"To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow, " said Audrey Hepburn apparently, in her humanitarian phase. It’s a concept that all gardeners understand and I can't think of a better one for the first Sunday of October.

I promised myself there would be no excuses this year, and I'm overjoyed to report that the bulbs have finally made it out of the kitchen. Some years they have made a brief trip to the shed and are unearthed in January, looking rather sorry for themselves. This year there are daffodils going in in guerilla gardening style in the grass verge outside, a scattering of alliums for late spring in the borders and some tulips in pots by the door. Kneeling in coldish soil with a trowel and a mug of coffee going lukewarm on the garden table, I thought once more about how bulbs are an act of faith

Almost the end of September. The Autumn Equinox. A Full Harvest Moon. A slight nip in the air. The earth is in balance, and it's the perfect moment to look back and look forward.
Around here, the winter wardrobe is coming out, boxes of bulbs are waiting on the kitchen floor (last year's bulbs made it as far as the shed, only to be unearthed in January, so this year there are NO excuses), and any spare minute is spent putting the garden to rights for next year. There's a fine crop of quince to harvest, even if the apples were poor.

Harvest is one of my favourite festivals. At next week's Harvest Supper we'll share food, fun and news with friends we haven't seen for a while. It's a time to be thankful and to connect before moving indoors for the darker months.

“It was September, and there was a crackly feeling to the air.”

There’s a nip in the air when I go for an early morning wander around the garden. Spiders’ webs glisten on the hedge; a faint smell of woodsmoke in the air; the borders are a riot of golds, oranges and deep, deep purples; and of course there is foraging to be done. Somewhere nearby lustrous bunches of elderberries hang just within reach. I love them even more than the blackberries and gather them in my basket, carrying them home to make elderberry tincture, surely the easiest of all my elderberry concoctions. I have my eye on a bumper crop of sloes but should wait until the frost has touched them. It’s a race between me and the birds. If I get too impatient, I’ll gather them anyway and pop them in the freezer.

Another September and the start of the school/agricultural/gardening year and I am to be found wandering around a local National Trust landscape. It's a ritual I've been embracing for over thirty years. The early September ramble as a teacher, then a mother, then both has marked the boundary between the lazy days of Summer and the more structured back-to-school life that September introduces. It's bitter sweet but life ought to be full of ebb and flow, ice creams and homemade soup, holidays and workdays, freedom and structure.

Let's be clear. I am queen of spontaneity; I prefer to choose what's for supper on the way home from work rather than to formulate a menu and shopping list for the week ahead.

BUT

I have decades of lived experience to illustrate that when routine and structure disappear out of the window my mood, productivity, positive relationships and general wellbeing go too.

The Good Enough Teacher: What Winnicott Can Teach Us About the Classroom

I loved teaching but it took me a while to embrace the concept of being good enough. Not good enough but good enough. What I mean is to be comfortable with being good enough, to have boundaries, to maintain a work-life balance, to work smarter rather than harder and to have a personal wellbeing target on your annual appraisal which was more meaningful than ‘go for a ten minute lunchtime walk once a week’. (This was a real target!)

A lifetime ago, when I was a young Mum at home with her three very small children I stumbled across a copy of D W Winnicott’s book The Good Enough Mother and it changed my life. Some time before I had been gifted Gina Ford’s The Contented Little Baby (AKA Infant Boot Camp) I love a routine but this one read like a survival manual written by a drill sergeant and so I had successfully ignored other parenting manuals until I came across Winnicott in a charity book shop.

Winnicott offered relief. Guess what? You don't have to be a perfect mother. In fact, he argued, you shouldn't try to be. What children need is "good enough”; someone who meets their needs closely at first, then gradually, tolerably, fails to meet them, giving children room to discover their own resources.

Like all good ideas it's a simple but with large implications. And it turns out that it translates remarkably well from home to school.

August brings “the promise of golden sunsets, reminding us to find beauty in every ending.” I’m quite good at endings. It comes with practice I suppose – all those exam classes and drama productions which require your eyes to be fixed firmly on the end of the ‘project’ from the very beginning. Despite being the height of the school summer holiday (except in Scotland), August seems more like a beautiful ending. Harvest is in full swing; the leaves are turning; there’s plenty to forage in the hedgerows; chutney-making starts in earnest and if you’re lucky there’s a trip to a sunflower field, a saunter round a maize maze or a beach sunset to enjoy. This year, more than ever as the drought and high temperatures has brought everything forward. My garden is awash with brown leaves and I’ve been picking blackberries for weeks.

There’s no better way to spend an hour than in taking a glut of produce from the garden and turning it into chutney to fill the pantry for the winter or to pop into Christmas hampers. I don’t follow a recipe but add apple cider or red wine vinegar, brown sugar and a spice mix to whatever gluts we have of fruit. If you’d be happier following instructions, ask friends and family members if they have any heirloom recipes laying about. Chutney-making is the perfect opportunity to keep the past alive.

Three times this week I have been reminded that in times of stress and uncertainty there is a lot to be said for doing something familiar, whether that is the music you choose to play when giving birth, the familiar books you escape into when you’re unwell or the television programmes you rewatch when everything feels difficult. When life is uncertain, even small decisions start to feel heavy. That is exactly why the familiar becomes so valuable.

It's not a distraction from the hard stuff. It's a way of automating some of your choices, so you have more space for the ones that actually matter.

Anyone who has children will recognise their penchant for having the same bedtime story read to them time after time. I must have read Postman Pat’s Difficult Day thousands of times. However much I wanted to break out something new for my little bookworms at bedtime the comfort reading of PP and his exploits was doing sterling service. I like to explore the reasons behind why things work. It’s the teacher in me, honed over many years of coaching students in the most effective ways to learn and manage their mental health. And so here is the neuroscience behind my claim.

Reading a familiar story or rewatching a favourite TV programme calms the amygdala, reduces cognitive overload and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. In this instance familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it provides predictability and soothes an overloaded nervous system.

It’s an anchor, not an escape.

If you've ever sat down to study, write, or practice a skill and looked up hours later wondering where the time went, you've experienced flow. Psychologists call it a state of complete absorption in an activity and as it happens this idea sits at the heart of one of the most talked-about happiness books of the last decade: Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, which I’ve finally got around to reading

The book explores how the residents of Okinawa, one of the world's "Blue Zones" known for extraordinary longevity, tend to stay engaged, purposeful, and mentally sharp well into old age. One recurring thread throughout their stories is a deep, almost meditative absorption in daily tasks whether it's gardening (my ears pricked up here), martial arts, cooking, or craftsmanship. That absorption is flow, and understanding it can change how students and professionals alike approach their work.

It’s been a couple of weeks of community and belonging. I've been lucky enough to belong to several quite different communities over the years, and each has taught me something slightly different about what it means to show up for other people, and to let them show up for you. And I celebrated this with a visit to the Archers tribute garden at RHS Badminton. (Yes I am a paid-up member of the Archers Addicts.)

And so I’m reflecting on three communities to which I belong and what they bring to the people who belong to them.

The village gardening club

A new grief cafe in my local town

The professional network I joined when i stopped working full-time in school

The professional network I joined when i stopped working full-time in school

I often use pictures to promote discussion. A creative approach to opening up conversations was bread and butter to me as a teacher and pastoral head but it works just as well in sessions with bereaved clients or individuals thinking about memorial rituals, with couples who are planning their weddings and in coaching A Level students. It’s also a technique I use myself when setting goals for the future. This picture taken by Chris Doel perfectly reflects where I am halfway through the year at the solstice, where day and night are in equal balance, the perfect time to pause and reflect. I’ve come to a crossing point, over one stile and with another to climb, the path ahead clear but for now I’m content to stand in the middle surrounded by wildness, pause, reflect and plan.

My brief foray back to teaching ends tomorrow. The final A Level English Literature exam is in the morning. From the very first lesson I taught back at Goffs School in 1991 to the last one a couple of weeks ago before the current students went on study leave, the subject of motivation is something we have pondered. There is always a gardening analogy to be found and no better place to illustrate how motivation works than in the garden.

My grief counselling days take me into gardens, onto allotments, and into overgrown plots that clients have been meaning to tackle for months. The conversation that happens most reliably, somewhere between pulling the first weed and filling the first trug, is this: “I don't know why I've been putting this off. I actually feel so much better now I've started.”

They're not imagining it. What they're noticing is a real neurochemical shift, and it happens faster than most people expect.

My husband is currently researching the Lynmouth Flood, which marks its 75th anniversary next year, using his well- honed genealogical research skills to flesh out the stories of the people who sadly lost their lives. Conversation inevitably turns to the one recovered victim who has not been identified. Why weren't they reported missing? Who did they matter to? Surely we all hope that we matter to someone?

Mooching around Toppings in Bath after work as I do fairly regularly, I picked up a copy of Mattering by Jennifer Breheny Wallace.

The premise of Wallace’s book is simple, and that’s what made it so readable. Feeling that you matter to someone or somehow doesn’t just give you a warm, fuzzy feeling; it's a core human need, as essential as food or sleep. It’s in our DNA. To our ancestors mattering meant being included in the tribe, safety. Literally a matter of life and death.