"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." — T.S. Eliot
My April has been dominated by the publication of Designed to Thrive. There are obvious parallels between birthing a book and birthing a baby, and this one took nearly three years from Chetan’s invitation to collaborate to its release on 17th April. For those wondering about the process: Chetan and I wrote different chapters and then edited each other’s work before our lovely editor, Natasa, helped polish the text to completion.
If you are curious about your children, grandchildren, or even yourself, this book is packed with insight and examples that I hope will shift how you see the people you love most. Every one of us arrives in the world with something particular to offer, and it is my deepest wish that this book helps us notice and celebrate what is unique in each child.
The Flower Moon – 1st May
May’s Full Moon, the Flower Moon, reaches its fullness on Friday 1st May at 18:23 BST, named for the abundance of wildflowers blooming across North America and Europe at this time of year. May is unusually generous in 2026 — there are two full moons in the month, the Flower Moon opening it and a Blue Moon closing it on the 31st, giving the whole month a particular quality of fullness and completion.
This moon asks what is coming into bloom in you — not something forced or hurried, but something that has been growing in its own season and is ready now to be seen.
Gate 24 — Returning
As the Flower Moon reaches fullness, the Sun illuminates Gate 24, Returning, sometimes called The Rationaliser. The name alone is worth sitting with.
The mind is a tireless worker. It loops and reviews and reconsiders, circling a question not once but many times over, and if we try to rush it towards a conclusion we miss the point of the cycling entirely. Gate 24 teaches that when the mind revisits the same territory, it is not getting lost — it is going deeper. Cycles become spirals, and each return refines our understanding.
The shadow is addiction: not only to substances, but to thought patterns, to stories told in the same way, to a mental circling that has lost its purpose and become a loop. The compulsion to rationalise everything, to keep the mind busy enough that stillness never quite settles in.
The gift is invention. When the cycling mind trusts the process rather than forcing a resolution, it finds connections that straight-line thinking would never reach. Innovation often looks, from the outside, like someone who simply refused to let a question go.
The pinnacle is Silence, which holds the paradox at the heart of this gate: the rational mind, taken to its highest expression, arrives somewhere beyond rationality. Truth is not worked out — it is experienced in stillness. The dilemma is gravity, the accumulated weight of unresolved thought that can keep us earthbound when we are ready to soar.
Line 4 invites us to cultivate mental clarity in the company of others, and to find the balance between the thought patterns habit has handed us and those that are genuinely our own. These are not always the same thing.
Bottle 24 — Love, Money and Creativity
Bottle 24 in the Colour Mirrors system carries the pairing of pale magenta and pale olive, and where Gate 24 invites us to look at how we think, Bottle 24 invites us to look at what we have made.
Imagine picking up a tapestry you have spent a lifetime weaving and, for the first time, seeing it whole. The pale magenta speaks of divine love illuminating the design from within. The pale olive is the colour of integration and wisdom earned through living, not through theory. Together they say: look at all of it, the bright threads and the dark ones, and recognise that the pattern was always more intelligent than you knew.
This is not an invitation to regret the difficult passages. The Bottle asks something more generous: acknowledgement. You have always been taken to the right place at the right time to become precisely who you are now. The cycling, rationalising mind could not have planned this. Something greater was weaving it all along.
Now is the time to own the blessings of love, money and creativity in your life — not grasping at them but receiving them in the way of someone who has finally recognised their own inheritance. You have earned this. You are the master weaver, and what you have made is, quite genuinely, a work of art.
Working with May's Energy
You might like to take a moment with these over the coming weeks:
- What has your mind been returning to lately — and is it deepening rather than repeating?
- Where have you been hurrying yourself towards a conclusion, when the process itself was the point?”
- What would it mean to receive, without qualification, the inheritance of love and creativity that is absolutely yours?
Book Corner
This month I am recommending Chetan Parkyn’s first book, Human Design: Discover the Person You Were Born to Be as it complements our new book beautifully.
For those of you who encounter Human Design through the newsletter each month and have found yourselves wondering what lies beneath — how it works, where it comes from, and how to apply it — this is the book that answers all those questions clearly and with real warmth. It is the foundational text, and for good reason. Given that Gate 24 is asking us to return and deepen, there is something fitting about going back to the beginning of a body of knowledge that may have been sitting at the edges of your awareness for a while now.
A Book of Our Own - and an Invitation
Designed to Thrive, A Human Design Guide for Parents is now in the world, and I would love to celebrate that with you.
On Saturday 16th May, from 4:00 to 5:00pm BST, Chetan and I are hosting a book launch party over Zoom. As a reader of this newsletter, you are warmly invited, and the ebook is yours to download for free on the day. Come and meet us, ask your questions, and hear more about what the book holds and why we wrote it.
I hope to see you there.
The Inner Forge — May's New Moon Circle
Final Thoughts
May carries a particular invitation: to stop treating the mind’s returning as a sign that something is wrong and to recognise it instead as wisdom finding its way. What cycles through with patience and attention does not simply repeat, it transforms. The tapestry of your life is already a masterpiece.
With love and in gratitude,
