This month, Pilkhan turns five.
I want to sit with that for a moment.
Five years ago, I began with a small, quiet wish - that children could have a way of meeting the natural world that wasn't hurried, wasn't measured in outcomes, wasn't packaged as an achievement. That was all. Just a way in.
What I could not have known then is what those five years would carry.
Workshops in gardens and living rooms. Boxes that travelled to homes I have never seen, opened by children I have never met. Schools that let us come in and gently reshape an afternoon. Weekend gatherings. Return gifts at birthdays. Small conversations at parents' doorsteps. A few children who, slowly, over months, began to notice.
The reach still surprises me. And humbles me.
The vision has changed, of course. What began as one kind of offering slowly became many. But the core - the small, quiet thing at the centre - has not moved. Slowness. Wonder. Watching. The instinct to look more closely at what is already around us.
That has stayed. That will stay.
I want to be honest, though: it has not been easy.
There have been months when I have wondered whether to continue. When the numbers didn't hold. When I wasn't sure who was still listening. When the effort seemed larger than the reach.
And every single time - every time - something has arrived. A parent writing out of nowhere to say a box had made a difference. An order coming through on a day when everything else felt heavy. Someone reaching out to say they had waited for the next season.
There is no other word for it: the work has been held - by more than me.
The stories are what have kept me going. A child sending me a photograph of something they had planted, months after we had spoken. A parent telling me their child had held a worm for the first time - that fear had turned, quietly, into curiosity. Watching a child I first met at three learn to sit still with a leaf at six. A message from a family that bought a box three years ago, telling me their daughter still starts every morning at the balcony, watching. A child at a workshop who runs up to ask - when is the next one?
Pilkhan was never really about boxes or activities.
It is about helping children begin a relationship with the living world. With trees they come to recognise by name. With birds they begin to wait for. With the quiet rhythm of seasons unfolding around them.
Everything else - the painting, the planting, the making, the stories - is simply a way in.
The relationship comes first. Everything else follows.
These moments do not scale. But they are the reason for everything.
One summer, we ran a camp. Children arrived from very different homes — different backgrounds, different languages, different ages. Inside a room, those differences would have mattered. Outdoors, they did not. A puddle asks nothing of a child's context. It only asks that they look.
I have thought about that a great deal since.
Five years has taught me that almost nothing that matters in this work happens quickly. Wonder cannot be rushed. A relationship with the living world is built slowly, season by season, noticing by noticing.
Perhaps Pilkhan has grown in exactly the same way.
Pilkhan will keep evolving. There will be new boxes, new workshops, new places, new hands. Some things I cannot yet imagine.
But I want to say, on this quiet fifth birthday, that the core will not move.
To notice. To wonder. To care.
Thank you - every parent who wrote back, every child who sent a photograph, every school that opened its gate. Thank you to my team, who have carried this work with me, day by day. And to my family, who have been the ground beneath everything. This is your five years too.
Here's to the next season.
- Nandita
