Posted: by Jo Thursday, 24 February 2022 @ 15:36
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.

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