Tenderness stories

Tell me yours...

Every year when the season allows, a dear friend of ours plants sunflowers secretly in different places throughout his garden for his lover to find. Imagine her delight when she unexpectedly finds them one-by-one for the entire season that allows them to grow. 

Tenderness stories can be found all around us. It is becoming of simple habit that I collect them. I am witnessing just by simply hearing and seeing them, a softening of my own kind.

For the past three years, tenderness has become a curiosity of mine—a continuous exploration pondering how intentional acts of softness can profoundly transform our human experience. This theme has woven its way through much of my recent work, reflecting a commitment to capturing and celebrating the quiet strength found in the everyday act of choosing softness.

I’ve thought long and hard about this idea—wondering if tenderness might become an instinctive response if only there were room for it. Reflecting on times when survival mode had me anxiously doggy-paddling upstream, I’ve seen how the constraints of life often overshadow care, ease, and intentionality.

Could creating space in our lives act as a doorway to tenderness? Could it be a way to truly live and allow life to touch our skin, making us softer, more open beings? Is this pursuit of softness a luxury in our society, not because we hold reluctance to it, but simply because the scaffolding of our society has made such a pursuit an almost impossible choice? And if such is true, how can one untether, slowly, slowly, truly, truly, from the place in which one stands, to add even just a tiny new centimetre of spaciousness?

In lots of ways, this pursuit might feel like there is a losing of things before there is an opening of room, for it is true that things do need to be taken away for space to have its way—

I ask all this, not from a place of exponential earthly provision, but from a place where I’m allowing the taking away of some things, to make way for the softer things…

slowly, slowly.

Interestingly, this exploration of tenderness has inadvertently led to my next book. As I delved into these questions, the themes and reflections began to take shape, evolving into a new project that, quite serendipitously, embodies the very essence of softness and space I’ve been contemplating. So, in a way, the pursuit of tenderness has written its very own chapter in my creative journey.

I look forward to sharing more about the release of this… soon.

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In the meantime, the print can be found here.

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Read my pieces on Tenderness:

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Thank you for sowing here, for this opportunity to push my own limits and find the words begging to be found, just beneath the words on top.

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