On whims, watchful women, and why I built a room where delight answers to nobody.

A whimsical little girl is adorable. A whimsical woman of 70 is a concern. The trait didn’t change. Her obligations did. Let’s talk about it.

This morning I had coffee on my porch. No phone. No plan. I watched the light move and listened to my bird make his ridiculous sounds. I wasn’t producing anything. I wasn’t preparing anything. I was just there, following my own attention wherever it wanted to go.

It took me 70 years to do that without guilt. Let me tell you why.

Start with the word itself. A whim is an impulse you follow for no reason except that it’s yours. Whimsy is what happens when a person obeys her own attention instead of somebody else’s agenda. It produces nothing. It serves no one. It can’t be scheduled, monetized, or delegated.

That’s exactly why it’s dangerous.

A woman following a whim is, for that moment, completely ungoverned. Nobody is getting anything out of her. Think about how rare that is. Think about how it was trained out of you.

Here’s what women’s time is supposed to be for under the old arrangement. Care. Vigilance. Anticipating everyone’s needs before they say them out loud. All of that requires attention that is permanently on loan to other people.

Whimsy requires the opposite. Attention that answers to nobody.

So the system doesn’t ban it outright. It does something sneakier. It permits us a domesticated version. Play, but in service of others. Make the table pretty. Plan the party. Be delightful for the room.

The moment the delight is for herself alone, the labels arrive. Flighty. Scattered. Not serious.

Notice something. A whimsical little girl is adorable. A whimsical woman of 70 is a concern. The trait didn’t change. Her obligations did.

Childish. Or Child-like?

There’s a trap under the trap, too. We fight so hard to be taken seriously that whimsy starts to feel like a liability we can’t afford. Serious and credible on one side. Playful and dismissible on the other. Pick one.

Men don’t face this trade. An eccentric man is a visionary. His whims are quirks of genius. Einstein’s hair is charming. A woman with the identical temperament is disorganized and probably shouldn’t be trusted with the budget.

I learned whimsy from a complicated woman who put the fun in dysfunctional. But even at her worst, she had a magnetically playful personality. That taught me something important.

Whimsy is not a reward for a healed life. It’s closer to a birthright. It survives almost anything except constant usefulness.

Last month I spent two weeks on an island where I once stayed with her. I sat still long enough to breathe. To notice. To move with the life around me instead of ahead of it. And I realized the whimsy I missed in her was never hers. She was just the first place I met it. It was in me the whole time. The noise of being useful had drowned it out.

Whimsy is not frivolity. It’s precision of attention.

It’s the practice of noticing the bird, the light, the pull toward one thing over another. It’s the same faculty as intuition. Just off duty. Which means when we lose whimsy, we lose the practice ground for trusting our own signal. A woman who can’t follow a small whim on a Tuesday will struggle to follow a big knowing when her life depends on it.

So many of the women I talk to describe themselves as exhausted. Numb. Flat. They think they lost their joy somewhere along the way. Near or at burnout. You didn’t lose it, friend. It was requisitioned. And anything requisitioned can be taken back.

Today I’m opening the doors to The COVE, a community of women daring to dream by seeing the systems. Naming the wound, and reclaiming the collective ground.

It’s a place where women practice exactly this. Sitting still. Breathing. Noticing. Listening. Following your own attention without apologizing for it. Safe. Seen. Valued. Activated.

It’s $97 a month, and that includes everything. One private session with me each month. One facilitated small group fireside chat in the Cove limited to 8-10 women. Weekly f2f group calls. A resource library exclusively for members of The COVE. And founders get first seating at the table when women gather.

The community area is for small talk. The fireside chats are intentional. Where a handful of women at a time learn to trust themselves and each other in ways we could only wish for on the outside. It is where we unpack the conditioning one topic at a time, see who benefits from our silence, say the things out loud that have been stuck in our craw for sometimes decades, and treat each other with the kindness and respect we all deserve. The first fireside chat is orientation to the cove. The next one begins unpacking the systems born of patriarchy and what it has done to our bodies, minds, and spirits. It’s screened because safety isn’t a vibe, it’s a structure. And it moves at the pace of a porch, not a program.

If your joy has been on loan to other people for decades, this is where you get it back.

The door is open. Come sit down.

https://stan.store/onevoiceevolving/p/the-cove-monthly-membership

Do you want to know more about why I felt compelled to create The Cove? I did a whole series of videos explaining why it's needed based on our conditioning: watch the Reel Conditioning series on YouTube HERE.