19/05/2026
"People are profoundly lonely. Technology has digitally connected everyone but emotionally disconnected us from each other…… People fundamentally need tribes, rituals, familiarity & belonging. The more digital life becomes, the more valuable physical human connection becomes." Jeff Klein.
Quote from a podcast that I listened to over the weekend; from a business man who has set up a chain of members only clubs in the US. It resonated. I know this feeling intimately.
This picture is of me & my mother, 24 hours after the birth of my first child. A snapshot of time when I felt overwhelmed, but supported. Just 2 weeks before my mother left to go back to England.
I was 38. A new mother. Far from my family, far from my London life, in a city I was still learning to call home. I had a baby in my arms, I hadn’t got a clue what I was doing & there was almost nobody nearby.
That was before smartphones. Before social media. Before I began to listen to women as they navigated the huge transition that is motherhood. The loneliness of a mother in 2026 is an entirely different beast even to what I experienced; surrounded by digital noise, the extremes of the algorithm & starved of real human warmth.
That loneliness, the particular, peculiar loneliness of new motherhood, is something I have been curious about ever since. You are never more in need of a village than in those first weeks & months. And never more likely to find yourself without one.
That feeling is the reason Blossom & Bloom exists.
Every class I teach. Every WhatsApp group I run. Every event I hold. Every circle I host. All of it grew from those feelings in Cape Town in 2008.
Seventeen years later I have built those villages for hundreds of women. Pregnant women, new mothers, mothers of toddlers, mothers of teenagers, women navigating peri-menopause & menopause. Women who began as strangers & became sisters; a vital contributor to a community of other women.
If you are a woman in Cape Town & you are lonely, please know there is a place for you here. In my classes. In my WhatsApp communities. At my events. Around my table.
We were not designed to do this alone.
love Hx
