Jo’s Journal – March 2022

Happy Spring!

March 1st is the first day is meteorological Spring, and I bet you have been looking forward to it as much as I have! Lighter evenings, warmer days, cherry trees blossoming, daffodils blooming, and a real sense that life is starting over again.

February was a party month for me...

With Valentine’s Day, my husband’s birthday, and my best friend’s birthday, it is always a month of lovely dinners and nights out. And with my husband being a big fan of Scottish Rugby, there are usually also a couple of weekends in Edinburgh to fit in. This year was no exception, with some fabulous evenings of good food and wine.

Also this month, I managed to get up to Wakefield, to see the Barbara Hepworth retrospective at #Hepworthwakefield – a beautiful gallery built to celebrate this wonderful British sculptor. I have always loved her work, and have seen it at the Tate St Ives, as well as at her old studio – now a museum dedicated to her - in St Ives.

This was a chance to see it in context, with a large part of the exhibition dedicated to showing the enormous technicality behind her creations, with drawings, cut-outs and plaster models as part of the planning, before she ever took chisel to stone or wood. It was beautiful, fascinating, and inspiring.

I have always had a keen interest in art...

 especially painting, but also architecture and sculpture - so I always make time for exhibitions when they are of something or someone that interests me. My Dad used to take my sister and me up to London for big exhibitions in my childhood – I remember Renoir, where some of the paintings were bigger than me; Monet’s Series paintings - Rouen Cathedral and Westminster Bridge; and Dufy, amongst others.

Another cultural highlight for me this month was the Spectacle of Light show at Compton Verney, a country estate just up the road from us in Warwickshire. I took my friend Emma for her birthday, and we had a lovely time strolling around the grounds, lit in a myriad of colours with synchronised music and ever-changing patterns.

I mentioned last month our new All-seeing Eye myMantra Necklace...

which has just come back hallmarked from the Assay Office, and is now available to order on our website. This month saw us doing our first ‘Facebook Live’ to launch the necklace, and show a live engraving of my own personal mantra.

Shop the 'All-seeing Eye myMantra Necklace'

For a while now, I have been working on a mantra for myself about being the author of my own story. The reason I wanted this is because I sometimes forget how much influence we all have over our own lives. I’ll often say something like, ‘I wonder where we’ll end up living, when we retire?’, to my husband. To which he rightly replies that it is very much within our control to decide.

I think, because I love reading novels so much, I am always keen to find out what happens next in the story, and what happens in the end. With my own life, I need to remember that I am in control of much of the story. Not all of it, by any means. But I am in control of how I react and respond to what happens in my life, and I can exert a huge amount of influence over my circumstances.  

So, I decided that something around ‘I am the writer, not the reader’, or ‘I am the author of my own story’ needed to be part of a mantra of my new All-seeing Eye.  

And then, I also want to inspire myself to make my story a good one – full of things that excite and thrill me.

So, my final mantra to be engraved is:

I am the author:

write what sets my soul on fire

 

Celebrate an empowering woman! 

March sees both International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day, so we are using the whole month to celebrate women, as we usually do in March.

We are talking about strong women in our social media; celebrating them in our blogs; offering an ‘Empower’ Necklace as a prize in our competition celebrating inspiring women; and giving FREE ENGRAVING on all our Disc Necklaces, so you can have something personal engraved on the reverse, to celebrate an empowering woman that you know.

 

I have also been doing a lot of reading and audio listening this month, as I do.

‘Manifest’ by Roxie Nafoushi has been seen everywhere, including in the hands of my old bank manager, who was loving it - so I read it a couple of weeks ago. It is a straightforward and easy-to-read account of steps to take to get clear on a vision of what you want in life, warmly encouraging you to take steps to manifest it with firm belief and coordinated action.

Having finished that, I moved onto Martha Beck’s ‘The Way of integrity’ – recommended by Oprah Winfrey, amongst many others; whilst concurrently listening to Mel Robbins’ excellent ‘The High 5 Habit’ on Audible – a highly energetic ‘pep talk’ about giving yourself a visual pep talk each morning.  

Now, you might wonder how I manage to retain all the information in these books, as I rush eagerly onto the next one. And you’d be right to question it, as I certainly move on too fast, before I have absorbed the lessons of the last one. So – if I had to recommend one above all – it would be Mel Robbins, as she is warm, down-to-earth, very real, and her messages and learnings much more impactful and memorable than anyone else’s.

Well, that’s all for this month. I really hope you all have an amazing March, and I look forward to the ending of Covid restrictions, and will keep hoping for a peaceful outcome in Ukraine.

Jo xxx