Seven weeks ago, I published my first article on this blog. I was writing about my father's garden and the strawberries he had taught me to find.

Since then, we have moved through six decades together, childhood in Niort, India at nineteen, a marriage between two cultures, Montreal and the crisis that forced me to find myself, South Africa and the betrayal, and the fifties that asked me to be more honest than strong.

This is not a summary. It is an invitation to look at what all of it forms together.

The lesson that runs through everything

When I look back across six decades, one truth runs through all of it, appearing in different forms at every stage.

Every difficult experience carries a lesson worth finding. It sits beneath the surface, the way strawberries sit beneath their leaves in my father's garden, present, patient, waiting for someone who knows how to look.

The practice is learning to look.

What I learned about transmission

I started writing this book because I wanted to share what I had learned. But in writing it, I understood something I had not anticipated : writing your life is also reading it for the first time.

Patterns I had never named appeared on the page. Connections between decades I thought were separate became visible. And lessons I believed I had learned turned out to still be integrating.

Transmission does not travel in one direction. In writing for you, I kept learning for myself.

What comes next

The Strawberry Wisdom is a six-volume series. Each volume covers one decade, combining personal narrative, distilled life lessons, and a reflective question for you.

I am finalising this project to present to a publisher this summer.

If these seven weeks of articles have spoken to you, if a reflective question made you stop, if a story resonated with something in your own life, you are exactly who I am writing this book for.

Subscribe to this blog to follow what comes next. And tell me in the comments : which week touched you most, and why ?

Elisabeth Court, known as Babette
Author of The Strawberry Wisdom