Last week, I saw this beautiful photo of a mountaintop. I can’t tell you the exact source, but it was posted by Earthfocus. I wanted you all to see it, too.

The world continues to surprise us, and there’s so much beauty to enjoy if we look for it. Australian winter has been full of sunny, crisp days with camellias blooming, and cold, starry nights. Sydneysiders have mostly been healthy, but now we’re heading into full lockdown so we’ll all be expected to stay at home for two weeks and wait for Covid to subside.

It’s a time to turn inward.

Work on our projects.

Be kind to the people we’ve been given to love, whether that’s cranky forced-to-be-home teens or family via zoom, co-workers on Teams meetings or the grocery and Amazon delivery guy.

I’m trying to summon up a mindset of appreciating this lockdown: we’re healthy here, we have a freezer that’s full, books and board games and work we can do remotely. But still—lockdown always makes me want to plan a dinner party, do a day trip, go shopping for a dress—the opposite of what we’ll have to do.

If you’re freewheeling into summer in the other hemisphere, enjoy your barbecues and gatherings. If you’re living in our lucky country Down Under, I hope you and yours are healthy and well.

And if you’re in my hometown of Sydney, I’m wishing you a peaceful time in the next two weeks. I hope you get a lot of little jobs accomplished: wipe out the fridge, clean up your desk, soak the school shirts in nappy san, crack open the Monopoly or Scrabble. I hope you and yours are okay.

We face what we have to face, and even lockdown can be useful.

Love Catherine x

PS.

• Something to learn: books I’ve been planning to buy are Flavour, a cookbook by Ottolenghi (love the cover) and Atomic Habits by James Clear. I borrowed Atomic Habits from my library but I need my own copy as a reminder.

• Something fun: new socks. When was the last time you went through your own sock drawer and made sure you had enough new socks? I regularly do this for everyone else I live with but my own socks were woeful. So I did a full ‘range of socks’ shop for me. Feels so good to replace them all at one time! Look how pretty.