Something started here.

It's Friday morning and I'm in a vast basement space with five women I've never met before. Music spills through the speakers and we close our eyes and move together. "Think about a moment when motherhood was really hard" we are instructed "How does that make your body move?". I crunch my shoulders and twist in short, jerky motions. I think about losing my temper with my nine year old the previous week, I think about all the times I've raised my voice, slammed down plates, clenched my fists. I clench my fists again as I twist and stamp and let the shame and the anger inhabit my legs, my hands, my face.

Later, over tea and cookies, we talk about the guilt of motherhood, the habit we've all picked up of belittling our own achievements. Of talking about what we're "trying" to do in our lives instead of what we're actually building. So often, mothering feels like an infinite failure parade, forever giving 60% of what you'd like to each of the projects on your plate. Feeling guilty about your work ambitions whilst tearing yourself apart that your marriage, your children, your community don't also get more of you; squeezing in emails while you wait in the car; listening to your child while wondering how to respond to your husband's voicenote; committing to show up for one person knowing you'll let down someone else you love.

Around the table we make eye contact and see ourselves reflected. We see each others' fierceness and our softness. We see how competent, how strong, how impressive we are and we also see the desperation and the worry, how we are disappointing ourselves all the time. I leave the space feeling lighter, feeling seen, feeling like I've given something by showing up as who I am. This is a work event. The team are building an app to support mothers in the months and years post-partum, when people stop asking how you are and you talk about your kids instead, while your own identity dissolves and diffracts, and you find yourself waking up as someone different. The app is designed to be there in the moments of spiralling self-reflection, of doubt and uncertainty, of solitude and deep thought. But the project straddles digital and physical spaces; AI and human; intellectual and somatic. It's a tool on your device and it's also about coming together to move like this, or to make things, or just to talk to each other, in the same room. I've been talking about this for weeks but somehow it's only now, at this intimate in-person event, that I suddenly feel I understand the purpose of the project, and feel its impact begin to reverberate. I'm glad I left the mountains to come to this room. I return home to a neon pink sunset and a feeling I recognise: Something started here.

Over the following days I think about all the times I am together with other humans and how and why we meet and what it means to me. Why, despite my love of reading, of disappearing down trails for hours of solo running, of being left undisturbed with a book or a journal, I return constantly to these encounters with others, almost always in small groups, rooms of conversation, these semi-structured moments in which, contained with a purpose and permitted to let loose, I feel myself expand into something approaching coherence. My thoughts coagulate into a point of view, and I see recognition in someone else, and I exhale in more than just a physical sense.

It's Wednesday night and I'm sitting at Valerie's kitchen table after book group. We've been discussing Lawrence Durrells' Justine, set in pre-war Alexandria, and Monica has riffed on the Egyptian theme - yellow rice scattered with deep pink pomegranate, sweet carrots flecked with brilliant parsley, juicy grilled aubergines. A table of immigrants, we talk about what it means to be home, we talk about how fragile the world is, how the things we think are so stable (the number in your bank account; the meaning of your passport) can be whisked away at a moment's notice. Of course we talk about Covid. We talk about our lives and our stories, and we talk about the world and what's happening. Earlier, we took turns to share our reflections on the book itself, its' dreamline evocation of tangled prewar love affairs. Hearing peoples' reflections on a book I've opens my mind up in the best possible way. It's astonishingly intimate, to know how someone responded to this relationship or that event, and it's also not personal at all. It's cultures and ideas and art and humanity; it reminds me that this point in history is never uniquely precarious, that precarious moments are all that have ever existed, toppling forwards one on from the other, and maybe art and arguments about what colours are in a sunset and how much plot do you need in a story and is the language lush and sensual or pretentious and nonsensical are as sane a thing as any to debate with intelligent friends on a warm October evening.

It's Thursday at midday and I'm sweating in jeans dragging blackened logs from one steep terrace to another. The air is filled with the sounds of chainsaws and strimmers. We're here to start clearing the trees from around the little stone cottage Sarah has decided to bring back to life. The purchase finally completed, it's time to remove the trees that burned in last year's fire, to start laying in stores of firewood; to christen the space with laughter and voices and shared meals eaten on laps in the patches of sunlight around the poor. We marvel at the wisdom of the builders, perhaps a hundred or more years ago, who managed to site the house so perfectly that despite being tucked in a west-facing valley it somehow catches the morning sun, just as you'd need it. We imagine the deck that will catch that sun, see future Sarah sipping tea in the stillness of the morning, we sweat and curse and lift and cut and leave neat piled of wood, tread in the paths

At this turning point in my life, I find myself looking back, trying to see a pattern in the threads spread out behind me. Again and again I see these moments of connection, I se people gathered around a real (or virtual) table trying to figure out how to do the thing: build the festival, feed the crowds, stop the wildfires, share the tools, get the roof on, digest the loss, honour the feelings. I see women's circles, team meetings, strategy sessions, potluck dinners, parties, conferences, picnics, retreats, ceremonies, team days, webinars, trainings. An infinite procession of awkward greetings, of shared agreements, the sudden momentum of an idea. Empty dancefloors filling up, whiteboards tangled and rewritten, tears and laughter. I see people sitting back and people leaning forward; leaders sharing visions and dissenters bringing them down, I see the times we've left unsatisfied, critical, disappointed and the times we've left filled up, light, knowing that something magic has taken place.

Seeking the pattern, I look ahead and consider what I'd like to cultivate more of, as the world fractures and heaves, as certainties fall away and moral anchors suddenly untether. I think of the experiment where research participants where placed, unknowingly, in a group of actors who all chose the wrong answer to a self-evident question. How three-quarters of the time they chose the wrong answer too, because it's better to be wrong than alone. I think we need to not be alone. We need to see each other. We need to be heard. We need to be able to share our doubts and our fears and our questions. We need to be able to say I'll bake the cookies, I'll move the logs, I'll meet you at the parking spot, I think it's a great idea, how can I help?