A monthly letter from Joanne. May 2026.
OPENING RITUAL
Come and sit a moment, dear friend. May is here.
This is the month of the long evenings, the warm air through the open window, the particular feeling of a year that has found its stride. The urgency of January is far behind us now. June’s full summer is still ahead. We are in the soft middle of things.
And it is here, in the soft middle, that the most interesting changes tend to happen. Not the dramatic ones — those belong to the turning points, the beginnings, the bold decisions. The changes of May are quieter. More interior. More about the quality of attention you bring to what is already here than about adding something new.
This month, we are practising the art of the small choice. The modest, repeated, almost invisible decision that changes not just a day but, slowly and durably, the person making it.
Settle in. The story is waiting.
THIS MOON’S TALE — A small story about the quiet change that begins with one honest question.
“The Woman Who Asked How She Was”
Nadia had been a nurse for nineteen years, and she was very good at asking people how they were.
She had the particular gift of making the question feel genuine rather than procedural — of asking it in a way that opened rather than closed, that made the person in the bed feel, even briefly, that their honest answer was welcome. She had been told this many times, by patients and colleagues and the occasional consultant who noticed things like that. It was, perhaps, the thing she was most quietly proud of.
It was a Saturday in early May when she sat down with her coffee in the kitchen and asked herself the same question.
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