Something catches your attention, and suddenly you find yourself asking questions. What did these things mean to the people who made them? How did people in the North understand magic? What did they believe about fate, death, the gods and the unseen? What was seiðr? How were runes actually used? What did devotion look like? And perhaps most importantly, how much can we actually know?

These are the questions that sit at the heart of The Northern Thread, my upcoming three week introduction to the spiritual and magical traditions of the North. I created this offering for those who feel drawn toward Norse spirituality and the old ways, but who want to explore them with a little more depth, context and curiosity. There is no shortage of information about Norse mythology available today.

You can find lists of gods, explanations of the runes, modern rituals, reconstructed practices and countless interpretations of what the ancient Norse “believed.” Some of these can be beautiful starting points, but I think there is something important that happens when we slow down and ask where these ideas actually come from.

Is something found in a medieval written source? Is there archaeological evidence for it? Is it a modern reconstruction? Does it come from folklore? Is it an interpretation that has developed over generations? Or is it something that has simply been presented as ancient because it sounds ancient?

Those distinctions matter to me, not because I think spirituality needs to be stripped of mystery, but because I believe the mystery becomes much more interesting when we are honest about what we know, what we think we know, and what remains unknowable.

My own approach to Northern traditions has been profoundly shaped by archaeology. For the past twelve years, I have had the honour of studying Scandinavian archaeological sites, and that experience has changed the way I understand the ancient North.

Archaeology gives us something the written sources cannot: things. Objects, graves, buildings, landscapes, inscriptions, amulets, weapons, jewellery, animal remains, offerings and ritual spaces. Sometimes these pieces of evidence seem remarkably clear. Other times, they raise more questions than they answer. I love that uncertainty because an archaeological object doesn’t come with a little label telling us exactly what it meant. We have to interpret it. We have to consider its context, compare it with other evidence, acknowledge competing interpretations and sometimes simply say, “We don’t know.”

I think there is something deeply valuable in those words. We don’t know. They leave room for curiosity. They leave room for imagination without requiring us to present imagination as historical fact. They allow us to approach the past with humility. Much of what we know about pre-Christian Northern traditions comes through sources that were written down later, particularly medieval Icelandic literature.

The Eddas and sagas are enormously valuable, but they also require careful reading. They were written after the conversion to Christianity and shaped by the cultural, political and literary contexts in which they were recorded. They don’t provide us with a straightforward transcript of what every person in the Viking Age believed.

There are also enormous gaps: women whose voices were never recorded, practices passed orally, local traditions that left no surviving written record, rituals that disappeared without leaving recognizable archaeological traces, and beliefs that may have varied significantly from one community to another. The North was never one single, uniform spiritual system. It was a living cultural landscape, and I think we lose something when we flatten it into one tidy set of beliefs.

The runes are one of the most obvious doorways into Northern traditions, but they are also one of the places where modern interpretations can become particularly detached from historical evidence. In The Northern Thread, we’ll explore the history and development of runic writing, their symbolism, their archaeological context and the evidence for their use. We’ll also explore their relationship with magic and divination while asking an important question: what evidence do we actually have?

Rather than simply handing you a set of meanings and telling you that this is what each rune “means,” we’ll look at where our ideas come from. We’ll explore inscriptions, objects and historical context, and from there begin developing our own relationship with the runes. Not by pretending we have recovered an untouched ancient system, but by understanding the material we have inherited and approaching it thoughtfully.

Then there is seiðr, perhaps one of the most intriguing and difficult aspects of Northern spiritual traditions. Seiðr appears in the sources as a practice associated with prophecy, magic, altered states, fate and interaction with forces beyond the ordinary human world. Yet when we begin looking closely, the picture becomes complicated. What exactly was seiðr? Who practiced it? What did the rituals look like? What happened during them? How much of what we imagine comes from the medieval sources? How much can archaeology tell us? And how much has been reconstructed by modern practitioners? These aren’t questions I want to rush past. I want to sit inside them, because sometimes the uncertainty is part of the teaching.

We’ll also spend time exploring the gods of the North, not simply as a list of names and stories, but as part of a broader religious and cultural landscape. We’ll look at devotion, offerings, ritual practice and relationship, while considering what archaeological evidence can tell us about how people may have interacted with their gods and sacred world. The goal isn’t to tell you what you should believe. It is to give you a foundation from which you can explore for yourself.

This is ultimately what The Northern Thread is about. It is not about memorizing a list of gods, learning a set of symbols, or being handed a modern spiritual system and being told that it is ancient. It is an invitation to look more closely. To study the evidence. To sit with the gaps and uncertainties. To learn the language of the runes. To enter the mysteries of seiðr. To meet the gods. To explore the relationship between archaeology, history, magic and lived spiritual practice. And perhaps, through all of it, to begin following the thread for yourself.

Over three Tuesday evenings, September 22, September 29 and October 6, we’ll gather live on Zoom from 6:30 to 8:00 PM PST. The course is intentionally limited to eight participants, creating a small and intimate space for learning, questions, reflection and personal exploration.

Your investment of $240 includes three live 90 minute teachings, replay access to every class, a comprehensive resource manual, companion workbook, guided experiential practices, and archaeological and historical source material.

If you’ve been feeling drawn toward the old ways, curious about the runes, fascinated by seiðr, interested in the gods, or simply wanting to understand Northern spiritual traditions beyond the surface level, The Northern Thread may be a place to begin. You don’t need to arrive with prior knowledge. You don’t need to identify with a particular spiritual path. You simply need curiosity and a willingness to look closely.

The old North left clues. Some are written in stone. Some are buried in graves. Some survive in stories and inscriptions. Some are fragmented, uncertain or almost entirely lost. And some questions may never have definitive answers. Perhaps that is part of the invitation: not to reconstruct the past perfectly, but to enter into relationship with what remains.

Only eight spaces are available. If you feel the pull, I’d love to have you join me for The Northern Thread.

[RESERVE YOUR PLACE IN THE NORTHERN THREAD →]

September 22 • September 29 • October 6
6:30–8:00 PM PST • Live via Zoom • $240

Follow the thread. See where it leads. ᛉ

At first, my interest was rooted in ancestry.

I wanted to know what my ancestors might have believed, how they might have understood the world, and what it meant to live in relationship with forces that modern life often teaches us to separate ourselves from. What began as curiosity gradually became something much more intimate. It became a way of relating to the world.

The deeper I went, the less interested I became in simply collecting information about Norse mythology and the more interested I became in the worldview beneath it. I began discovering animism, and something about it immediately made sense to me. The idea that the world is not simply a collection of lifeless objects, but is filled with relationship, presence and agency, changed the way I moved through my surroundings.

A tree was no longer simply a tree. A stone could become something I developed a relationship with. An animal encounter could invite reflection. The landscape became something I was participating in rather than simply moving through. I began to understand spirituality less as something that happens in designated sacred spaces and more as something woven into ordinary existence.

That shift changed everything.

The runes became one of the deepest ways I cultivated that relationship. I don’t experience the runes simply as an ancient alphabet or a system of symbols to memorize. They became something I could sit with, contemplate and develop a relationship with over time. I began working with them regularly, sometimes drawing a single rune in the morning and allowing it to accompany me through the day.

Sometimes I would carve them, paint them, meditate with them or explore the layers of meaning that had accumulated around them. I found myself returning to the same symbols again and again and discovering that my relationship with them changed depending on what I was moving through in my own life.

That daily practice became important to me because it moved the runes away from something I was studying and into something I was living with. There is a difference between knowing what a symbol is supposed to mean and developing your own lived relationship with it. Over time, the runes became a language through which I could ask questions, reflect, notice patterns and enter into a deeper conversation with myself and the world around me. They became less about prediction and more about relationship.

From there, my curiosity eventually led me toward seiðr, often described as a form of pre-Christian Northern European sorcery associated with practices of altered consciousness, prophecy, fate and working with unseen forces.

Much of what we know about historical seiðr comes through later written sources, particularly the Icelandic sagas and other medieval texts, so there is a great deal we cannot know with certainty about how these practices were actually performed. I think that uncertainty is important to acknowledge. There is a temptation in modern spiritual communities to present reconstructed practices as though we have a perfectly preserved instruction manual from the Viking Age. We don’t. What we have are fragments, stories, archaeological evidence, linguistic clues and later accounts that allow us to begin asking questions.

For me, that uncertainty has never diminished the practice. If anything, it has made me approach it with more humility.

I became fascinated by the idea of seiðr not because I wanted to recreate a historical practice perfectly, but because it opened another doorway into understanding how the people of the North may have related to fate, altered states, intuition, spirits and the unseen dimensions of existence. I began exploring ways of working that felt respectful of the historical material while also acknowledging that I am a modern person living in a very different world. What developed was not an attempt to pretend I was living in the Iron Age. It became a personal way of weaving ancestral influence into my contemporary life.

That distinction matters deeply to me.

I don’t believe ancestry requires reenactment. I don’t need to dress myself in a costume and pretend to be someone from a thousand years ago in order to feel connected to those who came before me (although that is fun…). Instead, I ask what can be carried forward. What ways of seeing might still have something to teach us? What happens when we remember that our ancestors lived in intimate relationship with seasons, weather, animals, land, death, birth, fertility, conflict, community and forces they could not control? What might it mean to bring some of that relational awareness into a world that increasingly encourages us to see ourselves as separate from everything around us?

That question has shaped how I see almost everything.

My relationship with the natural world has become more intimate. I pay attention to seasonal shifts. I notice animal behaviour. I collect bones and skulls when I encounter them and work with them as objects of art and contemplation. I paint and carve. I spend time with the runes. I create rituals. I make offerings. I listen. Sometimes magic, for me, is not dramatic at all. Sometimes it is sitting quietly beneath a tree. Sometimes it is washing my hands before beginning a ritual. Sometimes it is carrying a particular symbol with me. Sometimes it is making art from something that once belonged to an animal and considering the life that existed before I encountered it.

My relationship with Freyja has become particularly important within all of this.

I experience Freyja as my patron goddess, and my relationship with her has developed slowly rather than arriving as a single dramatic revelation. She is a complex figure within the surviving Norse material: associated with love, beauty, fertility, desire, wealth and war, and famously connected with seiðr. What draws me to her is precisely that she cannot be reduced to one simple archetype. She contains tenderness and ferocity. Sensuality and sovereignty. Grief and power. The capacity to love deeply without becoming powerless.

My relationship with her has become less about asking for things and more about cultivating qualities. I think about what it means to inhabit my own sovereignty. To be connected to desire without being consumed by it. To understand beauty as something powerful rather than merely decorative. To allow grief and pleasure to coexist. To be soft without surrendering my strength. To recognize that femininity, in whatever form it takes for each person, does not have to mean submission.

I don’t claim to speak for Freyja or to know what she is beyond my own experience of relationship with her. That distinction is important to me. My spirituality is personal. It is an ongoing conversation, not a declaration that I have somehow discovered the one correct interpretation of an ancient deity.

This is also why I find it interesting how quickly people can become afraid of things they don’t understand.

When I tell people that I work with Norse magic, runes, animism or seiðr, there can sometimes be an immediate categorization. Witchcraft. Dark magic. Pagan. Not good. Sometimes there is an assumption that anything involving magic must automatically be sinister or spiritually dangerous. Sometimes people hear the word “sorcery” and their imagination immediately moves toward something sinister.

I understand where some of that fear comes from. For much of Western history, practices outside dominant religious frameworks have been treated with suspicion. The unknown has always been an easy place to project fear. If we don’t understand something, it can be tempting to categorize it before we have actually taken the time to encounter it.

But I have never found the word “witch” particularly frightening.

What I find more interesting is the assumption that anything mysterious must be morally bad.

Magic, in the way I practice it, is not about harming people, manipulating people or gaining power over others. It is about relationship. Relationship with myself. Relationship with the land. Relationship with ancestry. Relationship with symbols, stories, seasons and the unseen dimensions of existence that I personally believe are worthy of reverence.

I am not interested in using spirituality as a way to feel superior to people who don’t share my worldview. In fact, the older I become, the more suspicious I am of any spiritual practice that encourages someone to believe they have all the answers.

The magic I work with asks something different of me.

It asks me to pay attention.

It asks me to cultivate humility.

It asks me to develop a relationship rather than simply consume information.

It asks me to remember that I am part of a much larger web of life.

And it asks me to approach the old ways with respect rather than romanticizing them.

There is a tendency in modern spirituality to want everything to be immediate. We want a ritual, a symbol, a deity, a practice and a result. We want to know what everything means. But my relationship with the runes has taught me that meaning develops through time. A symbol can become different as you become different. A practice can reveal something you weren’t ready to see ten years ago. A relationship with a deity can deepen through years of attention rather than through one profound experience.

That is what I mean when I say I cultivate my relationship with the runes.

I return.

Again and again.

I sit with them. I question them. I make things with them. I carry them into my life. I allow them to challenge me. I don’t expect every encounter to produce some mystical revelation. Sometimes the practice is simply the practice.

And perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things about discovering ancestral spirituality as an adult. I am not trying to prove that I am exactly like the people who came before me. I am trying to understand what threads might still be meaningful.

There is something profoundly grounding about realizing that the people who came before us were not living in a world without magic. They were living in a world where the boundaries between the human, natural and spiritual realms may have been understood very differently than they are today. Their lives were intimately shaped by forces they could not control. The seasons determined survival. Animals provided food and materials. Weather could destroy a harvest. Birth and death were ever-present. The landscape was not scenery. It was the world upon which everything depended.

When I look through that lens, the world feels different.

More alive.

More relational.

More mysterious.

And I think mystery is something we desperately need to reclaim.

Not everything needs to be explained immediately. Not every experience needs to be reduced to a category. There is value in standing at the edge of what we understand and allowing ourselves to say, I don’t know.

That is where magic begins for me.

Not in certainty.

In relationship.

In reverence.

In curiosity.

In the willingness to pay attention.

I honour the magic I work with by approaching it slowly. I honour it by learning where my practices come from and being honest about what is historically known and what is modern reconstruction. I honour it by not pretending that my personal experience represents an entire ancient culture. I honour it by treating the runes as something worthy of relationship rather than simply a tool for divination. I honour it by making art, by spending time outdoors, by observing, by listening, by offering gratitude and by allowing my spiritual life to remain something living.

For me, ancestral magic isn’t about escaping the modern world.

It is about seeing the modern world differently.

It is about remembering that I belong to something older than the systems around me. That my life exists within a much longer story. That the land beneath my feet has its own history. That animals are not merely objects. That death is not an interruption to life but part of it. That grief can be sacred. That beauty can be powerful. That the feminine can contain both tenderness and ferocity. That there are things I will never completely understand, and perhaps I don’t need to.

I found Norse magic because I was searching for my ancestors.

What I didn’t expect was that, along the way, I would discover a different relationship with myself.

The runes taught me to listen.

Animism taught me to notice.

Seiðr opened questions about what exists beyond what I can immediately see.

Freyja taught me something about sovereignty, desire, beauty and power.

And the old northern worldview gave me a language through which I could begin to understand my place in the living world.

I don’t know exactly where this path will take me.

I think that’s part of the point.

Magic, at least the way I understand it, isn’t a map that tells me exactly where I am going.

It is a way of learning how to walk through the mystery with my eyes open.

When I think about the old Scandinavian world, I find myself drawn to the way death existed much closer to the centre of ordinary life. We have to be careful not to romanticize the past or pretend there was one standardized Viking Age approach to mourning, because there wasn’t. Scandinavian societies were diverse, changed across centuries, and the archaeological and literary evidence gives us fragments rather than a complete handbook of grief. But what we can see is a culture in which death, burial, ancestors, memory and ritual were deeply woven into the social and spiritual fabric of life. Death was not hidden away in the way it so often is now. Funerary practices could involve the community, grave goods, feasting, remembrance and elaborate acts of transition. The dead did not simply disappear from the landscape. They remained present in memory, story, place and ancestry. And perhaps that proximity to death gave people a different relationship with grief itself.

I keep coming back to the longhouse. Not because I imagine it as some perfect ancestral sanctuary, but because of what the longhouse represents: people living in close proximity to one another, sharing food, labour, warmth, stories, hardship and ritual. There was no easy way to disappear into a private apartment and shut the door on the rest of the world. Your life was embedded within the lives of other people. Your joys belonged, at least in part, to the community, and so did your losses. When someone died, the absence would have been felt within the physical and social structure of everyday life. The empty place was visible. The person was remembered. The loss had a location within the community.

And this is where I think the old ways have something profound to teach us.

We have become extraordinarily isolated in our grief.

Francis Weller has written beautifully and extensively about this. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, he talks about grief as something that has historically been communal, and about the enormous difficulty we face when sorrow becomes private. He describes how, in modern Western culture, grief is often pushed underground, hidden behind the expectation that we should remain functional, productive and composed. He speaks about the need for a larger vessel, a community capable of holding what an individual cannot always hold alone. Grief, in his work, is not simply an emotion that we process privately. It is a human faculty, a sacred process, something that can deepen us and reconnect us to one another when we are given the communal structures to express it.

That idea feels almost radical in our current world.

Imagine, instead, that you lost someone and your community understood that you had entered a different realm for a while. Nobody expected you to be quite yourself. Nobody asked you to have a five-year plan for your healing. Nobody needed you to reassure them that you were going to be okay. Someone brought food. Someone sat with you. Someone tended the fire. Someone told stories. Someone remembered the person who died. Someone took care of the ordinary tasks while you were temporarily incapable of caring about ordinary things. You were allowed to be disoriented because everyone understood that grief itself is disorienting.

You were held.

This is what I mean when I think about time amidst the ashes.

Image: from Sami symbols (the Magical Drum) - painted to represent the community, grief and the initiations of loss

There is a particular image that keeps coming to me: sitting beside what remains. Not rushing to rebuild. Not trying to make the ashes into something beautiful before we have even had the chance to acknowledge what burned. Just sitting there. Feeling the weight of it. Letting the body understand what the mind cannot yet comprehend.

The ashes are the evidence that something was here.

A person.

A relationship.

A home.

A future.

A version of yourself.

Something existed, and now it has changed.

And perhaps one of the most primal responses to loss is simply to sit beside the evidence of that change.

Modern culture is not particularly good at this. We are much better at movement than stillness. We value productivity, independence, self-sufficiency and resilience. Even our language around grief often carries the assumption that we need to get somewhere. We need to “work through it.” We need to “move forward.” We need to “find closure.” We need to “get back on our feet.”

But grief does not always move in a straight line.

Sometimes grief takes you down.

It disorients you.

It strips you of your usual orientation to time, identity and place. You can wake up and for a few seconds inhabit the world as it used to be, only to remember, and suddenly the entire landscape changes. You can walk into a room and instinctively expect someone to be there. You can reach for your phone. You can hear a voice that sounds vaguely like theirs. You can smell something familiar and suddenly you are nowhere near the present moment. Grief can make you feel as though you are living between worlds.

And perhaps we should stop treating that as a malfunction.

Perhaps that disorientation is part of the process.

The old stories understood descent. Again and again, we find the motif of the person who must enter the dark, the underworld, the realm beneath ordinary consciousness. Something must be surrendered. Something must be encountered. The person does not return unchanged. Norse mythology is filled with an awareness of death, fate, sacrifice, the inevitability of endings and the thin boundary between the living and the dead. The old worldview was not built around the fantasy that everything can be controlled or preserved. Mortality was not an abstract concept. It was woven into the fabric of existence.

There is something strangely liberating about that.

We live in a culture that tries desperately to keep death at a distance, and then we are shocked when grief completely overwhelms us when death finally arrives. We sanitize it. We institutionalize it. We often remove the dying and the dead from the home. We separate the body from the community. We use euphemisms. We avoid talking about what happens to the body. We become uncomfortable with the smell, the silence, the physical reality of death. And then, when someone dies, we expect the bereaved person to somehow process an experience that we have spent an entire lifetime being taught not to look at.

Our ancestors did not have the luxury of such distance.

Death was visible.

The dead were buried in the landscape.

The community participated in rituals surrounding them.

Stories carried their names forward.

Ancestors existed within the living imagination.

And grief had a place.

That doesn’t mean ancient Scandinavians grieved “better” than we do. It means their world gave grief different cultural conditions. There were rituals, social structures and communal practices surrounding death that reminded people that loss was not solely an individual experience. The funeral was not simply an administrative event. It could be a social and ritual threshold, a way of acknowledging that the relationship between the living and the dead had changed.

That matters.

Because grief needs ritual.

The human psyche needs thresholds. We need ways of marking the moment when something has changed. We need gestures that tell the body, This happened. This mattered. We are not pretending it didn’t. Without ritual, loss can remain strangely suspended. We may know intellectually that someone has died, but the body has not necessarily caught up with the fact that the world has changed.

Older cultures understood the power of ritual because ritual was not decoration. It was technology for the soul.

It helped the community orient itself after disruption.

It gave shape to the unspeakable.

It created a container for emotion.

It allowed the living to acknowledge the dead.

It helped people cross a threshold.

Weller speaks about this in his own work, describing ritual as one of the ways communities can create a vessel large enough to hold grief. He writes about the need to restore practices that allow sorrow to become visible and shared, rather than forcing it underground. He describes grief as an apprenticeship, something we learn to inhabit rather than something we simply “get over.”

That word, apprenticeship, stays with me.

Because perhaps grief is something we become initiated into.

The first time we experience a profound loss, we don’t know the terrain. We have no map. We are suddenly standing at the edge of something enormous, and nobody can tell us exactly how to cross it because grief is different for every person. But over time, we begin to understand its landscape. We learn where the rivers are. We learn which memories are dangerous to touch and which ones become sources of warmth. We learn that some days will knock us flat and other days will surprise us with laughter. We learn that grief can coexist with beauty. We learn that joy is not betrayal. We learn that the person we lost can remain part of our lives without us needing to remain frozen in the moment of their death.

But I think there is an important distinction between being initiated by grief and being forced to endure grief alone.

Initiation requires a community.

There is someone who has walked the terrain before you.

There are people who know that the darkness is not necessarily the end.

There are people who can hold a lantern while you find your own way.

This is what feels so missing now.

We have experts, therapists, books, apps, support groups and resources, and I am grateful for many of these things. But there is still something profoundly different about being held by a living community. Weller speaks about the “village mind,” and this idea feels deeply ancestral to me. We are not meant to be entirely self-contained beings. We are relational creatures. Our nervous systems, our stories, our identities and our capacity to survive have always been shaped by belonging. When someone is grieving, the community should not simply say, “Let us know if you need anything,” and then disappear.

The community should know how to show up.

That is a different kind of responsibility.

And maybe this is where the old Scandinavian world gives us a useful mirror. Not a blueprint. Not something we can simply recreate. But a mirror that asks us what we have lost in the pursuit of modern convenience and individual freedom.

What happens when death is removed from community?

What happens when grief becomes private?

What happens when the person who has lost someone is expected to carry the emotional, physical and practical consequences of that loss almost entirely alone?

What happens when we give someone three days off work and then expect them to function?

What happens when we become uncomfortable because someone is still crying six months later?

What happens when we stop speaking the name of the dead because we are afraid we will “remind” the grieving person of their loss?

They already know.

The loss is there.

The question is whether they have to carry it alone.

I think there is something deeply primal about being witnessed in grief. The cry that comes from somewhere below language. The wail. The shaking. The silence. The need to be held. The desire to walk into the woods. The urge to scream toward the sky. These responses are not necessarily signs that something has gone wrong. They can be the body trying to metabolize something enormous.

And perhaps the old world had more tolerance for the rawness of it.

There was less separation between body, land, death, community and ritual. There was less insistence that every experience needed to be translated immediately into psychological language. Sometimes a person was simply grieving. Sometimes the appropriate response was food, warmth, silence, prayer, ritual, story, touch and time.

There is a kind of wisdom in that simplicity.

Not everything needs to be explained.

Some things need to be witnessed.

I think this is why the phrase time amidst the ashes feels so important to me. It represents a period in which we stop demanding that grief become productive. We stop asking what the lesson is. We stop insisting that suffering must transform us into a better person. We simply acknowledge that something has been lost and allow ourselves to inhabit the reality of that loss.

There is a sacredness in that.

And there is also an edge.

Because grief takes us right up against mortality. It reminds us that everything we love is temporary. That our bodies are temporary. That our relationships are temporary. That the people sitting beside us at the fire will not always be there. That the landscapes we love can change. That cultures disappear. Languages disappear. Species disappear. Homes disappear. We are living beings, and living beings lose things.

Weller speaks about this larger field of sorrow too, the grief that extends beyond our personal losses into the losses of community, culture, ancestry and the more-than-human world. He argues that our capacity to grieve is connected to our capacity to remain in relationship with what we love.

And this feels particularly relevant now.

We are living through an extraordinary amount of loss.

People are lonely.

Communities are fragmented.

The natural world is under enormous pressure.

Languages and traditions disappear.

People move constantly.

Families live thousands of kilometres apart.

We spend more time behind screens and less time gathered around actual fires.

We can communicate instantly with people across the world and still feel profoundly alone.

There is something almost absurd about this.

We have never had so many ways to communicate, and yet we have become increasingly unfamiliar with how to sit beside one another in the darkest moments of life.

Maybe the answer isn’t to abandon modern life and pretend we can return to the Viking Age.

Maybe the answer is to remember what was never supposed to be lost.

Gather.

Remember.

Tell the stories.

Name the dead.

Make food.

Light the fire.

Create ritual.

Let the body grieve.

Let the community carry what one person cannot.

Give sorrow enough time to become something other than an emergency.

And perhaps most importantly, stop treating the descent as something that needs to be prevented.

There is a season for descending.

There is a season for sitting amidst the ashes.

There is a season where you are not supposed to know what comes next.

And there is a season for returning.

The return does not mean the grief has disappeared. It means you have learned how to carry it. You return with the ashes still in your hands, but you are no longer afraid of their weight. You begin to understand that grief and love are not opposites. They are intimately connected. We grieve because something mattered. We hurt because we belonged. The broken heart is evidence of attachment, not weakness.

Maybe this is the deeper lesson hidden inside the old ways.

Not that our ancestors had all the answers.

But that they lived closer to certain truths.

Death belongs to life.

Loss belongs to love.

Grief belongs to community.

Ritual belongs to transition.

And sometimes the human being needs to be allowed to go into the dark without everyone around them panicking and trying to pull them back into the light.

Maybe we need to become better at sitting beside the fire.

Maybe we need to become better at witnessing.

Maybe we need to become better at carrying one another.

Because one day it will be our turn to enter the ashes.

And when that day comes, I hope we have built communities strong enough to hold us.

I hope someone remembers how to sit beside us without trying to fix us.

I hope someone brings food.

I hope someone says the name of the person we lost.

I hope someone keeps the fire burning.

I hope we are given permission to disappear from ordinary life for a little while, to descend into the strange and sacred terrain of sorrow, to be disoriented, to surrender, to remember, to weep, to rage, to sleep, to simply exist.

And when we are ready, I hope someone is still there.

Not to tell us to move on.

But to walk beside us as we slowly find our way back.

Perhaps that is what it means to return to the old ways in a modern world.

Not recreating the past.

Remembering the ancient human technologies of belonging.

Remembering that grief was never meant to be a private burden.

Remembering that the ashes deserve our attention.

And remembering that sometimes the most sacred thing a community can do is simply gather around the person who has fallen into the darkness and say:

You don’t have to find your way out alone.

Sometimes the body needs more than words.

It needs to experience safety over and over again before it begins to trust it.

I am learning this in a very real way right now as I prepare to leave the Kootenays and move to Vancouver Island. This is a big move for me, and it carries far more emotion than simply packing up my things and changing my address. I have contemplated living on Vancouver Island for years. There has always been something about the Island that has pulled at me, something I could never quite explain. I remember it from being a child, but my relationship with the place now is also shaped by the person I have become since then. When I imagine it, I think about the ocean and the rain forests, the enormous trees, the moss, the mushrooms appearing after rain, the coastline, and the feeling of being surrounded by a landscape that feels both wild and deeply alive. I think about the possibility of finding community there, of creating a different rhythm for my life, and of perhaps meeting parts of myself that have been waiting for a different environment to emerge.

And yet, leaving the Kootenays is not easy.

The Kootenays became home to me. I found something there that I had spent a long time searching for. The mountains became familiar. The lakes, the forests, the roads, the little places I knew how to get to without thinking. There is something profound about knowing a landscape intimately. Your body learns a place. It knows the turn in the road, the smell of the air, the way the mountains look at a particular time of day. You develop a relationship with the land that goes beyond simply living somewhere. It becomes part of your sense of belonging.

So leaving means grieving something I love while simultaneously moving toward something I have wanted for a very long time.

That tension has been teaching me a lot.

Because there is a part of me that is incredibly excited. I can feel the possibility of the Island calling me forward. I can picture myself near the ocean. I can imagine spending hours in the forests, learning the mushrooms, finding trails, meeting new people, creating new routines and allowing my life to expand in ways I cannot fully see yet. There is curiosity there. There is wonder. There is a sense that something new is beginning.

But underneath that excitement, there is also fear.

And I have come to understand that fear does not necessarily mean I am making the wrong decision.

Sometimes fear simply means I am doing something unfamiliar.

Sometimes the body does not know the difference between uncertainty and danger.

That has been one of the harder lessons for me to learn.

When you have lived through enough uncertainty, your body can become very good at anticipating it. You begin scanning before you even realize you are scanning. You think about what could happen, what could go wrong, what you might need to prepare for. You become incredibly resourceful, but there is a cost to living that way. Eventually, hypervigilance can become so familiar that you mistake it for intuition. You think you are simply being prepared, when really, some part of you is constantly waiting for the next thing to happen.

And when you have lived like that for long enough, safety can feel strange.

Stillness can feel strange.

Not knowing can feel dangerous.

Even good things can create uncertainty because they require you to loosen your grip.

I think that is where I am right now.

I am learning how to loosen my grip without abandoning myself.

That distinction matters to me.

I don’t want surrender to mean becoming passive or pretending that everything will work out perfectly. I don’t think trust means ignoring reality or refusing to make plans. I still need to pack my belongings, organize my finances, figure out where I am going to live, build my routines, take care of my work and make practical decisions. There is nothing particularly spiritual about avoiding the logistics of your own life.

But there is something deeply spiritual about doing all of those things while accepting that you cannot control the entire outcome.

That is the surrender I am practicing.

I am trying to show my body, through my actions, that it doesn’t need to know everything in advance.

I am creating routines even while so much around me is changing. I am making myself eat properly. I am walking. I am writing. I am breathing intentionally. I am spending time outside. I am finding little rituals that remind me that I am still here, even when my circumstances are shifting. I am paying attention to the moments when I feel myself tightening and bracing, and instead of judging that response, I am trying to meet it with patience.

Sometimes I put my hand over my heart and breathe.

Not because I expect one breath to erase years of conditioning, but because each time I do it, I am offering my body another experience of being listened to.

I think this is something we often misunderstand about healing. We want the moment where everything changes. We want the breakthrough, the revelation, the profound realization that suddenly rearranges our entire internal world. But so much of the work is actually much less dramatic than that. It is repetition. It is consistency. It is doing the same small things enough times that eventually your nervous system begins to understand what your conscious mind has known for a while.

You are here.

You survived that.

You don’t have to live inside it forever.

There is another way.

I am beginning to believe that safety is not always something you find. Sometimes it is something you build.

You build it in the way you speak to yourself.

You build it in the boundaries you keep.

You build it in the people you allow close.

You build it in the food you make, the walks you take, the mornings you protect, the evenings you slow down, the way you allow yourself to rest without feeling like you need to earn it.

You build it by keeping promises to yourself.

And perhaps most importantly, you build it by learning that you will stay with yourself when things become uncertain.

That is a different kind of trust.

It isn’t the belief that nothing bad will ever happen again.

I don’t think that kind of certainty exists.

It is the belief that if something does happen, you will meet yourself there.

That you will listen.

That you will adapt.

That you will ask for help.

That you will find your way through.

That you won’t abandon yourself just because life becomes difficult.

There is something about moving to the Island that is bringing all of this to the surface for me. I think part of me is craving the physical landscape because it reflects something I am craving internally. I want water. I want trees. I want rain. I want moss and mushrooms and the smell of wet earth. I want to spend time somewhere that reminds me that life is constantly changing and becoming without asking permission.

The forest does not seem to panic about becoming a forest.

The mushroom does not need to know exactly what it will become before it pushes through the earth.

The tide comes in and goes out.

The seasons change.

Trees lose their leaves and stand through the winter without needing to know exactly when spring will come.

There is something about being close to these cycles that reminds me that uncertainty is not necessarily a failure of the system. It is the system.

Maybe I have been trying to know too much.

Maybe I have been asking the future to give me guarantees that it cannot give.

Maybe the deeper invitation is simply to walk toward what feels alive and trust that I will continue to receive the next step when I need it.

I don’t mean that in a naive way. I don’t believe that following your heart means everything will suddenly become easy. Sometimes following your heart asks a great deal of you. Sometimes it asks you to leave places you love. Sometimes it asks you to grieve. Sometimes it asks you to begin again when you are already tired. Sometimes it asks you to walk into a landscape where you don’t yet know anyone and allow yourself to be a beginner again.

That is what this move feels like for me.

A beginning.

Not because I am erasing everything that came before it, but because I am carrying what I have learned with me.

I am not leaving the Kootenays empty-handed.

I am taking the mountains with me.

I am taking the versions of myself that were created there. The lessons. The grief. The beauty. The friendships. The moments of belonging. The times I felt completely alive. The times I thought I would never find my footing again. All of it comes with me.

And perhaps that is another form of surrender: understanding that leaving something does not mean it didn’t matter.

I can love where I have been and still go somewhere else.

I can be grateful for the home I found and still be curious about the home I have not found yet.

I can be afraid and still move forward.

I can have an open heart and still have boundaries.

I can be uncertain and still trust myself.

Those things don’t have to contradict each other.

Maybe courage isn’t the absence of fear. Maybe it is the willingness to keep moving while fear is still present.

And maybe surrender isn’t the absence of effort. Maybe it is the moment we stop demanding that effort guarantee an outcome.

I am still learning this.

Some days I feel incredibly clear. I can almost feel the ocean before I see it. I can imagine walking through the forests and breathing in that wet, earthy air. I can feel something in me opening toward the possibility of a new life, a new community, a different pace. Other days, the uncertainty gets loud. I wonder if I am making the right decision. I wonder what will happen. I feel the old instinct to brace, to prepare, to anticipate, to make sure I have every possible answer before taking another step.

And on those days, I am trying not to force myself into certainty.

Instead, I breathe.

I come back to my body.

I come back to what I know today.

I remind myself that I don’t need to know the entire road.

I only need to take the next step.

There is a part of me that is ready to soften again.

Not because the world has suddenly become perfectly safe, but because I am beginning to understand that I cannot spend the rest of my life waiting for it to become that way.

I want to live.

I want to be curious.

I want to fall in love with landscapes and people and ideas.

I want to wander through forests looking for mushrooms.

I want salt water on my skin.

I want rain.

I want community.

I want to create.

I want to laugh more.

I want to let myself be surprised by my own life.

And more than anything, I want my heart back.

Maybe that is what this move is really asking of me.

Not simply to relocate my body, but to allow myself to inhabit my life again.

To stop living entirely from the part of me that is watching for danger and start making room for the part of me that is capable of wonder.

I don’t know exactly what awaits me on Vancouver Island.

And for perhaps the first time, I am trying to let that be enough.

I don’t need a guarantee that it will all work out.

I need to know that I can trust myself to meet whatever comes.

So I am going.

A little afraid.

A little hopeful.

A little grieving.

A little wild with curiosity.

And somewhere underneath all of it, there is a quiet voice reminding me that I have been guided this far.

Perhaps I can trust that there is still a path unfolding beneath my feet.

Perhaps I don’t have to see the whole thing.

Perhaps I just have to keep walking.

And perhaps this is the deepest surrender of all:

to soften my grip on the future,

to breathe into the uncertainty,

to listen for what is calling me forward,

and to let my heart become brave enough to open again.

I learned to read layers of earth, to understand disturbance and deposition, to recognize the significance of fragments, and to approach the remains of other lives with a kind of reverence that was not always spoken about directly.

Archaeology taught me that the earth keeps things. It holds what we leave behind, sometimes for only a few seasons and sometimes for thousands of years. A piece of pottery, a tool, a tooth, a fragment of bone can remain long after the person who held it has disappeared from the world. I learned early on that what looks like a fragment can contain an entire history, and that the things we leave behind often speak in quieter and more complicated ways than we expect.

Bone is at once profoundly intimate and strangely anonymous. A bone once belonged to a being who had a name, a body, a voice, relationships, habits, desires, fears and an entire interior world that we can never fully reconstruct. Someone once carried that bone beneath their skin. They walked with it. They lived through ordinary mornings and extraordinary events with it.

They loved people, perhaps they were loved deeply in return, they experienced hunger and laughter and grief and boredom and wonder. Their body was once entirely alive, and eventually the flesh returned to the earth and what remained was bone. When you encounter that bone centuries later, you are holding something that is both unmistakably human and almost impossible to know. It is evidence of a life and simultaneously a reminder of how much of a life will always remain beyond our reach.

I think this is part of what has fascinated me about bones for so long. They confront us with the strange material reality of mortality. We often speak about death in abstractions because the reality of it is difficult to hold. We speak about someone passing away, crossing over, leaving this world, becoming an ancestor. All of these expressions have their own meaning and tenderness, but beneath them is the physical truth that a body changes. Flesh decomposes. Organs cease to function. Bone remains for a while longer. Eventually even bone changes. Nothing stays in one form forever. Bones simply give us a particularly tangible encounter with that truth.

Human beings have always seemed to understand that bones are more than simply biological material. We have buried them carefully, arranged them ceremonially, built structures around them, carried them, decorated them, kept them as relics and returned them to the earth with offerings and ritual. Across cultures and across time, we have developed complicated relationships with the remains of the dead.

We seem to instinctively understand that something changes when a body becomes bone, but that this change does not make the remains meaningless. If anything, it often makes them more charged. The bone becomes a point of contact between the living and the dead, between memory and material, between what we can see and what we can no longer know.

I have come to think of this as the bonehouse.

The bonehouse is both literal and metaphorical. It is the place where what remains is kept. It is the inner chamber we enter when something in our lives has ended and we are left with its fragments. A relationship that once had a future. An identity that once fit. A dream that once gave us direction. A version of ourselves that once felt permanent. We carry these things for a long time, sometimes without realizing that we are carrying them at all. Then something happens. A season changes. A person leaves. A relationship ends. A certainty dissolves. A life we imagined becomes impossible. Suddenly we find ourselves standing among the remains, trying to understand what belonged to that life, what belongs to us now, what can be carried forward and what needs to be returned to the earth.

I have entered my own bonehouse more than once.

There have been chapters of my life in which I have experienced the strange and disorienting process of becoming someone I did not yet recognize. There is a particular kind of grief that comes when something ends that you were not prepared to lose, but there is another kind that comes when you realize that an older version of yourself can no longer continue. Sometimes it is not one dramatic event that changes us. Sometimes it is the accumulation of small endings, small realizations, disappointments, departures and awakenings that eventually make it impossible to remain who we were. Something begins to decompose. The structures that once held us together no longer do. We can feel lost in that space because we are accustomed to thinking of transformation as something beautiful and purposeful. We like to imagine the butterfly, but we do not spend nearly as much time talking about the dissolution that comes before it.

The alchemical process is much less glamorous when you are inside it.

I have always been drawn to the language of alchemy because it gives us another way of understanding transformation. We tend to think of alchemy as the magical conversion of one thing into another, the old dream of turning base metal into gold.

But the more I have lived, the more interested I have become in the process itself. Alchemy requires material to be worked with. It requires heat, pressure, dissolution, separation, recombination and time. Something has to change form. Something has to break down before it can become something else. There is no way to rush the material into its next state simply because we are uncomfortable with where it currently is.

That has been one of the hardest lessons of my own life: transformation cannot always be forced into being.

Sometimes we have to participate in it by staying present long enough for the process to reveal itself.

There have been periods when I wanted desperately to know what something meant. I wanted to know what the lesson was, what I was supposed to take from it, what came next. I wanted to make meaning quickly because meaning can make pain feel more manageable. If I could understand why something happened, perhaps I could move beyond it. But over time I have become more suspicious of the need to explain everything. Some experiences do not offer immediate wisdom. Some griefs need to be lived before they can be understood. Some endings do not arrive carrying a neat message about what we should do next. Some things simply have to be mourned.

This is where my archaeological training continues to live inside me in ways I never expected. Archaeology taught me patience with fragments. It taught me not to assume that the piece I was holding was the whole story. It taught me to distinguish what I knew from what I was interpreting. It taught me that the earth can hold evidence without necessarily giving us certainty. There are questions we can make educated guesses about, and there are questions we simply cannot answer. We learn to live with the gap between evidence and certainty.

I think grief requires the same humility.

Death certainly does.

Working alongside dying people and grieving families has only deepened this understanding for me. The closer I have come to death, the less interested I have become in pretending that I understand it completely. Death is perhaps the greatest mystery we encounter as human beings, and our culture often responds to mystery by trying to make it manageable. We create language, rituals, theories, beliefs and explanations because the unknown can be frightening.

And there is nothing wrong with that. Humans have always needed ways of making contact with the unknowable. But I have also learned that there is a particular kind of wisdom in allowing some mystery to remain mystery.

I do not need to know exactly what happens after death to understand that death matters. I do not need to have an answer for where consciousness goes in order to sit beside someone who is dying. I do not need to solve the mystery of what remains of a person after their body is gone in order to understand that relationship does not simply disappear when someone dies. Sometimes the most honest thing we can do is sit beside the question.

Perhaps this is part of what draws me toward animism.

Animism has given me a language for relationship that feels much closer to the way I experience the world. It asks us to reconsider the idea that the world is made up of passive objects existing separately from us, waiting to be categorized, consumed or understood. Instead, it opens the possibility of a world saturated with relationship and presence. Land becomes more than landscape. A tree becomes more than timber. A river becomes more than a resource. An animal becomes more than a specimen. A bone can become more than an archaeological object.

It can become a reminder that we are participating in something much older and larger than ourselves.

I am interested in the human instinct to recognize presence in what remains. Why do we keep the belongings of the dead? Why do we touch photographs? Why do we preserve clothing, letters, jewellery, ashes, hair, teeth and bones? Why do we return to graves? Why do we speak to people who are no longer physically here? Why do we create altars, memorials, rituals and offerings? Perhaps some part of us understands that relationship is not as simple as physical presence and physical absence. Perhaps the dead continue to participate in the lives of the living through memory, story, place, ritual and the ways they changed us while they were here.

The animist perspective allows me to sit inside that complexity without needing to reduce it. It reminds me that the world is full of transformations that we witness every day but rarely stop to consider. A leaf falls and becomes soil. Soil feeds a root. A root becomes part of a tree. A tree becomes shelter, food, firewood or a fallen log returning to the forest floor. An animal dies and its body feeds other life. Water moves from river to cloud to rain to earth and back again. The seasons turn without asking permission. The world is continually becoming something else.

Death is not outside of this process.

Neither are we.

Perhaps this is one of the things that working with bones has taught me most deeply: that transformation does not necessarily mean disappearance. The body changes, but it does not simply become nothing. It enters another relationship with the world. Flesh becomes earth. Earth becomes nourishment. Nourishment becomes life. Life eventually becomes something else. The materials that made us are not uniquely ours. They move through us for a while.

There is something humbling about this.

We spend so much of our lives constructing identities around the idea of permanence. We become attached to our roles, our relationships, our homes, our work, our bodies, our beliefs and our ideas about who we are supposed to become. We build a self and then spend an enormous amount of energy trying to protect it from change. But the natural world does not operate according to our desire for permanence. Everything is in motion. Everything is turning. Everything is becoming.

The seasons have never considered change to be a personal failure.

A tree does not look at its fallen leaves and believe it has failed to remain green.

The field does not mourn the end of summer as proof that summer should have lasted forever.

The forest does not distinguish between growth and decomposition as though one were sacred and the other were something to be avoided.

Both are part of the same system.

And perhaps our lives are, too.

I have learned this slowly through my own seasons of grief and change. There are chapters I once wanted desperately to undo, experiences I wished could have happened differently, versions of myself I thought I needed to get back to. But I am beginning to understand that the point of becoming is not to return to an earlier version of ourselves untouched by what happened. We cannot go backward through the layers. We can only learn to read them.

This, perhaps, is the archaeology of a life.

We excavate ourselves slowly. We find old beliefs beneath newer ones. We discover identities we thought had disappeared. We uncover wounds we thought were healed, memories we had forgotten, loves that shaped us, losses that altered our direction. We sift through the layers and sometimes find that what we believed was buried was never actually gone. It was simply deeper.

And sometimes we discover something else: that the person we are becoming is not an entirely new person at all. She is assembled from what survived.

This is where the bonehouse becomes less frightening to me.

I used to think transformation meant getting out of the dark place as quickly as possible. I thought healing meant rebuilding, becoming stronger, finding the lesson and moving forward. I understand now that there are seasons when the most meaningful work is quieter. There are times when we are not building anything visible. We are sifting. We are grieving. We are allowing what has ended to become fully ended. We are learning what can be carried and what cannot.

There is dignity in that kind of work.

There is also wisdom.

Bones have taught me to respect what remains. Archaeology taught me that fragments are worth studying and that absence itself can contain information. Grief taught me that love does not disappear simply because its object is no longer physically present. My work with the dying has taught me that there is profound value in being willing to sit beside another person without trying to make the mystery of death smaller than it is. Animism has taught me to look at the world as a field of relationship rather than a collection of objects. And alchemy has taught me that sometimes transformation is not something we accomplish at all. Sometimes it is something we allow ourselves to be carried through.

I think this is what I have been most honoured to learn from the chapters of my life in which I have been alchemizing.

That becoming is rarely as clean as we imagine it will be.

That decomposition has its own intelligence.

That grief is not a failure to move forward.

That endings can be thresholds.

That what is broken down is not necessarily destroyed.

That there are things we must let become bones before we can understand what they meant to us.

And perhaps most importantly, I have learned that we do not have to know what something is becoming while we are in the middle of its transformation.

There is a profound humility in that.

To sit in the uncertainty.

To allow a season to turn without demanding that it tell us where it is going.

To let the old form fall away.

To gather what remains.

To hold the fragments carefully.

To resist the urge to immediately name the next version of ourselves.

Maybe this is what it means to enter the bonehouse willingly. Not to go there because everything has been taken from us, but to understand that the bonehouse is part of the cycle. A place of reckoning and remembrance. A place where we encounter what remains after the unnecessary has fallen away. A place where we can sit with the dead versions of ourselves without needing to resurrect them.

I think about the young woman I was in my twenties, kneeling in the earth and learning to read the traces of people who had lived long before me. I did not know then how much of that work would become a metaphor for my own life. I did not know that years later I would still be thinking about layers, fragments, remains, burial and return. I did not know that I would come to spend so much of my life sitting with people at the thresholds of death and grief, or that I would become so interested in the ways we create meaning around mortality. I certainly did not understand that the bones I was studying were quietly teaching me how to understand my own becoming.

But perhaps this is how our lives work.

We move through experiences before we understand what they are preparing us for.

We collect pieces.

We leave things behind.

We return to old questions with new eyes.

We discover that the thread has been there all along.

For me, that thread has always been the threshold. The place between what was and what is becoming. The place where certainty dissolves and something more mysterious takes its place. The place where life and death meet, where grief and love become inseparable, where the physical world and the unseen world brush against one another.

The bonehouse lives there.

And perhaps it is not a place of death at all.

Perhaps it is a place of deep listening.

A place where we learn to honour what has ended without denying what it gave us. A place where we can recognize that some things must be allowed to decompose before they can nourish anything new. A place where we stop treating change as something that has happened to us and begin to understand ourselves as participants in the great turning that has always been underway.

The world has never promised us permanence.

It has offered us relationship.

It has offered us seasons.

It has offered us bodies that change, people who arrive and leave, landscapes that shift, lives that begin and end, and the strange privilege of being here for a little while to witness it.

Bones remind me of this.

They remind me that I am temporary.

They remind me that I am part of something that is not.

And strangely, rather than making life feel smaller, this has made it feel more sacred.

Because perhaps the beauty was never in staying.

Perhaps the beauty is in participating.

In loving while we are here.

In grieving when something is gone.

In tending what is still alive.

In honouring what remains.

In allowing the seasons to turn.

And in trusting that even when we find ourselves sitting among the fragments of something we thought would last forever, the story may not be over.

We may simply be in the bonehouse.

Sifting.

Listening.

Remembering.

Becoming.

Why did I stop trusting myself?

It’s an uncomfortable question because it asks me to look beyond what happened to me and into the ways I participated in my own suffering. Not because I caused someone else’s behaviour, but because I abandoned myself in quiet, almost imperceptible ways while trying to hold onto the possibility of the love I believed was unfolding.

At first I told myself that I had missed the red flags. It was a comforting story because it suggested that if I had simply been more observant, more discerning, more careful, I could have avoided the pain that followed. But the truth is much harder to admit.

I didn’t miss them.

I felt them.

There is a difference.

My intuition noticed things long before my mind was willing to make sense of them. It noticed how quickly everything moved. It noticed the intensity, the declarations, the promises that arrived before we had lived enough ordinary life together for those promises to have roots. It noticed that we were building a future before we had learned how to navigate a disagreement, before we had experienced disappointment together, before we had discovered who we were in the quiet spaces where real intimacy is actually formed. My body knew there was a difference between intensity and intimacy, even while my heart desperately wanted to believe they were the same thing.

Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t simply falling in love with a man. I was falling in love with a story. A story about the kind of partnership I had always hoped was possible. A story about finally being deeply chosen. A story about being met in all the ways I had longed for. His words spoke directly to something tender inside me, and because they reflected a dream I had carried for so long, I wanted them to be true. I didn’t just believe what he was offering. I wanted to believe it. There is an important difference between those two things.

I’ve come to realize that love bombing is powerful not simply because someone says all the right things. It’s powerful because it finds the places within us that have been longing to hear those things. It speaks directly to our deepest hopes, and when those hopes have existed for years, sometimes decades, discernment can quietly give way to desire. We don’t stop seeing reality because we are foolish. We stop seeing it because the dream feels so close that acknowledging reality would require grieving something we haven’t even had the chance to fully imagine.

As the relationship continued, something subtle began happening. It wasn’t one dramatic moment where I lost myself. It was much quieter than that. I started adapting. I softened parts of myself that didn’t need softening. I became more careful with my words. I found myself thinking about how something might be received before I asked for what I needed. When conflict arose, I spent more energy trying to understand his reactions than understanding my own. When he withdrew, I felt myself reaching instead of becoming curious about why I suddenly felt responsible for restoring closeness. Little by little, I became less anchored in myself and more anchored in whether the relationship felt secure.

That, more than anything, is what I grieve.

Not that he withdrew.

Not that he struggled to repair after conflict.

Not even that the relationship ended.

I grieve the moments when I stopped standing beside myself.

The moments when my intuition whispered that something wasn’t right and I responded by asking it to be quieter. The moments when my body felt tense but my mind rushed in with explanations. Maybe he’s overwhelmed. Maybe he’s afraid. Maybe he just needs more time. Compassion became the language I used to negotiate with my own knowing.

There is a profound difference between having compassion for another person’s wounds and allowing those wounds to become the reason we abandon ourselves. I think many of us confuse the two, especially those of us who naturally want to understand people. We tell ourselves that if we can just understand someone’s childhood, their trauma, their attachment style, or their fears, then perhaps their behaviour won’t hurt as much. But understanding someone’s behaviour doesn’t change the experience of living inside it. I could understand why he withdrew, but my nervous system still experienced that withdrawal as disconnection. I could understand why control might have been comforting for him, but that didn’t change the fact that I felt myself becoming smaller in its presence.

The irony is that, deep down, I already knew what love looked like.

I’ve known it for years.

Love has never been the whirlwind.

It has never been promises made before trust has been earned. It has never been certainty that arrives before two people have experienced enough life together to know what they are actually choosing. Love isn’t built in grand declarations made during the honeymoon phase of a relationship. It’s built in ordinary Tuesdays. It’s built in the conversations after misunderstanding. It’s built in repair after conflict. It’s built in the moments when two people disappoint each other and choose curiosity over defensiveness. It’s built in silence that feels safe rather than anxious. It’s built in time, in consistency, in the slow gathering of a shared story.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped trusting what I already knew because I wanted so badly for this extraordinary beginning to become an extraordinary ending.

That has been one of the hardest truths to face.

I wasn’t only attached to him.

I was attached to the future I had already started living inside my imagination.

When that future disappeared, it wasn’t just the relationship I lost. It was the life I had quietly begun building in my mind. I wasn’t only grieving a person. I was grieving a story.

But stories have a way of teaching us.

This one taught me that relationships are mirrors. They don’t simply reflect the person standing in front of us. They reflect the relationship we have with ourselves. They reveal where we trust our own inner knowing and where we hand that trust over to someone else’s certainty. They reveal where we hold our boundaries and where we slowly negotiate them away. They reveal where we believe we have to become smaller, quieter, easier, or more accommodating in order to remain lovable.

Most painfully, they reveal where we are still searching for someone else to choose us before we have fully chosen ourselves.

I don’t write this with shame. If anything, I write it with compassion for the version of me who wanted love so deeply that she confused intensity with intimacy. She wasn’t weak. She wasn’t naïve. She was human. She carried a beautiful longing for partnership, and someone spoke directly to that longing. What she didn’t yet understand was that longing, however beautiful, cannot become more trustworthy than intuition.

The relationship ended, but the mirror remained.

When I look into it now, I don’t see failure. I see invitation. An invitation to trust myself sooner. To let actions matter more than promises. To remember that real love doesn’t ask me to abandon my own wisdom in exchange for hope. And perhaps most importantly, to remember that the kind of love I have always longed for is not something that can be rushed into existence. It is something that is built slowly, in ordinary moments, through consistency, repair, honesty, and the quiet accumulation of trust.

I think that is what I was searching for all along. Not the feeling of being swept away, but the feeling of being able to exhale. Not someone who could convince me of a beautiful future, but someone who would patiently build one with me. And perhaps the greatest gift this relationship gave me wasn’t the future I thought it promised, but the clarity to recognize the difference.

Looking back, I don’t think my deepest lesson was about narcissism itself. It was about discernment. It was about learning that intensity is not the same as intimacy, that attention is not the same as care, and that someone wanting access to you is very different from someone who genuinely wants to know you.

When I reflect on my experience now, I don’t do so with anger. I do it with compassion for the version of myself that wanted to believe the best in people. I have always believed that beneath our wounds is goodness, that people can heal, and that love has the power to transform us. I still believe those things. But I also believe that love without discernment can become one of the quickest paths to abandoning yourself.

I think many emotionally manipulative relationships begin in ways that feel almost magical. They don’t begin with cruelty. They begin with feeling deeply seen. Someone seems captivated by you. They ask thoughtful questions, mirror your values, admire your dreams, and make you feel as though you are unlike anyone they’ve ever met. The connection feels immediate, almost fated. Conversations last for hours. The future is spoken about with certainty before you’ve truly had the chance to know one another.

It feels intoxicating because it touches something many of us long for: to be fully chosen.

Only later did I understand that intensity and intimacy are not the same thing. Intimacy is patient. It unfolds slowly. It is built through consistency, honesty, conflict, repair, and time. It doesn’t require urgency because it isn’t afraid of being discovered gradually.

Intensity, on the other hand, can create the illusion of closeness before trust has had the opportunity to develop. It can feel like you’ve known someone forever, when in reality you’ve only known the version of themselves they have carefully presented.

One of the things I have come to understand is that manipulation rarely announces itself. It doesn’t arrive wearing a warning label. It arrives wrapped in affection, admiration, and certainty. It is woven slowly, thread by thread, until you find yourself inside a web you never realized was being built.

The shift is so subtle that you hardly notice it at first. Small comments begin to make you question yourself. You bring up something that hurt you, and somehow the conversation ends with you apologizing. Your feelings are dismissed as being too sensitive, too emotional, too reactive. Memories are challenged until you begin wondering whether you misunderstood what happened at all. Over time, you stop trusting your own perception because someone else’s version of reality is presented with such confidence that it feels easier to believe them than yourself.

Gaslighting is one of the most disorienting experiences because it doesn’t simply make you question another person. It makes you question your own mind. Eventually you stop asking, “Why did they do that?” and start asking, “What’s wrong with me?” The centre of gravity shifts away from your own intuition and toward earning back their approval.

Then there is the narrative. Looking back, I can see how carefully it was built. Stories about former partners who were supposedly unstable, controlling, or impossible to please. Friends who had betrayed them. Family members who didn’t understand them. There always seemed to be someone else responsible for the conflict. At the time, I believed these stories because I cared. Now I understand that when every previous relationship ends with everyone else becoming the villain, it is worth paying attention.

Isolation often follows, although it rarely looks like someone saying, “Don’t see your friends anymore.” Instead, it happens through countless small moments. You begin spending less time with people who knew you before the relationship. Plans slowly revolve around one person. You stop sharing what is happening because you don’t want others to judge them. Maybe your loved ones express concern, and instead of becoming curious, you feel defensive. Without realizing it, your world becomes smaller and smaller until the relationship becomes your primary source of validation, belonging, and emotional safety.

Another painful dynamic is the introduction of third parties, whether intentionally or subtly. Comparisons begin to appear. Stories about other people. Former partners. Friends. New acquaintances. Sometimes it is overt flirting, sometimes it is simply enough ambiguity to create insecurity. You begin feeling like you’re competing for love that should never have been conditional. Instead of asking whether the relationship is healthy, you start asking how you can become more lovable. You work harder. You explain yourself more clearly. You become increasingly focused on earning back the warmth that existed in the beginning.

What I didn’t understand then was that I wasn’t chasing the relationship I had. I was chasing the promise of the relationship I thought we were going to have. I kept believing that if I could just communicate better, love harder, become more patient, more understanding, less emotional, somehow we would return to what existed in the beginning.

But often, that beginning wasn’t a foundation. It was a performance.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking realization is that losing yourself doesn’t happen all at once. It happens quietly. You begin editing your words before speaking. You rehearse conversations in your head to avoid conflict. You apologize for things that don’t require an apology. You make yourself smaller because it feels easier than defending your reality. Little by little, you disconnect from your own instincts. One day you wake up and realize you haven’t asked yourself what you need in a very long time.

Relationships are extraordinary teachers because they reveal where we still abandon ourselves in exchange for belonging. They illuminate the places where we confuse chemistry with compatibility, intensity with safety, and being chosen with being deeply known. They show us where our longing for love becomes stronger than our commitment to ourselves.

I don’t believe everyone who displays these behaviours has narcissistic personality disorder. Human beings are complicated, and labels cannot capture every relationship. But I do believe there are patterns of manipulation and control that leave us disconnected from ourselves, regardless of what name we give them. The important thing is not becoming an expert in diagnosing others. It is becoming deeply acquainted with the feeling in your own body when something isn’t right.

My intuition knew long before my mind was willing to admit it.

It knew in the moments I felt myself becoming smaller.

It knew when my nervous system stayed on high alert.

It knew when I started explaining away behaviour that, had it happened to someone I loved, I would have recognized immediately as unhealthy.

I simply wasn’t ready to listen because I wanted the story to end differently.

I think that is what grief often is. It isn’t only grieving the person. It is grieving the future you imagined. It is grieving the version of them you hoped would eventually emerge. It is grieving the energy you poured into trying to make something work that was never yours alone to carry.

Today, I no longer see this experience as a story about another person.

I see it as the story of returning home to myself.

It taught me that intuition is rarely loud. It whispers. It speaks through tension in the body, through the moments that leave you feeling confused instead of clear, through the subtle feeling that you are betraying yourself even while trying to preserve the relationship.

For a long time I believed that love meant staying, understanding, giving people more chances, and proving my commitment through my endurance. Today, I believe something different.

I believe love requires truth.

I believe love welcomes your voice instead of punishing it.

I believe love allows room for disagreement without making you fear abandonment.

I believe love expands your world instead of shrinking it.

Most importantly, I believe the deepest relationship I will ever have is the one I have with myself. Every other relationship should strengthen that bond, not weaken it.

If there is one lesson I will carry forward for the rest of my life, it is this: my intuition is sacred. My voice matters. My body keeps score long before my mind understands why. And no relationship, no matter how intoxicating its beginning or heartbreaking its ending, is worth sacrificing my relationship with myself.

That has become the love story I am most committed to living.

The truth is that character isn’t revealed in comfort. It is revealed in conflict.

There is something I’ve been turning over in my mind for weeks now. We spend so much time asking people who they are, listening to the stories they tell about themselves, believing the language they use to describe their values, that we forget one simple truth: anyone can tell you who they hope they are.

Anyone can tell you they are kind, emotionally intelligent, healed, self-aware, committed to growth, or capable of healthy love. Anyone can tell you they value communication, honesty, accountability, and respect. Those words are easy to say when life is going well.

They are easy to believe when someone is charming, charismatic, attentive, and making you feel deeply seen. But words are only stories until they are tested. It is conflict that tells the truth.

It is disappointment, frustration, rejection, boundaries, and unmet expectations that strip away the version someone wants you to believe and reveal the person standing underneath it all.

I used to believe people when they told me they had done the work. If someone spoke about healing, trauma, nervous system regulation, conscious relationships, or emotional intelligence, I assumed those weren’t just concepts they admired but qualities they had embodied.

I believed that because I wanted to. I wanted to believe that someone who had spent so much time talking about growth had actually grown.

What I have come to understand is that there is a profound difference between knowing the language of healing and living it. There is a profound difference between identifying as a healed person and behaving like one when life becomes uncomfortable.

A healed man does not need to continually remind you that he is healed. He does not need to convince you with long explanations about how much work he has done on himself. He certainly does not need to tell you over and over that he is different from everyone else. You don’t experience healing through someone’s words.

You experience it through the way they respond when things don’t go their way. You experience it in how they receive a boundary. You experience it when you disagree with them, when you tell them no, when they feel hurt, disappointed, embarrassed, or challenged. Healing is not revealed in moments of ease.

It is revealed in moments when every part of someone’s nervous system wants to react, but they choose responsibility instead.

That has become one of the clearest measures of safety for me. I no longer ask whether someone knows the right things to say.

I watch what happens when they are frustrated. Do they become curious or defensive? Do they seek understanding, or do they seek control? Can they stay present when a conversation becomes uncomfortable, or do they become louder, more intimidating, more determined to win? Can they take accountability without immediately shifting blame somewhere else? Can they sit with the discomfort of being wrong, or does every conflict somehow become evidence that everyone else has failed them?

One thing I have learned to pay close attention to is the stories people tell about their past. If every former partner is described as unstable, manipulative, narcissistic, or crazy, I pay attention.

If every friendship ended because everyone else was the problem, I pay attention.

If every conflict leaves them as the innocent victim and someone else as the villain, I pay attention.

We all have painful relationships. We all have people who have hurt us. But someone who has truly done the work is capable of telling those stories with humility. They can acknowledge where they were wounded without pretending they never wounded anyone else. They understand that accountability is rarely one-sided, and they don’t need to erase their own humanity to protect their image.

The hardest lesson for me has been realizing how easily charm can disguise dysfunction. I used to wonder how intelligent, capable women ended up in relationships that eventually became controlling, emotionally abusive, or physically violent.

I thought there had to be obvious warning signs.

I imagined that danger announced itself clearly. Now I understand that it often doesn’t. Sometimes it arrives wrapped in charisma. Sometimes it arrives through grand gestures, beautiful words, emotional intensity, and promises of a future you’ve always hoped for.

Sometimes what feels like profound connection is actually someone mirroring everything you value because they know exactly how to make you trust them. Sometimes love bombing feels so much like being deeply loved that it is almost impossible to recognize the difference until much later.

Then conflict begins. Your boundaries become inconvenient. You ask for respect. You disagree. You express hurt. Instead of being met with curiosity, you are met with defensiveness. Instead of accountability, you are met with excuses. Anger becomes louder. Rage begins to replace conversation.

You find yourself being interrupted, talked over, dismissed, criticized, or called names. You are told you are too sensitive, too emotional, too dramatic, or remembering things incorrectly. Conversations you know happened are denied. Words that were spoken suddenly become words that were never said. Little by little, your trust in yourself begins to erode.

You replay conversations in your mind wondering whether you imagined them. You question your memory. You question your reactions. You question your own sanity because someone you care about keeps insisting that your experience isn’t real.

That, to me, is one of the most devastating parts of emotional manipulation. It doesn’t just damage your trust in another person. It damages your trust in yourself. You become so busy trying to figure out what is true that you stop listening to the quiet wisdom inside your own body.

And yet your body has often known long before your mind was willing to admit it. It knows what it feels like to brace before someone walks through the door. It knows what it feels like to make yourself smaller so you don’t trigger another outburst. It knows what it feels like to choose your words carefully because you’re afraid of what might happen if you don’t.

A relationship should never require you to abandon your own reality in order to survive it.

A healed man does not try to dominate you. He does not need to silence you by becoming louder than you. He does not call you names because he is angry. He does not use intimidation as communication. He does not repeatedly violate your boundaries while insisting he respects them. He does not lay hands on you.

And if he causes harm, he does not spend hours convincing you that the harm never happened. He apologizes. He takes responsibility. He changes his behaviour because genuine healing is measured by action, not intention.

I no longer judge people by the beautiful things they say about themselves. I watch how they move through conflict.

I watch how they treat people when they are disappointed. I watch whether their actions create safety or fear, clarity or confusion, connection or control. Anyone can give love when life is easy. Not everyone can choose love when their ego feels threatened. That is where character lives. That is where healing either exists or it doesn’t.

Perhaps the greatest lesson this experience has given me is this: I no longer need someone to tell me who they are.

I will simply watch. Because eventually, every person reveals themselves. Not in the moments when everything is going right, but in the moments when it isn’t. And when someone consistently shows you who they become in conflict, believe them.

Not because they are beyond change, but because it is never your responsibility to stay long enough to see whether they eventually choose it.

Looking back now, I can see that very little of it had anything to do with other people.

It had everything to do with me.

Or more specifically, the relationship I had with myself.

For years, I carried an incredibly low sense of self worth. I struggled with severe cystic acne that consumed my confidence. I experienced periods of extreme weight loss that left me feeling disconnected from my own body. I lived with chronic shingles, persistent nerve pain, and a body that often felt like it was working against me rather than with me. Every day seemed to present another challenge, another reminder that I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin. I woke up each morning already carrying a weight that no one else could see.

When you don’t feel safe within yourself, the world begins to feel unsafe too.

I spent so much of my life wondering how I was being perceived. Every interaction became a mirror reflecting back all of the things I already believed about myself. Did they notice my skin? Did I sound awkward? Am I interesting enough? Am I attractive enough? Did I say the wrong thing? Do they secretly wish I wasn’t here? Those questions followed me everywhere. My attention was almost entirely directed inward, constantly evaluating myself instead of simply experiencing the moment.

What I didn’t understand then was that when all of your energy is spent monitoring yourself, there is very little left to genuinely meet another human being.

I wasn’t curious about people because I was too busy trying to survive being perceived. I wasn’t listening as deeply as I could have been because I was listening to the relentless voice inside my own head. I couldn’t truly connect because I wasn’t actually present. My body was in the room, but my mind was somewhere else entirely, trying to calculate whether I was acceptable.

Beneath all of it was an even deeper belief that quietly shaped my entire life.

I didn’t believe I was lovable.

Not completely.

I didn’t believe someone would truly choose me. As a partner. As a friend. As someone worth investing in. Somewhere along the way, I had convinced myself that I was less than everyone else, and because of that belief, I slowly removed myself from opportunities to be known. It’s difficult to let people love you when you’ve already decided you’re unworthy of their love.

I often say now that I was absent from my own life, and I mean that literally. I watched life happen from a distance. I stayed on the edges of conversations. I declined invitations. I missed opportunities to meet incredible people. I wasn’t really living. I was protecting myself from rejection before rejection ever had the chance to find me.

Healing wasn’t one profound moment or one life changing book. It was slow, quiet work. It happened every time I questioned a belief I had carried for years. Every time I chose compassion over criticism. Every time I asked myself why I believed everyone else deserved love, kindness, abundance, healthy relationships, opportunities and belonging, but somehow believed I had to earn those things.

Eventually, I stopped trying to become worthy.

I simply began believing that I already was.

That shift changed far more than my confidence. It changed the questions I asked myself.

For most of my life, I walked into every relationship wondering, Do they like me? Am I enough? What do I need to do so they choose me?

Now I find myself asking something completely different.

How do I feel around this person?

Do I feel relaxed? Do I feel seen? Do I feel respected? Do I leave our conversation with more energy or less? Does this relationship feel reciprocal? Is this someone whose presence actually adds something beautiful to my life? That question changed everything because it quietly reminded me that I also have a choice.

For so many years, I believed my role was simply to be chosen. To be agreeable. To be kind enough, accommodating enough, easy enough, lovable enough that someone else might decide I was worthy of staying for. I never considered that I was also allowed to discern. That I was allowed to decide who I wanted in my life. That healthy relationships require mutual choosing, not one person endlessly proving their worth.

As my self worth deepened, something inside me became steadier. It’s difficult to describe, but it felt as though my backbone lengthened. I found myself speaking more honestly. I became comfortable saying no. I stopped apologizing for having needs. I learned how to have difficult conversations without believing conflict meant abandonment. I realized that disappointing someone is sometimes simply the cost of honouring yourself.

Perhaps the most unexpected change was that strong personalities no longer intimidated me the way they once did. There was a time when I would immediately shrink around people who spoke loudly or carried themselves with certainty. Their confidence made me question my own. Today I don’t experience that in the same way because I no longer hand other people the responsibility of deciding my value. I don’t need to become smaller in order for someone else to take up space.

I think confidence is often misunderstood. We imagine it’s about becoming louder, more charismatic or more outgoing. For me, confidence has looked much quieter than that. It has looked like relaxing. It has looked like trusting myself. It has looked like walking into a room without needing everyone to approve of me. It has looked like allowing people to misunderstand me without rushing to explain myself. It has looked like choosing myself over the endless pursuit of being chosen.

Social anxiety didn’t begin to loosen its grip because the world became kinder. People didn’t suddenly stop judging. The world didn’t become safer overnight.

It loosened because I finally stopped believing that someone else’s opinion had the power to define who I was.

The more I rooted myself in my own worth, the less I needed to seek evidence of it everywhere else.

And in doing so, I found something I had been searching for all along.

I found my way back to myself

.

When the leap does not meet you with solid ground.
When the thing you said yes to does not open the way you hoped.
When the plan changes shape in your hands and what you are left with is not clarity, but discomfort. Not expansion, but resistance. Not arrival, but an unravelling.

Utah was so much like that for me.

It was this massive leap. Leaving the life I knew. Leaving the Kootenays, which held me in a way I do not think I even fully understood until I was gone. Leaving endings that were already tender and complicated. Leaving a place where I knew the roads, the rhythm, the mountains, the way the air felt in my lungs. Leaving a life that, for all its pain and complexity, was mine.

And I think some part of me believed that if I was brave enough to leap, life would meet me there.
That there would be some immediate confirmation.
Some sense of yes, this is hard, but it is right.
Some ground under my feet.

Instead, it felt like being met by one unexpected turn after another.

The visa application slowly became something I could feel was not going to unfold in my favour.
I was in a place that did not feel like my element.
I was staying in different people’s homes, trying to settle into spaces that were never really mine, and my nervous system knew it before I did. It reacted to the lack of anchoring, the lack of privacy, the lack of a place to fully exhale. I kept trying to ground, trying to regulate, trying to stay open, but there was this growing sense of disconnection in me. Like I could not fully land. Like I was hovering above myself a little bit.

And underneath all of it was homesickness.
A deep, aching homesickness.
Not just for a place, but for my place.
For the Kootenays. For the life that had texture and familiarity and belonging in it. For the version of me that knows how to move there. For my own corners and routines and the way my body softens when it knows where it is.

There was a fog that came over me there.
A heaviness.
A flattening.
A sense of trying to find myself in a place where I could not hear myself as clearly.

And I think in the past, I would have made that mean I was failing.
That I had made the wrong choice.
That something was wrong with me for not handling it better, for not being more adaptable, more easy, more resilient in the shiny way people like to talk about resilience.

But this season has asked something different of me.

It has asked me not to collapse into the hurt of it.
Not to make the sadness the whole story.
Not to treat the unravelling as evidence that I am broken or that I took the wrong road.

It has asked me to say: good.
Not good because it felt good.
Not good because I wanted it to be hard.
But good as in, what is this here to show me?
What is this revealing?
What is this asking me to learn about myself?
What part of me is being called forward here?

Because there was so much in Utah that brought me face to face with myself.

My patterns around safety.
My relationship to uncertainty.
How quickly my nervous system can begin to fray when I do not have a place that feels like mine.
How deeply I need solitude and space to regulate.
How easily homesickness can become grief in the body.
How disoriented I become when I cannot hear my own rhythm.

It also brought me face to face with the ways I am still learning to care for myself without disappearing into hyper-independence.

That has been one of the deepest pieces of this season for me.

To need support without abandoning myself.
To speak up when something is not working.
To have hard conversations.
To say, this is not okay for me.
To advocate for what I need.
To take care of myself before I am fully underwater.
To let myself be tender and struggling and not turn that into shame.
To ask for more without feeling like I am too much.
To hold myself through uncertainty without defaulting to “fine, I will just handle it all alone.”

There is something humbling about realizing that the leap is not always met with ground.
Sometimes it is met with an endurance test.
Sometimes it is met with the exact conditions that expose where you are not rooted yet.
Sometimes it is met with discomfort so that you can hear yourself more clearly.
Sometimes it strips away the fantasy and asks if you still know how to stay with yourself when things are not beautiful, not obvious, not rewarding.

And maybe that is part of it too.
Maybe not every leap is meant to feel expansive right away.
Maybe some leaps are clarifying.
Maybe some are meant to return us to ourselves by showing us exactly where we left ourselves behind.
Maybe some are not about building a new life as quickly as possible, but about revealing what actually sustains us.
What home is.
What safety is.
What is ours and what isn’t.
What we can force and what we cannot.

I do not think my unraveling in Utah was bad.
Painful, yes.
Disorienting, yes.
Lonely, absolutely.
But not bad.

I think it was honest.

I think it showed me that I cannot override my body forever.
That I cannot live untethered from my own needs and expect myself to thrive.
That I cannot keep calling it strength when I abandon myself in order to make something work.
That forcing a life to happen is not the same thing as building one that is right for me.

And I think, underneath all of it, it brought me back.

Back to my own voice.
Back to the quiet knowing in me.
Back to the understanding that I am allowed to pivot when something is not right.
Back to the truth that not every ending is failure and not every detour is a mistake.
Back to the woman I am when I stop trying to outrun my own knowing.

There are seasons where life opens like a meadow.
And there are seasons where it narrows into a path you can barely see, and all you can do is keep listening for yourself in the dark.

This was one of those seasons for me.

A season of not knowing.
Of homesickness.
Of disappointment.
Of trying to steady myself in unfamiliar places.
Of plans not unfolding.
Of realizing that what I thought would carry me forward was not actually available.
Of grieving what I had hoped it would be.
Of trying not to make my own tenderness a problem.

But also, a season of remembering.

Remembering that I can trust myself even when I cannot trust the plan.
Remembering that I do not need to panic every time life changes shape.
Remembering that there is wisdom in the unraveling too.
Remembering that sometimes the bravest thing is not to keep pushing forward at all costs, but to tell the truth about what is happening and let that truth redirect you.
Remembering that endurance is not just gritting your teeth through the hard thing.
Sometimes endurance is staying present enough to let the hard thing change you.

I wanted Utah to be one thing.
It was another.

And maybe the lesson was never in whether it worked the way I hoped.
Maybe the lesson was in who I became by having to meet myself there.

For a long time I believed that healing was mostly about becoming stronger. Becoming more resilient. More capable. Less affected by things. I thought that if I healed enough, I would eventually arrive at a place where uncertainty no longer touched me so deeply. But this move has shown me something entirely different. Healing is not becoming untouchable. It is becoming honest about what you need in order to feel alive, regulated, nourished, and whole.

Leaving the Kootenays has revealed to me just how much my body was being held there.

Not in some abstract romantic sense, but in a deeply physical and nervous-system level way. There are places that nourish us beyond language. Places where the body begins to unclench without us even realizing it. Places where the pace of life, the quality of light, the smell of the air, the rhythm of the seasons, the familiarity of roads and routines all work together to tell the body: you are safe here.

The Kootenays became that for me.

When I first arrived there years ago, I was carrying exhaustion in every layer of myself. Grief. Burnout. Survival. Trauma that had lived in my body for so long that I no longer even recognized it as tension because it had become my baseline. I had spent years pouring into others through grief work and end-of-life care while simultaneously trying to survive my own storms. And somewhere along the way, I lost connection with my own body. Not completely, but enough that I stopped listening when it whispered for rest. I only heard it once it was screaming.

The Kootenays slowed me down enough to hear myself again.

Healing did not happen there all at once. It happened quietly. Through repetition. Through ordinary days that slowly accumulated into something sacred. Morning coffee in silence. Long drives beside mountains and water. The gym becoming a place not of punishment, but devotion. Buying nourishing food and cooking for myself with care. Walking. Sleeping deeply. Reading again. Letting nature regulate parts of me that years of “working on myself” never fully reached.

I think we underestimate the intelligence of the body. We think healing is something we think our way into, but often it is environmental. Relational. Sensory. It is shaped by the spaces we inhabit and the rhythms we keep. My body began to trust life again because life around me became slower, steadier, and more connected to what is real.

And perhaps that is why leaving has felt so destabilizing.

Because I was not just leaving a place. I was leaving an ecosystem that had become part of my healing.

There is grief in realizing that a place held you more deeply than you knew at the time.

I think part of me assumed that because I had changed internally, I would be able to carry that groundedness anywhere without disruption. But this transition has humbled me. It has shown me that even after profound healing, we are still human beings with nervous systems, attachments, needs, and limits. We still require certain conditions in order to thrive.

After EDC in Vegas, I felt my entire system collapse inward.

Vegas itself was surreal in so many ways. Beautiful. stimulating. Electrifying. Standing backstage at Tiësto felt like one of those moments where you suddenly see how wildly life can shift. If someone had told me years ago that I would experience something like that, I would never have believed them. There have been so many moments recently where life has felt expansive, unfamiliar, and almost dreamlike in its unpredictability.

But the body keeps its own score.

After the festival ended, I crashed hard. My immune system gave out. My throat became swollen and painful. My body felt inflamed and exhausted in a way that went beyond simply “being tired.” And beneath the physical depletion was something deeper: my nervous system no longer knew where home was.

That realization shook me more than I expected.

Because for all of my talk about freedom and expansion and new beginnings, I realized how foundational home truly is for me. I need a space that is mine. I need privacy. Quiet. Familiarity. I need somewhere to wake up and place my nervous system down. Somewhere that allows me to fully exhale instead of remaining subtly vigilant.

Without that, I begin to feel suspended.

Like my body cannot fully land.

There is a specific exhaustion that comes from constantly adapting to uncertainty. Even beautiful uncertainty. Even chosen uncertainty. The body still interprets change as change. It still longs for predictability, especially after years of survival.

And then there is the gym.

People often reduce fitness to aesthetics, but what strength training gave me was far deeper than physical transformation. It gave me rhythm. Structure. A relationship with consistency. It taught me how to stay devoted to myself even when emotions fluctuated. It became one of the primary ways I rebuilt trust with my own body after years of dissociation and stress.

The gym became ritual.

There is something profoundly stabilizing about returning to the same movements over and over. About progressively carrying heavier things and realizing your body can adapt. About building strength through patience instead of force. Training taught me that transformation is not dramatic most of the time. It is repetitive. It is built quietly. One session at a time. One meal at a time. One decision at a time.

Losing access to that rhythm during this transition affected me more than I anticipated.

I suddenly understood that many of the practices I had built in the Kootenays were not luxuries. They were anchors.

And when enough anchors disappear at once, even a strong person can begin to drift.

There have been moments these past weeks where I have wanted to pack everything up and drive back immediately. Back to the mountains. Back to the roads my body recognizes. Back to the gym I know. Back to the rivers and forests and the slower pace that nourished me so deeply. Back to the place where I healed before.

There is such a temptation to return to the last place we felt fully safe.

Especially when we are depleted.

Especially when the unfamiliar feels too loud.

Especially when our nervous systems are begging for rest.

But beneath that urge, there is another quieter feeling emerging. A knowing that perhaps I came here for a reason I do not fully understand yet. A sense that this chapter is asking something different of me than the last one did.

The Kootenays taught me how to heal.

Maybe this next chapter is teaching me how to carry that healing into unfamiliar terrain.

And those are not the same thing.

It is one thing to feel grounded in a place that naturally nourishes you. It is another thing entirely to learn how to create grounding while everything around you still feels uncertain. To build routine from scratch. To slowly introduce familiarity into the unknown until the body begins to soften again.

Right now, I am in that in-between space.

No longer who I was before, but not yet fully settled into who I am becoming.

And I think we speak far too little about this stage of transformation. We glorify the leap. The reinvention. The bravery of starting over. But we rarely talk about the strange grief and nervous system disorientation that accompanies it. We rarely talk about how lonely it can feel to not yet know where you belong. How exhausting it is to continuously regulate yourself through uncertainty while trying to remain open to possibility.

There are moments where I question myself completely.

Moments where I wonder if leaving was a mistake. Moments where I miss the Kootenays so intensely that it physically hurts. Moments where I crave familiarity so deeply that even remembering certain roads or mountains makes my chest tighten.

But I also know this: if I leave too quickly, I may never discover what exists on the other side of this discomfort.

And so for now, I stay.

Not because I have certainty. Not because I feel fully settled. But because something in me believes that unfamiliarity is not always a sign we are in the wrong place. Sometimes it is simply the nervous system adjusting to a reality it has not yet learned to trust.

I am learning that grounding is not a destination we arrive at once and keep forever. It is a relationship we build continuously with ourselves. Through ritual. Through care. Through listening. Through creating spaces and rhythms that allow the body to soften enough to inhabit the present moment again.

Maybe home is not only geography.

Maybe home is also the collection of practices, relationships, and ways of being that allow us to remain connected to ourselves no matter where we are.

The Kootenays will always be part of me. That land changed me forever. It reminded me who I was underneath exhaustion and survival. It gave me space to rebuild. It nourished me in ways I will spend years fully understanding.

But perhaps the real test of healing is not whether we can remain safe inside the places that restored us.

Perhaps it is whether we can eventually carry that restoration forward into entirely new landscapes.

Right now I am trying to learn how.

Slowly. Imperfectly. One day at a time.

Something has been changing inside me lately in a way that feels both deeply grounding and deeply clarifying. I think after years of moving through grief, heartbreak, transformation, and witnessing the fragility of life so intimately through my work in end of life care, I am arriving at a place where I can no longer betray my own longing just to remain connected to someone. There is a kind of honesty that begins emerging after enough loss, enough uncertainty, enough emotional unraveling.

You begin realizing how precious your life actually is. How sacred your energy is. How deeply the body feels the difference between being fully met and merely being accommodated.

I think for a long time I tried to make peace with less than what my soul actually desired in partnership. Not because my desires were unrealistic, but because some part of me still believed deep mutual love was rare, unstable, or difficult to sustain. I think many people quietly carry this belief.

We convince ourselves that wanting emotional intimacy, consistency, romance, chemistry, tenderness, passion, friendship, devotion, attraction, and emotional safety all together is somehow asking for too much. But lately I have been realizing that what I truly desire is actually very simple.

I want to feel fully chosen by the person standing beside me. I want to feel their presence clearly. I want to feel wanted in a way that is grounded, embodied, and mutual.

I want partnership that feels alive in every realm. I want the romance of slow mornings together and the passion of being deeply desired. I want emotional intimacy where both people are willing to communicate honestly and remain openhearted even through discomfort. I want friendship underneath attraction. I want laughter, sensuality, devotion, softness, emotional intelligence, and depth.

I want to build a life with someone who genuinely enjoys me, who delights in me, who sees me fully and moves closer rather than further away.

There is something incredibly healing about being with someone whose energy allows your nervous system to soften rather than contract. Someone whose consistency creates safety within the body. Someone whose affection feels clear rather than confusing. I think many people underestimate how deeply relationships impact the nervous system.

We feel it in the body when someone is truly present with us. We feel it when affection is genuine. We feel it when desire is mutual. We feel it when someone is emotionally available enough to actually build intimacy rather than just speak about it conceptually.

And perhaps this is part of what self worth really changes. It changes what we are willing to normalize. It changes how much emotional absence we are willing to tolerate. It changes how deeply we trust our own desires instead of minimizing them to remain lovable. I think there comes a moment where you stop trying to convince yourself that crumbs are enough because you finally understand the fullness of what you yourself bring into love.

I know the depth I carry now. I know the way I love. I know the tenderness, loyalty, sensuality, emotional presence, care, and devotion I bring into partnership when I feel safe enough to fully open.

And I no longer want to pour that kind of love into spaces where it cannot be fully received, reciprocated, or honored. Life feels too brief for half love. Too sacred for relationships where the body constantly feels uncertain.

What I want now is simple in its honesty. I want someone who is deeply into me emotionally, physically, spiritually, intellectually. Someone who wants to build together, grow together, experience life together fully. Someone who is unafraid of intimacy, depth, tenderness, or devotion. Someone who sees partnership not as limitation, but as a sacred place where two people get to witness and nourish one another through all the seasons of being human.

And perhaps the most beautiful part of all of this is realizing that I no longer feel ashamed of wanting that kind of love.

I think there was a time where I tried to make myself smaller in my desires. More detached. More “realistic.” But grief changes you. Loss changes you. Sitting beside death changes you. You begin understanding how quickly life moves and how important it is to stop abandoning your deepest truths. You begin realizing that longing itself is sacred. That the heart knows what it is asking for. That wanting to be loved fully is not weakness. It is human.

So I am no longer settling for relationships that only partially meet me. I am no longer overriding what my body knows. I am no longer pretending I do not desire depth simply because depth asks other people to meet themselves honestly too.

I want the kind of love that feels nourishing to the soul and calming to the nervous system. The kind of partnership where both people arrive fully. The kind of love that feels rooted, passionate, tender, alive.

A hell yes in every sense of the word.

A door closes. A relationship ends.

Something we poured ourselves into falls apart. We are told no when we expected yes. We fail in ways that feel personal, intimate, disorienting. And in the aftermath, there is often this quiet, aching question that lingers in the body more than the mind: what just happened, and why? It can feel like we have been misplaced inside our own lives, like we have been diverted from something that was meant for us.

But the longer I live, the more I sense that these moments are not accidents, and not punishments, but a kind of redirection that carries an intelligence we cannot always access in the moment. That sometimes what does not unfold is just as important, if not more, than what does.

We are so good at writing stories about where we are going. We imagine the person, the place, the life, the version of ourselves that will exist just on the other side of this next step. We attach meaning, we build devotion, we begin to root into something that feels like destiny. And when it disappears, or turns, or refuses to open to us, it can feel like something has been taken.

And in a way, it has. There is a real loss there. Of the inner world we built around it. The future we rehearsed. The softness of anticipation. The sense of continuity that helped us feel safe moving forward. This is why grief arrives, and why it is so necessary. Grief is the body’s way of acknowledging that something meaningful has shifted. It is how we honour what we loved, what we hoped for, what we believed in. It is a form of devotion in itself.

To grieve is to say, this mattered to me. This touched me. This shaped me. And I am willing to feel that fully.

There is a subtle way we can become tethered to the life that did not happen, replaying it, refining it, trying to make sense of it as if clarity will bring it back. We linger at the edge of that closed door, hoping it might open again if we just understand enough, if we just wait long enough, if we just hold on in the right way. But life is already moving. The river has already shifted its course. And there is something sacred in choosing to move with it, even when our hearts are still catching up.

I think there is a kind of protection in these diversions that we rarely recognize in real time. Because we can only measure what we lost, not what we were spared from. We cannot see the conversations that would have eroded us, the environments that would have diminished us, the versions of ourselves we might have had to become to stay in something that was never truly aligned. We cannot see the slow misalignments, the quiet compromises, the ways we would have contorted to fit into a life that looked right but did not feel right.

And so we grieve what we can see, while being gently, almost invisibly, protected from what we cannot. There is a humility in admitting that we do not have the full perspective. That something larger than our immediate desire may be guiding us, not away from love or success or belonging, but toward a deeper, more honest version of it.

To trust this is not always easy. It asks us to loosen our grip on control, on certainty, on the timelines we have created to make ourselves feel safe. It asks us to believe in something we cannot yet prove. To stand in the unknown and say, even here, I am being led. Even here, there is care.

And this kind of trust is not naive. It is forged in experience, in the slow recognition that the things that did not work out were not always failures, but recalibrations. That what fell apart made space for something we could not have accessed otherwise. That the heartbreaks, the endings, the rejections became initiations into a deeper relationship with ourselves, with our boundaries, with our truth.

There is something that happens in these moments that shape us in ways nothing else can. Pain, as much as we resist it, strips away illusion. It shows us where we have been abandoning ourselves, where we have been holding on too tightly, where we have been seeking something outside of us that we are being asked to cultivate within. It deepens our capacity to feel, to discern, to choose differently. It makes us more honest. More rooted. More attuned to what is real and what is not. And in that way, even the experiences that break us open are not meaningless.

They are catalytic. They are part of the refinement. Part of the becoming.

So when life diverts us, when we find ourselves walking a path we did not plan, there is an invitation to meet that moment with a kind of reverence, even in the midst of grief. To let ourselves feel everything that arises without shutting it down or rushing it away, and at the same time, to not lose ourselves inside the story of what we thought would be. To remember that the river does not move against us, but with an intelligence we are still learning to trust. That we are not being cast off course, but carried into a different channel that may hold something more aligned with who we are now, not who we were when we first chose that path.

Beneath all of it, there is this quieter, steadier truth that I return to again and again. That we are held. That we are cared for in ways that are not always gentle, but are deeply intentional. That even when we are placed in the path of pain or heartbreak, it is not because we are forgotten, but because there is something in us that is being shaped, strengthened, opened. That nothing we move through is wasted. That every ending, every redirection, every unexpected turn is part of a larger unfolding that is guiding us, slowly and sometimes painfully, toward what is truly ours.

Maybe the work, if there is any, is to keep softening into that. To keep choosing trust, even when it feels fragile. To keep letting go of the need to understand everything immediately.

To allow the river to carry us, to feel the unfamiliar terrain without resistance, to become curious about where we are being taken instead of only grieving where we thought we would go.

To walk forward with the quiet knowing that even here, especially here, life is not working against us. It is working on us, and for us, in ways we may only fully understand when we have already arrived somewhere new.

In that space, I feel a part of myself opening that had been dormant. It is not loud or forceful. It feels more like a widening. A willingness. A curiosity that does not need immediate answers. I notice how much of life I had begun to predict without even realizing it, how I moved through my days with a quiet assumption of knowing what would come next. There is comfort in that, but there is also a kind of shrinking that happens when everything becomes known.

Now, standing in this threshold, I feel something different moving through me. There is a sense of being uncontained, of not needing to define what is next, of allowing myself to meet life as it arrives rather than trying to shape it before it has a chance to reveal itself.

Choosing to go to Utah feels like an extension of that opening. It is not just a change in location. It feels like a decision to step fully into this in-between space and let it work on me. I can feel the edges of my life softening, the identity I have held here becoming more fluid, less fixed. There is something deeply alive in not knowing exactly who I will be there, in not having a clear picture of how my days will unfold. I am allowing myself to enter it with an open mind and an open heart, to be shaped by what I encounter rather than trying to control it. There is a quiet trust growing in that, a sense that I do not need to have it all figured out in order to move forward.

I find myself returning to the idea of “just seeing.” Just seeing what is out there. Just seeing who I become in a different landscape, in a different rhythm, in a different version of my life. There is something honest in that approach. It removes the pressure to make something happen and instead invites me into a relationship with what is already unfolding. I am noticing how much more present I feel when I allow that to guide me. There is less striving, less grasping, and more attention, more receptivity, more willingness to be surprised.

Alongside this, there is a part of me that is saying yes in ways I haven’t before. Saying yes to experiences that feel expansive, playful, even a little outside of who I have known myself to be. Going to EDC (Electric Daisy Carnival) in Vegas next month feels like stepping into a completely different current of life. I have never been to Vegas. I have only been to one festival before. There is something about choosing this that feels aligned with the version of me that is emerging through this transition. A version of me that is open to joy, to movement, to being immersed in something vibrant and alive. A version of me that is allowing fun to take up space again.

Fun has not been something I have given myself fully over the past few years. There has been depth, there has been growth, there has been grief, there has been responsibility, but there has also been a quiet holding back when it comes to lightness. I can feel that shifting now. As something that is naturally returning as I loosen my grip on what life is supposed to look like. There is a permission in this moment that feels important. A permission to enjoy, to explore, to be in my body, to experience life without needing to justify it.

This threshold I am standing in feels rich with possibility, not because I know what is coming, but because I don’t. There is a kind of aliveness that exists when the future is not yet shaped, when there is space for something unexpected to enter. I feel myself becoming more available to that, more willing to meet life without needing to control it. There is a quiet confidence in that openness, a sense that I can trust myself to move with whatever arises.

I think there is something deeply transformative about allowing ourselves to remain in these in-between spaces long enough for them to work on us. To not rush toward the next solid ground, to not force clarity before it naturally comes, but to let ourselves be changed by the experience of not knowing. There is a kind of expansion that happens there that cannot be replicated in certainty. It reaches into every part of us, reshaping how we relate to ourselves, to others, to the world.

Right now, I feel myself inside that expansion. Not at the end of it, not even close, but within it. Living it. Breathing it. Letting it unfold in its own time. There is something deeply right about that, even in the uncertainty. Especially in the uncertainty.

And for the first time in a long time, I feel open not just to what I am becoming, but to the experience of becoming itself.

And in those spaces, I became the one who held everything.

I know how to love people in their brokenness. I know how to sit beside chaos, addiction, grief, confusion, and not turn away. My work in death, in grief, in the thresholds of life has shaped me into someone who can remain when things are uncomfortable, when things are unraveling. But somewhere along the way, that devotion to staying became entangled with self-abandonment. I turned myself into the steady ground for others while slowly disconnecting from the parts of me that were asking for more.

There were so many moments where I could feel it in my body, that quiet ache of not being fully met. The longing to be seen in my depth, not just appreciated for my strength. The desire to soften, to be held, to not always be the one carrying the emotional weight of the relationship. But instead of honoring that, I questioned myself. I wondered if I was asking for too much. I tried to become more understanding, more patient, more accommodating.

And beneath all of that, there was a truth I wasn’t fully ready to face. These relationships did not require me to fully open either. There was always a distance I could hide within. Always a reason to keep a part of myself protected. I could love deeply, but still remain just slightly out of reach. I could give endlessly, without having to fully receive.

It felt like love, but it was also a form of safety.

Because real intimacy, the kind I know I crave, asks something entirely different of me. It asks me to be seen in ways I cannot control. It asks me to let go of the identity of being the strong one, the grounded one, the one who holds it all together. It asks me to stand in my worth without negotiating it down to meet someone else’s limitations. And for a long time, I wasn’t ready for that.

There is grief in seeing this clearly. Not regret, but a deep tenderness for the versions of me who were doing the best they could with what they knew. The woman who stayed. The woman who loved men who could not meet her. The woman who thought intensity was intimacy, who mistook chaos and infatuation for depth. I understand her now. I have compassion for her. She was not wrong for loving the way she did, she was learning.

And I can feel how much those relationships have shaped me.

They have refined my discernment. They have shown me exactly what I am no longer available for. They have brought me into a deeper relationship with truth, with my body, with the quiet knowing that lives beneath all of the noise. Every ending has stripped something away. Every heartbreak has carved space for something more honest to emerge.

This is the alchemy of it.

I do not see those experiences as mistakes anymore. I see them as initiations. As necessary contrasts that have allowed me to know myself with a level I would not have otherwise reached. There is a kind of gratitude that lives alongside the grief now. Gratitude for what was revealed, for what was broken open, for what I was forced to confront within myself.

Because what is becoming clear is this, I am no longer willing to abandon myself in order to love someone else.

I am no longer willing to merge, to disappear, to shape-shift into something more palatable or less confronting. I am no longer interested in relationships where I have to question my place, where I have to decode someone’s presence, where I feel the subtle erosion of my own truth over time. That version of love no longer fits inside my body.

There is something else I am stepping into now, something that feels both more grounded and more vulnerable at the same time.

I am learning to see myself in my full worth. Not as an idea, not as something I say, but as something I live. I know what I bring into the lives of the people I love. I know the depth, the devotion, the presence, the way I can hold both beauty and darkness without turning away. And I am beginning to understand that this is not something to give freely to those who cannot meet it. It is something sacred. It is something to be honored, including by me.

My relationship with myself is becoming the foundation of everything.

Not in a way that closes me off from love, but in a way that actually allows me to enter it more honestly. Because I believe, deeply, that part of why we are here is to experience union. To meet another and see ourselves reflected back in ways we could never access alone. There is so much that is revealed in relationship, so much that is awakened, so much that is brought to the surface to be seen, felt, and integrated.

But I am no longer interested in union that costs me myself.

I want the kind of partnership where I can arrive fully. Where there is no shrinking, no performing, no over-giving to compensate for what is lacking. Where presence is steady. Where depth is not something I have to pull for, but something that is naturally met. Where intimacy is not built on chaos, but on truth.

And I can feel that the shift into that kind of relationship begins here.

In the way I choose myself now. In the way I listen to my body. In the way I no longer override my knowing for the sake of being loved. In the way I allow myself to be both strong and soft, held and holding, seen and seeing.

There is a different kind of love waiting for me. Not because I have finally found the right person, but because I am becoming someone who will no longer settle for anything less than what is real.

And that feels like the beginning of something entirely new.

I am packing up my life in this little mountain town, and even writing that feels surreal. The forests, the quiet, the way the air feels here, the rhythm of life that has held me in a kind of steady stillness. These spaces have been more than just a place to live. They have been a container for some of the most profound seasons of my life. Places where I have been able to disappear when I needed to. Places where I could grieve without being witnessed, rebuild without pressure, and slowly come back into myself in my own time. There is a certain safety in being held by land that asks very little of you. A kind of wild protection that allows you to remain partially hidden, even as you are transforming.

And I can feel now, with a clarity that almost startles me, that I am no longer meant to stay here in the same way.

So I am placing my belongings into a storage unit, and there is something about that act that feels far more symbolic than practical. Boxing up pieces of a life that has been deeply lived. Objects that carry memory, identity, versions of myself that existed in different seasons. And yet, as I wrap and pack and sort, I am not met with the heaviness I thought I might feel. There is no gripping, no sense of loss in the way I expected. Instead, there is a quiet honoring. A recognition that this life has been real, meaningful, and complete in its own way. That it does not need to be carried forward in its entirety in order for it to have mattered.

I am taking only what I need, and even that feels like a practice in discernment. A stripping back. A choosing. Asking myself again and again what is essential, what feels aligned to bring with me, and what can be left behind without fear. It is teaching me that beginning again does not require me to hold onto everything that has ever defined me. That I am allowed to travel lighter. That I am allowed to trust that I will gather what I need along the way.

And what has surprised me most in all of this is not the fear, not the uncertainty, not even the act of leaving something that has held me so deeply. It is the lightness that has come with the decision. The moment I stopped circling it, stopped questioning, stopped trying to make it make perfect sense, and simply chose, something in me softened. It was immediate and unmistakable. A release so tangible it felt physical, like something unclenched in my body. As if I had been holding myself at this threshold for longer than I realized, waiting for the moment I would finally step through.

It made me realize how heavy indecision can be. How much energy it takes to live in the space between knowing and not acting. And how, sometimes, the act of choosing, even without certainty, creates more stability than staying where you are simply because it is known.

Because this kind of change does not come with a clear map. It does not offer guarantees or timelines or neatly laid out steps. It does not allow for control in the ways I have been used to holding it. Instead, it asks for surrender. A real surrender. The kind that is not passive or disconnected, but deeply active and engaged. The kind that requires trust without proof, movement without certainty, and a willingness to be changed by the very process you are stepping into.

I am noticing what it feels like to sit inside the unknown without rushing to define it. To let uncertainty exist without immediately trying to resolve it into something solid or understandable. To resist the urge to grasp for answers too quickly, just to soothe the discomfort of not knowing. There are moments of disorientation, moments where I feel untethered, where I cannot quite locate myself in the same way I used to. Pieces of identity feel like they are loosening, falling away, or shifting in ways I cannot fully name yet. The roles I have played, the ways I have understood myself, even the environments that have shaped me, all feel like they are being gently, and sometimes not so gently, reconfigured.

There is a dismantling happening, but it does not feel destructive. It feels intentional, even if I am not the one fully directing it.

And in that, there is a quiet kind of trust emerging. A recognition that this unraveling is not a mistake, not a loss of direction, but part of the creation itself. That in order to build something new, there has to be space for it. Space that can only come from letting go. Space that cannot be negotiated into existence, but has to be made through release.

It also feels like this is not happening in isolation. There is something in the collective right now that mirrors this experience. A shared sense of uncertainty, of thresholds being crossed, of old ways of living, relating, and building no longer holding in the same way they once did. It feels as though many of us are being asked, in different ways, to pause and reconsider. To look honestly at the lives we have created and ask whether they still reflect who we are becoming. To make changes that may not feel logical on the surface, but feel deeply necessary underneath.

And so I have sat with myself in a way that feels more honest than ever before. I have asked what kind of life I actually want to create, not from a place of fear or limitation, but from a place of possibility. Not the life that is easiest to maintain. Not the life that is most familiar or predictable. But the life that feels expansive. The one that invites growth, connection, depth, and a different kind of visibility.

And the truth is, that life is not here.

It exists somewhere beyond what I have known. Beyond the forests and the quiet protection of being somewhat hidden. Beyond the version of myself that has been shaped in solitude. It is asking me to step into a wider landscape. Into spaces where there is more openness, more connection, more community. A life where I am seen more fully, where I am in relationship in a different way, where I am participating rather than retreating.

That feels vulnerable. There is no way around that. There is a part of me that wants to stay where it is safe, where I understand the rhythms, where I know who I am within that context. But there is a deeper part of me that knows that staying would be a different kind of discomfort. A quieter one, but a more lasting one.

So I am choosing the discomfort of growth instead.

It feels unsteady at times, and at the same time, deeply aligned. Like walking on ground that is new but somehow already known in my body. I do not have all the answers. I do not know exactly what this next chapter will look like, how it will unfold, who I will become within it. There are still unknowns, still questions, still moments where I wish I could see further ahead.

But I know the feeling of this decision in my body, and that has become something I trust more than anything else.

I trust the lightness that followed the choice. I trust the way my body softened instead of tensed. I trust the quiet clarity that continues to guide me even when my mind tries to reach for certainty. I trust that I do not need to control every step in order to be held within the process.

So I am following the current.

Letting it take me out of what has been known, out of what has been comfortable, and into something wider, more open, more alive. Letting it reshape me as I move. Letting it teach me what it means to trust at a deeper level than I have before

.

For much of my life, I learned to move this way. Through struggle, through loss, through experiences that required me to become independent very quickly. I became resourceful, resilient, and self-reliant. These qualities carried me through, and I honour them deeply. But over time, that independence became something sharper. It became a kind of armour. Beneath it lived a constant vigilance, a low hum in my nervous system that rarely turned off. It felt like walking uphill for years, like effort was the only way forward, like if I softened or slowed down even slightly, something might fall apart.

When you live like that long enough, it begins to feel normal. You forget that there are other ways to be. Fear, in this form, creates contraction. It narrows your world. It limits what feels possible and pulls you into a constant orientation toward managing outcomes. It tells you to be careful, to stay prepared, to anticipate every possible misstep. And from that place, anxiety grows, not always because something is wrong, but because you are trying to control what cannot be controlled.

What I have been learning, slowly and not always gracefully, is how to relate to fear differently. Not by trying to eliminate it, and not by forcing myself into some version of fearlessness, but by noticing the contraction and gently choosing to soften. By pausing instead of reacting. By allowing a moment to exist without immediately needing to shape it into something else.

Presence has become a kind of doorway. When I allow myself to truly arrive in the moment, even briefly, something in me opens. My breath deepens, my body unwinds, and the urgency that once drove me begins to loosen its grip. In that space, I can feel something else emerge, a quiet trust. Not certainty, not control, but a grounded sense that life is unfolding in ways I do not always need to understand in order to move with.

This has changed how I experience the unknown. What once felt threatening now carries a different energy. There is still discomfort at times, but it feels more like expansion than danger. The edges of my life no longer feel like places I need to avoid, but thresholds I can step toward with curiosity. There is even a sense of excitement in it, a recognition that something new is always trying to take shape.

I have also begun to move differently within my own life. I pause more. I hold things before deciding what they mean or what action they require. I listen, not just to my thoughts, but to the deeper intelligence within me. The voice I once believed was too quiet to trust has become more steady, more clear. It does not rush me or pressure me. It does not speak through fear. It simply knows, and it asks me to trust that knowing.

Leaning into discomfort has become part of this practice. Not in a forceful way, but in a willing one. I am learning that discomfort does not automatically mean something is wrong. Often, it means something is shifting. Something is growing. Something is asking me to expand beyond what has been familiar.

And within that, I am learning to make space for failure. For a long time, I tried to avoid it. I wanted to get things right, to move carefully enough that I would not have to face the sting of falling short. But failure is not separate from growth. It is part of it. It is how we learn, how we refine, how we deepen into who we are becoming. To avoid failure is, in many ways, to avoid life.

Letting go of fear is not a clean or final process. It is something I return to again and again. A softening in moments where I feel myself tighten. A remembering that I do not need to grip my life so tightly for it to hold me. That I can meet the unknown with openness instead of resistance. That I can trust myself, not because I will always get it right, but because I am willing to listen, to learn, and to keep moving with what feels true.

There is a different kind of freedom in that. Not the absence of fear, but a loosening of its hold. A life that feels less like something to manage and more like something to enter, moment by moment, with presence, trust, and a quiet, growing sense of ease.

What strikes me most is how far we seem to be drifting from the natural world that shaped us.

For most of human history our lives were deeply embedded in the rhythms of land, season, and weather. The body understood the passage of time through light, cold, hunger, growth, migration. Knowledge came not only through thought but through lived relationship with the living world. A person knew the soil beneath their feet, the smell of rain coming across a valley, the quiet signals that marked the arrival of spring.

That intimacy is becoming increasingly rare. Instead of drawing closer to the earth in a time when it feels we need that relationship more than ever, there seems to be an accelerating movement away from it. Our lives are becoming absorbed into invisible worlds of thought. Worlds built of screens, networks, and constant streams of information that occupy the mind while leaving the body strangely absent.

Much of our attention now lives in places that have no soil, no wind, no seasons.

In these spaces everything moves quickly. Ideas circulate, images multiply, opinions rise and disappear in rapid succession. Yet despite this endless activity, something essential can feel curiously hollow. The deeper rhythms that once grounded human life become harder to perceive when our awareness is pulled constantly into digital landscapes that never sleep and never change with the seasons.

The result is a subtle but profound disconnection. When we lose our relationship with the natural world, we do not simply lose scenery or recreation. We lose a kind of orientation. The land has always offered a vast field in which human life could situate itself. Mountains, rivers, forests, migrations of animals, the turning of stars across winter skies. These were not merely beautiful phenomena. They were anchors for the human psyche, reminders that we exist within something far older and more complex than ourselves.

Without these anchors, the mind can begin to drift.

The modern world offers endless stimulation but very little depth. Much of what we encounter is curated, simplified, or engineered to capture attention quickly. Complexity is often flattened into easily digestible fragments. Difference is smoothed out into sameness. The strange and wonderful diversity of life, both human and nonhuman, becomes harder to encounter in its full expression.

And yet beneath all of this, the living earth continues its quiet work. The soil still breathes beneath layers of fallen leaves. Rivers continue to carve their patient paths through valleys. Mushrooms rise silently from damp forest floors at their appointed time, carrying out intricate exchanges beneath the surface of the earth that most of us rarely consider.

The natural world does not hurry to keep pace with our inventions. It remains governed by rhythms that operate on entirely different scales of time.

When I spend time in the forest, this difference becomes immediately clear. The nervous system begins to slow in ways that are difficult to force in any other setting. Attention shifts outward. Small details emerge. The pattern of moss climbing a fallen log. The soft collapse of old leaves beneath a boot. The quiet presence of birds moving through branches. In those moments it becomes obvious how much of modern life pulls us away from this form of perception.

We begin to live primarily in the mind. Thought becomes the primary medium through which we experience reality. While thinking is one of our greatest capacities, it is not meant to be the only channel through which we engage the world. When thought becomes dominant, the body can lose its sense of place. The senses dull. The wider field of life that surrounds us fades into the background.

The consequences of this disconnection are not only ecological but psychological. Human beings evolved within living ecosystems. Our nervous systems developed in constant relationship with sound, texture, scent, and movement in the natural world. When those relationships diminish, something within us begins to feel untethered. Anxiety, restlessness, and a pervasive sense of disorientation can arise when the deeper structures that once held human life in balance begin to erode.

Yet even as the world accelerates in this direction, there remains another possibility.

The earth has not disappeared. The forests still stand. The rivers still move. The seasonal turning continues whether we acknowledge it or not. What has changed is the degree to which we choose to remain in relationship with these forces. This realization brings with it an important question. How do we live in a rapidly changing world without becoming entirely absorbed by it?

It would be easy to fall into despair or bitterness when witnessing the extent of disconnection unfolding around us. But despair is another form of paralysis. It does not restore relationship. It does not rebuild the bridges between human life and the living earth.

Instead, the work may lie in learning how to remain anchored.

To witness the transformations taking place without allowing them to sever our connection to deeper ways of being. To continue cultivating relationships with land, with animals, with seasons, with the subtle intelligence that exists beyond the human mind. For some, this may look like tending a small garden. For others it may mean walking regularly through forests, paying attention to the slow unfolding of seasonal change. It may mean learning the names of plants that grow nearby, listening to birdsong at dawn, or simply allowing periods of time where no device mediates the experience of the world.

These acts may appear small in comparison to the vast technological systems shaping modern life. Yet they carry a quiet power.

Each moment of attention directed toward the living world restores a thread of relationship that might otherwise be lost. Each act of presence reminds the body that it still belongs to a larger community of life. Perhaps the task before us is not to escape the modern world, but to move within it differently.

To remain aware of the forces that seek to pull us away from the living earth, while continually returning to the places that restore balance and depth. To cultivate an inner steadiness that allows us to witness change without becoming overwhelmed by it.

If we can do this, something important remains possible.

We can stand rooted even as the landscape of culture shifts around us. We can maintain a living relationship with the earth that continues to nourish perception, imagination, and care. And from that rooted place, we may still discover ways of flourishing that do not depend on the plastic sheen of modern life, but on the enduring vitality of the world that has always held us.

Not metaphorical. Not poetic for the sake of it. I mean a real, living terrain that pulses beneath your ribs. You can feel it when you step away from the noise long enough. When the screen goes dark. When the notifications stop. When you are no longer performing a version of yourself for an invisible audience.

It feels like heat in the chest. Like a drum under the sternum. Like breath that wants to deepen but has been kept shallow. It feels like legs that want to run. Like hands that want to build, to touch soil, to hold something real. It feels like hunger. Not just for food, but for texture, for meaning, for contact.

For years, I tried to civilize that wilderness. I mistook it for restlessness. For intensity. For being too much.

I lived in my head because it was safer there. It is easier to scroll than to feel. Easier to consume than to create. Easier to comment than to commit. The modern world is brilliant at keeping us slightly sedated. Slightly distracted. Slightly disconnected from the animal body we inhabit.

We are fed endless images. Endless opinions. Endless outrage. Our nervous systems are tethered to glowing rectangles. Our thumbs move more than our hips. Our eyes scan more than they soften.

And beneath all of that, the wilderness waits.

It waits in the body.

It waits in the way your heart speeds up when you stand barefoot on cold earth. In the way your spine straightens when you lift something heavy. In the way your voice drops into its true register when you stop trying to sound agreeable.

The inner wilderness is not chaos. It is instinct. It is the ancient intelligence that knows when to rest and when to move. When to fight and when to soften. When something is true and when something is hollow. It does not speak in polished language. It speaks in sensation. Tightness. Expansion. Heat. Tears. Goosebumps.

To cultivate this wilderness in a modernized world is an act of rebellion.

It means choosing depth over dopamine. Presence over performance. It means allowing boredom long enough for something real to surface. It means walking without headphones. Training your body until your blood pumps hard enough that you remember you are made of muscle and marrow, not just thought.

It means coming home to your breath.

There is something profoundly grounding about feeling your own pulse. About placing your hand on your chest and remembering that your heart has been beating since before you had language. Before you had a profile. Before you had a curated identity.

That heart is ancestral.

Your blood carries stories older than your name. Older than the city you live in. Older than the systems you navigate daily. You are not just an isolated individual trying to succeed. You are the continuation of people who survived winters and wars and famines and births by firelight. You are the descendant of bodies that knew how to listen to weather and soil and animal movement.

When you reconnect with your inner wilderness, you are not becoming primitive in a regressive way. You are becoming integrated.

You begin to trust your inner compass more than the algorithm. You begin to notice what your body actually wants to eat, to say, to build, to refuse. You begin to feel when something is misaligned, not because it looks wrong on paper, but because it contracts your gut.

And slowly, you become harder to manipulate. A person rooted in their body is difficult to control. A person who knows the sound of their own true voice is not easily swayed by trends. A person who trains their legs to be strong, who feels their lungs expand fully, who respects their cycles and their limits, carries a different kind of presence.

To be loud and bold from this place is not performance. It is embodiment.

It is letting your voice come from your diaphragm instead of your throat. It is allowing your opinions to be shaped by lived experience instead of borrowed language. It is walking into a room with the quiet certainty that you belong there because you are alive.

Strong voice. Strong legs.

There is something deeply symbolic about that. A strong voice means you are willing to speak. A strong body means you are willing to stand. When you cultivate both, you move through the world differently. You are not asking for permission to exist.

You are existing.

The modern world will continue to distract you. It will offer you endless reasons to stay small, to stay busy, to stay consuming instead of creating. It will tempt you to measure yourself against filtered images and curated lives.

But the wilderness inside you does not care about any of that. It cares about rhythm. About sun and dark. About touch and effort and rest. It cares about truth.

Coming home to your primal roots does not mean abandoning technology or retreating from society. It means refusing to let them sever you from your body. It means building a life where your nervous system is not constantly hijacked. It means protecting spaces where you can feel your own thoughts.

It means remembering that you are part of something vast.

When you stand under the night sky without a screen in your hand, when you feel the wind against your skin, when you breathe air that has moved across mountains and oceans, you remember that your problems are real but they are not the whole story. You are part of a continuum of life that is both fragile and ferocious.

To live from that awareness is audacious.

It is audacious to be embodied in a disembodied culture.
It is audacious to be present in a distracted world.
It is audacious to take up space without apology.

Your inner wilderness is not something to conquer. It is something to tend.

Feed it with movement.
Feed it with silence.
Feed it with honest conversation.
Feed it with work that makes your blood move.

Let it shape your vision for a nourished future. A future where we are not just optimized, but alive. Where we measure success not only by productivity, but by vitality. By how deeply we feel. By how courageously we speak. By how strongly we stand. You are not meant to live as a flickering image on a screen.

You are meant to feel your heart pound. To trust your instincts. To know, in your bones, that you are part of something so much bigger than you can fathom.

There is a wilderness inside you.

Come home to it. And do not whisper when you arrive.

Not in a dramatic way anyone else could necessarily see. But in the quiet, daily, exhausting way of someone who does not feel at home in their own body.

My skin burned easily. It flushed. It broke out in waves I could not predict. Sometimes it felt tight and papery, other times inflamed and reactive, like it was bracing against the world. I would stand in front of the mirror pulling my face closer to the light, scanning for what was wrong today. A new spot. A patch of redness. Texture that did not used to be there.

Every flare felt like a failure. Like I had missed something. Like my body was not cooperating with the plan.

And so I tried to manage it.

New cleanser. New serum. Something “active.” Something “corrective.” Something designed to exfoliate, speed up cell turnover, kill bacteria, balance, brighten, tighten. My routine grew more complicated, and my skin grew more fragile. I did not realize I was caught in a loop of stripping and repairing, over and over again.

Underneath it all was a deeper belief I did not have words for yet.

My body needed to be fixed.

The Exhaustion of Fighting Yourself

There is a particular kind of tired that comes from trying to control something that is alive.

Skin is not fabric. It is not a wall. It is a living organ, constantly sensing, responding, protecting. But I treated mine like a surface problem. Something to correct into submission.

If my skin reacted, I assumed I had not done enough. Or I had done the wrong thing. I would double down. Add another step. Remove something. Try again.

What I did not see at the time was that my skin was not failing.

It was overwhelmed.

And in many ways, so was I.

The Humbling Simplicity of Tallow

Tallow did not enter my life as a miracle. It entered as a last resort.

Rendered animal fat. That was the description. It felt almost laughably simple compared to the language I was used to. No lab. No clinical percentages. No promises of transformation.

Just fat.

The kind humans have used for thousands of years. The kind our ancestors cooked with, healed with, protected their skin with in harsh climates.

The first time I used it, I was skeptical. I expected heaviness. I expected breakouts. I expected my skin to rebel.

Instead, something else happened.

My skin softened.

Not just in texture, but in its behavior. The constant tightness began to ease. The background redness that I had accepted as normal slowly dialed down. My face stopped feeling like it was bracing for impact all the time.

It was not dramatic. It was not overnight. It was a quiet, steady settling.

And that is when I realized how unfamiliar that feeling had become.

Calm.

Recognition at the Level of the Body

As I learned more, the pieces started to make sense in a way that felt almost obvious.

Tallow is rich in fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E, and K. It contains fatty acids similar to those found in our own skin barrier. In other words, it is made of materials the body already knows.

That word mattered to me. Knows.

For years, I had been putting things on my skin that were designed to force a result. Speed this up. Break this down. Kill that. Resurface this.

Tallow did not force.

It supported.

It felt less like an intervention and more like a conversation. My skin seemed to recognize it, to use it, to relax around it. Instead of being pushed into change, it was given resources and allowed to do what it is designed to do. Repair. Protect. Regulate.

I stopped trying to outsmart my body and started trusting its intelligence.

Skin as a Relationship, Not a Project

The biggest shift was not visual.

It was relational.

For years, my skincare routine had been fueled by subtle aggression. Even when it was wrapped in the language of self care, underneath was the message that my skin, as it was, was not acceptable.

Using tallow slowed everything down. It asked me to touch my face differently. To warm it between my hands. To press it in. To feel my own skin instead of analyzing it.

Something softened in me.

I began to experience my skin as living tissue that deserved nourishment, not correction. As part of my body, not a problem sitting on top of it. I started noticing how stress showed up in my face. How lack of rest did. How hydration, food, and emotional state all played a role.

My skin was not an isolated issue. It was a messenger.

And instead of silencing it, I began listening.

Ancestral Skincare and Remembering

There is a reason these old remedies are returning now.

We are in an era of endless options and rising sensitivity. More products, more steps, more actives. And yet so many people are dealing with compromised barriers, chronic irritation, and confusion about what their skin even needs.

Ancestral practices are not about romanticizing the past. They are about remembering that humans have always been in relationship with their bodies and the land.

Tallow carries that memory.

It comes from an animal that was nourished by grass, by soil, by seasons. It is part of a cycle, not a factory. When I use it, I feel connected to something older than trends. Older than marketing. Something cyclical, grounded, and sane.

It reminds me that care does not have to be complicated to be profound.

Nourishment as a Way of Being

Tallow helped my skin heal, yes.

But more than that, it taught me a different definition of nourishment.

Nourishment is not intense. It is not harsh. It does not shock the system into submission. It supports gently, consistently, over time.

That lesson started to ripple outward.

I began asking, where else am I being too forceful with myself? Where else am I trying to “fix” instead of feed? With my body. My work. My healing. My expectations.

Tallow became a daily reminder that my body is not the enemy. It is not broken. It is adaptive, intelligent, and always trying to move toward balance when given the chance.

What my skin needed was not more control.

It needed something familiar. Something whole. Something that said, you are safe. You are supported. You do not have to fight right now.

And in learning to care for my skin that way, I started learning how to care for myself the same way.

Check out Audhumla Tallow if you are interested in trying Grass-fed & Finished Skincare