Beauty and Play. The SENSE Method™
I’ve been on my own quiet journey lately. Something has shifted. I’m no longer a mother to very young children, and that change has opened up a kind of space I didn’t realise I’d been missing. A space to ask myself what I enjoy, what I’m drawn to, what I want to make. A space to learn new ways of balancing my nervous system, instead of just pushing through the days.
A few books have been companions during this time, and I’ve been wanting to explore their ideas more deeply — not as theory, but as something lived. The first is Do/Design: Why Beauty Is the Key to Everything by Alan Moore. It feels like a bit of a bible for where I am right now, especially with the whole fast‑moving world of AI and digital acceleration. I’ve been trying to understand what beauty means to me, and how it shapes the nature of my aesthetic in textile design.
There’s a line in the book that keeps circling back to me:
“When things are beautiful, they will become sustainable.”
It feels like a blessing, a reminder, and a challenge all at once.
Moore writes for the people who create beauty, who strive for it, who will one day share it with the world. And what I love is that he doesn’t talk about beauty as something polished or perfect — he talks about it as something deeply connected to curiosity, process, and attention.
He describes “the power of curiosity,” which is really just another way of talking about play — exploring without a fixed outcome, letting yourself try, test, discover. He encourages us to rethink how we make things, not just what we make. To slow down. To notice. To reconnect with the joy of making.
It feels very close to the heart of the SENSE Method — the idea that emotion, mood, and presence shape the work more than technique alone.
At the same time, I’ve been reading Katherine May’s Enchantment, and her chapter on play has been sitting with me in a very tender way. She writes about play not as something childish, but as a way back into aliveness, curiosity, and wonder. A way of re‑entering the world when life feels flat or overwhelming.
She talks about small acts — wandering, collecting, noticing, tinkering — and how these tiny gestures can reopen your sense of wonder. For me, this has become a new way of settling my nervous system. A way of grounding myself in the tactile, the sensory, the real.
Play reconnects you with your body. Play is not childish — it’s restorative. Play is small, not grand. Play is a form of attention.
I love that. It feels like permission.
May doesn’t ask you to reinvent your life. She invites you to linger. To be absorbed. To let yourself be moved by the world again. And in a way, that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do — to find my way back to the parts of myself that got quiet while I was raising small children, building a business, keeping everything going.
So this journal entry is really just a note to myself: To keep following beauty. To keep choosing curiosity. To let play be part of my practice again. To trust that the small things — the noticing, the wandering, the tiny experiments — are enough.
Because maybe beauty isn’t something we chase. Maybe it’s something we return to, slowly, gently, when we’re ready.
