“Live the questions now.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

At the end of 2025, I was consumed with creating a signature series called Architects of the Unknown as part of the paid subscriber benefits for Read It & Leap. It had been a year of unprecedented change, and all I wanted was to make some sense of it.

So many of my friends and readers were struggling with the same questions I had wrestled with all year. What now? What comes next? Who am I when the life I knew no longer exists?

The world as we knew it was changing. Careers, identities, and ideas about purpose all seemed precariously perched on shaky ground.

Since I’d been navigating these turbulent waters for a few years, I felt compelled to create a series of weekly Field Guides designed to address these incredibly unsettling concerns. Writing my way out of these scenarios helps me make sense of them.

I have a good friend who is a designer and works with architects to create amazing spaces. She got me thinking about how the principles of architecture might be applied to the unknown.

And then the downloads began.

For eight weeks, a fire hose of information flooded my awareness faster than I could write it down. Architectural concepts such as foundations, blueprints, pillars, scaffolding, materials, flow, and light began weaving themselves together with intentions, meaning, and beauty.

It was a heady, adrenaline-producing time when novel ideas, possibilities, and even characters seemed to present themselves to me. Like catching lightning in a bottle, I thought I could contain the chaos by putting a familiar frame around it.

There was just one small problem with that premise. The unknown refuses to be confined by a blueprint.

It has to be lived. It has to be practiced one choice at a time. It has to be experienced without the luxury of a map, a compass, or an answer guide.

I can see now that I was trying to navigate a new world with the tools of the old one until 2026 reminded me of what 2025 had already force-fed me:

Permanence is simply what something feels like when it has been true for a long time.

I know nothing lasts forever. People leave. Bodies change. Parents die. Relationships end. Houses are sold. Things I once believed with absolute certainty become things I no longer believe at all.

You know this, too.

And still, when something has been true for five years, fourteen years, or our entire lives, we stop imagining that it could ever be otherwise.

We build our lives around things we believe will remain true. We use them as coordinates—points on the map that tell us who we are, where we belong, and, if we’re lucky, where we’re going.

Until one day they change, move, disappear. Or shape-shift. With little or no warning.

And suddenly the map we’ve been carrying bears little resemblance to the landscape beneath our feet.

That’s when we realize what got us here won’t get us where we’re going next. But even that assumes there already exists, and we simply need to find our way to it.

What if there only comes into existence as we walk toward it? What if the unknown isn’t some foreign territory waiting for us to find our way through it? What if the landscape itself is being created as we go?

Choice by choice. Misstep by misstep. Question by question.

What if the real invitation of the unknown isn’t to draw a new map as quickly as possible, but to discover who we are when we no longer need one?

This isn’t an easy truth to swallow. I love me some certainty. I love righteous reinventions, fresh starts, seven-step plans, and believing that this time I finally know exactly what I’m doing.

But I know that’s not how it works. Curiosity has fueled my lifelong, and at times colossal, quest for consciousness. Some of the most important things in my life have arrived unplanned, unexpected, and without an answer attached.

Which makes me wonder if there comes a point when the search for answers becomes its own way of avoiding uncertainty.

Because what if there isn’t an answer?

Rainer Maria Rilke famously advised a young poet to “live the questions now.” I’ve played with that idea for years.

I’m not sure I understood what it asked of me until now.

Something happened the other night that helped me understand.

I had finished watching a show on TV, turned it off, and walked into the dining room. When I came back into the living room, photos of my dad started appearing on the screen.

My dad died this summer. And suddenly, there he was.

A picture of me, my dad, and my sister flashed onto the big screen. Then Dad sitting on the patio with Paisley the pup. Dad holding the baby. And, just so I wouldn’t doubt his energetic imprint, the car in Arizona he insisted we bring back to Illinois.

After I acknowledged both his presence and his brilliance in selecting the precise photos, the normal screensaver returned… on a TV I was sure I had shut off.

Now I know there are perfectly reasonable technological explanations for this. Algorithms surface memories. Software makes connections behind the scenes.

And yet…

I’m left with questions I can’t answer.

There was a time when I had to know what was true. Now, not so much.

Admitting I don’t know might be one of the most honest and expansive places I’ve ever stood. Because the moment I rush to a conclusion, something closes.

If I decide it was definitely an algorithm, the mystery disappears. If I decide it was definitely my dad, the mystery disappears then, too.

But if I simply notice the photos, feel whatever moves through me, and say, “Hi, Dad,” I get to inhabit the unknown, invite the mystery, and live the question.

I get to leave a little room for what I can’t explain. To wonder without needing to know. To let the mystery be the mystery.

Did my dad have anything to do with those photos appearing on my television? I don’t know.

But considering he already confiscated the keys to his truck, I wouldn’t put it past him.

My summer mornings begin the same way. I step onto the front porch with a hose in one hand and a watering can in the other. I hang the ferns I’ve taken down the afternoon before to spare them the punishing western sun, then make my way from pot to pot, watering the flowers that have delighted me all summer.

This ritual grounds me. Before I enter the world of emails and electronics, I spend a few minutes with the elementals — soil, water, sunlight, and whatever the morning breeze has to say.

The other day, though, I noticed something different.

Beneath the bright blossoms of my petunias was a tangle of brittle brown stems. The hanging baskets that had spilled over with vibrant reds and pinks in May now looked weary.

I wondered if I'd lost my green thumb. Had I overwatered them? Underwatered them? Left them in the heat too long? Forgotten to fertilize them? Something had to be wrong, and it had to be my fault. Maybe I wasn't the plant mother I imagined myself to be.

I stood there with the shears in my hand, trimming away the withered stems, the dry brown leaves crackling into the pot below, talking partly to the plants and partly to myself.

“Are you dying... or just tired?” I asked the plants.

Or maybe they were asking me.

The question lingered longer than I expected. As I worked, I noticed something I’d overlooked.

Beneath the old growth were tiny shoots of fresh green. The life I'd assumed was gone had been hidden beneath flowers that had already poured everything they had into blooming.

I had mistaken exhaustion for an ending.

I thought that if I watered faithfully, fertilized on schedule, and pinched back the spent blooms, I’d stay in Mother Nature's good graces. If I did everything right, the flowers would remain as beautiful as the day I brought them home.

I began to see that tending asks something different of me than control.

To notice that the ferns need to come down before the afternoon sun scorches their fronds. To see how quickly the soil dries after a week of relentless heat. To recognize that what nourishes a plant in spring can smother it in midsummer.

What sustains a plant in May isn't what sustains it in July.

As I moved from petunias to lantanas to marigolds to geraniums, I wondered if love might be made up of ordinary acts repeated so often they become sacred.

Admittedly, I've been a bit wobbly lately. The evidence is in the plants I forgot to move, the leaves I let grow brittle, the trimming I put off a week too long.

Grief has a way of narrowing my vision. I keep watering because it’s what I know to do. But sometimes what’s needed just as much as water is the willingness to let go of what has already finished blooming. I thought I was tending the flowers. In truth, they were tending me.

Meanwhile, the weeds were having a field day. They thrive in neglect, and over the past month they’ve had plenty of opportunity to go wild. I finally called a landscaper, but it's busy season, and I can’t get on the schedule for another couple of weeks.

Until then, I suppose the weeds have a few things to teach me, too—the same lesson, just from the other direction. If the flowers taught me that some things need tending or they'll wear themselves out, the weeds are teaching me that other things keep growing whether I tend them or not.

Grief is like weeds. I don't have to remember it. It comes up anyway. Each evening, I find myself outside pulling a few more.

Every garden tells a story. The flowers may be its poetry, but the weeds are definitely its cuss words.

Between the trimming, the watering, and the weeding, the plants have been telling their story all along.

The more time I spend with these living things, the more I realize their lessons are mine as well. They teach me the language of living things. And every season, if I'm paying attention, I become a little more fluent.

A few weeks ago, quarterly taxes and property taxes came due at the same time my dad started showing unmistakable signs of decline. His 89th birthday was only a few days off, and I couldn't help wondering if that was the finish line he'd set for himself.

I could tell he was tired. As his frustration over the words he could no longer find was waxing, his energy for the things he still longed to do was waning.

In the early hours of tax day, my dad went into the hospital. The phrase “death and taxes“ began clinking around in my head, as though warning me that death was now waiting in the shadows.

Despite the rally that had us all believing he would be home for his birthday, Dad never came home. He wanted to leave this world watching the birds outside the picture window in his living room. Instead, he died in a hospital bed with his immediate family surrounding him.

I arrived at the hospital on Dad’s final day carrying everything that had ever helped me summon the sacred—crystals, feathers, stones, my journal, a pillow and a blanket. I built a tiny altar beside his bed and invited grace to move through me.

One of the most valuable things I’ve learned from meditation and healing retreats is how to hold space, to sit through discomfort, no matter how excruciating, and to be with uncertainty and bear witness to what wants to emerge.

Our nurse that day was an angel in disguise. He gently walked us through what was happening and what to expect at every turn. He gave us hope when it was warranted and told us the truth when it was time to hear it.

As the time between Dad’s breaths grew longer and his hands—the big hands we knew so well, their distinctive nails always in need of a trim—grew cold in mine, panic could easily have set in. But when he exhaled his final breath, there was such ease, such freedom, that my only thought was: I'll have what he's having.

Witnessing someone’s departure from this world is just as holy as welcoming their arrival into it. What I hadn't yet realized is that death doesn't simply take someone away.

It rearranges the living.

It's as though a crack opens in the time-space continuum. Everyone else continues with their day, unaware that the laws of the universe have changed. Only those standing closest to the fracture can feel the ground shift beneath them.

Try as I might to carry on as if I’ve found my footing, I cannot. Because I haven’t.

A friend of mine, no stranger to loss herself, told me not to be surprised if life goes wonky for a while.

“The world will wobble,” she said. “Expect glitches.”

The week after my dad's death, the TV remote he was always so intent on keeping in its proper place in his power lift recliner suddenly disappeared from its coveted spot at my place—and has yet to reappear. Blueberries meant for breakfast covered the kitchen floor on a couple of occasions, where Dad surely would have been the first to spot them. Maybe this isn’t otherworldly interference, but it gives me pause.

How would someone get my attention if they were no longer around physically?

My dogs seem to be watching the corners of the room where nothing appears to be. The moon feels brighter, beckoning me outside in the wee hours. The skies have opened in relentless rain. Maybe grief heightens our awareness. Or maybe love leaves traces we notice only after someone is gone. Either way, everything suddenly feels like an oracle.

Just before he passed, I told my dad I would always think of him when I saw a rainbow because he never saw one without calling me. As I left the hospital, I heard "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" playing in the lobby. Not Muzak. Iz and his ukulele.

I knew then that my dad and I were both going to be okay.

Death and taxes may be life’s only guarantees. But nobody tells you about the wobble -the way gravity shifts, the way ordinary objects suddenly become messengers, and the way love refuses to disappear simply because a body does.

Yes, the world insists on carrying on. But mine is still finding its balance.

The Irony of Aging

I had a birthday last week.

There was cake. Scrumptious carrot cake from a local bakery, to be precise. Loved ones showed up virtually and in person with good wishes, along with a rollercoaster of emotions I hadn’t expected to surface.

The older I get, the less birthdays feel like levity, and the more they feel like gravity. Less possibility, more reckoning.

Better than the alternative, we’re told. The alternative, of course, being death.

But if you’ve lived long enough to experience a profound loss, a lifequake, or the throes of perimenopause or menopause, then you are already intimately acquainted with the little deaths that are part of being alive.

The self that seemed to disappear. The relationship that required you to stay the same. The person in the mirror you didn't quite recognize. The morning you woke up and realized you'd spent years programmed to fight a natural process that’s an evolutionary mandate, not a malfunction.

The irony of “live long and prosper” is that when you finally do, you realize the unspoken endgame is actually “stay young and hungry.”

It’s the same cultural contradiction women are handed:

• “Age gracefully, but not visibly.”

• “Mature, but remain desirable.”

• “Gain wisdom, but don’t lose vitality.”

You can survive everything, only to mourn the version of you that didn't.

Let’s Talk Menopause

The other day, I came across this video of a guy mansplaining menopause. Normally, I do not find mansplaining useful. But this guy gets it right.

Although I feel very passionate about this subject, I haven’t written about it directly. Somewhere along the way, I subscribed to the code of silence around topics that seem too personal, even though the effects of perimenopause and menopause impact us all, regardless of gender, in some way or another.

Here is what the guy in the video understands about menopause that most people don’t: that the caterpillar, when it enters the chrysalis, does not simply grow wings. It dissolves. Completely. It digests itself — turns to liquid, to cellular soup — and from that formlessness, something entirely new is assembled from the imaginal discs. There is a period of total disintegration before there is any emergence at all.

This is not just a metaphor for menopause. This is the biology of transformation.

And the cultural response to a woman in that process? Fix her. Return her to normal. Here is a prescription. Here is a euphemism. Here is a face cream and a cheerful book about the second chapter of your life.

Here, mostly, is silence.

The Cost of Silence

Two years ago, I attended a women's wellness week at MEA, where renowned Ob-Gyn Dr. Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz shared what felt like long-overdue truths about women's bodies, perimenopause, and menopause. I met kind, courageous women facing real health challenges who refused to leave their wellbeing unquestioned, undefended, untended. I left empowered, enraged, and determined to understand what was happening in my body — and to stop apologizing for it.

Because what she gave us in that room wasn’t just information. It was the information we should have had all along. Information our mothers should have had. Information that would have changed things. Information that, until recently, wasn’t considered important enough to study, understand, or make widely available. So when the anger surfaced, it was clarifying: this was always ours to know - we were just never told.

Why were we not told?

For a long time, medicine was built around the male body as the default human. Male bodies — specifically white male bodies — were assumed to represent everyone. Women’s bodies were treated as deviations from the norm, medically, culturally, and psychologically. Researchers excluded women because hormones and menstrual cycles were considered “too complicated.” The risk of pregnancy created liability concerns. So symptoms, drug dosages, disease patterns, and treatment protocols were built on male physiology and handed to everyone as universal truths.

Because of that, women’s heart attack symptoms were missed. Women experienced more adverse drug reactions. Autoimmune diseases, chronic pain, endometriosis, and menopause were underfunded and understudied for generations. And when women reported symptoms — symptoms that were real, biological, and entirely explicable — they were told it was anxiety. Stress. Hormones. Exaggeration. Hysteria.

SIDE NOTE: The word hysteria shares a root with hysterectomy — both from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus. For centuries, the wandering womb was blamed for women's irrationality, grief, and unruliness. We've been pathologizing the female body's natural processes for that long. The unruly woman and the surgical solution are bound together in etymology from the start.

When I thought I was losing my mind, nobody told me that there was a name for what was happening. Nobody told me that the cognitive fog, the mood shifts, the feeling of being somehow untethered from myself were neurological events, not character flaws. Nobody told me that medicine had a 200-year head start on dismissing exactly what I was experiencing.

Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color have faced even deeper layers of this. They’ve endured forced sterilizations, non-consensual experimentation, chronic undertreatment of pain, and dangerously high maternal mortality rates. The silence was not equal. It never is.

To paraphrase Edmund Burke: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

So I want to give voice to all things menopause. Because women have suffered in silence and blamed themselves for what is a biological imperative for far too long.

And now that the information is available, it’s my mission to let the ones I love know.

Casualties of Silence

When I went through perimenopause and menopause, no one was really talking about it. I was living a relatively isolated life without other women nearby to say "me too," or "that happened to me," or even just "you're not losing your mind."

In that silence, I filled in the blanks myself. And since my symptoms weren't severe, I told myself this was simply what getting older felt like.

I blamed my lack of energy, weight gain, irregular sleep patterns, general irritability, depression, brain fog, lack of libido, and the inability to find words for everyday objects on an essential flaw in my emotional architecture.

I took responsibility for things that were happening to me as though I had consciously chosen them and was too lazy to correct them. I blamed myself for the confusion, for the depression, for the distance that crept into my relationship, and for the slow dissolution of things I had built and loved.

I even blamed myself when my partner followed the classic midlife crisis script, bringing our relationship to an abrupt end. As if the script itself absolved him of choosing to act on it.

But here’s what I know now. Men are also casualties of this silence.

Unless they are exceptionally attuned, like the guy in the video, they don’t know what’s happening either. And many are afraid to ask.

Nobody tells them their partner is not falling apart; she’s walking through fire. That she is not broken, she’s rebuilding. That the dissolution is necessary, and that what comes on the other side is not less but different. Nobody tells them to hold the fire, not put it out. To protect the cocoon. That what looks to them like an ending is actually a metamorphosis. And you cannot rush a metamorphosis.

Some men will lose patience and do what their culture has taught them. Find another caterpillar. Others will tend the flame.

I share this because the personal cost of the silence around menopause is not just the impact on your body or your sense of self, but what it can do to the space between you and another person.

Knowing this might allow you to hold each other through the fire instead of letting it consume what is between you and become a casualty of ignorance rather than incompatibility.

Voices of Change

There are extraordinary medical voices doing the work of returning this information to the women it always belonged to. Dr. Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, with her Menopause Bootcamp, is one of them. Dr. Mary Claire Haver, whose book The New Menopause is the guide I wish I’d had at forty-five, is another. The Menopause Society offers research-backed resources for both women and the clinicians treating them.

Nobody handed me a map for this.

Nobody sat me down and said: This is what's coming, this is what it means, this is what you'll find on the other side. I'm still discovering that.

But I know this much. The woman I am now could not have been reached any other way. The dissolving was the only way to become a butterfly.

Now there are doors. Walk through them.

And then hand someone else the key.

This may not be your story exactly. But somewhere in it is probably someone you love. A sister. A co-worker. A partner. A bestie. A friend who went silent, and you didn’t know why.

Please pass it on.

This is how the silence ends.

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Joining a dating site is a bit like looking for love in all the wrong places. And yet somehow, I found it.

Just not in a person.

In a pair of boots.

Of all the profiles in front of me, the thing that caught my attention was an Ariat ad for a pair of cheetah boots.

Since I’ve moved back to the farm, I’ve reconnected with a few high school friends who have been married since we were in our twenties. As I marvel at what it takes to sustain a relationship for three or four decades, they ask me what it’s like to be single.

In some ways, it’s easier than people expect.

Just allow the tattooed Texan on TikTok to explain to other men that they are not competing with each other. They’re competing with a woman’s peace of mind.

Because, you know, he’s not wrong.

While some people rush to replace what’s no longer working with something newer and shinier, others take time to reflect. And it’s often in that reflection that a more radical idea begins to emerge: what if life doesn’t need to be organized around someone else?

What might have once felt daunting starts to feel… liberating.

No one wants to be on a dating app. Everyone wants to believe love will show up unannounced on a random weekday, looking like a hunk of burning love in a neon sweatshirt with smoldering brown eyes, a full head of hair, and the ability to replace the shingles that have blown off your roof. Obviously, he finds your dogs, your windswept hair, and sweatpant chic irresistible.

We assume a good, kind, self-aware person with a sense of humor cannot be that hard to find.

Let me tell you what is easier to find.

A great pair of boots.

Online dating, especially at this stage of life, is a strange marketplace of hope and projection, with more than a hint of Hail Mary. I’d avoid it altogether if I had the kind of lifestyle where I was around people more often or thought the shingle guy was coming back.

Online, everyone is “active,” “fun,” and “loves to travel,” even if their profile picture begs to differ. There are a suspicious number of men holding fish (why always a fish?) or standing next to a motorcycle, a boat, or other vehicle that may or may not belong to them.

And then there are the messages that attempt to pass for conversations or come-ons.

“Hey.”
“Hi, beautiful.”
“I can be there in an hour.”

As a coach, “tell me more” is hard-wired into me, so men of few words don’t get far with me.

Some of these “conversations” disappear mid-sentence like a bad Wi-Fi signal. Some are clearly scams designed to get me, my credit card, and my personal information off the site and into their database.

Some make me laugh. Some clue me in to hobbies I never knew existed.

A few make me question the logic that suggested a dating site had more to offer than my dogs, my friends, or my new boots.

Because here’s the thing about the boots—and my dogs and my friends.

I don’t have to pretend to be anyone other than me when I wear them or spend time with them. I don’t have to wonder if I am too much or not enough for them. I don’t have to explain my quirky sense of humor or defend what makes me different.

Clearly, the boots are fabulous.

Boots and I go way back. My sister and I got our first go-go boots around the time Nancy Sinatra sang, “These Boots are Made for Walkin’.” There was something about these futuristic, visually striking boots that conveyed independence, freedom, and movement.

Then came hiking boots, muck boots, snow boots, rain boots, and cowgirl boots. They remind me of who I am and who I can be when I slide into them.

Boots have walked me through every kind of adventure. They say, “I may not know where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there.”

Confidently…in these boots.

This isn’t about “boots before bros.”

The point isn’t to stop wanting connection. I just think we need to reconsider how we connect and what true connection means. So many of us have been sold the idea that we can only experience this kind of intimacy through the love of a partner, a family, or finding “the one.”

That idea silently shuts out the enormity of love available to us in any given moment.

• If you’ve ever spent time in nature and given in to the sensory delights all around you, you know what love feels and looks like, even if there’s no other human in sight.

• If you’ve ever walked by a boulangerie in the wee hours of the morning, you know what love smells and tastes like. (Hint: fresh bread.)

• If you’ve ever listened to a song on repeat, letting the lyrics and the feeling wash over you, you know what love sounds like.

In the past year, I’ve experienced so many surprising and deeply personal forms of love that I had closed myself off to when I expected it to come from one place. Many of these expressions of love came from people I may never meet, places I may never return to, and moments I might never experience again.

Sean Hayes’s performance—and his virtuoso piano playing—in the play “Good Night, Oscar,” which I saw in London last fall, felt like an act of pure love.

Standing inside the inner circle at Stonehenge at sunrise, surrounded by a murder of crows and a sudden rainbow, was its own kind of magic.

Having my flight to Santa Fe on American Airlines canceled, only to find one seat available in first class for 15,000 miles and $5 on United an hour before boarding, felt like divine intervention.

When we confine love to coupledom, we limit its endless capacity to surprise and delight us. And when we expect it to come from another person as proof that we are lovable, we risk overlooking all the ways it’s already finding us.

I’m not done with dating.

The world is full of fascinating people and unexpected possibilities waiting to unfold. But I’m not willing to outsource my sense of worth or belonging to an app.

Or a man holding a fish.

For now, I’ve got these boots.

And they already know how to take me where I’m going.

Your Turn

Where did you find love when you weren’t looking for it?

Have you ever found something better than what you were originally seeking?

I’d love to know in the comments below. Your stories add to our collective conversation.

I get a lot of packages.

Living in a rural area, I order most of what I need online, from groceries to garage door openers. It’s easy, reliable, and keeps me from driving an hour to get the goods.

Most of the time, I know exactly what’s inside. And I know whether to expect it in an hour or a few days.

But the other day, something different showed up. A stowaway box snuck in among the usual suspects.

I didn’t question it. I live alone. If it’s on my porch, it’s most likely mine. But as I started unpacking it, I paused.

Have my dogs, Ruby and Pearl, been watching me closely enough to start ordering things online while I’m gone? Honestly, it’s not impossible.

They have earned the title “watchdogs” because nothing gets by them. Especially snacks. And delivery trucks.

The outside of the rogue box warned of lithium ion batteries inside. As I unpacked the contents, I mentally tried to reverse-engineer what late-night version of myself had decided this was essential.

It wasn’t coming to me. So I looked closer, and that’s when I saw the shipping label.

It wasn’t my order.

The label read: David.

He lived in the same town, but at a completely different address.

My town is small enough that I thought finding David wouldn’t be that hard. But I had never heard of the road listed on the label, even though Google insisted it was just five to ten minutes away. And I wasn’t even sure if David was a first name or a last name.

Still, I tried to do the right thing. I packed everything up and the next day, handed the box back to the Amazon driver, saying, “This was delivered to me by mistake.”

He nodded, took it, and walked back to his truck. Two minutes later, my doorbell rang. It was the Amazon guy again, smiling like it was my birthday.

“My boss said it’s yours now,” he said.

Mine now. Interesting.

I stood there holding a small generator that had somehow become mine. And that’s when the questions started.

Because when life sends you a portable generator… what do you do?

Open to Receive

If you’re me, you get curious.

I asked ChatGPT what it might mean to receive a generator. It gave me practical, useful, logical answers about backup power, emergency preparedness, and energy on demand. Clearly, this was a windfall for my inner (albeit underdeveloped) Eagle Scout.

But then I asked the question I really wanted to ask:

“Knowing what you know about me… what does receiving a generator mean symbolically?”

I know I was chatting with artificial intelligence, but I swear it was as delighted as I was that I was finally asking juicy questions.

I laughed out loud reading the responses. Not because they were ridiculous, but because they were so accurate for me. It was one of those you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up moments.

This was no longer a random package or a mistaken delivery.

This was priceless writing material delivered directly to my doorstep.

And I was absolutely open to receiving it.

Everything Is An Oracle

I am nothing if not a meaning-maker.

Give me anything—a generator, a name, a coincidence—and I will start weaving meaning into it. (My name, Penny, is derived from Penelope, which means weaver.)

I am always on the lookout for unlikely patterns and quirky connections. Sometimes that instinct leads me somewhere profound. Other times, it leaves me slightly unhinged. But it always leaves me altered.

This was no longer about a shipping error. I was standing on the edge of a reality-bending rabbit hole. I could stick with the surface story, or I could dive deep into an alternate interpretation.

One that asked me to explore energy that doesn’t depend on external systems to function. One that encouraged me to consider my capacity to generate my own power. The kind of power and energy that doesn’t require permission, stability, or perfect conditions to operate.

Instead of an obvious invitation to a mystery school, I received a portable generator. Because it wouldn’t be much of a mystery school if I didn’t receive something mysterious as an entrance exam.

I consider everything that shows up to be an oracle. Not in a fortune-telling, crystal ball kind of way, but in the sense that life is always speaking. Through missed deliveries and wrong turns, as well as synchronicities and coincidences. Through conversations that linger longer than expected and things that were left unsaid. Through the things I didn’t plan, and the things I can’t quite explain.

What if unexpected arrivals aren’t random interruptions, but invitations to notice, question, and get curious?

The miraculous often comes wrapped in the mundane. The extraordinary is often contained within the ordinary. It’s so easy to dismiss because it’s hiding in plain sight.

Aha’s and epiphanies are often just one shift in perspective away from realization. The question isn’t whether guidance is present, but whether I’m paying attention to it.

Generating My Own Power

The past few years have had a way of pulling the plug on things I once thought were permanent.

Beliefs. Relationships. Roles I assumed I would always play. And when those systems failed, I found out what I was running on.

So maybe that’s why the generator showed up now.

It gave me a chance to see where I still outsource my power and how I’ve generated my own.

It also reminded me that resilience isn’t something I can order overnight but something I’ve been building, storing, and strengthening over time.

So that when the unexpected arrives, as it always does, I’m not left in the dark. And when you learn to generate your own power, you won’t be either.

Your Turn

This is where you get to go down the rabbit hole, if you are so inclined. Here are a few writing prompts to Write Your Way Out.

• Your Backup Power

  • Where do you go when things feel uncertain or unstable?
    What do you reach for first? Does it actually support you?

  • What has “lost power” in your life recently?
    A belief, a role, a relationship, a plan?

  • Where are you still outsourcing your sense of stability or worth?

  • What does your internal “generator” look like right now?
    Do you have practices, people, or environments that ground you?

  • What would it mean to strengthen your own source of power?
    Not overnight, but over time.

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  This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This month, in our Write Your Way Out Zoom call on Friday, March 27th, we’ll explore the idea of claiming your own power or Sacred Sovereignty. Calls are included in your paid subscription, or you can pay for a one-time class fee here.

Have you ever felt like you missed the memo on how the world works?

Long before FOMO had a name, I’m sure I had it. A persistent, low-grade anxiety that everyone else knew something essential about life that I had somehow missed.

It started for me when I arrived at McGill University in Montreal. Coming from a small farming community in the Midwest, I was convinced I was already behind. My fellow students seemed so sophisticated, worldly, culturally fluent in ways I could barely comprehend.

Most of them spoke at least two languages. I was still trying to find my voice in one. But it wasn’t just their language I longed to learn.

It was their ease. Their confidence. Their way of seeing the world as a place to fully inhabit, not shy away from.

I went to McGill as part of the National Student Exchange program at University of Northern Iowa. My goal was to learn French, and because there were few francophiles in Cedar Falls, Iowa, I went where the language was spoken. After my first semester in Montreal, I transferred to Université Laval in Quebec City to participate in their language immersion program.

I rented a room from a lovely Québécois couple, and for the first time, I wasn’t just learning a language. I was living inside it. I was absorbing its culture in the conversations drifting through cafés, the stone streets in the old city, and winter lingering far longer than I was used to, but celebrated spectacularly. ( Carnaval de Québec, anyone?)

I fell in love with a new country. And it was life-changing.

That year planted the idea that life could always be expanded, reimagined, and reinvented. It also made me realize that if I was going to become fluent in any language, I needed to live where it was spoken.

So after I graduated, I moved to … Texas.

Yes. You read that correctly.

After all the effort to immerse myself in French-speaking culture, I landed in a place where Spanish would have served me better.

As it turned out, Texas was its own kind of language immersion program. And the most important word to master was y’all.

Sometimes, the place you land matters less than the willingness to keep exploring.

Let’s Get Physical

The next language I immersed myself in was body language, and there was no better time or teacher than the 1980s fitness culture.

Jane Fonda, Denise Austin, Kathy Smith, Richard Simmons, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even Cher were leg-lifting, grapevining, and power-lifting their way to super stardom by showing us how to get in shape in the comfort of our own living room.

In 1985, the movie Perfect, with Jamie Lee Curtis as an iconic aerobic instructor and John Travolta as a Rolling Stones journalist assigned to investigate the booming health club movement, captured the electric pulse of a cultural moment.

It felt alive. Empowering. Hopeful.

And in many ways, it was.

I loved being a fitness instructor and getting in front of a room in little more than leotards, tights, and a microphone. From that platform, I could play, create, choreograph, explore, and invite joy into the room.

My classes were my sanctuary, my mixtapes were legendary, and my students were just as much my teachers as I was theirs. We shared a bond formed by vulnerability, discipline, sweat, and, ultimately, endorphins.

We knew it wouldn’t last forever, so we played Prince and partied like it was 1999. Because it probably was.

Later, the language shifted.

Abs became awareness.
Cardio became consciousness.
Flexibility became flow.
Personal trainers became spiritual teachers.

Back then, transformation wore leg warmers. Now it wears linen and mala beads. Yet the longing underneath remains the same.

The belief that someone else has already arrived at the place we hope to go, and that we’re only one more workout or practice away from bodily or spiritual perfection.

In Search of Enlightenment

When it became evident that my body could only take me so far, I turned to my mind and spirit.

I went in search of the high priests and priestesses of enlightenment and followed them across cities, across countries, across continents. I read their books, attended their workshops, sat cross-legged at the edge of science and spirituality in hotel ballrooms and retreat centers, with my notebooks and mind wide open. Ready to drink it all in.

Psychology.
Spirituality.
Somatics.
Energy work.
Coaching.
Tapping.
Meditating.
Consciousness.

I collected teachings the way others collected souvenirs. Each modality promised to open another doorway. Another layer. Another key to the meaning of life. Or at least provide a clue as to why I was so curious and decidedly different from most people I encountered.

Admittedly, I became a workshop junkie. It allowed me to travel to places on my own where I knew I’d find others who understood me.

Like many devoted students, I outsourced true wisdom to the experts, the enlightened ones, the sages on the stages.

It’s easy to be enticed by the idea that someone else holds the map to your awakening when it comes wrapped in charisma, certainty, an entourage, and an exceptional marketing team.

It certainly takes the pressure off the seeker to look elsewhere.

Especially when seeking can feel like such a holy pursuit.

There’s comfort in believing someone else knows how the world works and can hand you the map.

But it’s their map, not yours.

And most leaders know little more about you than your willingness to pay whatever price they charge for your enlightenment.

Losing My Religion

Over time, I began to see what had always been there.

Somewhere along the way, I became the oldest person in the room instead of the youngest. And it was harder to ignore the widening gap between the teachings and the lived reality.

Where I once held influential leaders in high esteem, I can no longer ignore the incongruencies.

The teachers who preach presence and compassion but bristle backstage with impatience and diva-like demands. The gurus of abundance entangled in complex financial dramas. The embodiment experts oddly disconnected from their own bodies. The sexual healers seducing their students. The consciousness leaders behaving unconsciously.

Granted, most of these leaders are not intentionally harming people. Many work hard to get their message to the masses while walking their own imperfect path. Their schedules are often brutal, and the demands on their time and attention are relentless.

But sadly, some of them have become enamored by their own authority, forgetting the responsibility that comes with influence - and doing real damage in the process. 

I no longer confuse charisma with wisdom,
certainty with depth,
or visibility with viability.

Because when the truth is exposed, the confusing, conflicting behavior of those we believed in can feel like betrayal.

In a culture where superheroes save the day, celebrity implies expertise, and influence is currency, discernment isn’t optional anymore. It’s required.

Whenever we put someone on a pedestal, the only place they can go is down.

And losing your religion, especially one of your own making, is heartbreaking, disorienting, and embarrassing.

Because you don’t just lose who or what you believed in, you lose your identity. You question everything about what you thought you knew, every choice you defended, and wonder what their behavior says about you.

Own Your Throne

If the past year has taught me anything, it’s that everything is necessary. And mostly survivable.

The longing, the searching, the devotion, the disappointment, the betrayals. The partners, the players, the patterns, the lessons, the awakenings, the illusions. The against-all-odds promises. The falls from grace.

It’s all necessary to see what couldn’t or wouldn’t be revealed until there was no denying the truth.

I wasn’t wrong to believe. You weren’t naïve to hope. We weren’t foolish to invest our time, our money, or our hearts.

Every workshop, journey, relationship, and outrageous adventure I was certain would change my life actually did.

Just not in the ways I expected.

My greatest teachers didn’t fail me. They may have disappointed me, confused me, or left me deeply disillusioned. But they played their roles perfectly.

Because sometimes the teacher’s greatest gift is not what they gave me…but what they unintentionally took away.

The pedestal.
The projection.
The belief that someone else stands closer to the truth than I do.
The certainty that they know more about what’s right for me than I do.

They don’t. No one does.

If ever there was a time to own your throne and claim your sacred sovereignty, it’s now.

And long after the gurus are gone, the people who’ve walked the path with us remain and remind us how far we’ve come.

Keeping the Faith

I never lost my faith in growth, healing, or transformation. I lost my faith in the fantasy that anyone else could hand those things to me.

I no longer believe enlightenment lives exclusively on stages, in ashrams, at yoga or meditation retreats on the beach, inside expensive mastermind groups, perfect Instagram feeds, TikTok reels, or cleverly concealed cults.

What I believe now is far less glamorous.

I believe wisdom is participatory, emergent, and deeply personal. And I believe you can willingly access it, without mortgaging your power or bankrupting your future.

While teachers can illuminate, clarify, and point you in an unexpected direction, they can’t replace the need for due diligence and getting to know, like, and trust yourself.

Your body is a truth teller, and energy is its universal language. It interprets the inconvenient truth of any situation. It bypasses the brain and gives you immediate information.

Trusting that information and what to do with it?
That’s true wisdom, grasshopper.

What Remains

I will continue to align with others who are curious, open, and interested in the awakening of our hearts and the expansion of our souls. I will continue to seek out adventures in consciousness with quirky co-creators and unexpected plot twists.

As Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

The world doesn’t change because a guru or self-proclaimed messiah rises. It changes when small groups of people decide to trust themselves.

Losing my religion did not leave me empty.
It left me accountable.

It left me standing - slightly stunned, considerably wiser - and finally facing the one authority I had been carefully avoiding my entire life:

Myself.

Any guide worth following will always point you back to yourself.

Your Turn

If this resonates, I’d love to hear your story.

Have you ever lost your “religion” — a belief, a teacher, a relationship, a job, or a system you once trusted?

What did it take from you?
And what did it give back?

Please share in the comments. Your reflections always deepen the conversation 🌿

(If you want to listen to this episode on Spotify, here’s the link to A Penny For Your Thoughts.)

I’ve never really considered myself a car person. My cars usually picked me, and we’d happily co-exist for a dozen years or more until a new make or model caught my eye.

When the burnt rubber smell started showing up after short trips in my 2013 Hyundai Santa Fe, I feared the worst. The mechanics said they fixed it, but the smell persisted, and the thought of being stranded in sub-zero temperatures made me realize it was time to consider something new.

The thought of trading it in almost seemed treasonous. I’d had a good, long run with my Santa Fe with no major repairs required.

But there are moments when practicality nudges sentimentality aside. And I was experiencing more of them lately.

My heart just wasn’t ready to admit it yet.

A Rolling Archive of My Life

I never fawned over my car or didn’t do all the things car people do, but I did love my car. Like a favorite chair or that warm blanket on a cold evening, it provided a gentle, familiar place for my life to unfold.

Over the years, my car didn’t just transport me. It carried me.

It carried groceries and overnight bags.
It took me to work, to run errands, and to see friends.
It brought puppies home and took beloved older dogs to their final vet visit.
It listened to all the speeches I rehearsed on my way to speaking gigs.
It blasted the music I needed to instill courage or confidence.
It allowed me to unleash the rage of endured injustices in the safety of its interior.
It drove me safely through the fog to the hospital when the middle-of-the-night call came from home.
It waited patiently in the airport parking lot for me to return from my faraway adventures.
It witnessed the devastation of grief and the elation of small triumphs.

It carried the ordinary days that stitched a life together. And it carried the days that quietly changed me.

So when I found myself at the car dealership being asked, “What would keep you from buying a new car today?” my answer defied logic.

I’m sure the salespeople expected an objection they could easily overcome. Numbers. Monthly payments. Interest rates. Features. Trims.

But it was purely nostalgic.

Because essentially what I heard was, “Are you ready to let go of the car /life that got you here today?”

At that moment, I was not. No amount of persuasion could help me process that. I had to come to terms with it in my own time.

Love At First Sight

I bought my Hyundai Santa Fe at the beginning of what I was sure was a promising new life.

A new job.
A new relationship.
A new town.

And there it was. A copper colored Santa Fe with all the amenities. The perfect color for a person named Penny, whose favorite place on earth was Santa Fe. There was the instant recognition that we were made for each other.

Driving it off the lot was proof that I was going somewhere. Proof that I had turned a corner, had a real job, a lasting relationship, and everything I needed to be happy in the foreseeable future.

But here’s the part I couldn’t see then.

All those things would eventually end, unravel, and require reconsideration.

The only thing that remained of that future today was the car. It was a time capsule of hope, effort, love, possibilities, loss, disappointment, and resilience.

Letting go of it felt like letting go of a part of me.*

The car had done its job. It carried me through beginnings I believed in, messy middles I struggled through, and endings I never planned. It had been a quiet witness to an entire chapter of my life.

Letting go wasn’t about metal and mileage.

It was about acknowledging that the person who bought that car was not the same person who would buy the next one.

The Pivot at the Dealership

Going into the car dealership alone felt as advisable as going into a tax audit without an accountant. And while I’m endlessly grateful for the guidance of family and friends who know more about buying cars than I do, this was something I needed to do myself.

There’s something profoundly empowering about making a decision like this without asking anyone’s permission — and then figuring out how to make it work.

After test-driving a couple of cars, it would have been easy to let my newfound confidence drive a new vehicle off the lot that day. But I’ve made enough big decisions in my life to know this one was worth sleeping on.

I also needed time to clean out my Santa Fe and honor its 13 years of loyal service. A proper wash and vacuum felt like a fitting farewell.

And Then Came the Hyundai Tucson Hybrid

At the end of the month, I went back to drive the hybrid that had captured my curiosity. Again, I went alone, knowing I had done my homework and could walk away if I didn’t feel like it was a fair exchange.

Thank goodness for the respectful sales and financing team at Green Family Hyundai. Jamie, my sales guy, was especially patient and willing to give me not just the facts, but all the time and space I needed to make a decision. I didn’t feel pressured or taken advantage of.

And just in case I needed a little divine intervention to seal the deal, when the sales manager came out to meet me, he shook my hand and gave me his card.

His name was Jesus.

I blinked. Looked at the card again. Yep. Jesus. (Pronounced differently, of course, but still.)

I’m not overly religious, but I have to admit, it felt like a pretty well-timed cameo. And honestly? He lived up to his namesake. He was calm, kind, and reassuring. In that moment, I figured whatever decision I made, I was probably going to be okay.

Still, seeing my Santa Fe parked next to the Tucson was bittersweet.

I’m sure the sales team expected me to be as excited as they were about my purchase. But I was letting go of something I dearly loved that saw me through the best of times and the worst of times. Even the sexiest of substitutes would take some time to embrace.

The New Car Doesn’t Know Me Yet

It doesn’t know my history or my heartbreaks. It hasn’t heard me rehearse the hard conversations or sit in the driveway a little longer than necessary as I work up the courage to face what awaits. It doesn’t know (yet) how quickly it can be covered in dog hair without the proper seat/floor coverings. It doesn’t understand the rhythm of my days.

But it will.

And I will come to know all the gadgets, goodies, and upgraded safety features and benefits. If not, Jamie has offered to assist.

It may not have been love at first sight like it was with my Santa Fe, but the Tucson quietly encourages me to step into the sleek, savvy, and sophisticated version of me it mirrors.

And that’s a new chapter worth writing.

Your Turn - Write Your Way Out

I’d love to hear your car stories - or any stories! Please leave your comments below and let me know any of the following:

• What’s something in your life that looks ordinary from the outside, but quietly holds an entire chapter of who you used to be?

• Is there something you’ve been holding onto not because you still need it, but because it reminds you of who you were when you first chose it?

• Have you ever realized you weren’t just letting go of a thing, you were letting go of a version of yourself?

• What might be waiting for you on the other side of releasing the last remnant of a former life?

• What have you kept long after the life around it has changed?

• What would it feel like to let go of what you’ve outgrown and embrace what’s next?

  Post Script

  *It turns out, psychologists find becoming attached to our belongings normal. Our beloved possessions often become emotional anchors and symbols of continuity, identity, and comfort. When an object carries memories of milestones and routine alike, letting it go can feel like letting go of a piece of who we once were.

  ---

  Thanks for reading! This post is public, so feel free to share it with your car-loving friends!

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I first imagined going to South Africa when I heard about Marth Beck’s Self-Transformation Adventure Retreat at the Londolozi Game Reserve. I had no idea how I would muster the resources or the courage to get there, but it planted the seed.

I knew someday, I’d find a way.

My siblings and I have been obsessed with the creatures and cultures of South Africa for as long as I can remember. Whatever spell that continent cast over us eventually compelled each of us to go - at different times, for different reasons, answering different inner calls.

In January 2023, I finally got there. Not to Londolozi, but to another amazing game reserve where I could take daily treks into the bush and experience an in-between world that’s neither forest nor desert, but a living mosaic of grassland, thorn scrub, and scattered trees.

I didn’t know it then, but the bush was teaching me something I would need to survive a few years later: how to live without certainty and still move forward.

The savanna is spacious and untamed, with a vast sky, long horizons, and land stretching out in every direction. Tall grasses ripple. Acacia scrub grips the earth. Pockets of woodland add texture and shadow.

I learned quickly that the African bush is both beautiful and uncompromising. It’s more than a landscape.

It’s a living intelligence.

Even when it looks still, stillness is an illusion. It is intensely alive, pulsing with hidden life.

Movement there is often subtle… until suddenly it isn’t.

The bush is always speaking. Tracks, snapped twigs, bent blades of grass, or the hush that falls when something large moves nearby are clues to a larger movement of a place ruled by rhythms of rainfall, drought, fire, and migration.

This is why trackers learn to listen with their whole bodies. The bush trains you to notice what you’ve been taught to ignore.

It also has a way of putting you back in your place. It returns you to a reality
that you belong to something older, wilder, and far more connected than your mind can explain.

What You Notice Shapes What You Become

A few weeks ago, when the facilitators at MEA introduced the idea of tracking, it took me right back to South Africa.

Boyd Varty is a tracker, storyteller, and fourth-generation custodian of Londolozi. He describes the wild as “a kind of cathedral, a sacred place that reflects the best parts of us back to us”. In his TED Talk, he introduces the idea of ubuntu, “I am, because of you,” because in the bush, nothing lives alone.

The savanna is a sanctuary, a mirror, and a threshold all at the same time, where you meet yourself without the noise. Your stories and programming start to dissolve as your wild self emerges.

It’s not tame.
It’s not curated.
It’s not “scenery.”

It’s a field of ancient belonging. Once you’ve been inside it, some part of you never fully returns the same way.

In the bush, attention is a matter of survival.
In ordinary life, attention is creation.
In both scenarios, what you notice shapes what you become.

The Thing About Tracking

Tracking isn’t a strategy. It’s a relationship.

Trackers don’t force the bush to reveal itself. They don’t march into the savanna demanding certainty, clarity, and a ten-step plan.

They move differently.

They walk slowly.
They lower the volume of the mind.
They learn to read what’s right in front of them.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent much of my life doing the opposite.

We’ve been trained to hunt certainty like a predator: to “figure it out,” “lock it down,” to name the destination before we even take the first step.

But tracking doesn’t work that way.

The bush doesn’t reward control.

It rewards presence.

Boyd Varty teaches that tracking is an ancient art of deduction, of learning to read meaning from an imprint. A track is evidence. Not a guarantee. Not a full map. But a living clue that something moved through a place… and might still be nearby.

Learning the basics of tracking made me wonder:

What if I don’t need to know the whole plan?
What if I just need to learn how to recognize the clues?

What it means to “track your life”

If a tracker can read a crushed leaf or a broken branch and know what passed through in the dark, what might become possible if you learned to track the subtle signs in your own life?

A drift.
A flinch.
A recurring thought.
The places your energy disappears.
The moments your body says yes or no before your mind has caught up.
What evidence is your life leaving behind that you’ve been ignoring?

In the bush, trackers look for evidence of appetite, urgency, ritual, and rest in addition to tracks.

In real life, the clues may not be as obvious, but they’re everywhere.

They are:

• what keeps repeating

• what keeps calling

• what keeps draining

• what keeps lighting you up

• what your body knows before your mind approves

• what goes quiet when something isn’t true

Curiosity, not certainty, is key.

After spending the last two months creating and designing a course called Architects of the Unknown, I can embrace this philosophy more readily than I might have when I was certain I could control any outcome.

It took me losing everything familiar and being forced to trust what I couldn’t yet name, to see how much becomes possible when I stop demanding instant answers.

The Three Tracks I’m Learning to Follow

This year, I’ve been practicing a simple daily ritual I call Track • Tension • Truth.

1) Track (What did I notice?)
What caught my attention today (whether on purpose or by accident)?
What did I circle back to?
What did I reread, revisit, replay?

2) Tension (Where did I feel the energy shifts?)
Where and when did my system contract?
Where and when did my system expand?
Where did I feel the “hush” (that internal quiet that falls when something big is near)?
Where did I push past a no?

3) Truth (What’s the clue?)
If today contained one honest breadcrumb, what was it?
What might my life be asking me to admit, release, or begin?

This isn’t journaling for journaling’s sake.

This is how you learn to track your life.

Because attention is not neutral.
Attention is a compass.

And when I started tracking mine, I realized something that alarmed me.

Throughout the last year, I’d been tracking death. I’d been acutely aware of what I had lost or was losing. I’d been tracking my own disappearance from a life I thought was solid, safe, and certain, and relationships I thought defined me.

This was not what I wanted to track.

It made me question how long I’d been scanning for what might fall apart next.

Tracking showed me the truth. And then it gave me a choice.

I could keep rehearsing endings, or I could start tracking what brings me back to myself.

Loss would no longer be the only trail I follow.

So I’m learning to track life again.

Because tracking invites something wilder and more honest to reveal itself to me.

A different kind of intelligence.
A deeper kind of guidance.

Not certainty.
Not control.
But knowing without needing proof first.

The Gift of Not Knowing

In the savanna, you don’t get the whole story at once.

You get toe/claw marks or tail/belly drag lines.
You get broken seed pods or stripped bark.
You get beetle dung tracks or disturbed ant trails.
You listen for alarm calls or a sudden hush.

You learn to trust that the smallest sign can be the beginning of a revelation.

Tracking is not a way for me to control the future, but a way for me to stay in relationship with what’s unfolding.

It asks me to listen. It invites me to belong to something bigger. It reminds me that my life, just like all wild places, is always speaking.

This may be the true gift of tracking. It trains us to become Architects of the Unknown, people who can stand at the threshold without panicking and trust we’ll find our way.

(All of the above photos were taken by me while in South Africa in 2023.)

Your Turn

So let me ask you:

What are you tracking right now?

• a repeating pattern

• a craving

• an energy drain

• a quiet truth you’ve been avoiding

• a longing that won’t let go

Leave a comment and tell me what you’re noticing.

Because one of the best parts of tracking is realizing we’re not on the trail alone.

If you’re in a season where certainty is unavailable (or overrated), I’ve created Architects of the Unknown just for you. It’s a way to practice moving forward with trust, creativity, and your own inner compass—one track at a time. Our next round begins in February. Email me at penny@wellpower.com if you are interested in joining me.

A Year I Didn’t See Coming

2025 wasn’t the year I expected.
It wasn’t the year I planned for, asked for, or felt particularly ready for.

But in some strange, aching, holy way, it was the year I needed.

I knew 2025 would get interesting when I unknowingly texted “Happy Ew Year” to my bestie instead of “Happy New Year.”

At first, I thought she had sent it to me as a way to capture the collective post-holiday crash. Then I realized I was the one who sent it to her!

Clearly, it was the kind of typo that tells a story before you even realize you’re in it.
It was going to be a “Buckle Up, Buttercup” kind of year that would get messy, be devastatingly disorienting, relentlessly uncomfortable, and deeply necessary.

If 2025 felt like a year of shedding, unraveling, or demolition for you, you’re not alone. This is the story of everything falling apart…and how it became the most remarkable kind of gift.

Inside the Belly of the Beast

It wasn’t pretty, I can assure you.

Internally, I was reeling from several simultaneous losses. From the unexpected betrayals that uprooted my home to watching my parents’ health decline to learning of the serious health diagnoses in a few close friends to experiencing the dissolution of our family business, the hits kept right on coming.

Externally, I felt the world’s moral compass derailing at a startling pace, as if we were all on a speeding train toward some unseen brink.

Together, these events comprised the lifequake that brought about an abrupt end to life as I knew it.

I wouldn’t wish an “Ew Year” on anyone. And yet, I know many of you may have experienced one as well.

Friends reported heartbreak, job upheaval, health crises, deaths, divorce, loss of identity, and plans dissolving with almost mythic precision. So many of us felt like we were being shaken apart for some reason we couldn’t yet see.

What Broke and What Held

The upside to an “Ew Year” is that it burns through what no longer serves you and catapults you into a life that asks more of you than you believe is possible.

You discover what you are made of, who your true friends are, and the secret sauce that allows you to make the world a better place. (Hint: It isn’t your despair. It’s your joy.)

While I don’t recommend taking on all the things all at once, sometimes it’s unavoidable. Unexpected trauma can set a series of events in motion that have a momentum all their own.

What you can do to combat the shock is to engage your senses so you can stay present with what’s right in front of you:

• Drink in the sunrise.

• Listen to the birds outside your window.

• Feel the brisk air on your skin.

• Taste the way comfort food nourishes you.

• Believe the people who believe in you. (This one comes from my friend Lynda.)

Allow the small, tender pieces of life to remind you that you’re still here, and you’re still alive.

(Photo: Santa Fe sunrise)

Resilience in Practice — The 3 P’s

The concept of the “three P’s” is a psychological tool that illustrates how people explain events to themselves, especially in Martin Seligman’s work on explanatory style and learned optimism.

The three P’s are:

• Personalization — believing you are to blame for what happened

• Pervasiveness — believing the event will negatively affect every part of your life

• Permanence — believing the pain or its effects will last forever

In Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant illustrate how these thought patterns can stall resilience after loss.

Throughout the year, I wrestled with these 3 P’s. It was easy to believe I would never see the light at the end of the tunnel. The betrayals felt incredibly personal, the losses felt pervasive, and the grief felt permanent.

But learning about transitions, lifequakes, resiliency, and grief allowed me to see that there was an arc to this trajectory.

Feeling it all, from denial to rage to fear to grief, allowed me to be present in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.

Leaning into the support of friends - old and new - allowed me to see how much their wisdom, kindness, humor, and love sustained me.

(Photo: PHS friends to the rescue!)

The Arc of Change

Because it was such a pivotal year, ushering it out with respect felt essential.

So I made my way to Modern Elder Academy (MEA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Ring in the New Year at the Ranch, where I knew the land, the horses, the blue skies, wide open spaces, and important strangers would nourish me.

In no time, the place worked its magic on me. My heart cracked open. My soul felt at home.

On New Year’s Eve, we experienced “collective effervescense” (a term MEA describes as the powerful, shared emotional energy that arises when a group of people come together in a common experience) as we sang and danced like we’d known each other for years.

Throughout the week, we looked at where we’d been and where we’d like to go. We shared our uncertainty about what’s next and laughed at the wildness of it all.

The outpouring of wisdom, humor, and resiliency was heartwarming.

It was exactly the way I wanted to welcome in 2026.

(Photo: Rising Fire Horse MEA cohort)

How Community Changed the Ending

Maybe for you, ending the year with your journal, a few friends or family, your pets, and a good movie is more appealing than sharing your innermost thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams with a room full of people you just met.

That used to be my preference. For years, I assumed being a lone wolf was my only option.

Now I’ve learned to reach out to my community when my instinct is to isolate.

Of course, it has to be a community where I feel safe, seen, heard, and held. That’s why MEA is my go-to place.

At Modern Elder Academy, there’s a practice called Vault 3 sharing. This is an invitation to speak from your deepest, unscripted self. When you share from Vault 3, you share what truly matters. It requires vulnerability and allows for raw insights and presence in the moment. This is where connection and transformation happen.

Even though we can all communicate from Vault 3, few of us do. Most of us stick to:

• Vault 1 — safe, polite facts

• Vault 2 — personal stories and emotions

But Vault 3 is the game changer. It’s where strangers become friends and where healing feels possible.

My Wish for 2026

If 2025 was a year of disintegration, then perhaps 2026 can be a year of integration -
where we build with what remains.

My hope is that you don’t shrug off the hard moments like they weren’t real,
but that you see how much strength was forged in them.

I hope you will stay curious about your own resilience. Notice the people who stayed, and let their presence remind you that transformation isn’t something you endure alone.

May you notice the tiny beautiful things in front of you.
May you let your heart break open just enough to let grace in.
May you find or create communities where you feel safe enough to share what matters.

And may you bring more Vault 3 communication into your life. You can do this with a partner, a friend, a colleague, or even the reflection in your own mirror.

Here’s to more courage, connection, and presence in 2026!

Write Your Way Out

What surprise gifts did 2025 give you?

What did they cost or ask of you in return?

If 2025 was a year of shedding (it was the Year of the Snake, after all), what’s one thing you want to bring intentionally into 2026?

Leave me a comment and let me know. I read and respond to your replies. Your story matters to me.

If you prefer, you can listen below on Spotify:

I was talking with my mentor the other day, telling her I ought to be over this grief by now - the relentless unraveling, the uncertainty, the general coming-undone-ness that has defined my year. I told her I should be ready to face the new year as the new me, filled with renewed hope and enthusiasm.

She smiled and said what she’s been saying since we began working together:
“The end game is there is no end game.”

“Go deeper.
Clear more trauma.
Integrate more lessons.
Empty your vessel.
Be the medicine.
Become the alternate ending.”

Unpacking any one of these mantras could take a lifetime. I’ve been trying to embrace all of them in a matter of months.

I am already a deep thinker. I’m not sure how to “go deeper,” so I double down on rabbit holes, deep dives, labyrinth-level mazes, mysteries, and the growing suspicion that nothing is what it appears to be.

Until I remember: thinking is what got me into this mess.
So I try feeling instead.
Feel everything.
Feel nothing.
Feel frightened.
Feel courageous.
Feel alone.
Feel loved.
Feel trapped.
Feel free.

And then, eventually, I surrender.
I let it all burn down.
I allow for emptiness.
I let it go.
I let me be me.

I move. I travel. I go places. I meet people. I try new things. I get lost and find myself in the most unexpected places, both figuratively and literally.

Yet through it all, I keep asking myself that maddening question any adult on a long road trip on an open road with restless kids dreads:
Are we there yet?

Because, frankly, I’m ready for this “joyride” to end. It’s uncomfortable. It’s unfamiliar. It requires me to be fully awake and alive enough to actually drive in uncharted territory, not just ride along.

And that’s when it hits me: no matter where I think “there” is, it’s not the place that was once safe and familiar. It’s not the “there” I could always find my way back to.

The only “there” now is the one that invites me to keep expanding, keep growing, keep unfolding, and becoming more me.

If you are like me, you are an infinitely curious creature, and an endlessly righteous one, too. You want to know what’s behind curtain #1, even after choosing curtain #2. Even if you made the best possible choice with the information you had, you want to know you were right.

Because what if you weren’t?
What if you made a “bad” or, heaven forbid, “wrong” choice?

But what if it’s just information?
Neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, fortuitous nor disastrous.
Just feedback.
Data points on a map you and I are still learning to read.

What if each choice, each consequence, each plot twist is simply the lesson we needed to navigate more confidently, more carefully, or more courageously next time?

Because there will be a next time. It won’t look like this time, or possibly any time before it. But if we can suspend judgment, if we can trust that everything is necessary, maybe we can relax and enjoy the ride a little more.

I say this as I stand at the edge of one of the hardest years of my life. Twenty-twenty-five is not a year I care to repeat. I’m guessing a few of us may feel this way.

But it’s not a year I would skip, either.

Gracious goodness rode shotgun with gut-wrenching grief.
Unexpected gains emerged from necessary losses.
Friends filled in the blanks that family left.
Emptiness opened the space that clutter had once claimed.

And the unknown, my constant companion, became the wild card that taught me more about how to play my hand than any solid strategy ever could.

Times like these teach us what works, what matters, and what’s worth our time and attention. They invite us to question the rules we’ve lived by and consider making up our own. They show us what we stand for and ask us to act from a sacred kind of sovereignty we didn’t know we had until something or someone threatened it.

Maybe the point is not to arrive at some recognizable version of ourselves. Maybe the point has always been to keep becoming - slowly, wildly, mysteriously - as many times as life asks it of us.

The road doesn’t get smoother just because we’re weary, and the lessons don’t land just because we want them to. But somewhere along the way, we start to soften into the truth that arrival is a myth and presence is the real pilgrimage.

I don’t know what the future holds because, honestly, I’ve yet to have a single day unfold the way I anticipated when I woke up that morning. I don’t know what will rise from what has burned.

But I do know this:
I trust my ability to handle it.
I trust my ability to work with whatever shows up.
I trust my capacity to co-create something surprising.
And I trust the Universe is conspiring on my behalf - even when I’m being broken open and remade by things I never would have chosen.

So no, I’m not “there” yet.

But I am here. I’m more honest, more awake, and more willing than I’ve ever been to allow the unknown to be my ally and show me things I could never have seen if I knew exactly where I was going or what I was looking for.

Maybe this is its own kind of arrival.

I’d love to hear from you:

Where are you on your journey right now?
What are you learning, letting go of, or slowly becoming as this year winds down and the new year promises another beginning?

Share in the comments—I always love reading your stories.

A few years ago at this time, I was in San Miguel de Allende at a writing retreat with my dear friend and consummate creative, Julia Alter. We had met at Asilomar seven years before, where Julia dreamed into existence the very retreat I was part of in Mexico. It was every bit as magical as she imagined it could be.

When we arrived in San Miguel, the city was already humming with preparations for the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) celebrations. Entrances to businesses were decorated with the most vibrant marigolds I’d ever seen. Pop-up markets filled alleys and plazas with offerings to the deceased. The streets felt alive with anticipation of the return of the dead.

The closest thing I can compare it to in my culture is Halloween, but Halloween doesn’t hold a candle to the rich, multi-layered ritual of honor I observed in Mexico.

Día de los Muertos is built on the belief that the souls of the departed return to the world of the living for a short visit. Families construct altars (ofrendas), placing photos of the deceased alongside candles, marigolds (cempasúchil), and their favourite foods and drinks to welcome them.

Officially celebrated on November 1 (in memory of children) and November 2 (in memory of adults), Día de los Muertos is about honoring the memory of those who’ve passed and acknowledging that life and death are part of the same cycle. The tradition blends both Indigenous and Catholic elements.

Rather than evoking fear or sorrow, this day emphasises connection, community, storytelling, and the sense that the dead are temporarily brought back to life through memory and ritual.

Costumes, parades, public altars, and community events are part of this dynamic celebration.

This year, after many personal losses, the Day of the Dead feels important to celebrate. It’s a day to honor the parts of me that have died, remember the parts of me that are finally returning, and celebrate the parts of me that are being reimagined.

It’s a bittersweet reckoning of past, present, and future. I release what could have been, acknowledge what is, and allow what might be to reveal itself.

None of that can happen without a deep appreciation for life itself. For all the plot twists that keep things interesting and moving along. For all the hard-won lessons and reminders that life is achingly beautiful and shockingly brief.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised that a poem arrived this week, when the veil between worlds is thin, that wanted to be called Día de los Muertos.

It’s both deeply personal and universal. I’ll share a few lines I’m guessing we’ve all experienced when we’ve had to leave a part of us behind.

On the Day of the Dead
I am no longer a ghost,
longing for all that has been lost.
On the Day of the Dead
I find myself back among the living,
where I allow myself to be loved back to life
by those who can truly see me.

While ghosting is a real thing these days, and you may disappear from another’s life or they may disappear from yours, may you never lose sight of who you truly are. And I especially hope you’re brave enough to show up in Technicolor for those who have never lost sight of you.

Your Turn

If you feel called, this week, create your own mini-altar for the part of yourself you’re mourning and for the part of yourself you’re birthing.

Light a candle. Write a note. Scatter a few petals. Invite your ancestors, your past selves, and your future self into the same circle of remembrance and emergence.

You can listen here on Spotify.

When I have an idea for a book, the ideas don’t just appear - they start living through me. It’s like being creatively possessed by the muses, who have no sense of time and get most chatty between 2-4am. Apparently, they run on moonlight.

As I write Architects of the Unknown and design the 8-week course, I’m suddenly seeing the world through the eyes of an architect. I’m noticing light, texture, color, form, function, space, and perspective as if these are new languages I’m just now learning to speak.

One of the chapters is on how to use light. I explore how light changes everything, reveals what’s hidden, softens what’s hard, and illuminates paths we didn’t know existed.

After spending Monday afternoon writing about it, I walked outside my front door to witness this amazing play of light. I heard these lyrics from John Mayer’s song Gravity in my head: “Just keep me where the light is.”

Now I’m not an architect, nor do I play one on tv, but I’ve always been fascinated by how design shapes how we see and experience places. Architecture reveals more than walls and roofs. It showcases societal values and power, culture and identity, as well as how we live and what we long for.

Knowing this, I suspected architectural concepts could help us bridge the unknown. It could give structure to the structureless, form to the formless, and illuminate areas that may be hidden from our awareness.

In design, the “unknown” is the starting point. The blank canvas. The empty page. A clean slate.

In life, the “unknown” often seems like the ending. The fire that wipes out a community. The relationship that ends abruptly. The career that gets derailed without notice. The health diagnosis that changes everything.

In these moments, the unknown is not something we want to work with. We want answers. We want certainty. We want our predictable life back.

But that’s no longer an option.

The unknown asks us to step into new territory and take a stand, even on shaky ground.

What if the unknown is not something to fear or resent but something we design and build from?

So many of us find ourselves in situations we couldn’t have imagined a year ago. This is why I created Architects of the Unknown. Not to avoid ambiguity. But to work with it. To look at what we’ve been taught to fear, like the dark side of the moon, and discover its untapped potential. To do so with a community of others who are going through similar upheaval and uncertainty.

If you’ve ever stared at a demolished building, a blank document, or the rest of your life and thought, “What next?”… I see you. If you’re ready to see yourself as an architect and not merely an occupant of your own future, then I’d love to have you join me for the next 8 weeks as together we build something we’ve never built before.

Join Architects of the Unknown

If you want nothing to do with the unknown right now, I get it. Instead, play with the light.

Here are some Write Your Way Out prompts:

• Where does the light weave its way throughout your day?

• Where does it illuminate your work?

• Where and how does it show up in the spaces you design or inhabit?

• What may be pulling you away from that light?

I’d love for you to share your answers with me at penny@wellpower.com.

If you’d prefer to listen to this on Spotify, you can do so at A Penny For Your Thoughts.

“You can’t see what’s next because you are being asked to create it.”

I didn’t expect to say that during our last Write Your Way Out session. In that moment, I wasn’t even sure what it meant. But it felt true. And something stirred in me.

The next morning, at 4 a.m., I found myself outlining a new path for Architects of the Unknown.

I imagined a world where we design our lives around our values, desires, and a willingness to receive. I pictured a time when the unknown doesn’t paralyze us but compels us to take a leap forward.

We exist in a time when old structures and systems are dissolving, and new realities are being shaped moment by moment, choice by choice. That means you and I are being asked to build our personal blueprint, follow our own compass, and make our own meaning. To reincarnate into a new way of being.

Some of you will hear freedom in those words. You’ve waited a long time to live life on your terms.

Others will hear danger, risk, chaos, and discomfort.

If words like “unclear,” “undefined,” or “unknown” trigger your nervous system, you have my permission to quit reading now because these words are going to weave their way through this piece, and preserving your peace is important to me.

But if you feel a nudge, a stirring, a twinge of curiosity, keep reading.

If you’ve been awake, alive, and aware in 2025, you know the comfort ship has sailed. There is no going back to the safety of the shore.

While you may not be ready to embrace the unknown, you may agree that it’s time to explore some strategies for dealing with it.

What to Do When You Don’t Know What’s Next

1. Take a breath.
You’ve survived everything life has thrown at you so far. Despite your perceived imperfections and alleged epic fails, miraculously, you are here now reading this. That means your survival rate is 100%. Trust you can handle whatever comes next. Even if you don’t know what that is yet.

2. Start small. Start before you’re ready.
Tiny steps, micro-movements are all that are required. Assess. Adjust. Choose. Every step you take reveals another you may not have anticipated. Choose again.

3. Follow your fascination.
Lean into what holds your attention, and listen to the whispers of what’s calling you forward.

Many of you have spent lifetimes following rules, paying “the price of nice,” and living someone else’s blueprint. Today, ready or not, you have a chance to begin creating your own.

You have the opportunity to unleash your creative power. To move from being defined by a role to being guided by your soul.

This is both liberating and terrifying. I’m aware I’m making big claims. But what if the discomfort of not knowing is actually your invitation to move from predictability to possibility, from reaction to reinvention?

I used to be a lone wolf and assumed I had to because no one understood my vision. But those days are over. As Barbara Sher wrote in Wishcraft, “Isolation is the dream killer.” Thriving in this new world requires community, connection, and shared courage.

None of us has all the answers. But I have plenty of questions, and so do you. Together, we can explore possibilities and help each other see what wants to emerge.

Maybe all is well in your world now, you’re in a good place, and you don’t want to look at or invite change in. I get it, and I bow to where you are.

But if your world is shifting, if you feel lost in the transition between the familiar and the unfamiliar, I invite you to join an 8-week journey into the unknown.

I can’t promise you’ll know exactly what’s next by the end of our time together. But I can promise you won’t have to face your fears alone. You’ll be surrounded by support, strategies, and allies who help make the unknown less scary, maybe even exciting.

How It Works

• Field Guides
  Beginning Friday, October 24th, you’ll receive weekly reflections, prompts, and action steps to start playing with your personal blueprint. We’ll use architectural and design metaphors to help you visualize, experiment, and collaborate with your desires and sense of wonder.

• Biweekly Live Zoom Sessions
  Every other week, we’ll gather for a live discussion on Zoom, providing a space for you to connect, share, ask questions, and be witnessed as your future unfolds.

• Community & Support
  Although you can do this work on your own, it’s designed to be explored, evolved, and imagined in a community. You’ll build your blueprint based on your unique answers to a variety of questions. The group will be your sounding board, holding space for one another, sharing perspectives, and building momentum together. If you can’t attend the live group discussions, you can always ask for input from the community on our group page.

Join the Journey

Once a year, I create a program exclusively for paid subscribers to Read It and Leap. Architects of the Unknown is the program for 2025. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, you can participate in the following ways:

• One-Time Purchase – Click this link to enroll in the 8-week program.

• Yearly Substack Subscription – Become a paid annual subscriber to Read It and Leap and receive the course as part of your paid subscription. This option saves you $21 and includes all the exclusive content and community benefits reserved for paid members year-round. This helps grow our community, allows me to offer cutting-edge content throughout the year, and funds scholarships.

  Subscribe now

• Limited scholarships are available. I don’t want financial constraints to keep you from participating in this journey if it’s calling to you. Reach out to me at penny@wellpower.com if you’d like to apply for a scholarship.

Your Invitation

From grade school to grad school, we’ve been handed maps: how to get from here to there, step by step. What if the map for what’s next doesn’t yet exist? What if you’re meant to build it?

You know better than anyone what you want your life to look and feel like. You know your preferences, your capacities, and your deepest longings.

If “Architect of the Unknown” resonates with you, I invite you to join me and my fellow seekers as we walk toward what’s calling us. If now isn’t your time to join this journey, I hope reading this plants a seed for what’s next for you.

If you prefer to listen, tune in here on Spotify.

Last week was homecoming in my small town. I didn’t realize it was happening until it was over. Still, the mere mention of the word sent memories flooding back of late nights building floats draped in crepe paper, bonfires, pep rallies, parades, dances, and the big game.

Homecoming is one of those traditions that mixes the silly with the sacred. The week leading up to the main event is bursting with activities meant to spark school spirit and energize the community.

On the surface, it’s about all football, fall formals, and crowning a king and queen. But underneath, it’s about something deeper.

To me, it’s about returning to the place that shaped me and to the people who knew me before I knew myself. Like high school reunions, it invites me to look back at who I was then, with big hair, shoulder pads, and other questionable fashion choices. And I wonder when I became a person who wears sensible shoes and is in bed by 10pm.

When I reminisce with friends who remember things differently, I wonder what false narratives I’ve allowed to shape my story all these years. When I catch a glimpse of the teenager I used to be, I wonder how she feels about the adult I’ve become.

In truth, we’re all alumni of our past. There are parts of ourselves we abandoned long ago that long to be remembered. Reclaiming those parts now can be a bit like trying to tame a feral animal. They’ve grown wild and highly suspicious of us in our absence.

Some of those lost parts don’t come home easily. During my time in England, I worked with a shaman to do a soul retrieval to begin to call those parts of myself home. This sparked a journey Into The Mystic with a healer here at home who continues to help me integrate all my rogue and restless parts. (You’ll be hearing more about this in upcoming posts.)

We all need a homecoming now and then. We need a pause from relentlessly pushing forward, a chance to retrace our steps, and welcome ourselves home.

For a long time, I thought coming home meant I had failed. That this small-town girl just couldn’t cut it in the big city. But now I know what a gift it is to have a place to come home to, like Keith Urban sings about in his song Coming Home:

“There’s a place that I know where they all know me,
I gotta get back now to the ones who love me.
I’m longin’ for the real thing,
people who know the real me
and all the ways to love me back to life.”

The highlight of any homecoming is often the crowning of a king and queen. But in a personal homecoming, the crown belongs to the parts of us that we are willing to acknowledge. The resilience that carried us through heartbreak, the courage that rose when everything fell apart, or the tenderness that surfaced when harshness seemed like the only choice. It also belongs to the old friends who opened their hearts to us when we returned.

What if we celebrated these small victories, ordinary acts of courage, unseen persistence, and old friendships with the same enthusiasm and joyfulness as a homecoming parade down Main Street? What if we could clap for ourselves with the same fierce loyalty as we do the marching band at halftime?

Maybe your homecoming is about reconnecting with an old dream. Maybe it’s about softening toward a part of yourself you’ve judged too harshly. Maybe it’s about opening your heart to a new love, a new community, or rediscovering a forgotten joy.

Whatever it looks like, homecoming is less about stadium lights and more about letting your light shine. It’s less about crowns and corsages and more about claiming your own throne.

I’d love to know who or what you are ready to welcome home. If you’re not sure, here are some journal prompts from my Write Your Way Out process to help you reflect on your own homecoming.

1. Begin with Belonging
   Homecoming begins by recognizing where you already belong.
   • Where do you feel most at home right now? Is it a place, a person, or within yourself?
   • What spaces, habits, or relationships give you a sense of warmth and welcome?

2. Remember Who You Were
   Sometimes we have to visit our past selves to understand our present.
   • Think back to a past homecoming or a turning-point in your life. What did that version of you hope for? What did they fear? What did they act on?
   • What part of your younger self is still alive in you today?

3. Celebrate the Small Victories
   The crown belongs to the parts of you that kept going.
   • What moments of courage, grace, or resilience deserve a standing ovation?
   • How can you honor them with gratitude or a personal celebration or ritual?

4. Coming Home to Yourself
   Homecoming is less about a destination and more about recognition.
   • What pieces of yourself are you ready to welcome back?
   • What forgiveness or softening might create room for your return?

5. Shine Your Light
   Shift the focus from the stadium lights to your inner light.
   • What light within you wants to be seen or celebrated this season?
   • How can you let it shine — in your home, your work, or your relationships?

Join the Journey

In our last Write Your Way Out session, several people shared how they wished they knew what was next for them. What I found myself saying was, “We have no way of knowing right now because we are being asked to create it.” And unlike anything that has come before, we’re being asked to build our future in an entirely new way.

With this in mind, I’ve set out to create a container for us to explore the unknown, to create something meaningful in ways we haven’t seen or done before, and to leap into the mystery without fear or doubt but with the clarity that draws our unknowable futures closer with each choice.

I’m calling this adventure “Architects of the Unknown.” If you’re in a place of uncertainty around what comes next, I’d love for you to join me for this journey. I promise you, it’s like nothing you or I have done before.

Every Friday from October 17 - November 28th, I’ll share a Field Guide about how to boldly go where no one has gone before and suggest steps for you to take to create an individualized blueprint to wherever your imagination takes you. Every other week (October 24, November 7, November 21), I’ll host a live Zoom call where we can share our discoveries.

What does it cost? This course is included with your yearly subscription, so if you’re a paid subscriber, you’re already in! You can become one today and get the course as part of your annual subscription. Or you can also choose to pay a one-time fee for the class. Click here to register and find out more about the course.

This is your invitation to stop waiting for the map and start designing it. To walk toward what’s calling — even if you can’t yet name it. To become an Architect of the Unknown.

To listen to this on Spotify, click here .

One of the most telling photos from my trip to England wasn’t the most obvious. It was a small road sign in Bath: No Reversing.

Of all the signs I got, from feathers to an enormous model left ear in a window (I kid you not!), this was the most straightforward.

There would be no going back after this trip. No reversing.

A portal opened. I walked through it.

This wasn’t a vacation; it was a powerful pilgrimage—a walkabout along the St. Michael ley lines, meant to leave behind what no longer served. To remember, to retrieve, to activate and embody the ancient wisdom that had been waiting to be reclaimed.

I had been to England fifteen years earlier to walk the lands around Lake District with poet David Whyte and friends who called ourselves the Lost Ladies of Cumbria, since we often veered from the path, lost in conversation or captivated by a particularly picturesque view.

The fact that this trip aligned with the eclipse season felt destined. The first step toward your destiny can often be denied or dismissed as impractical or outrageous.

This was no different. But the nudge to attend a workshop in London turned into a commitment once a few friends decided to join the journey.

Before I set out, I did an energetic prep call with Diomira Rose, a faery whisperer and all-around magician, who crafted a bespoke flower essence specifically for my trip. She asked what I hoped to receive and what I longed to connect with. She urged me to prepare gifts for the stones, wells, waters, forests, and trees because so often visitors arrive and take without giving anything in return.

In the days leading up to my trip, I collected corn, beans, acorns, and feathers from my home to leave at theirs. I put them in little medicine pouches with specific questions and affirmations. This added a level of intentionality and reverence, turning this journey into a ritual.

A week before departure, crows began appearing everywhere. I created a “symbology of crows playsheet” that I’m happy to share with you, exploring their symbolism and meaning. They were harbingers of the transformation to come, but I hadn’t yet grasped their full meaning.

Then, at Stonehenge, I understood. We’d arranged a sunrise tour that allowed us into the inner circle. Once again, crows were everywhere, guardians of that circle, black sentinels in the surreal dawn light. Their visit to my world was preparing me to experience theirs.

When I spotted the rainbow, my mind was officially blown.

The crows also accompanied me to Glastonbury, the climb up the Tor, the Chalice Well/Red Spring, the White Spring, to Bath, to the stones at Avebury, and the trek up to the West Kennet Long Barrow. They were even spotted at Windsor Castle when we attended Evensong at St. George’s Chapel. They became companions, messengers, witnesses.

Of course, not everything was crows and rainbows. Inherent in any quest are the trials, tests, and challenges.

Traveling in a foreign country is both exhilarating and terrifying. I adored the individuality and personality of the people, that dogs are allowed in pubs, that I felt more a part of a global community than I do in my country, and that everything sounds better with an accent.

But driving on the opposite side of impossibly narrow, hedge-lined country roads with no shoulders was a continuous stress-fest. Figuring out the Tube and train schedule (especially during a strike), how to deal with so many people all in one place at the same time (Platform 9 3/4 and the Harry Potter store were always packed), using and converting a different currency, unfamiliar-to-me foods (bubbles and squeaks, anyone?), and the time difference when texting people at home definitely forced my brain to forge new neural networks and synaptic links.

And then there were the life lessons. It may be possible for lessons to be delivered with gentleness rather than a sledgehammer, but insights from sacred sites are seldom subtle. If you’ve traveled far and wide to get them, they will create the conditions for you to receive them.

What I hadn’t considered was that usually when I travel to workshops, I stay in the same place for several days and spend my time with many different people.

After the weekend workshop with a couple of friends, this trip became a movable feast with one other person, whom I admittedly didn’t know that well. Of course, travel reveals things about people we think we know really well, too, so there’s that. But the shared history and awareness of each other's quirks and foibles tend to soften us and allow us to give each other a wider berth than someone who doesn’t know why we do what we do.

My travel companion and I had done a lot of personal growth work, so when one of us hit a wall, we were able to address it. We had both experienced big life changes and were looking at this trip as a way to help transmute and transform the losses and initiate a new beginning. Doing so required space and grace.

Fortunately, the land itself provided both and the six to eight miles of walking daily gave us the ability to stay grounded and move through whatever we were going through. It also left us exhausted and on edge.

There’s a risk in revealing yourself to another person. There’s a vulnerability in showing yourself to another when you’re tired, scared, stressed, raw, emotional, or awestruck. There’s always the possibility you’re too much or too little for another human being. That they’ll judge you, reject you, or disapprove of you. That you will somehow disappoint them.

But if you refuse to judge, reject, disapprove, or disappoint yourself, you take back your power, and you alone get to determine your worth.

Traveling with someone who functioned as a mirror revealed to me a pattern I’d carried unconsciously for years, one that shaped how I relate, speak, and hold space. I doubt I would’ve seen it if I’d traveled with a best friend or family member.

Because I’m an empath, I feel deeply. I absorb the emotional undercurrents around me, sense what’s unspoken, attempt to express it, and stay clear of conflict. The trick is not to mistake that sensitivity for responsibility and carry burdens that aren’t mine, or to see myself as worthy only if I “fix” what feels unsettled.

In ten days, I had more fierce conversations than I’ve had in the past ten years. This was both brutal and beautiful. And much to my surprise, I didn’t die. My voice did shake, just like the Maggie Kuhn quote suggests, “Speak your mind - even if your voice shakes,” and I felt incredibly wobbly at times. But I ultimately felt free.

The land, the time, the sacred threshold I was crossing demanded that a truer, stronger version of me emerge. And it did.

Just like the sign said, no reversing. No going back.

Only forward. Onward. To the light.

Or to the pubs because there are dogs - and cider - there.

I’d love to hear your travel stories, the signs you’ve been given, and lessons you’ve learned. Email me at penny@wellpower.com and share them (and photos!) with me. Or leave a comment below.

When it comes to reunions, there are two types of people. Those who love them - organize them, travel far and wide to attend them - and those who avoid them even when they’re five minutes away.

Until this year, I was firmly in the latter camp. Not because I didn’t want to reconnect with the people who grew up in the same place at the same time I did, but because high school was a hormone-fueled, trauma-triggering time.

Even though I got through it relatively unscathed, the 80s were not a great time for girls. The emergence of supermodels versus soccer stars or poet laureates gave us questionable models to aspire to. We had come a long way since June Cleaver, but it was still very much a man’s world, where our biggest contribution was to look good.

Like many women and girls, my way of coping with this standard was a subtle form of self-loathing. I became anorexic before anyone knew what that was. Even I didn’t understand what was happening to me or why. I only knew I was hungry for something more than a Stepford future. It took decades before I knew what to do with that hunger.

So, I wasn’t sure I wanted to revisit the “glory days.”

It’s one thing to return to your reunion when you’re at the top of your game, have lost twenty pounds, had some work done, and are in a supportive and loving relationship.

It’s another thing when you’re in “middlescence”, a place gerontologist Barbara Waxman says shares many of the characteristics of adolescence, but with the wisdom and experience of midlife. It includes emotional and psychological shifts, physical and hormonal changes, and life transitions.

But at a certain age, you realize everyone has survived something. There’s no need to prove yourself anymore - your survival is validation enough.

You don’t take for granted that you’ll see your peers again. Instead, you’re genuinely curious: Who have they become? What have they learned? And you recognize that everyone is as shell-shocked as you are to discover they are this age.

Since moving back to my hometown, one of the biggest shifts has been connecting with people in person again. Zoom is wonderful, but nothing compares to sharing energy, presence, and emotion face-to-face. My life feels fuller, deeper, and richer because of it. There’s comfort in knowing someone will keep the light on for me.

And there is a familiarity in being with people who knew me before I had to be anything to the world. Before I became someone’s partner or parent, boss or employee, hero or nemesis.

Maybe that’s what compelled me to go to my reunion after all these years. I needed my future self and my past self to help me reconcile and reimagine my present self.

No one tells you at eighteen that, despite all your hard work and good intentions, at some point, your life will unravel. That you’ll have to let go of who and what you love and resurrect your life from the rubble.

Graduation speeches promise greatness; they rarely mention the detours, heartbreak, or hidden gifts of being gutted: greater compassion, expansion, and deeper awareness.

Although it can happen any time, because this unraveling time often arrives in midlife, we label it a crisis. Maybe it’s a betrayal - by your body, your culture, your identity, the medical profession, a spouse, your family, or all of the above - that brings about the reckoning and ignites the rage.

But what if, as Chip Conley suggests, we saw it instead as a chrysalis? A necessary cocoon where transformation unfolds. Not decline, but rebirth.

With this perspective, transition times become less crisis and more emergence. You shed your skin not to become someone new or regain what was lost, but to become more fully YOU right now, in this moment.

There is no going back, my skeptical caterpillar. Only forward, my bold butterfly.

I may never have gone to that reunion without my good friend Gertie by my side and a few nudges from others. I may never have left my comfortable yet constrictive life without an unexpected betrayal. But those leaps allowed me to remember who I am and how resilient I’ve become.

Maybe returning for the reunions and subsequent reckoning is really about remembering that you and I have always been these things… curious, courageous, creative, compassionate, whole, and complete.

Fun Fact:

My mom is currently organizing her 70th high school reunion and eight of her original class of twenty-eight are still around to celebrate! How great is that? Their gathering proves that timeless connections endure and mature.

On another note, this week I’m headed to London for the much-anticipated Lee Harris Energy Mastery weekend. Last year, I attended Lee’s Soul Magic in Santa Fe, and it was exactly that - magic for my soul. After that, a friend and I are off on a pilgrimage through Stonehenge, Glastonbury, and Bath for our own magical mystery tour. The days between the lunar eclipse on the 7th and the solar eclipse on the 21st are potent days to release what no longer serves and let the truest version of yourself emerge.

Here’s hoping you find your way back to your original magic during the next few weeks.

If you'd prefer to listen, you can do so here on Spotify.

I’ve been fascinated with time lately and how everything seems to be happening to everyone everywhere all at once. On any given day, it certainly feels like everything is happening to me. Things that could have easily paced themselves and spread out over a lifetime instead of all happening today, this month, or this year.

Yet ironically, the things I truly wish were happening are not. That doesn’t mean they never will; they’re just not happening… yet.

I learned about the power of yet from psychological researcher Carol Dweck, who coined the term growth mindset. Unlike a fixed mindset, which sees abilities as static, a growth mindset sees potential as developable with effort and time. Instead of saying “I can’t do this,” saying “I can’t do this… yet,” shifts the feeling of finality to one of possibility and perseverance.

In a world where I can order something in the morning and have it delivered that afternoon, my expectations around wish fulfillment may have become slightly skewed.

Some things simply take time. Things like:

• Planting a garden

• Pursuing a degree

• Training a puppy

• Learning a new language or a new sport

• Healing a broken heart

• Moving to a new town and leaving friends and family

• Bringing a new baby home or having your “baby” leave for college

These things are not to be rushed. They’re transformative journeys. Feeling comfortable with them as soon as you set out to do them is seldom possible.

Because you’re not there emotionally… yet.

You’ve done the courageous thing of setting things in motion, acting on your intention, and putting yourself out there, but you haven’t arrived safely at your new reality ... yet. You could even argue that at this point, you don’t even know where “there” is … yet.

You’re a work in progress. You’re in your own bardo, the place Tibetan Buddhism refers to as the powerful, in-between state - between death and rebirth, or between any two experiences of becoming. You’re not stuck, not behind, but evolving.

Like the woman in the Gordon Coutts painting from 1896 called Waiting (above), you’re neither here nor there. You’ve packed your bags, bought your tickets, and are at the station. You’ve entered that liminal space of uncertainty where your old reality dissolves before the next emerges. It’s a space of becoming, not a fault to be fixed, or a discomfort to be endured. It’s the threshold where transformation truly begins.

It’s in this in-between bardo place and time where shit gets real. It’s where the things you never saw coming come out of nowhere, and you survive by using your tools and finding your resilience, strength, flexibility, brilliance, sense of humor, curiosity, compassion, and courage.

This is what yet asks of you: to remain present in the messiness of transition, to sit with uncertainty not as a failure, but as sacred ground for becoming - where definitions dissolve and the new, yet unnamed, self begins to emerge.

This is the place where any attempt at expansion and growth is worth acknowledging. Any attempt at aligning your head and heart is worth celebrating. Any attempt at expressing your soul’s desire is worth honoring. Any attempt at any age is to be commended.

Yes, it’s going to get messy. Yes, it’s going to take longer and cost more than you thought. Yes, you’re going to have delays, detours, and the occasional epic failures that temporarily derail you.

Until you realize how far you’ve come.

Maybe you’re not out of the woods … yet.

Maybe you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel … yet.

But you’re still here. You’re doing the work, putting in the time, and showing up.

You’re making a difference. You're changing what’s possible for you with every new choice you make from this perspective. You’re changing your life at a cellular level. Every step is rewiring how you live, how you choose to lead, and who you dare to become.

You’re not meant to play small or hide out. You, my friend, have greatness within you that’s longing to be expressed - no matter when you start looking.

What do I mean by greatness? I mean the thing that makes you YOU. The thing that only you can do or be. The thing that only you know, only you can create, curate, make, bake, perform, play, express, experience, and share.

Maybe it’s the smile you offer a stranger, the secret handshake you invent with a co-conspirator, your uncanny ability to soothe a crying baby, the animated voice you use when you read a child’s favorite story, or how you hold your dad’s hand when he gets confused. Maybe it’s your karaoke version of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me.”

The world is always rushing to resolve itself as if in a perpetual, “Are we there yet?” loop. To get to the next thing before the present thing is fully felt or experienced.

But you don’t have to rush. You’re allowed to linger longer. You have permission to take your time. You get to “Sit and feast on your life,” as Derek Walcott urges in the closing lines of one of my favorite poems, Love After Love.

My goal these days is to appreciate the power of yet. To not have all the answers, trust how I feel, or know what my next step is … yet.

Your Turn

Here are some questions for you to reflect on and to use for your very own Write Your Way Out session.

• What’s an area where you feel you’re not quite there… yet?

• What gifts are available to you in the messy middle?

• What would happen if you gave yourself the benefit of the ‘yet’?

• Where in your life are you standing between what was and what will be?

• Can you sense that sacred bardo (in-between place) and step into it with curiosity, courage, and grace?

I’d love for you to share your responses with me at penny@wellpower.com or join me for this month’s Write Your Way Out live session on Friday, August 29th at 1pm Eastern on Zoom. Click here to register.

I’ve been playing around with ChatGTP lately, and it turns out, it knows a staggering amount of stuff.

Cool stuff, helpful stuff, interesting stuff, and even what’s-best-for-me stuff.

It knows which places might fit my temperament, who might be interested in what I have to say, and what jobs would suit my skill set.

It can act as my editor, assistant, BFF, therapist, coach, and travel agent. Although sadly, it can’t help me move furniture or carry heavy objects, it can help me find someone who can.

Like a genie in a bottle of infinite answers, all I have to do is wish to know something, et voilà! More possibilities present themselves than I may have ever considered.

A friend recently suggested I ask ChatGPT for affirmations about peace, letting go, and healing. Within moments, it not only gave me excellent affirmations but also formatted them into illustrated cards I can tuck into my pocket or tape to my mirror.

My friend also suggested using these affirmations as a tapping script for EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique).

For me, tapping is a great tool for shifting the stories on repeat in my head. Yes, I may look silly tapping meridian points on my face and body, but it shifts the intensity of my emotions quickly.

EFT is one of many tools I’ve practiced along the way. As a transformational coach, I’ve discovered how important is is to have a variety of tools to serve different purposes—especially in challenging times, transitional times, and times-they-are-a-changin’ times.

But no matter what tools I have at my disposal, they only work if I actually use them.

Like a child who loses track of all the toys in her toy box, I forget how many tools I have to play with. And I forget that I’m never too old to pull them out and put them to work, even if they seem odd or unconventional.

Because these tools can save my life. At the very least, they save my sanity.

“What do I mean by tools?” you ask.

Before there was an app for anything, there was a tool for everything. The quality and speed of repairing or creating something depended upon having the right tools for the job.

I grew up on a farm surrounded by tools of all sizes and shapes for working on tractors, trucks, trailers, fences, buildings, construction, and destruction.

While hammers and nails, wrenches and screwdrivers, tape measures and chisels, power tools and safety gear are what you’ll find in our machine shed or a literal toolkit, what I’m talking about here is a figurative toolkit. These are the practices, habits, and mindsets that help you handle life’s challenges.

Here are a few of mine:

• Writing and creating → survival tools

• Walking and swimming → shift-my-energy tools

• Traveling and reading/watching The School of Life books and videos → gaining perspective tools

• Ho’oponopono and radical acceptance → give-peace-a-chance tools

• Playing with my dogs, feeding the birds, watering the plants → ground, center, and spark joy tools

• Spending time with friends or attending workshops → grow-through-what-you-go-through tools

Your toolkit may look entirely different. Yours might include baking bread, digging in the dirt, or feng shui-ing your home or workspace. Maybe it’s chopping wood, mowing the lawn, or playing pickleball. Maybe it’s writing a song, solving crossword puzzles, or listening to guided meditations on an app like Insight Timer.

Capital One may be interested in what’s in your wallet, but I’m far more interested in what’s in your toolkit. Because that’s where your gold lies.

No matter what may be going on around you, your tools remind you how to access what’s going on within you.

Your tools are your buried treasure. They allow you to reinvent, rediscover, and remember who you are.

Perhaps it’s time to dig up your gold. Make your list, as I did, and describe what tools you use and why. Having them written down in front of you makes it easier to remember—and to actually use them.

And if you’re not sure what’s in your toolkit? Ask a friend. Ask a mentor. Ask me. Or even ask ChatGPT.

Because your tools—whether silly, simple, or profound—aren’t just what you use. They’re what carry you forward.

Here’s a playsheet ChatGPT compiled and I illustrated for you to see the different types of tools to consider including in your toolkit. Your figurative toolkit is about inner resources and your literal toolkit is about external resources. I find a combination of both is usually required.