A tarot card reading in Tuscany

And what an Italian healer told me about my future in Australia...

You’ll have to excuse the slightly off-schedule post today. I’ve been overseas for almost a month now, and—suffice it to say—my lack of routine has left me a little off-kilter. I owe about a million people emails. I’m never quite sure who I’m seeing or where I’m going each day. I know I should be putting things into my phone calendar—dates, meetings, people, places—but the part of me that thrives on spontaneity still resists the structure.

I’m behind on my writing. There are a handful of pitches I need to send. I miss routine and quiet mornings alone. But I’m also incredibly grateful. Grateful for a career that allows me to spend extended stretches of time wherever I choose. Grateful for Nico, who supports me heading home as often—and for as long—as I need. Grateful for the friends and family who let me treat their homes like my own (you know who you are, and I love you for it). Grateful for all of it. I don’t take a moment of it for granted.

If you’re new to my Substack, this post will make more sense if you read this one first.

A week after we got the news about our visa, I boarded a one-way flight to Florence. I was feeling suffocated by Sydney’s heat and humidity, but also by the shift that had taken place—a chasm had opened up inside me. My disillusionment with the life we were building pulled me further and further from the one place that had once felt most like home.

I’d long wanted to go on a retreat with

Aweventurer

, ever since I met Tara—the founder—at the book club I used to host in Bondi. So when she reached out to say there was one room left on a retreat they were running at Ebbio, a farmhouse in Tuscany with

Emma Gannon

(who I’d met years earlier when she presented me with the London Book Fair’s inaugural Book Blogger of the Year award), I jumped at the chance. Never one to turn down a last-minute trip, I booked the final spot and a flight to Florence.

I’ll write another time about the magic of the retreat—the wild swimming, the writing, and the afternoon we spent drinking limoncello in the nearby village with Luigi, the deli owner we befriended during our stay.

But today I wanted to write about what happened when Emma read my tarot cards—and what came up during a pendulum healing session with the owner of Ebbio.