inside me spilled over. It wasn’t just that moment, it was the weight of all the ones that came before it.

I screamed and I cried, because I missed you, my boy.

When you were little, your need for me felt like love—pure, uncomplicated, constant and unmistakable. I felt it with your arms wrapped tightly around my neck, or the way your eyes searched for mine in every room, or the way your whole world seemed to orbit around my presence. And in those years, that kind of love felt so clear to me, recognisable to my heart and easy to receive.

But now, I find myself learning how to meet your love in a different form. It’s still there—I feel it every day—but it doesn’t arrive in the same ways it once did. It’s quieter now, more indirect. A little look. An elaborate story. A small hug on the way to kick the footy. A genuine ‘thanks, Mummy’ when I slide your favourite pancakes in front of you as you colour. And I know it’s love. Our love. I can feel it in the way you still let me in, in your own time, in your own way. And while it may not always be with the smothering of kisses I prefer, it’s no less real. If anything, it’s maturing alongside you, and that is the most glorious thing to witness.

I want to tell you, sweet boy, there is so much joy here, too. Watching you step more fully into who you are is one of the greatest privileges of my life. The way your mind works, so sharp and quick and curious. The humour that spills out of you, catching me off guard and making me and most people around you laugh. The questions you ask. The things you notice.

I love that I now know the ins and outs of AFL, and will happily jump off the couch in sheer excitement when our mate Issac Rankin kicks a 'sick' goal. I love that I’ve become *that* passionate soccer mum, bright-eyed (and loud) on game day. I love that I’ll drive across town without hesitation to find the next book in our series, just to see the spark in your eyes when I hand it to you. And I mostly love the way you still curl into me at night, wrapping your leg over mine as I read to you, revealing that pure and sweet part of you that still likes to know—I’m right here.

So I hold both.

The tenderness for what used to be, and the deep, true, honest joy for all that is emerging.

I’ve come to understand that nothing quite prepares us for how our hearts will keep changing shape in motherhood. We don’t realise, at first, that the love we come to know so intimately—the cuddles, the need, the orbit—will shift with time, and with it will ask something different of us as women and mothers as it evolves. It’s only when we’re standing in the midst of that change that we begin to understand just how many times we’ll be asked to let go and begin again.

And maybe that’s the quiet heartache we carry, not from having to leave, but from staying right here, loving you just as much, while needing to hold you a little more loosely. Being the safe place you return to, even as you begin to walk further into the world on your own.

That’s the bittersweet part, I think… knowing we can’t go with you, not all the way. But also knowing, with a kind of deep, mother-earned certainty, that what lies ahead will only grow more beautiful. That our love, if we let it, will keep expanding, and we’ll keep finding each other in new ways, again and again. Forever.

I love you.

And, I am so sorry I yelled.

Love,
Your Mama x

“We teach them how to live without us, but nobody teaches us how to live without them.” - Elaine Adams

This is a deeply personal letter about miscarriage. If this is a tender topic for you, please feel free to pass it by and wait for the next one to arrive in your inbox.

But if, like me, you carry an intimate history of losing babies, I hope these words feel like a kind reminder, you are not alone.

Love,
Jody x

Dear Baby, (in the sky)

I trace the path of water droplets sliding down the shower screen as steam thickens the air around me and the raging hot water meets my skin. It’s one of those showers where you suddenly come to, the intensity of the water remembered only after moments spent somewhere else entirely. I catch a glimpse of my soft belly, it hasn’t ‘bounced back’ like it did the times before. Instead, it lingers, sticking out just enough to remind me you were here with me, not so long ago. Maybe it’s my age, or my confused hormones, or maybe it’s simply that this time, letting you go has been the hardest.

It’s Mother’s Day, and your Daddy sneaks his head inside the shower curtain just in time to watch the first tears escape from my eyes. His face comforts my heart before he even speaks. ‘But what about all our babies?’ I ask. ‘I know,’ he says, softly, honestly, with that look I’ve come to recognise. The one that says, I’m so sorry, my beautiful wife. I know my words will never be enough in these moments.

I let the water engulf me, and I cry.

I’ve come to understand that grief doesn’t always announce itself. It waits quietly in the corners of your heart, folded into some hidden box you try not to open. But sometimes, something slips the lock. And suddenly, the ache rushes in, larger than your body, heavier than your heart knows how to carry. It seemingly stops everything for a brief moment, as if the grief itself needs to hang in the air just long enough to let its presence be known. Over time, I think I have become better at walking alongside it in those moments, allowing the box to be slightly ajar, no longer locked, but not fully open either. Just enough to let love back through, again and again.

Let me tell you a funny story about your brother, River. My desire for him met me in a cafe ten years ago. I was sitting across from a friend when it arrived suddenly, unmistakably, like being swept up by something invisible and vast, right there in the middle of suburbia. I went home that afternoon, sat on the bar stool across from Daddy, and said, “I want a baby.”

Four days later, your brother was conceived.

It couldn’t be more true to character that he cannonballed into the womb. And while we still laugh about how fast and furious his arrival was, the truth is—I never had time to long for him. Longing never had the chance to take root. He was already here, claiming space in my body before my heart could catch up. And in some ways, that shaped the way I came to know him with velocity, a heart flung wide open, and my eyes still adjusting to the magnitude of his presence.

But you, you were the dream I never let go of.

My womb has known four babies. Only one made it to my arms—but you, my darling, you felt different from the start. I could almost see you. Every detail of your sweet face. It was as if holding you in my arms was already written. Certain. You were chosen, and right on time for my heart and for our lives.

Like your brother and the sweet surprise babies that arrived before you, you didn’t wait long to make yourself known. Those breath-held, heart-in-throat moments waiting for two faint lines never came. Instead, there you were bold, immediate, unmistakable. The ink ran deep, and so did my joy. You were finally here.

In the months leading up to your conception, I began making peace with what might come, readying my body, steadying my spirit for the weight of another Hyperemesis Gravidarum pregnancy. After years of trepidation, tangled with longing and fear, something in me finally settled. I had read countless articles about the delicate interplay between a mother’s and baby’s genes, and how Hyperemesis Gravidarum isn’t always guaranteed. I read about personal environments, histamines, parasites, all the possible contributing factors to a condition still considered a mystery, with no known cure. If I’m honest, there was a naive, maybe even hopeful, part of me that quietly believed it might miss me this time. As if I’d cleared some invisible karma, or enough time had passed that my body had simply forgotten it was ever an option.

The joy of being pregnant with you lasted for days, and days, and days, and days before the nausea hit. Enough so, I felt a glimmer of what it would be like to be pregnant and not sick.

But as the weeks passed, the rolling waves of nausea compounded on themselves until I could no longer see straight. And before I knew it, I was back in that familiar dark and lonely place, facing off with each day from the four walls of my bedroom. I can only describe Hyperemesis as a dark depression of the heart, an entangled place where both joy and despair live equally and where, only by the grace of God, we are able to birth babies from that place.

But as time would reveal, that would not be our story, my sweet child.

Given my history of miscarriage, specifically missed miscarriage, I knew I wanted an early scan in the first trimester. And if I’m honest, my nauseous, weary body longed for that moment... to see you, safe and real, bobbing around on the screen. There’s a moment I’ve come to know too well, lying on the ultrasound bed, white-knuckled to your Daddy’s hand, holding my breath as they say again, “We might need to do an internal, I’m not quite getting the full picture”. They told me you were measuring too small, that maybe my dates were off, and to come back in a couple of weeks to check if you were growing. But I knew the exact day we conceived you. The dates weren’t wrong. And deep down, in a quiet corner of my heart, I knew you weren’t growing. Two of the longest, slowest and most tender weeks of my life followed. I cried tears that could have flooded an ocean, whispering silent prayers on repeat—please, not again.

“There is no viable heartbeat” were the next words we heard in that synopsis room.

My friend Tara recently said to me, “It’s one thing to lose a love, but it’s another thing to have fought hard for that love and lost it.”

I fought hard for you, and I lost you.

What if you were my daughter?
What if it was your hair I learned to braid,
your little face I’d watch in the mirror as you got ready for school?
What if I were the one to hold you in the confusion of your first period,
to celebrate that sacred threshold with reverence and excitement,
to teach you about the wild, wondrous, glorious nature of our womanhood?
What if it was your hand I held through heartbreak,
your dreams I helped carry,
your name I whispered at night?

What if you were my daughter, and I lost you?

I found out your big brother told his class about you during show and tell.
“We lost our baby,” he said.
Just like that.
Small voice.
A big truth.

I didn’t just lose you,
we lost you, my love.

Your brother lost the chance to become someone’s big brother in the everyday sense,
to teach you games,
to tell you silly jokes,
to roll his eyes when you took too long in the bathroom.
He was already holding space for you before he knew what that meant.
And somehow, even now, he still is.

Your Daddy carries you, too, in his own quiet way.
He reaches for me when he sees the ache rise behind my eyes.
He talks about what could have been, and sometimes, he doesn’t talk at all, but I see it.

I recently read about a woman who planted Forget-Me-Nots in memory of the baby she lost. And I saw myself in her, scattering seeds across our garden like confetti, patiently waiting for little pops of blue.

And it felt... light. And beautiful.

So that’s what I’ll do.

I’ll grow a garden of Forget-Me-Nots for all of my children.

Love,
Your mama x

Those countless days sprawled across your lounge room floor by the fire with tea and chocolate truly gave way to some of the most insightful, truthful and honest conversations about love, marriage, God, and the desires placed on a woman's heart. Some days, the tea tasted more of tears than peppermint, and the curiosity cushioned itself right up close to concern, as if you were unsure in those tender moments if two things could be true.

I saw your heart tumbled through wild waters, bounced off the walls of the raging riverbanks, pulled under, weary and bewildered, again and again. I watched you learn to swim when the ground you had trusted gave way beneath you. I watched you gather yourself from the currents that tried to undo you.

And I watched the way you danced yourself back to life when you were asked to begin again.

It is here that I know God did his greatest work, because through it all, you did not harden. In those quiet, candlelit early mornings with your Bible open, your heart still reaching toward hope, you stayed buoyant to what was possible. All the while, life was gently preparing you for a love that would change everything and gifting you the wisdom, born from all the storms, to recognise real shelter when it arrived.

You’ve found your harbour, my love.
And this weekend, you become a wife to a good man.

It is no small thing to stand at the edge of a new beginning. To say yes to a future you cannot yet see. To offer your whole heart, your dreams, your trust, your tenderness into the hands of another.

And rarer still, to be met there by someone ready to cherish it all.

As I sit here writing to you, I find myself thinking not just about weddings or beginnings, but about marriage itself and the extraordinary beauty that unfolds when two people choose each other, not just once, but over and over again.

I remember writing my wedding vows, as if the moment still lives peacefully in my chest, untouched by time. It was a Thursday evening, and I was sitting at my office desk in our old federation rental, with ceilings so high you could feel the stories they held. My desk sat in the middle of a room heavily influenced by the Samantha Wills bohemian era. Pink roses in a vase sat on top of a curated collection of books, splashes of turquoise, and an odd pair of antlers on the mantelpiece. The room smelled of those early years of Jase’s business, candles curing on every surface and the air thick with essential oils. If I close my eyes, I can still find my way back there.

Much like how I write today, sentences, words and threads of feeling swirled in my awareness for weeks before I finally put pen to paper.

I knew I would begin with the words,
"Jason, you are the great love of my life."

I promised him I would be,
"Quick to listen, and slow to speak,"

and that I would,
"Strongly protect his heart for all of my days."

I added a scribbled line from the notes app on my phone that said,
"It is your heart that moves me, your spirit that inspires me, and it is your love that has healed me."

And I finished by saying,
"I am grateful to God that our worlds collided at a moment in our lives where we could accept this life-changing love."

While I am able to close my eyes and meet that misty-eyed bride-to-be right there in that moment, what I didn’t yet understand, at 28, with giddiness in my heart and vows fresh on my tongue, was how to live marriage.

We are taught how to dream about marriage, how to celebrate its beginnings, but we are rarely taught how to live inside it. We are sold the beauty of the wedding day, the romance of the early chapters, but not often the truth about what it means to build a life. To choose each other through the ordinary seasons, the uncertain seasons, and the seasons that demand more than you ever knew you could carry.

But with time, marriage has not only revealed its gritty and glorious self to me, it has shaped me in ways I could never have understood standing at the altar.

I’ve come to know time as the slow alchemy that turns vows into something lived. It is the forgiveness handed back and forth like a gift. It is the joy woven into the fabric of ordinary days. And it is the thousand quiet choices to stay soft, to stay kind, to stay open.

That is what makes marriage so sacred. Because the real beauty lies in the unseen, the parts of yourself you entrust to just one person. The silences that speak volumes. The daily acts of choosing, again and again. It’s that quiet, consistent exchange of truth, love and presence that no one else will ever fully witness, but that, in the end, defines what love and marriage truly are.

I find myself fumbling over my words, torn between the urge to offer you advice and the knowing that marriage can’t be distilled into neat little phrases, especially not ones like “marriage is all about compromise” or “happy wife, happy life.” My advice doesn’t come because I have it all figured out, but because I deeply believe in marriage.

I believe in the togetherness, the unity, the safe corners of marriage that allow you to be most fully yourself. And I want to offer you something, not as a prescription, but as a love letter.

I want to tell you that marriage, the kind that stretches you and holds your heart all at once, is not built on control, perfection or performance. It’s found in the grace you offer one another when things are messy, unfinished or misunderstood.

I want to tell you that marriage, the kind that endures, that softens and strengthens over time, requires you to believe in the goodness within one another, even when it’s hidden, even when it’s hard to reach. To speak it in every room, to honour it, and to feed it intentionally with your words, your touch and your presence.

I want to tell you that marriage, the kind that becomes a safe home for your soul, is made stronger with the intimacy of honesty, vulnerability and the courage to be fully seen by another. The kind that asks you to be bare, in truth, in tenderness, in trust.

I also want to tell you to pash in the kitchen.
To make love on any given Tuesday.
To dance barefoot while the pasta boils.
To whisper something outrageous in the middle of the supermarket.
To hold hands under the table, long after the guests have gone.
To leave the light on. Just because.

I want to tell you to undress each other slowly, even when time says hurry.
To write each other notes no one else will ever read.
To laugh mid-argument, even when you're trying not to.
To remember what turns each other on, and what calms each other down.
To fall asleep tangled, even when it’s too hot.
To say “I love you” when you hang the washing out, and mean it.

I want to tell you to light the candles on a Wednesday.
To run a bath just because they look tired.
To sneak out early for croissants and come back with two of everything.
To make time for desire, not just when it’s easy, but when it’s needed.
To kiss in the doorway like you’ve been apart for years.
And to let your love spill into the ordinary, the dishes, the fuel light, the school pick-up line.

I want to tell you that marriage will only ever be how you make it.
It becomes what you give to it.
What you speak into it.
What you are willing to believe in, again and again.

So, my love, this is what I have come to learn.

To live inside a marriage is to let it be alive.

A living ecosystem that breathes and bends with time, with context, with seasons and life stages.

It is to carry the weight and the wonder in equal measure.

To let the mundane become sacred through attention.

To let the repetition become a rhythm that steadies you.

To let the ordinary moments become your private language of love.

And to remember that love doesn’t always feel the same over time,
but it is always asking the same question:

Will you meet me here?

It is time to let the great love in.

Happy Wedding Day.

Love,
Jody x

If we stitched together all our daily voice notes to one another, we’d have the most exquisite playbook for living a creative life. Not the polished kind you’d find in a bookstore, but the messy, magnificent kind. One filled with contradictions, course corrections, deep questions, and wild bursts of clarity recorded between school pick-ups and morning walks. A thousand tiny moments where we said out loud, I think I’m onto something or I’m lost again. A living document of what it means to move through the world as a woman committed to a creative life.

I’m not sure I would even know my artistry so intimately if it weren’t for you. I remember you as this flurry of creativity when we first met—possibly a mix of caffeine and anxiety, flying on the curtain-tail of an unwavering impulse to follow the muse. I sometimes felt dizzy by the ways your devotion knew no bounds, and your stunning stamina for seeing something through with exquisite detail. But what I remember most is how I watched you unlock something I hadn’t yet known. The way creative work became the threshold through which dreaming was possible.

I had slipped so naturally into the corporate real estate world. I mean, could I have been any more the definition of square peg, round hole? Possibly the next expected step, but mostly a way of funding the next fabulous outfit and champagne for my eagerly anticipated weekends. Before you, I don’t think I fully understood that creativity could be the foundation of a life. Not just something you did as part of Year 12 art class, but something you could build a whole world upon. A way of working. A way of living. A way of being true to yourself.

You were the first person I’d seen who lived their art. Who followed beauty with both discipline and abandon. You painted the canvas in vivid colour for what creative work could look like for me, too. In watching you, I saw a new and refreshing kind of life take shape. You modelled this beautiful intersection of inherent skill and palpable possibility. Like somehow, creating art could be a vocation that encouraged the abstract and beautiful ways I saw the world. Within you, I learned that the places my mind wandered were cues, the subtle architecture of a life made not just of art, but of deep, deliberate dreaming.

For over a decade, I’ve shaped my life and work from that place, and perhaps it all began with you—and that serendipitous meeting beside your greeting card stand, long before either of us knew what it would mean.

Funny, I’ve never thought of it this way before, my love. But there you have it. The glorious, self-organising nature of letter-writing casting a whole new light on the origin of our friendship.

While no creative path is ever truly linear, yours has moved with such steadiness. Each step following the last with a kind of quiet devotion. Mine has felt more like a dance of turns, detours, and the occasional long pause. And if I’m honest, I think I’ve carried shame about that. Like my inability to stay close to the work at all times meant I was flaky, undisciplined, or somehow less committed. That my stepping away was a failure of devotion, a telltale sign I couldn’t see something through. It’s taken me many years to soften those stories. To realise that my rhythm is simply different, and that my propensity to self-exile my art holds its own kind of wisdom.

I’ve come to understand that the discomfort I’ve felt is because often my creations feel like an extension of who I am. To step away has felt like a betrayal of that part of myself at times. I think as creatives, our natural disposition is to pour so much of ourselves into our work that at some point, the intensity becomes too great. Like a flame burning too hot, that requires space to cool. For us to step back and regain our sense of self, apart from that which we create.

That’s how I would describe the past few years for me. Like maybe, if I had stayed too close, I risked getting stuck in the echo chamber of my own thoughts and identity. I risked getting burned. But maybe it’s not betrayal to step back for a moment. Maybe it’s trust. Is it that we push away because we sense the need to expand? As if the distance allows us to live freely, to gather up new experiences and deeper, more truthful insights that make room for us to tenderly reframe what we thought we knew about our work. I think there is something profoundly human about stepping away, whether out of apathy, frustration, or even doubt, only to find ourselves drawn back in with renewed clarity and curiosity. Could it be that this full-circle feeling is a necessary rhythm in the creative process? And what if, instead of resisting it or feeling shame, we acknowledged it as a way of maturing as women and creators?

As I sit here writing to you, my gaze is often caught by the garden beyond my office window, as if the words might drift in from there. I laugh at my internal back-and-forth with deciduous flowers and how I still resist their rhythm. How I cling to their fullness, reluctant to witness the part where they let go. I wonder if we are similar as creative beings—if our growth requires both dormancy and emergence. And somehow, by giving ourselves permission to detach, we can return to our work with less attachment to the initial intention or feeling. Allowing it to unfold into something richer or more aligned. I think I’ve come to understand that creativity often thrives in the tension between absence and presence—well, at least mine anyway.

I can’t help but think that this cycle is part of what makes truly meaningful work. Allowing time away acts as a way of disentangling the surface reasons, the performance, the push. Until what’s left is the original ache. The subtle pull beneath it all. The entire reason why it existed in the first place. But now timeless, rather than fleeting or reactive.

And perhaps that’s what led me here—to this very letter. To Let Me Write You A Love Letter. Not as a project or a product, but as an honest return. A homecoming of sorts to the part of me that still believes in beauty, in truth-telling, and in living a creative life.

I sent you that voice note last week—remember? The one where I was practically squealing with delight, just after the real estate agents had come through. Gratefully reassured that the tireless work renovating our small but mighty home will reward us abundantly. But more so, because of the way those two women saw our home—or more truthfully, saw me as the creative within it. I stood back as they wandered through, eyes darting left to right, generously gushing at the abundance of colour, art, and consideration. Noting in detail the textures, the feeling, and the unique way our home felt emotive and revealing of the kind of people that live here. Jase graciously gestured my way to acknowledge me when they commented on how unexpected our home felt. And how refreshing it was to move through a space where our hearts were visible. In the eclectic art on the walls, the curated treasures I’ve gathered over time, and the audacity to pair things that seemingly have no business sitting together, and yet, somehow, they work.

Driving to school pick-up that afternoon, I felt almost giddy. Not just because of the financial reassurance, but because, in their generosity, those two delightful strangers seemed to recognise something truer. Not just a well-styled home, but its layers, its intention, the life beneath it. They saw the devotion to living in a way that reflects what so deeply matters to me: a creative life.

It made me realise that my creative life never pauses in the same way my work does. And in that, I began to understand the nuance between creative living and creative work.

Creative living is my lens. It is our lens, my love. It is more of an orientation, a natural disposition to see and shape meaning. Which, my gosh, we do in abundance. I would go as far as to say it’s almost the foundation on which our friendship resides. A common and deep-seated desire to live with beauty, curiosity, and artful intention. Hence, our message feed is filled with photos of freshly picked dahlias, morning light sprawled across the dining table, memory-keeping notes scribbled in our planners, our children’s precious faces, and life’s magnificent and mundane moments. A creative life doesn’t require our effort, as such, or our output. Instead, it reveals itself through presence. The more you notice it, the more it reveals—and slowly, almost imperceptibly, it becomes the way you live. Not something you do, but something you are.

Creative work, on the other hand, is the expression. It’s where our inner life finds form. It’s the intentional moment when creative living is channelled into something beautiful and specific. Something that often requires more spaciousness, more structure, and honestly, more courage.

Our creative work asks something of us—our time, our attention, our willingness to stay with the discomfort of shaping something that doesn’t yet exist. It asks us to choose, to commit, to bring form to the formless. It stretches us beyond observation and into articulation. Where creative living is intuitive and fluid, creative work is a kind of devotion. It invites discipline, discernment, and the risk of being seen.

But because of that, it also calls for time away, for living. It needs us to step back into the world, to feel, to gather, to remember. It seems our art thrives on pause at times. It feeds on our boredom, our heartbreak, our joy, our stillness. And somehow, it simply doesn’t feel sustainable without the ongoing nourishment of creative living.

So much of what I know about tending to a creative life, and translating that into meaningful work, has been shaped in tandem with you.

I’ve tried to leave it, you know. The work, the calling, the spark. But it keeps circling back, time and again. Tapping gently on the misty windowsill of my creative heart. Subtle. Certain. Unrushed. Reminding me who I am. (Turns out, my muse is a real sass like that)

Ten years ago, you taught me to dream—with my creativity at the helm—and in these past few creatively quiet years, I’ve held that close. Even in the personal silence, I held it (white-knuckled at times). And as it turns out, it never left me.

I thought I was writing a letter about creativity.
But really, it’s a thank you, my love.

Love,
Jody x

Is it me, babe, or is our generation frozen in time? Well, our foreheads, at least.

Are we the minority now, the women whose laughter takes their whole face with it?

The ones who, no matter how we try, can’t hide the furrow of our brow beneath the rage of the afternoon sun?

Why is it that in a sea of silky skin, I start to question my relevance? Even as the lines around my eyes speak of wisdom, the world around me whispers flawed?

Do you remember? You were the first person I dared admit it to: that this walk with aging is more uncomfortable than I’d anticipated.

It was right at dusk, and the chill of the evening had just started to catch our fresh faces. We had fallen behind the group as we walked, as if the moment itself wanted to stretch out, to ensure there was space for the truth to slip out.

We clumsily described the unfamiliar feeling of meeting the woman in the mirror. Not the one we expected to become, but the one who had arrived, quietly, over time. Wasn’t it only yesterday we were popping those silly little circle patches over our adolescent pimples and sleeping in our make-up?

Now we find ourselves wondering—is Botox the only bridge back to feeling like ourselves again?

It reminds me of those early days of new motherhood, when the ache to return to who I was before felt almost primal. I longed for the familiarity of tight denim, for the discipline of morning workouts, for some small proof I hadn’t disappeared. But when I got there, nothing fit. Not the clothes. Not the rituals. Not the version of me I was trying to revive.

Maybe our aging faces are the first to admit: we no longer wish to return, either.

I think I’ve come to understand our late 30s as an aging crossroads. The meeting place of all the years that have come before us (without enough SPF 50, obviously), and the exciting and confronting reality that we don’t turn back from here. That we are, now in fact, aging as a forever-in-motion thing.

Perhaps what’s most tender about this place, this crossroads, is the invitation it offers.
Aging isn’t just personal. It’s communal. Generational. Because without surrendering to our own becoming, the 20-year-olds don’t get to fully be the 20-year-olds, and the 30-year-olds can’t truly claim their thirties. If we, the women on the cusp of 40, keep clinging to where we’ve been, we don’t leave space for those rising behind us to truly arrive.

I’ve come to understand that this isn’t really a conversation about Botox at all. However, it does seem to enter the chat often. To be clear, some of my best friends have Botox regularly, and I love their beautiful (flawless) faces.

However, in choosing not to intervene, I know I will age visibly, perhaps even rapidly, comparatively speaking, while others seem to stay frozen in time.

I think I’m learning that this is the cost of choosing presence over preservation. Allowing my face to say, I’ve lived a beautiful life, thus far while others aren’t able to frown.

Just last week, we were out to dinner celebrating River’s 8th birthday. He tucked himself under my arm, and we smiled for a photo. When Jase flicked the phone around to show me, I instinctively swiped through, searching for at least one keeper amid a sea of silly, scrunched-up eight-year-old expressions.

I caught a glimpse; there I was, an almost 39-year-old woman and her eight-year-old son.

And then, there they were: my tired eyes. The Julia Roberts vein that runs down the centre of my forehead whenever I smile too big. And more movement across my brow than I was expecting.

It made me wonder, when did I learn to see myself like this?

To search for signs of aging instead of evidence of joy? As if joy alone wasn’t enough. As if the moment had to meet some invisible standard of beauty or, dare I say, worthiness. To look for the things I’d edit, instead of the things I’d remember?

But amidst all of it, I saw something else too, babe.

Happiness.

Real happiness.

The kind that takes over your whole face, a mother and her boy on his 8th birthday. The undeniable joy of having witnessed eight whole years of him.

Maybe that is the truest beauty of it all, the privilege of witnessing him up close, all this time.

And here lies the ongoing battlefield of an aging woman. Wild, isn’t it?

I think what I’m learning, my love, is that beauty isn’t something to hold still. It’s something to be witnessed, to be met in motion. Maybe that’s why it feels essential that we age together as women. Because within friendship, we remind one another that aging isn’t a failure of beauty, it is, in fact, the very embodiment of it.

And yet…

I might still get Botox, even though it goes against all the ways I live my life.

I might still get Botox, even though Jase reminds me often that I would be willingly injecting a neurotoxin into my pinel gland.

I might still get Botox, even though I read recently that Botox interferes with the empathy centre of the brain.

I might still get Botox, even though I deeply believe in the right of passage of aging.

And, I might not for all these reasons, too.

But if it's true, if this isn’t a letter about Botox, then maybe it is a letter about a deeper kind of acceptance.

A willingness to be seen not just as I was, but as I am becoming.

Love,
Jody x

Ps. Thank the heavens for tallow balm, facial cups and a strong slathering of retinol.