Usually, what disappears in a woman’s explanation is her own authority.

A woman says “something isn’t right,” and immediately feels compelled to defend herself, reaching for evidence or proof, recounting a conversation, referencing an article she read, maybe even quoting an expert. Rarely is it “enough” for her to simply say, I know this.

And not to wax poetic, but I don’t think this is by accident, I think its by design. I believe one of the most profound consequences of systems rooted in patriarchy isn’t that women lose their power, but that we lose confidence in our knowing as a legitimate form of information. And this means that a woman’s unique relationship to reality itself is overruled by, as, for & through her explaining herself. And this shifts entire generations, belief systems and societies!

Because once her knowing is no longer valued, then objectivity is prioritized and the observer becomes more trustworthy than, and therefore an authority over, the (woman) having the experience.

What an astonishing idea! Imagine telling a creek it will only understand its current by watching from the riverbank, or telling a tree about the science of the seasons to explain the life cycle of leaves. It becomes absurd! Yet women have been asked to distrust knowledge arising from within their own bodies for centuries!

Why? Because she cannot easily be argued out her experience, but she can be manipulated into doubting it, shamed for it, & taught to reinterpret it IF she is convinced that her own experience is an inferior form of knowledge.

That’s the training so many of us— and those before us—received— not merely to doubt our bodies, but to doubt that inhabiting a body grants us any authority at all.

When I ask a woman what she notices, I am not simply inviting her introspection, I am inviting her back into feeling what she knows— not what she thinks about how she feels. I am asking her to suspend her impulse to analyze or explain herself—to me or anyone, icluding herself—and instead remain present with what is already alive inside her, which changes the question “what do you notice” completely—because the body is no longer a witness called to testify before the mind, it is no longer evidence in a case someone else will decide. The entire adversarial courtroom analogy dissolves inside her embodiment! Becoming instead the fecund ground from which knowing arises and is not diminished.

Women arrive thinking I can tell them something essential about themselves. I try like hell to have them leave with their knowing restored. Reoriented & reorganized around their own irreducible authority. SHE ALREADY KNOWS because a woman’s body is an oracle, not a fucking obstacle.

And I’m just here to help her remember.

Pilgrim Highway is reader supported. Please consider becoming paid subscriber and/ or engaging with the content by liking, sharing, commenting. All of it “supports” my writing habit! Thank you!

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One of the things I think I’ve learned about walking this long trail is that the landscape never changes all at once. Sometimes the light shifts almost imperceptibly, or the ground crumbles beneath you, then the horizon opens or narrows. The climb begins asking something new of your body, your mind. And you don’t even notice the exact step where one landscape gives way to another. Only that, somehow, you’re no longer where you were.

Lately, it feels like I’ve wandered into new terrain.

When Isaac died, I wanted to disappear. I imagined surrendering my life to a monastery, walking the Camino, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. I wasn’t trying to find myself so much as outrun the unbearable fact that the world still existed without my beautiful boy in it. Part of me imagined never coming back—at least not until I could stand the life I’d been left with.

My beloved therapist—St. Joanna Pepe, as I’ll always think of her—said something that has echoed through the canyons of my life ever since.

“Your pilgrimage is here.”

At the time, I heard something very different. I thought she believed I was too fragile to leave. Too broken to walk across Spain & France, too heartbroken to disappear into the wilderness by myself.

It’s taken me the better part of the last 11.5 years to begin wondering if maybe I misunderstood her, but lately I think I finally get it. My husband returns tomorrow from a couple weeks in Alaska so it’s been one of those rare stretches of solo time where nothing much has happened, and yet it feels as though everything has. Like a fog has slowly begun to lift, revealing the stunning landscape I’ve been walking through all along.

A few mornings ago, I wrote something in my journal that stopped me in my tracks.

‘I’ve know that I’ve unconsciously used all the shitty shit that’s happened to me as proof.’

Not proof that I’d survived, but proof that I was fucked. That I was damaged. That I would always have to work harder than everyone else just to tread water. That my body couldn’t be relied upon, my brain was a problem to solve, and my life would always be heavy and hard.

To be fair, I’ve collected plenty of evidence to support this thesis.

But the evidence isn’t the problem. The problem is that I slowly began organizing my life around it. Every new experience found its place in an old story. Every setback confirmed something I already suspected. Every success came with an asterisk. Without realizing it, I wasn't just carrying my history—I was consulting it. Again and again, I looked to the past to explain the present, until the explanation itself began to feel like my identity. And I believe once you've mistaken a story for the truth, it becomes the lens through which everything else is interpreted, and you don’t even know it.

But I’ve noticed over these months since my dad died that it’s felt like the stories I’ve carried about myself for decades have started to erode.

My mom always used to say, “It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back.” And I think my dad’s death is exactly that. Not simply because it broke me but because another life altering trauma finally made me turn around and face the trail behind me. Arms crossed in utter defiance.

ENOUGH.

Enough letting every tragedy become evidence against me. Enough asking my worst days to tell me who I am. Enough mistaking survival for identity. Enough allowing pain to have the final word. Enough believing that what’s happened to me is the most important thing about me. Enough treating how I handle every heartbreak like a character reference. Enough assuming that because something has wounded me, it defines me. Enough confusing the shape of my scars with the shape of my soul. Enough letting my past predict my future.

But, if suffering ceases to be the primary organizing principle of my life...what is?

I've been sitting with this question for weeks. Not trying to answer it so much as noticing what it offers me. Because if I have spent a lifetime orienting myself around what hurt, what broke, what was missing—what becomes possible for me now? What has been here all along, quietly waiting beneath the noise of survival and the endless cycle of recovering?

What if awe deserves more of my attention? Curiosity?

Or beauty, whimsy, love, mirth?

Or the quiet satisfaction of making something with my own two hands. The smell of cedar boughs warming in the sun. A morning swim in Lake Michigan. The very particular kind of laughter that happens with your girlfriends that leaves your ribs aching. The privilege of being trusted with another person’s heart. Wonder. Discernment. Birds. Moss. Good food. The ordinary miracle of waking up and getting another chance to be here.

I feel like I’m beginning to inhabit this idea that life isn’t built only by what breaks us, or what we need to armor ourselves against and heal from. It’s also what repeatedly calls us back to our true selves.

I trust I finally know what Joanna meant. For eleven years I’ve carried her words, “Your pilgrimage is here”.

I thought she was talking about place, and that I didn’t need to flee my life to find whatever I was searching for. But I don’t think it was ever about where I chose to live. It was about learning to trust my own experience. To pause in the space between what happens to me and what I make that mean. To let grief be grief. Joy be joy. Love be love. Failure be failure without immediately building a case against myself.

It was never an X on a map, You Are Here.

It was here.

Hand over my heart.

Feet on the ground.

This breath.

This body.

And the quiet, ordinary courage of staying with myself no matter what.

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My 50th birthday is in a coupla weeks. Yer dear Mama is getting old. I imagine you’d be cracking up over this milestone. We both totally would.

You, my dear, should be turning THIRTY this year. Your g…

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After a solid two years of health challenges, illness, injury, surgery, grief, perimenopause, and a season of lif…

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sisters three, jessa, jennzie & me.

I find myself craving a good old fashioned summer~ it might be because I’m turning 50 this year, or maybe its because losing my sweet Daddio has initiated me into a…

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I’m in the home stretch, barreling toward 50 (!), And I am kinda crushing on the idea that I’m no longer wondering who I am, or what I’m here for. I think I am more curious about who’s really with me, here. Who wants to grow old with this iteration of me…

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Back when I drank alcohol for fun (before it became a coping mechanism & long before I quit almost 10 yrs ago), I would sometimes speak in a southern accent, to be …

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I write almost every day. More accurately, I live in ongoing relationship with writing. I have since 5th grade, when my creative writing teacher told us that if you want to be a writer, you have to t…

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i dont like this one that keeps playing on and on,

cuz no matter what i do or try,

at the end,

you

still

die.

but i still believe in …

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When people inquire about my work, they often expect Nervous System Sovereignty to look dramatic. They expect riveting breakthroughs, major life overhauls, huge boundaries, a completely different per…

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“In all of this emptiness, you have this oasis.”

We have always looked up
and made meaning out of the moon as mother.
The moon as witness.
The moon as keeper of tides we cannot hold.

They say her craters & stretch marks are from impact.
From billions of years of taking the hit.

Stone after stone,
pulled into her field
so fewer would reach us.

And whether that is protection or simply gravity—
whether it is devotion or physics—

the body does not know the difference.

It recognizes the shape of it as care.

A surface marked by contact.
By resilience.
By something that held, that stayed

But it is not only the moon who has been keeping watch;
not just her body, marked by time and wear.

It is this—
this improbable, breathing, singing Earth—
that begins to feel almost too tender to look at directly.

A thin blue seam of atmosphere
holding everything we have ever known.
Every name we’ve ever whispered.
Every hand we’ve reached for in the night.

That anything grows here.
That anything loves here.

That water falls from the sky
and we call it ordinary.
That seeds split themselves open
to become something infinitely more.

That we learned how to make music
out of air moving through a throat—
vibration shaped by longing,
by joy,
by something we cannot quite name
but know and feel immediately when it touches us.

That we built cathedrals—
stone reaching upward in devotion,
we stand barefoot in kitchens,
kneading and then passing bread,
laughing and crying,
letting the sacred arrive without ceremony.

That we made language
out of the need to be heard and held and known.
That we kept refining it,
word by word,
until it could hold things like
ache
and belonging
and stay.

That we painted on cave walls,
on canvases,
on the insides of our own lives,
trying again and again
to say:
I was here.
I felt this.
It mattered.

That grief exists at all—
not as a flaw in our design,
but as evidence
of attachment strong enough
to leave an imprint
like a crater on the moon.

That the body knows how to break
and still continue.
That the heart fractures
and somehow becomes more permeable,
not less.

That we bury our dead
with care.
That we honor them
in gestures as small as making their favorite snack,
and as vast as reshaping the entire trajectory of our lives in their absence, or naming a celestial body in their memory.

That we love things we cannot keep.
That we keep loving anyway.

And from that distance—
from an impossible, suspended vantage point—
this planet does not look hardened
or defended
or deficient.

It looks alive.

Overflowing.
Robust. Barely contained.
Life insisting on itself.

Green pressing through soil,
Flowers blossoming so bees can spread pollen and life can continue,
Waves refusing stillness, water rushing and flowing,
Sweetness bleeding from trees for our nourishment and pleasure.

Where contradiction is not a problem to solve
but the very condition of being here:
beauty and devastation, creation and destruction,
birth and death,
laughter in the same hour as sorrow.

An oasis, yes—

but not a fragile ecosystem.

A fierce one.
A generative one.
An impossible wonder and almost unbearably beautiful place that keeps saying yes
in a universe that offers no probability
it ever had to

There are doors I must keep closed to survive. Not locked or barricaded,
just shut. But sometimes, I open them and stand there to let a wild wind move through.

Last night, I made contact with the beast in that room as I watched the movie Hamnet. My breath shifted and the floor opened to the familiar scenes of earth shattering disruption— the kind that says we’re not just watching— we’re right here, right inside it.

A moment arises in this film where—if ya know, ya know—grief recognizes itself in what it’s witnessing.

Muscle memory.
Cellular recall.
Resonance like an X marks the spot.

No longer the viewer—you are the mother with a body that remembers the breaking.

I felt the contortion of bracing rise like an ancient, intelligent contraction—
one that carried me through the labor of his coming, and the labor of his unthinkable leaving. A bracing that is not my armor or enemy, but my teacher, my protector.

And last night the brace buckled—or maybe I unbuckled it. Letting my own heart break on purpose, not recklessly, not casually, but as an act of sacred contact.
An act of truth & solidarity with my grief, with all grieving mothers everywhere.

I asked my mister to watch it with me—not to fix it, not to buffer it, but to be there when it found me. And when it did—
I let myself sob.

The kind of heaving & sobbing that takes your whole body with it.

I let him hold me inside it,
with no words that could make it better, no attempt to make it smaller,
just being held while the undulating waves wracking my viscera move through—
like a tide chewing me up and spitting me out and coming back for more.

And when Agnes does not see that Hamnet is in trouble—

not in time

Something in me
goes cold, folds in on itself

because I know that place—

the place where the signals are there
but you do not know
what you’re seeing.

Not in time.

And maybe our story is not the same.
But the shape of it.
The rupture of it.
The before and after that will never ever ever ever ever reconcile.

And too, threaded through this ache,
something almost unbearable to admit:

relief.

Not simply because the pressure building inside is released or the hurt feels real—

But because its ferality doesn’t have to be explained.

Jessie Buckley & I didn’t have to articulate it,
or make it useful,
or whittle it down into something beautiful or palatable.

For a moment,
the scale of it was…normal.

Grief, mirrored—even fictionally—loosens the loneliness just enough
for breath to catch, and return.

Eventually.

In being able to express it, in being seen and heard and held, in not being alone inside of the agony of it. To touch it.

Because this is the part no one I know talks about:

Grief→ Breath→Catharsis is not clean.
There is no resolution here.
No closure.
No tidy arc.

But there is contact. Recognition. And the body saying:

YES.
This is what it looks and sounds and feels like.

And yes. I knew what I was doing when I pressed play.

I knew it would break me open.
And I let it.

About what it does to a girl — and then a woman — to grow up with someone so pure hearted.

I never once heard my dad talk shit about another person.

Not once.

He might have said occasionally something honest about an experience, but there was never gossip. Never vitriol. He didn’t tear people down for sport. He didn’t relish someone else’s mistakes, flaws or imperfections. It simply wasn’t in him.

As a kid, I didn’t think much about it. It was simply the atmosphere around him. Only later did I realize how unusual that kind of restraint actually is.

My father was not a saint, though arguably, as near to one as I’ve been. Rarely, he could be impatient or get a little irritated. He worked long hours and carried his own stresses like anyone else. Not sure those could be categorized as shortcomings, but that’s the extent of his.

But cruelty simply wasn’t in him.

And neither was the casual objectification of women that seemed so normal among men of his generation.

My aunt used to make homemade lollipops. She had molds for all kinds of shapes, including a pair of knockers. Her husband (now her ex), used to make a spectacle of eating his. The kind of juvenile performance that expects an audience of laughter.

My dad didn’t laugh.

He didn’t make a federal case about it either.

He just simply didn’t participate or engage.

I remember him quietly setting his aside until we girls were out of sight. Maybe he ate it later? Maybe he didn’t. I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that I never once saw him turn a woman’s body into entertainment.

There were no calendars with women hanging in the garage. No magazines lying around the house. No running commentary about women’s bodies. Not ours— not anyones—not ever.

He raised three daughters. And he managed to do it without ever making our bodies a topic of conversation. How they looked. How they should look. What we wore.

We were just people.

My dad was unequivocally pro life. I am unequivocally pro choice. He was pro Israel & I support Palestinian Sovereignty. And we never once argued about it. In fact, we never even discussed it.

I think we both understood neither of us was going to change the other’s mind. So we simply didn’t make the difference into a battleground.

That, too, was part of his character. He didn’t seem to feel the need to dominate a disagreement.

I was so upset I once told him about some unkind words my husband said to me early in our marriage, when Josh was still drinking, and my dad got choked up. Tears in his eyes. He didn’t rage. He didn’t threaten.

He just felt it.

You could see how deeply it hurt him to know someone had spoken to his daughter that way.

And, also, he didn’t hold it against or over my guy, either. He stayed connected to his love and humanity, always.

Children and animals gravitated to him. Some might say flocked. Always. Without exception. He worked long hours but he never missed an opportunity to hold a baby or pet a dog.

He was happy with simple pleasures. A strong cup of coffee, biscuits & gravy, baked beans, cutting wood, a Sunday drive, a good book, a campfire with all the kids and grands. He was never trying to get or do or be grandiose in anyway.

He rarely used my moms name— with others he called her his bride, with her it was Babe, Sweetie, Toots (my personal favorite— pronounced with a soft double o, not to be confused with the long o of flatulence!). He never missed a chance to get her a sweet & sappy card for her birthday, anniversary, Valentine’s Day & Sweetest Day, leave her a love note if he ran an errand (before he had a cell phone). He was God’s and hers before anything else, “All my love, all my life long”.

I can’t remember a single time hearing him raise his voice to my mom. And I have very few memories of him yelling at us girls. I was an curious/mischievous little girl & unruly teenager, but he and I never argued— he might ask me what I was thinking, but we only ever talked it out.

When I got pregnant at 19, my biggest fear, raised in a Christian household, was that my family would expect me to get married (they did)— and I wasn’t ready for that. He told me I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to— so I didn’t.

He was always working on something, inside or outside, and plenty of it alone. He didn’t ask for help much. Though he and my mom worked hard together, in tandem, with a beautiful homestead to prove it, he did alot himself.

He’d come into the house and find us girls clucking like hens around the kitchen island, talking endlessly. He’d walk up behind one of us and rub our shoulder or make his little mouth noise, a sound I still don’t know how to describe but would recognize anywhere. He’d give our mom a smooch, grab a snack, listen for a minute. And then back outside he’d go.

He never seemed bothered that we could go on and on like that or that we never stopped asking him if he needed anything. Drink some water. Take a break. We were always trying to mother the man who spent his whole life quietly taking care of everyone else.

When my son was little, my dad always called him “sweet boy.” Or sometimes “my sweet boy.” He’d hold his hand when they walked. Let him work slowly beside him with his own little tool apron. Even when he had shit to do.

When I was little he used to let me punch him in his eight pack abs. He was the strongest man I knew. And that strength never really went away. No one outworked Mike Ryan. He would never say something like that about himself. But it was true.

He was built for endurance.

Hot or cold. Tired or in pain. Young or aging. He worked. And he hummed while he did it. Just humming along. Content. Resolute. At ease in his own effort.

If he needed to talk to you about something he’d ask first.

“Hey kiddo, you got a minute?”

And then he’d be intentional about whatever it was.

I stopped going to church in 2008 when it became clear there was no separation of church and state there anymore. I could not let my son grow up hearing the kind of rhetoric that was being preached. I decided in during a sermon one day that when it was over I would never go back. Except for funerals and weddings.

My dad never questioned my decision. Never made me feel bad about it.

But a few years ago he left me a voicemail.

“Hey kiddo. Tomorrow’s friends day at church and you’re my friend, so I thought I’d invite you.”

You bet your ass I went to church that Sunday.

I went with him to his Veterans Day luncheons there too.

I loved spending time with him when it was just the two of us. Because he always talked more than I did. Whether we were cutting wood, watching birds, working in the yard, driving to get lumber, fixing something at my house, or just tossing stones into a river.

He could talk your ear off if you let him! And you could hear the giddiness in his voice when he shared stories and memories. Hopes. Aspirations. Sometimes he was a man of few words. But when he spoke, those words were carefully chosen.

He prayed before we ate. Always. And he talked to God like a friend he respected a lot. You could feel that relationship in him. It was solid & familiar.

I never once saw him take advantage of a person or a situation. Not once. I never heard him lie. He didn’t make excuses. If you asked for help, he helped. Unless he was already helping someone else. And then he’d help as soon as he could.

There are so many more things I could say.

The imprint this left on us girls, on me, is almost impossible to describe.

Maybe ineffable is the word.

Because what do you call it when someone gives you a moral compass so steady you you know the moment you— or the world— is off the map? What do you call the inheritance of growing up inside the orbit of a man who simply lived with integrity.

Not loudly.

Not self righteously.

Just quietly.

Every. Single. Day.

My daddy didn’t leave me money or land he collected over his lifetime.

What he left me was something harder to measure and far more enduring—

He left me a way of orienting inside this ol’ world, with love and kindness and devotion and humility and grace.

And I’ll carry his legacy with me everywhere I go.

The heat & smoke of the fire.

The thrum of bare feet on earth & bodies in motion.

Women have g…

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Do you know
Do you know

that I was up howling the other night
shaking my body like a wet dog and
choking on the grief that has lived in my lungs
for eleven and a half years—and keeps c…

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