First, I owe you all a big apology. My email provider changed their process, and I accidentally sent out Week 2 of our 8-week series last week.

Don't you just hate it when you finally learn something, get it working well, and then they go and change it on you? Now I have to relearn the whole program!

So if you got a strange email from me last week, that's why. I'm so sorry for the mix-up, and thank you for your patience while I find my feet again.

The good news is that we're starting properly now. Week 1 arrives this Sunday morning, and a new week will land in your inbox every Sunday for the next eight weeks.

So grab a cup of tea and join me on Sunday morning. I'd love to have you along.

Steady Ground: Healing in an Unsettled World - 8 Week Series

It’s Sunday morning, lovely you. Grab your cup of tea, settle in, and join me in week 1 of our new eight-week series, Steady Ground: Healing in an Unsettled World.

I’m so glad you’re here.

Week 1: The Ground Is Moving

There’s a particular kind of tiredness I keep noticing in people lately. It isn’t the ordinary kind that a good night’s sleep can fix. It’s something deeper, and I hear it in conversations with friends, in messages from readers, and in the people I meet through my work. So much feels uncertain at once: the news that never seems to pause, the rising cost of simply living, the changes rippling through our workplaces, the health of the people we love. Most of us are carrying it quietly, without quite being able to name it.

Feeling It Before We Can Name It

The body usually knows first. Our shoulders creep up toward our ears. We catch ourselves clenching our jaw at a red light, or we wake at three in the morning with thoughts racing, unsure what we’re even worried about. We tell ourselves we’re just busy. I know that story well, because I told it to myself for years while my body was whispering and I wasn’t listening.

Part of what’s unsettling so many of us right now is how quickly the world of work is changing. In my other life as an HR advisor, I sit with leaders deciding how artificial intelligence will reshape their companies. I also sit with the people on the other side of those decisions, the ones quietly wondering whether their skills and their sense of being useful will still matter in a few years’ time. I don’t have tidy answers for that. But I do know that kind of fear doesn’t stay at the office. It comes home with us, and it settles into our bodies.

When the Ground Has Already Moved

If you’re living with illness, all of this lands on ground that has already shifted beneath you. A diagnosis rearranges everything: your plans, your energy, your sense of who you are. More than thirty years ago, I was told I had six months to live, and I remember feeling as though the earth itself had tilted. When your body is already asking so much of you, the wider world’s uncertainty can feel like one weight too many. If that’s where you are right now, please know you are not imagining how heavy this is, and you are not carrying it alone.

What Surveyors Know

My dad was an engineering surveyor in New Zealand, and if anyone understood that land is never perfectly still, it was a Kiwi surveyor. New Zealand sits right where two great tectonic plates meet, and the earth beneath us is always quietly moving. Around twenty thousand earthquakes are recorded there every year, somewhere between fifty and eighty a day. Most are so small that only sensitive instruments notice them. A hundred or so are strong enough to feel, the kind that rattle a teacup or make you pause mid-sentence. Every so often, a much bigger one comes along and changes lives and landscapes in a single moment. Even on the stillest day, the ground under New Zealand is shifting at about the pace our fingernails grow.

So surveyors rely on something called a benchmark: a fixed point they can trust, against which everything else is measured. Dad knew the ground would keep moving. He respected the land for what it was, restless and alive, and worked with it rather than against it.

I’ve been thinking about benchmarks a lot lately. When everything around us seems to be moving, what do we measure ourselves against? What stays true when so much else is changing? I’m not going to answer that for you today. I’d rather we discover it together over the coming weeks.

A Gentle Practice for This Week

Once a day, pause for a moment and place a hand wherever you feel the unsettledness most. It might be your chest, your stomach or your shoulders. Don’t try to fix it. Simply acknowledge it, the way you’d acknowledge a friend who’s having a hard time: I feel you. I know things are uncertain right now.

Then ask yourself one question: What in my life is still standing? The answers might be small, like a friend who always picks up the phone, the first cup of tea in the morning, or the tree outside your window. Write them down and keep the list somewhere safe. You’ll want it later in this series.

The Cul-de-Sac

I was a young girl when Dad took me to a quiet cul-de-sac I’ve never forgotten. There were tall trees, a creek running through it, and flowers and plants everywhere I looked. He told me his job was to survey the land and create space for twenty-five homes. The developers wanted it done as quickly as possible. They didn’t care about the trees or the creek; they just wanted houses built.

I remember looking at all that green and feeling something in me sink. Then Dad looked at me and said, “I’m going to make this cul-de-sac one of the most beautiful places to live. It has so much potential, Prudie. You will see.”

I didn’t know then what he was going to do. And I had no idea how long it would be before I finally saw it.

Next week, in Week 2, Where Worry Lives in the Body, we’ll gently explore where this unsettled world lands in us physically, and how we can begin to soften it. I’ll also take you back to that cul-de-sac, to the creek, and to the sound I still remember all these years later.

Come on over to Prue's Place blog and let's chat in the comments. I'd love to know what you think of this series. Or, join us on the Facebook or click below.

❤️ Love,