“Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.”
— Brené Brown
Hello, Lovelies!
For this quarter, I’ll be working with This Might Hurt Tarot by Isabella Rotman – a bold, honest, and deeply compassionate deck that doesn’t shy away from truth, but holds it with warmth, humour, and a fierce belief in your ability to grow through whatever life is asking of you.
Our card to guide us for the week ahead is the Six of Cups – gentle, nostalgic, and deeply healing, inviting us to reconnect with what once made us happy and to rediscover the power of simple, shared moments.
2026 is a profoundly intuitive and creative year, encouraging adaptability, flexibility, and new beginnings that are both practical and sustainable.
April → May Energies
We’re in a threshold week — one foot still in April, one stepping into May.
April has been asking you to stand more firmly in your own energy. To trust your inner compass, meet your own needs, and begin shaping your life from the inside out. It’s been a month of self-awareness and self-sovereignty — of recognising what feels right for you, and what no longer does.
As we move into May, that awareness wants to become something more active.
May is about self-leadership. It’s time to develop a deeper understanding of what drives you, what holds you back, and what truly matters. Once you can see yourself clearly, you can begin to choose differently. You don’t need to create pressure or chase perfection. You’ve outgrown that way of being.
This is where the shift happens. April helped you see. May asks you to begin aligning your life — your relationships, your work, your creative energy — with your values, your capacity, and your truth.
If you’ve been feeling stuck, procrastinating, or caught in old patterns, this is where things can start to loosen. Not all at once. But gently, steadily, and in ways that can actually last.
This is not about becoming someone new. It’s about understanding yourself more deeply, making more aligned choices, and finding your way forward — one thought-out step at a time.
🌿This Week’s Guidance
This week carries a gentle, homecoming kind of energy.
The Six of Cups invites you to look back — not with longing, but with warmth. To reconnect with the simpler things that once made you happy. The activities, the places, the people, the rhythms of life that felt easy and true before everything got so complicated.
There may be old dreams stirring again — things you set aside, perhaps for very practical reasons, that are quietly asking for your attention now. Don’t dismiss them. Sometimes what feels like nostalgia is actually a compass, pointing you back toward something you still need.
This is also a beautiful week for reconnection. Reaching out to old friends or family. Picking up a conversation that got lost somewhere along the way. Or simply allowing yourself to be present with the people already around you — sharing a meal, a walk, an unhurried moment together.
There is real healing available here, especially in long-term relationships. The Six of Cups reminds us that connection doesn’t need to be dramatic to be powerful. Sometimes the most meaningful repair happens quietly — in a shared cup of tea, a softened tone, a willingness to try again.
If you’ve been carrying old patterns that no longer serve you — ways of relating, responding, or protecting yourself that have outlived their usefulness — this is a supportive week to begin gently untangling them. You don’t need to do that alone. Seek out the people, the practices, or the professional support that can help you move through what’s ready to shift.
And for those of you with creative projects on the go — this is wonderful energy for that work. The Six of Cups opens up a channel between memory and imagination, between what was and what could be. Let yourself play. Let yourself be curious. Something good wants to come through.
Above all, this week is a reminder that connection is medicine.
Not the performative kind of connection. Not the exhausting kind that leaves you drained rather than restored.
The real kind. The kind that happens when you let someone in, when you show up as you are. The kind where love, laughter and connection flow from that glorious place of being accepted as yourself — no masks, no filters.
And this kind of connection isn’t only found with other people. It can happen just as powerfully when you meet your true self through journalling or a solo creative practice, when you sit quietly in nature, or when you’re simply being with a beloved animal companion.
Guided Meditation
This week I’m sharing one of my guided meditations — a Loving Kindness practice that sits beautifully alongside the Six of Cups energy.
It’s a simple, gentle meditation that begins with you — breathing kindness and compassion into your own heart — and then gently expands outward, flowing that warmth toward someone you love, and then out into the world.
If connection is medicine, this is one of the quietest and most powerful ways to practise it.
You don’t need any experience. Just a few minutes and a willingness to be gentle with yourself.
Feel free to hold a crystal as you do the meditation. Enjoy!
📖Journaling Prompt
What from my past — a dream, a relationship, a way of being — is quietly asking for my attention again? And what would it look like to honour that, even in a small way?
🌟 Top Tip of the Week:
Reach out to one person this week — someone you’ve lost touch with, or someone you see often but haven’t really connected with in a while. It doesn’t have to be a long catch-up. Just a message, a call, a moment of genuine warmth. Connection doesn’t need to be complicated to be real.
Crystals to support you this week – Moonstone, Rose Quartz, Rhodonite, Amethyst, Ruby Zoisite, Howlite
And speaking of connection and all that heart-nurturing goodness…
🌿A note from the Treehouse
This week we had a dear friend staying here at the Treehouse, and it has been the most Six of Cups week imaginable.
Our days were spent telling stories, catching up on each other’s lives, and just hanging out over a cup of tea or a shared meal. I love the easiness that comes from being with someone you know so well that they are not a guest in your home — they are part of the family. That means I can relax. I don’t have to entertain. I don’t have to play hostess. And honestly? That’s been so restorative.
One evening we packed up a picnic and headed to the beach at dusk, and the sunset was glorious — all gold and pink, with a crescent moon rising over the water. We stayed longer than we’d planned, and were rewarded with streaks of light from the Lyrids meteor shower flashing across the early night sky. None of us had expected it. It was one of those gifts you can only receive by being present and unhurried.
Back at the Treehouse, the wildlife has been putting on a show of its own. A cheeky Brown Tree Snake — a Night Tiger — arrived one evening and ate all the fat Hawk Moth caterpillars off my Peace Lilies. And our resident microbat has been making regular appearances, perching on the picture rail like a tiny, furry gargoyle.
Autumn has well and truly settled in now. The days still warm up beautifully, but by late afternoon the temperature plummets. The air is crisp and clean, and the light has that particular golden softness that only this season brings. I’m still doing my daily physio exercises in the swimming pool, although at this point it’s become more like cold water therapy. No complaints though — I actually love it.
And through all of it, I’ve been writing. A lot.
Early last year I made a decision to prioritise my own creative work above everything else — except health. That one shift has changed more than I expected. I finished a manuscript and got it ready to pitch to agents. This year I’ve written 28,000 words of a new story. Writing is the first thing I do each day after my meditation, while my mind and body are fresh, and that rhythm has become the foundation everything else is built on.
What I didn’t anticipate was how much would flow from that single decision. Ideas — not just for writing, but for life, for business, for how I want to spend my time — have begun arriving with a clarity and frequency that surprises me. I’m making big decisions with confidence and conviction. Not always with ease — some of them have been genuinely hard — but with a sense of direction I haven’t felt in a long time.
I think what’s happened is quite simple, really. I stopped reacting to my life and started authoring it. And once you do that, once you stop waiting for the right conditions and just begin, something shifts underneath you. The meaning returns. And meaning sustains you in a way that output alone never can.
And speaking of things coming full circle — many of you will remember a story I first shared here on the blog years ago, about a day in a Brisbane café when I broke my own rule and delivered a psychic message to a complete stranger. A young father, a baby who wouldn’t stop reaching for me, and a message I wasn’t sure I should have given.
I carried doubt about that encounter for fourteen years. Wondering if I’d crossed a line. Wondering if I’d done more harm than good.
This week, that father found me. He reached out to tell me what happened after they walked away that day. I won’t say more here — the full story is over on Substack, and it deserves to be read in one piece — but I will say this: after fourteen years of not knowing, I finally have my answer.
I wrote it up as The Baby Who Needed To Speak, and the response from those of you who remembered the original blog post has been deeply moving. Some of you have carried that story too. I hadn’t fully understood that — that closure for me would also be closure for you.
I lost a handful of subscribers after publishing it, and that’s OK. I want to write for people who want to be here on the journey with me. If I’m not someone’s flavour, that’s absolutely fine.
This week, I hope you let yourself reconnect with something — or someone — that matters. It doesn’t have to be big. A message. A memory. A moment of warmth over a shared cup of tea.
Connection is medicine. Let yourself have some.
With love from the Treehouse, Nicole xx 🌿
PS: while we’re talking about things I’ve been working on behind the scenes…
I’ve quietly adjusted all of my prices across Etsy and Amazon — everything has come down — to make my work more accessible right now.
If you’ve been thinking about picking up a planner, a resource, or something to support your journey, this might be a lovely time to do that.
No pressure at all — just a gentle nudge if it feels right for you.
Hard Copy Planner – Amazon USA Hard Copy Planner – Amazon Australia Digital Planner, Hard Copy Planner, and all bonus goodies – Etsy Store
