20/06/2026
These photos arrived this week and they brought me straight back to that week, the one we lived together at the start of this month.
I keep trying to find the right word for it and I think it’s awe. That’s the closest I can get. There’s a kind of depth and a kind of bigness to what happens there that’s hard to name properly.
One of the mothers used the expression soul searching to describe her week, and I think that’s exactly it.
When a woman finally has time, real time, to stop, to disconnect from everything she normally carries, something opens. She can hear herself again. And from that, so many moments of connection happen almost on their own. With her children, really seeing them, playing with them without her mind somewhere else. With herself, finding things she’d put aside without even noticing. And with the other mothers too, that recognition that happens when someone says something true out loud and you realise you’ve felt the exact same thing.
Going through these photos now, I can see all of it. I can see the awe.
The next edition of this same week will be in October, same place, same kind of magic waiting to happen.
The Woman Within, this October in Lagos, Algarve 🤍