Community Stories

Some days, the idea of being organised feels almost laughably unrealistic. We’re told constantly that life would run more smoothly if only we were a little more on top of things. Plan ahead. Do things earlier. Prep the meals in advance. Buy the Christmas gifts in November. Simple, right? Except…not really. Because underneath every piece of organisation advice is one silent assumption: That you have time. And for many of us, that’s the part that’s missing. Organisation = doin

Sehnsucht - Susanne_Kraißer After years of living away I experienced a profound  hiraeth  for the fog, the flatlands and quiet villages of my hometown. Sometimes, I’d be overcome with a yearning to be around my ancestors and the life they once lived; the places they had once walked in. I was experiencing saudade - a deep emotional state of melancholic longing for something that was absent. However, it is fair to say that this yearning, this longing was largely Sehnsucht beca

As the leaves turn and the air cools, many of us feel an intuitive shift, a quiet invitation to look inward.  The end of October and the arrival of Samhain (pronounced Sow-en ), the ancient Celtic festival marking summer’s end, offer a powerful moment to pause, reflect, and realign before the deep winter sets in. The modern calendar urges us to “start strong” on 31st December.  To charge into a new year full of resolutions and new routines. But when we look around, nothing in

Online shopping: thrills and disappointments. I was going to talk about post-menopause but have been distracted by AI. I use Ai quite a lot and really appreciate what it can do. I find that I rarely google anymore because AI can gather the information and discount the irrelevant pieces of information and then present it to me in a language I understand - and conversationally too! I also know we should be cautious about AI because of the environmental drain, especially with su

As someone therapeutically trained, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of grief. I understood the theory. I felt open to it, willing to...

Exploring the Possibilities of Parallel Paths For a long time, I believed that life had a singular, correct path. That we were meant to...

I have been striving for independence my whole adult life. I thought that being able to do it all myself meant that I was strong,...

What do you see when you look in the mirror? It is going to get so much harder, getting or should I say looking older. I have always...

“I learned about microchimerism today.” Microchimerism and miscarriage are deeply intertwined in ways that are both scientifically...

Middle adulthood has come at different ages over the decades. I remember looking at Ladybird books and comparing the original versions...

When we think of burnout, we usually imagine long hours at a demanding job, a full inbox, or never-ending meetings. But for many women,...

If there is one thing I am vulnerable to on Instagram is sample sets of perfume. It is made worse by my tendency to immediately buy them,...

Happy New Year! Many of us know that April 1st was once the first day of the new year, and that this was during pre-Christian times,...

Since Ostara’s origins around the end of last year and the beginning of this, I have had to embrace social media in a way I don’t find...

Have you ever found yourself looking at your cat or dog and thought “I’ve got an animal freely wandering around my house! How has this...

Tiddy Mun Tiddy Mun was one of the Tiddy people - bog spirits who lived in the marshes, or Carrs, of North Lincolnshire, the Fens of...

I have been watching Davina McCall's podcast on You Tube "Begin Again with Davina", and she is talking with Eleanor Mills. Eleanor is a...

1980s and 90s pop culture Googling ‘ Origin Stories’  brings forward a wealth of articles and documents, and it becomes clear that this is of interest to many people. Could it be because we are in a time of uncertainty and that we are looking back into our pasts because there is comfort to be had in thinking about the past, rather than becoming anxious about what might be to come? Possibly, but are we in uncertain time? Yes, we are but aren’t we always? And haven’t we always

We will all have arrived to the Ostara community via different paths. Perhaps some of us have physically moved from other parts of the...

Having returned from Australia recently I remember clearly the announcements on public transport at the beginning of each journey or as...