Is it exceptional? No. But I’m still following the thread of not letting exceptional get in the way of good.

So I spent today figuring out how to bring The Map Maker to life in a completely different way.

And this is what I came up with.

The Map Maker comes into the world October 4. It’s starting to feel very real.

If you’d like to wander around the little corner of the internet I built for it, you can find me at shelbyskubic.com

I want to tell you a story.

The week before I had surgery on my neck, I felt a calling to go to Hawaii.

I was scared.

There was something about imagining myself lying on a table with my neck cut open while doctors removed parts of my body and replaced them with artificial discs that frightened me in a very physical way.

I wanted to raise my vibe before I walked into that operating room.

And for whatever reason, I felt like I needed the ocean.

So I took Charley Rose with me and went to the Big Island to visit a friend. I thought maybe if I could spend a few days in Hawaii, in the water, surrounded by that energy, I would come home more prepared for what was waiting for me.

A few moments from that trip have stayed with me.

One was seeing the volcano erupt.

Not only was it erupting while we were there, but as I stood watching, the lava appeared to be flowing in the shape of a heart.

A heart.

I remember looking at it and feeling like Pele was speaking directly to me.

I didn’t need to know whether anyone else would see what I saw. It felt personal.

Afterward, we walked through the lava tubes.

And after witnessing something as enormous and powerful as an erupting volcano, somehow my attention was caught by something very small.

A little mouse sitting in a fern.

I leaned over and took a picture.

The woman behind me saw what I was photographing and liked the image so much that she asked if I would send it to her. I did.

A few weeks later, I heard from her again.

She sent me a photograph of my photograph.

She had blown up the picture of that little mouse and hung it on her wall.

Somewhere along the way, I learned that she was a speech pathologist.

Of course she was.

I couldn’t help but smile.

Then came our last night in Hawaii.

We decided to go dancing.

We thought we were going to ladies’ night.

Instead, we walked into Fuego.

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Three years ago, we brought home a puppy.

His name is Roger.

I thought I was bringing home a dog. I didn’t know I was about to discover how much more love my heart could hold.

Not long after Roger came into our lives, I severely injured my ankle. Suddenly, my world became smaller. There was pain, limited mobility, surgeries and recovery, and a lot more time spent sitting still than I was accustomed to.

And there he was.

Still a baby himself, but somehow already understanding the language of staying close.

There is a photograph from that time that says more than I realized when it was taken. My legs are stretched out in front of me, wrapped and immobilized, and Roger is curled against me with his head resting on my lap.

He isn’t doing anything extraordinary.

He’s just staying.

I used to think our closeness began because he was a puppy and puppies attach themselves to you. Looking back, I wonder if something else happened. I brought him home just before an injury forced me to become still. For months, there were so many things I couldn’t do.

But I could sit with him.

I could hold him.

I could let him curl against my body while mine healed.

Maybe that is where we learned each other.

Three years later, Roger still follows me from room to room. If I move, he moves. If I settle somewhere, eventually he settles nearby. Sometimes I wonder whether he thinks it is his job to keep track of me, or whether he simply can’t imagine why we would ever need to be in separate rooms.

Either way, I love it.

But our mornings might be my favorite.

Before the day asks anything of us, I make my coffee and we go outside together.

Anyone who sits beside me long enough learns something about me: I like to touch the people I love. Roger is no exception.

He learned quickly that if he settles across my lap, my hands will find him. I’ll run my fingers through his curls, scratch behind his ears, and absentmindedly love on him while we watch the morning unfold.

He turns his face toward the yard, and together we watch the squirrels and the birds, and, if we’re lucky, the deer wandering through.

There isn’t much happening in those moments.

And maybe that’s why I love them so much.

My coffee in one hand. Roger beneath the other. The two of us watching the world wake up.

Before either of us goes anywhere, we are still together first.

Maybe that’s part of what those months gave us.

We learned how to be still together.

There is something about loving Roger that brings me directly into the present. He doesn’t care what happened yesterday or what I need to accomplish tomorrow. His entire world seems to exist inside this morning, this squirrel, this patch of sunshine, this moment beside me.

And somehow, being loved by him has taught me to live there a little more often too.

Sometimes I look at him and feel almost overwhelmed by how much I love him. His ridiculous curls. The way he watches me. The way my hands reach for him without me even thinking about it. I say his name just because I like saying it. I have whole conversations with him that require absolutely no response.

There is nothing complicated about the love between us.

Maybe that’s part of why it feels so enormous.

Roger isn’t my first dog. But I have never loved a dog quite like this.

Recently, Charley captured a photograph of us walking together. When I looked at it, something about it stopped me.

There we are, side by side.

And I can’t help but think about that earlier photograph. The one with my legs immobilized and this tiny puppy curled against me.

Three years ago, I couldn’t walk.

Roger stayed beside me.

Now we walk together.

I thought I was bringing home a puppy. Instead, this curly-haired little boy arrived just before life brought me to a standstill, settled himself beside me, and made himself at home.

I had no idea how much my heart could hold.

He may not be my first dog.

But this one?

This one has the keys to my heart.

If you found something of your own in this story, a beloved animal, a season of healing, or one of those quiet relationships that somehow becomes part of the fabric of your life, I’m glad you’re here.

Subscribe to follow along as I continue writing about the ordinary moments that have a way of revealing just how much our hearts can hold.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about the courage it takes to change.

Not the dramatic kind that happens in a single moment, where everything before and after can be neatly divided.

The quieter kind.

The kind you almost don’t notice until you look around and realize you are standing somewhere you never expected to be.

Somehow, I became a blogger.

I laugh a little even writing that because I never set out to become one. I was a writer. I wrote privately for most of my life, filling journals with the things I was trying to understand. Writing was where I went to hear myself more clearly.

Then, slowly, I began letting other people read.

One essay became another. A personal story became a conversation. Someone would tell me that something I wrote made them feel seen, and something inside me would shift.

Because there were so many times in my own life when that was exactly what I had needed.

To be seen.

Not fixed. Not handed someone else’s map.

Seen.

Somewhere along the way, I began to understand that perhaps some of the experiences I thought belonged only to me could become something else when shared.

Now, as I move from being someone who writes to becoming the author of a novel, I can feel another threshold beneath my feet.

My words are beginning to extend beyond me.

And sometimes I wonder, Are people actually interested in all of this?

It isn’t really approval I’m looking for. I think I am still getting used to the intimacy of being known this way.

Pieces of a life that once lived inside journals or conversations with people I trusted are now being offered to people I may never meet.

Especially because being a writer isn’t something I inherited permission to do.

When my mother was a teenager, my grandmother found her journals and made her burn them. She told her not only to stop writing about those things, but to get them out of her head.

I think about that sometimes.

A girl being taught that certain thoughts should not be written down.

A generation later, here I am, preparing to publish a novel.

The more I have trusted my own inner compass instead of measuring my life against someone else’s definition of success, the more I have found myself in places where the exchange feels reciprocal.

I write something true. Someone recognizes themselves inside it. And somehow, their recognition gives something back to me too.

But now change is asking something new of me.

I have written the book.

Soon, I have to help it find its readers.

And there is a practical reality I can’t journal my way around: I want to promote my book responsibly, and right now there is a gap between what I want to do and where the money to do it will come from.

I don’t yet know the answer.

There was a time when that uncertainty might have convinced me I wasn’t ready.

Now I wonder if this is simply what the next threshold feels like.

Maybe courage is being willing to keep moving before I know exactly how everything will work out.

My grandmother once told my mother to burn her words.

I am learning how to send mine farther.

And maybe that is enough for now.

To trust my own inner compass and take the next step.If you’d like to walk alongside me as I take these next steps, I’d love to have you here. I’ll be sharing more of the journey as The Map Maker makes its way from something I wrote quietly into something I release into the world.

Perhaps that is part of the courage, too. Letting ourselves be witnessed as we become.

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I have always wondered how two people can love each other enough to build a life together, and then somehow arrive at hate.

I understand falling out of alignment. I understand realizing that the life you are living is no longer the life you want. I understand anger, hurt, betrayal, disappointment, and needing distance.

What I have never quite understood is how love gets converted into hate.

Maybe that is because I don’t have much hate in my heart.

I was fifteen when I met my first husband. We married at eighteen. Those are such formative years, the years when we are still deciding what we believe about love, family, ourselves, and the world.

For me, those years were especially complicated. There was the way I had been raised and what I had learned I was supposed to believe. And then there was my inner compass.

It was actually pretty loud.

I just didn’t know how to listen to it yet.

Somewhere along the way, I began shape-shifting. Becoming what other people needed me to be. Learning how to belong by adapting myself to the people around me.

But that doesn’t mean the life we created wasn’t real.

We grew up together. We had fun. We made memories that still make me smile. We became parents. There are entire chapters of my life that no one else witnessed in quite the same way because we were there together.

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At the back-to-school picnic last night, I found myself talking with parent after parent who said some version of the same thing.

They were tired.

Ready for school. Ready for schedules. Ready for someone else to decide what everyone was doing at 10:00 on a Tuesday morning.

I understood.

We’re coming into the last few days of summer, and I’ve had the unusual gift of spending nearly the entire break with my nine-year-old daughter, Charley Rose. I intentionally kept our summer fairly open. There were a few things sprinkled onto the calendar: short mini camps for art, soccer, golf and archery, along with plenty of playdates and sleepovers. We met new friends and spent time with family.

I even slipped away myself. I went to Canada to meet a new friend and dig a little deeper into the layers of who I am. Chris and I took a road trip to Victoria and listened to The Alchemist along the way.

There wasn’t one grand summer vacation.

Mostly, there was space.

A summer built less around what we should do and more around following what called to us.

It hasn’t always been this way.

When my older kids were young, summer happened alongside a full-time job and the logistics of raising four children. I remember feeling an almost invisible obligation to make summer fun.

And fun, it turns out, is a tremendous amount of work.

Take camping.

My kids may remember campfires, sleeping bags and whatever happened that eventually became part of family lore.

I remember everything required to get us there.

The planning. The food. The packing. Making sure everyone had what they needed. Loading the car. Unloading the car. Feeding a family outside. Keeping everyone relatively clean, safe and entertained. Then packing everything back into the car and bringing home an entire household’s worth of dirty camping gear.

Maybe that’s why, all these years later, I’m looking at the camping gear taking up space in our garage and thinking I’m finally ready to get rid of it.

This summer had fewer logistics.

That didn’t make motherhood less exhausting. It just changed the kind of work.

Charley is extremely extroverted. Her social life energizes her. Given the choice between hanging out with me and hanging out with a friend, the friend is probably going to win.

I’d be lying if I said that never makes me a little sad.

But we’re together all the time. She doesn’t have to crave access to me because access to me is something she has always had.

What has exhausted me this summer hasn’t been taking her places. When we’re out doing something, we usually have a wonderful time.

It’s being home.

It’s the endless negotiation around what to do with boredom.

Can I watch TV?

Can I play an online game?

Can my friend come over?

Why not?

Sometimes I feel as though I’m trying to convince my child to have fun.

Read something. Make something. Go outside. Use your imagination.

I intentionally created space in her summer and then discovered that sometimes children need help learning how to inhabit space.

Charley is also growing into her own agency. She is strong-willed and increasingly certain that she should be able to make her own decisions.

I don’t want to take that from her. I want her to trust herself.

But agency requires more than knowing what you want. It requires learning to pause long enough to understand how your choices affect someone else.

And so I find myself teaching perspective-taking over and over in a hundred tiny interactions.

How do you think that made your friend feel?

What happened before she responded that way?

What might you have done differently?

Sometimes, to Charley, I’m sure it feels like we’re arguing.

Sometimes it feels that way to me too.

But underneath the resistance, I’m trying to teach.

There isn’t a photograph for this part of summer.

No scrapbook page for the seventh conversation about why another person’s feelings matter. No vacation album documenting the afternoon I asked her for the fourth time to turn off the television and find something else to do.

And yet, I suspect this is where much of motherhood actually happens.

In a hundred tiny interactions nobody else sees.

Standing among all those tired parents at back-to-school night, I realized something.

Presence isn’t the absence of exhaustion.

I can be grateful that I got this summer with my daughter and still be ready for her to go back to school. I can feel a little ache when she chooses her friends over me and know that she has never had to wonder whether I would be there.

I can look forward to the rhythm of fall without wishing summer away.

Maybe I used to think a good summer was something I had to create for my children.

This one wasn’t grand. It wasn’t meticulously planned. It wasn’t always peaceful.

But I was here for it.

Today it looked like a walk with the dog while Charley rode her hoverboard beside me. Nothing we would have put on a summer bucket list. Nothing that required reservations or a packed car.

Just us, on an ordinary August afternoon.

Soon she’ll go back to school. The days will find their rhythm again, and I am ready for that.

But I don’t need to squeeze anything else out of these last days to make the summer count.

We were here for it.

That was enough.

If this kind of writing resonates with you, I hope you’ll subscribe and follow along. Your support helps me keep showing up here honestly, sharing the vulnerable pieces while I’m still living them, not only once I’ve figured out what they mean.

I’ll also be sharing the journey toward the release of my upcoming novel, The Map Maker, a story about remembering how to trust the knowing already within us.

Maybe that’s what I’m practicing here too.

Not all maps are drawn. Some are remembered.

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Today I caught myself singing a song in my head.

I wasn’t listening to music. I hadn’t heard it playing somewhere. I don’t know what called it forward. I simply became aware that The Sound of Silence was moving through my mind.

So I found it and listened.

Almost immediately, I was somewhere else.

The opening took me back to a loneliness I know intimately. There was a time when silence felt excruciating. It wasn’t peaceful or spacious. It felt like absence. Like being alone with everything I could feel but didn’t yet know how to express.

When the song greeted darkness as an old friend, I knew that friend too.

I thought of myself as a young girl with my journals. The page was where I went with the things I couldn’t say anywhere else. It didn’t interrupt me or misunderstand me. It didn’t require me to explain why I felt what I felt.

It simply listened.

Darkness was my old friend.

But as I kept listening today, something happened.

I could feel that old loneliness completely, but I wasn’t listening from inside it anymore.

I was hearing the same silence from the other side.

Silence has become something entirely different to me now. I welcome it. I seek it. What once felt empty now feels full. There is a layer of myself I can access there, a life force, an inner knowing, a connection to something I can only describe as Source.

Last night, even my dreams seemed to know this.

I was at a party surrounded by people who wanted access to me, while I kept searching for a room where I could be alone. Not because I was lonely, but because I wanted privacy to experience the sensual energy arising within me. I wasn’t searching for someone to give me something. I wanted to experience what was already mine.

There was a time when being alone in that room would have been the thing I feared.

Now I was searching for the room.

The silence didn’t change. I did.

As I listened again, a flash of light through the darkness took me immediately to my own inner knowing. That sudden illumination that doesn’t arrive through reasoning or explanation. It simply arrives as recognition.

I know this.

And somehow, becoming more comfortable in silence hasn’t separated me from other people. It has brought me closer.

I have met people who seem to know this place too. Sometimes very little needs to be said. I can feel what is underneath their words. I recognize something in their silence, and they seem to recognize something in mine.

There was a time when I needed words to reassure me that I wasn’t alone.

Now I can sit in silence and know that I am connected.

Still, I can hear the loneliness in this song. I can feel those people carrying words they cannot say, standing beside one another and longing to be known.

I know that loneliness because I lived it.

But today, I could hear something else too.

I am listening. I have always been listening.

That is what the little girl with the journal was doing all those years ago. She wasn’t only writing because she was lonely. She was learning to hear herself. To hear what wasn’t being said. To recognize the quiet voice beneath all the noise.

I still do this.

I feel for the place beneath people’s words. I seek the depth where we can actually meet. And when my own knowing becomes loud, even in the silence, I have a difficult time leaving it unspoken.

I want to disturb the silence.

Not because silence frightens me anymore, but because I know what can be found inside it.

This is part of why I write.

The little girl once poured what she couldn’t say into a journal no one else would read. Now I take what I hear in the quiet and offer it outward.

I cannot be someone else’s light. That isn’t mine to do.

But I can sit near enough to their darkness that they might recognize their own.

I spent so much of my life believing silence meant I was alone.

Today I can still hear that loneliness. I can still feel the girl who desperately wanted to be heard.

But I can also feel the woman who knows she has been listening all along.

It is the same silence.

I am simply hearing it from the other side.

If something in these words meets something quiet in you, I hope you’ll stay.

I’ll continue sharing what I hear in the silence, the questions I’m living, and the inner knowing that has shaped so much of my writing. Soon, I’ll also be sharing the journey of releasing my upcoming novel, The Map Maker, a story born from many of these same places: intuition, remembering, and learning to trust the voice within.

Subscribe if you’d like to walk alongside me.

Not all maps are drawn. Some are remembered.

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Earlier this week, I wrote about lifting the needle on a record player.

About what happens when our awareness changes and we begin to hear the old music differently. The patterns. The familiar refrains. The parts we have played so many times we barely notice ourselves playing them anymore.

I wrote about realizing that we can lift the needle.

What I hadn’t considered was what happens after we do.

It gets quiet.

I noticed that quiet yesterday.

Nothing was particularly wrong. I just couldn’t find anything I wanted. I picked up something to read and put it back down. I looked for something to catch my interest. I organized my closet. Then my bathroom.

At first, I wondered if I was bored.

But boredom didn’t feel quite right.

It felt more like an absence of wanting.

And strangely, there was something peaceful about it.

After a season of meaningful growth, of looking closely at old roles, patterns, relationships, and the parts of myself that were pulling me out of alignment with my soul, I expected there would be something next.

Another realization. Another question. Another place to grow.

Another record.

We are so accustomed to seeking that when the music stops, silence can feel like something we need to fix.

We recognize an old pattern and look for a healthier one. We release an identity and begin constructing another. We heal something and wonder what still needs healing.

Even becoming can become a familiar song.

But what if we don’t put another record on yet?

What if there is something to hear in the space between songs?

I have spent much of my life seeking. Curiosity has carried me into some of the most meaningful places I’ve ever known.

But this feels different.

I feel as though I am transitioning from seeking to being.

There is a steadiness here that I don’t remember feeling before. My life still contains plenty of things I don’t know, but I am worrying less about what is coming.

Some of that is simply where I am in life.

My children are older and doing well. I have reached a season where I can sit back a little and enjoy the fruit of what I spent years tending. And I have more evidence now of what I have already survived.

Chronic pain. Financial stress. Relationship stress. Parenting through difficult seasons. Times when I felt physically alone and deeply misunderstood.

While I was inside some of those experiences, they felt like more than I could bear.

And still, somewhere underneath the fear and exhaustion, there was a knowing.

I could.

Not because I knew how things would turn out. I simply knew I could meet what came.

Much of that knowing I attribute to my relationship with Spirit.

Even when I felt alone, I knew I wasn’t entirely alone.

Maybe that is why I don’t feel the same need to anticipate everything anymore.

I don’t have to suffer tomorrow in advance in order to be prepared for it.

Whatever comes, I trust myself to meet it. And I trust that I will not meet it alone.

A few months ago, I found language for something I called sovereign discernment. At the time, I was noticing it.

Now I notice myself living it.

Sometimes I hear myself beginning to explain a choice, adding details, building a case for why something makes sense to me.

And then I stop.

Midstream.

I realize I don’t need to convince anyone.

Sovereignty is trusting myself enough to remain present through uncertainty without abandoning myself for someone else’s certainty.

Sometimes lifting the needle happens exactly like that.

The old song has already started. I am halfway through my familiar verse before I realize I’m singing it again.

So I stop.

And there it is.

The quiet.

As I was thinking about all of this, another song came back to me.

I’ve written before about the little girl I was, sitting in a pasture and singing to the cows. They would gather around me while I sang, curious creatures listening as though I had invited them to a private concert.

Many of the songs I sang were spiritual.

One of them came back to me.

Spirit, I adore you. How I love you.

I’ve told the story of that little girl before.

But I heard it differently this time.

As a child, I knew God was there with me. I wasn’t searching for proof. I was seeking comfort. I craved the kind of unconditional love I somehow knew I could find there.

So I sang.

Back then, I understood God as a presence outside of me. Someone I could turn toward when what I was feeling became too big to hold alone.

My understanding changed as I grew. Religion gave way to something more spiritual. But the deepest shift wasn’t simply in the words I used.

It was in where I understood Spirit to reside.

The little girl looked outward and knew God was with her.

The woman I am now looks inward and knows Spirit is here.

The presence didn’t move.

My awareness did.

I can see that thread now.

Through the little girl singing to cows. Through the journals that became a place for me to hear myself. Through the years that hurt more than I thought I could bear. Through all the searching and questioning and becoming.

Through the woman who eventually learned words like alignment, sovereignty, alchemy, discernment, and now, evocation.

Calling forth what is already here.

Maybe that is what I am experiencing in this space between songs.

I am not calling in more clarity. More purpose. More certainty. Another version of myself.

I am becoming quiet enough to notice what is already here.

Calling forth what remains when all the unnecessary versions have grown quiet.

I have spent years finding language for something the little girl in the pasture already knew.

Presence.

I thought lifting the needle would leave me with silence.

Instead, beneath all those familiar songs, I am hearing something much older.

The song that was there all along.

If this kind of noticing resonates with you, I’d love to have you here.

Follow along or subscribe to join me as I continue writing about the quiet places where awareness shifts, old stories reveal something new, and we learn to hear what has been there all along.

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This morning, I woke with a familiar feeling in my chest.

Anxiety. At least, that’s what I have always called it.

For as long as I can remember, I have noticed some version of this feeling in the morning. Historically, there has always been plenty for my mind to land on. Something I needed to do. Something I was worried about. Something unfinished. Someone I needed to take care of. A conversation I needed to have. The sensation would arrive, my mind would find a reason for it, and the two would become one.

This morning, though, I got curious before I finished the sentence.

I am on day 28 of a cycle that, for much of my life, arrived closer to day 21. Midlife has made those rhythms less predictable. Perimenopause has made me increasingly aware that hormones can turn the volume up on things I have felt in my body all along.

So I simply lay there and noticed.

The feeling lived in my chest. A surge of energy. An activation. For once, there wasn’t an obvious story attached to it.

I found myself wondering about cortisol and the natural rise that happens as our bodies wake. What if at least some of what I have called morning anxiety all these years begins as something much simpler? My body waking me up.

I don’t know that cortisol explains it, and strangely, I don’t need it to. What interests me more is what happens next.

Somewhere along the way, I learned to experience that sensation as anxiety. Once I called it anxiety, my mind became very good at finding something to be anxious about.

Long before I understood anxiety as something happening inside me, I noticed it in the people around me. I noticed when things weren’t going smoothly. I noticed the shift that came before anger or sadness. I could feel when something had changed, even when no one said it out loud.

As a child, I didn’t have the language I have now. I had tears. I had music. I had the outdoors.

There were times I would walk out into the pasture and sing to the cows. I’ve always remembered the singing. What I understand differently now is the crying. Sometimes I sang with tears streaming down my cheeks.

I wasn’t analyzing what I felt. I wasn’t asking myself why I was anxious or what I needed to do about it. I was simply giving the feeling somewhere to go.

Looking back, I wonder if I knew how to be with sensation before I learned to be afraid of what it meant.

As I got older, I started noticing another pattern. The week before my period, the feeling seemed to grab hold of me more intensely. Finally, I had an explanation.

PMS.

That explanation made sense, so I did what many of us do. I tried to fix it.

Over the years, I tried different medications, hoping they would quiet what I was feeling. For me, they never felt quite right. The anxiety softened, but so did everything else. My ability to feel genuinely happy seemed to soften alongside it.

I remember thinking, I don’t want to stop feeling.

I wanted to understand what I was feeling.

Writing became one of the places I learned to do that.

I spent time with therapists over the years, and I value the people who helped me see parts of myself more clearly. But I always sensed that the deepest work would happen in the quiet moments between me and the page. No one could become as familiar with my inner landscape as I could.

So I wrote.

Not because I knew who I was, but because writing helped me discover who I was.

Looking back through decades of journals, I don’t see someone trying to eliminate anxiety.

I see someone patiently learning its language.

For years, I thought I was trying to become less anxious. Looking back, I think I was trying to become a better listener.

Writing became the place where I could notice patterns without immediately needing to fix them. The page never rushed me toward an answer. It simply held whatever I brought to it until something clearer emerged. Over time, I realized my relationship with anxiety wasn’t changing because anxiety had disappeared. It was changing because I had.

I stopped seeing anxiety as an enemy I needed to conquer and began approaching it as something that might have something to teach me. That shift didn’t happen all at once. It unfolded over years, often so gradually I didn’t recognize it while it was happening.

For a season, the word that guided me was equanimity. I wanted to know if I could remain steady without becoming numb. Could I stay present with discomfort instead of immediately trying to escape it?

Then came freedom mindset. I began wondering how much of what I experienced was shaped not by the feeling itself, but by the story I attached to it. Was I actually trapped by anxiety, or had I become trapped by the belief that anxiety meant something was wrong?

Later, peaceful well-being became my compass. I had spent much of my life believing peace would arrive when I finally solved enough problems. Gradually, I began discovering something different. Peace wasn’t waiting on the other side of a feeling. It could exist in the middle of one.

Now the words that continue to meet me are sovereign discernment. Not every feeling is asking me to act. Not every sensation is asking me to solve it. Not every thought deserves my agreement. Discernment has become the quiet practice of listening before deciding what is true.

When I woke this morning with that familiar sensation in my chest, I could feel decades of habit waiting to unfold. My body stirred and my mind immediately prepared to explain it. But somewhere between the sensation and the story, something new had become available.

Awareness.

I simply noticed the feeling. I noticed where it lived in my body. I noticed my mind beginning to search for a reason. Instead of following it, I stayed with the sensation itself.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the tension softened.

Not because I had solved anything or discovered the perfect explanation, but because I had stayed long enough to realize I didn’t have to believe the first story my mind offered.

That may be the greatest gift curiosity has given me. Not certainty, but space. The space to notice. The space to wonder. The space to let my body speak before my mind translates.

The little girl who walked into the pasture didn’t know any of this. She didn’t know about cortisol, hormones, nervous systems, or emotional regulation. She simply knew that something inside her needed room. So she walked outside. She cried. She sang to the cows. The feeling moved through her because she allowed it to.

Somewhere along the way, I learned to explain my feelings before I experienced them. Now I find myself returning to something that little girl seemed to understand instinctively.

A sensation is not an identity.

A feeling is not a forecast.

And the first story my mind tells is not always the truest one.

Perhaps healing has never been about changing what I feel.

Perhaps it has been about learning to pay attention before deciding what my feelings mean.

There is a tiny space before a feeling becomes a story.

Today, that’s enough.

I’ll keep paying attention.

I’m beginning to think that paying attention is something we learn best together.

If these reflections resonate with you, I’d love to invite you a little deeper. By supporting my writing through a subscription, you’re not just encouraging me to keep writing vulnerably. You become part of a thoughtful community where curiosity is welcomed, stories are held with care, and we continue noticing what life is trying to teach us.

I’d love to have you walking alongside me.

Come walk with me.

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Over the past year, I’ve realized there are two kinds of writing I love.

One is the essay. It’s where thoughts have had time to settle and reveal what they were trying to teach me.

The other happens much closer to real life.

It’s the noticing.

The questions that interrupt an ordinary walk.

The conversations that stay with me.

The tiny moments that most people would pass by, but somehow keep asking for my attention.

For years, much of that lived only in my journals.

Now, as I’ve grown into being a writer, I find myself wanting to invite others into that part of the journey too.

Come Walk With Me is the first piece written in that spirit.

Instead of sharing only what I’ve come to understand, I’m inviting you into the moments that helped me understand it.

For those who choose to support my writing through a paid subscription, this is the kind of work I’d love to share more often. Longer reflections. Short memoirs. Behind-the-scenes pieces. The moments that don’t always become essays, but shape every essay that eventually gets written.

If this way of paying attention speaks to you, I’d be honored to share more of it with you.

There are seasons of life that seem ordinary while we’re living them, only to reveal their significance when we look back.

This wasn’t a planned adventure or a search for answers. It was simply one week spent visiting a friend who had first entered my life through writing. What I didn’t know was that the conversations we shared, the places we wandered, and the quiet moments in between would become a mirror, reflecting parts of myself I hadn’t fully seen before.

I don’t write because I have life figured out.

I write because writing helps me notice.

It slows me down long enough to see what I might have otherwise walked past. A conversation, a flower growing in an unexpected place, a moment of trust, or a question quietly asking for my attention.

This memoir is an invitation.

Not simply to follow me through a week in Vancouver, but to walk beside me as I experience it. To notice what I noticed. To pause where I paused. To wonder alongside me. My hope isn’t that you’ll see the world exactly as I do. It’s that, by the time we reach the final page, you may find yourself paying a little closer attention to your own.

So...

Come walk with me.

Chapter One - The Invitation

There was a season of my life when I began meeting people through my writing. Not readers in the abstract, but people who recognized something in my words that reflected the woman I had quietly been becoming.

was one of them. was another.

We found one another through Substack, but it never felt like social media. It felt more like joining a conversation that had been unfolding long before any of us arrived. We read each other’s essays, left comments, exchanged messages that became phone calls, and phone calls that became friendships. We talked about writing, curiosity, healing, and the subtle ways a person changes over time.

Somewhere along the way, they stopped feeling like people I knew through the internet. They simply became people I loved talking with.

When Haide invited me to spend a few days with her and her family in Vancouver, I said yes. At the time, I thought I was accepting an invitation to visit a friend. I had no idea I was about to step into a week that would reflect my own life back to me.

It wasn’t a trip I had planned months in advance. That alone made it unusual for me. I don’t often travel by myself, and I rarely book a flight on such short notice. When Haide invited me to spend a few days with her in Vancouver, something in me simply said yes. Before I had much time to overthink it, I booked the flight.

Looking back, I realize that small decision set the tone for everything that followed. It wasn’t certainty that got me on the plane. It was trust.

By the time Haide arrived at the airport, we connected over the phone to figure out where we were. She spotted me before I spotted her. I smiled as I made my way toward her car, and when I reached her, we embraced like old friends.

It struck me how natural it felt. We had spent months getting to know one another through our writing and our conversations. Meeting in person didn’t create our friendship. It simply gave it a physical place to exist.

As we pulled away from the airport, it didn’t take long before we were back in the kinds of conversations we’d been having for months. We skipped the small talk almost entirely, finding ourselves talking about life, family, and all the places beneath the surface where our friendship had first begun.

I honestly had no idea what to expect from the week ahead. And yet, I felt unusually peaceful. Not because I knew what was coming, but because something deeper in me recognized that I was exactly where I needed to be.

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The first journal I ever owned looked like this. I was in third grade.

It had hearts on the cover and a warning written across the front telling everyone to stay out. Apparently, I took my privacy very seriously. I carried it everywhere. Sometimes I’d take it outside and sit beside a stream to write. I didn’t know it then, but I had already found one of the first places where my questions were welcome.

I still have that journal. In fact, I still have every journal I’ve ever written.

They’re tucked away, each one holding the thoughts of a younger version of me. Every so often, I pull one down and begin reading.

What surprises me most is how familiar she feels. She already sounded like me. Those journals tell the story of my life. They also tell the story of how the page taught me to listen.

Over the years, I’ve heard people say they wish they had kept their journals. Others have shared the sadness of having them lost, discarded, or taken away.

Every time I hear that, I feel quietly grateful. Somehow, I never let mine go. I couldn’t have explained why then. I only know that some part of me trusted I would one day need to meet that little girl again.

Every time I open one of those journals, I expect to meet a younger version of myself. Instead, I keep meeting the same soul.

Even as a child, I wrote to make sense of the world around me. Writing became the place where I discovered what I believed. Putting my thoughts on paper helped me separate what felt true from what had simply been handed to me.

There was always a quiet knowing inside me that kept asking,

Is there more?

Many of those questions became prayers. I laid them at the foot of the cross because they felt too heavy to carry alone. Looking back, I can see those pages slowly changed my relationship with myself. They helped me recognize the quiet voice that had been there all along.

The page slowed everything down.

It gave me somewhere to lay my thoughts before reacting to them. Questions that felt overwhelming in my mind often became clearer once they found their way onto paper. Understanding unfolded one honest sentence at a time.

Years later, I began passing journals back and forth with out Kaden and Jessa. We still do. At first, they gave us time to think, to feel, and to listen before responding. Over the years, they’ve become part of birthdays, graduations, and other meaningful moments. A place to honor one another, reflect on who we’re becoming, and say the things we never want left unsaid.

Sometimes I wonder if, years from now, one of my children will pull one of those journals off a shelf and hear my voice the way I still hear the little girl in mine.

I was passing on a way of listening.

When I open those journals now, I find myself wanting to wrap my arms around that little girl.

She carried so much curiosity. So many questions. And so much hope that someone was listening.

If my writing offers anything, I hope it’s a place where you don’t have to rush your questions.

A place where you can stay with them long enough to hear your own quiet knowing.

Long before I found answers, I found a place where my questions were welcome.

I’ve been returning there ever since.

I’d love to hear from you.

Did you keep a journal growing up? Or was there another place where you learned to hear yourself more clearly?

I’d love to read your story in the comments.

And if you’ve been following along, thank you for being here. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more behind the journey of my debut novel, The Map Maker, a story inspired by many of the same questions about self-trust, curiosity, and the quiet ways we find our way home.

I’m grateful you’re here for the journey.

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Loneliness has a way of convincing us that we’re the only one who has ever felt this way.

Grief tells a similar story. It whispers that life existed before the loss and will begin again once we’ve finally made it through. We imagine healing as a destination somewhere beyond the water, where everything that hurts will finally be behind us.

For a long time, I believed that too.

Years ago, while writing my memoir, an unexpected image kept returning to me. I saw myself floating alone in the middle of the ocean, holding onto a life preserver.

It never made logical sense. I came from a large family. I wasn’t physically alone. Yet the image carried a truth I couldn’t explain.

Only years later could I see that I was giving shape to a part of myself that had been waiting to be recognized.

For me, one of those seasons was chronic pain. It introduced me to another kind of grief. Not the grief of losing someone I loved, but the grief of losing certainty. I mourned the body I once trusted, the future I had imagined, and the version of myself I thought I was supposed to become.

As a teenager, I spent years teaching swimming lessons and working as a lifeguard. At the time, I simply loved the water. It wasn’t until decades later that I recognized the irony.

The girl who imagined herself alone in deep water had spent years helping other people trust it.

One evening in the Mojave Desert, I stood beneath a sky filled with paper lanterns. On one I wrote Ancient Wisdom. On the other, Peaceful Well-Being.

As they drifted upward, I watched until they became indistinguishable from the stars. I remember thinking I was releasing something, though I couldn’t have told you exactly what.

I lingered after everyone else began walking away.

Then a little girl wandered over to me.

She couldn’t have been more than four or five years old. She held up her tiny hand, waiting for me to place mine against it. When I did, she looked into my eyes, smiled, and said,

“Look... we’re family.”

I had never met her before.

I didn’t know where her parents were or why, out of everyone there, she had chosen me.

Only then did I notice she was dressed like a little princess.

A wave of chills moved through my entire body.

I never saw her again.

But I’ve carried those words with me ever since.

Recently, I heard a lyric that reached past my mind and into recognition.

“Because the ones who’ve known the darkness know the value of the light.”

It gave language to something my heart had quietly known for years.

The ocean.

A lifeguard stand.

Lanterns.

“We’re family.”

For years, I believed healing meant reaching the shore.

Now I wonder if healing has less to do with escaping the water than learning how to live within it.

I wasn’t searching for a rescue.

I was learning how to keep my fire burning on the water, so that one day its warmth might help someone else find their way.

Perhaps that is what hope has been all along.

Not reaching the shore.

Not escaping the water.

But discovering that, even here, the fire can still burn.

The water never disappeared.

Neither did the fire.

Maybe they were never meant to.

If you’ve known loneliness, grief, or the quiet work of keeping your own fire alive, I’d love to hear what this essay brought up for you. Your stories often become part of the conversation in ways I never expect, and those conversations are one of my favorite parts of writing.

If you’d like to continue the journey with me, I’d love to have you here. My first novel, The Map Maker, will be arriving soon. If these essays speak to you, I think you’ll feel at home there, too.

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I’ve been wondering if gardeners have seasons too.

We spend so much time watching the plants change that we rarely notice we’re changing alongside them. Every plant asks something different of us. Some need pruning. Some thrive when they’re left completely alone. Others need gentle support until they’re strong enough to stand on their own. Over time, I’ve learned that gardening isn’t about making things grow. It’s about creating the conditions where growth becomes possible.

Motherhood, I’ve realized, has been much the same.

Lately, I’ve found myself wondering if motherhood has seasons too. Not just the obvious ones we celebrate when children are born, start school, graduate, marry, or become parents themselves. I’m talking about the quieter seasons, the ones no one prepares us for because they don’t announce themselves until one day you look around and realize something inside you has changed.

Looking around, I see our children building lives of their own. Graduate school. Marriage. Careers. Friendships. Homes in different parts of the country. The very things we spent years preparing them for. And somewhere in the middle of celebrating all of that, I began noticing that motherhood was asking something different of me, too.

I don’t think I recognized the beginning of that transition at the time. Looking back, I think it started three years ago.

An injury forced me to let go of decorating for Christmas the way I always had. The bins stayed in storage. The house was simpler. I assumed I’d feel disappointed.

Instead, something unexpected happened. Christmas still came. We still gathered. For the first time in years, I wasn’t quietly carrying the weight of making everything feel magical or wondering if anyone noticed how much work happened behind the scenes. The holiday was simpler, and so was I.

At the time, I thought I had simply learned to simplify Christmas.

Now I wonder if something much deeper was happening.

This week, that feeling returned.

Before I understood why, I noticed myself feeling restless. A little spicier than usual. Less willing to quietly go along. More willing to honestly express what I was feeling.

Years ago, I probably would have assumed someone else was the problem. Now curiosity interrupts that instinct. Instead of asking, Who is causing this? I’ve learned to ask, What is this trying to show me?

As I sat with that question, I realized I wasn’t grieving holiday plans. I wasn’t even grieving my children growing up.

I was grieving the quiet loss of an identity I had worn for decades.

Somewhere along the way, I had begun measuring my value by how well I could hold everything together. Planning the holidays. Remembering birthdays. Coordinating schedules. Creating traditions. Making sure our children had opportunities to build relationships with one another.

I quietly became the keeper of our family, and the truth is, I loved it.

Looking around now, I can see the harvest of those years. Our children genuinely love one another. Their relationships belong to them now, not because I arrange them, but because they choose them.

That was always the hope.

Motherhood wasn’t ending. It was simply asking something different of me.

At first, I thought I was grieving the reality that we may never again all be together for every holiday. Then I realized I wasn’t mourning memories I wanted to recreate. I was mourning an idea, the hope that one day our holidays would finally look the way I had imagined.

That realization surprised me.

I wasn’t grieving something I had lost.

I was releasing an expectation I had quietly carried for years.

And that’s when my garden spoke.

Every plant has different needs. Some are like wildflowers, happiest when they’re given space to grow where they land. Others need support for a season, not because they’re weak, but because what they’re are growing becomes heavy. They need someone to gently brace them until they’re strong enough to carry it themselves.

Our children have been no different.

Each one has needed something unique from me. More freedom. More structure. More reassurance. More space.

The goal was never to make them dependent on me.

The goal was always to help them become fully themselves.

I’ve spent years preparing soil, watering, weeding, protecting tender growth from the wind, and sometimes simply waiting. Then one day, almost without noticing, another season arrived.

Not just for the garden.

For the gardener.

There comes a moment when your greatest act of love is no longer doing more.

It’s trusting more.

It’s learning the difference between tending and interfering. Between supporting and holding on. Between love and control.

No one talks about this season of motherhood. There isn’t a ceremony for the day a mother realizes her children no longer need her in the same ways they once did. No one marks the moment she quietly removes the stake.

And yet, perhaps they should.

Because removing the stake isn’t something that happens to the plant. It’s something that happens inside the gardener. It’s an act of trust, a quiet blessing that simply says, I trust what we’ve grown.

For decades, my hands were full. Full of lunches and laundry, Christmas decorations and calendars, carpools and conversations. Full of holding space and making sure everyone had what they needed to bloom.

I thought the sadness came because my hands were becoming empty.

Now I know better.

They’re becoming available.

Available to write.

Available to wander through my garden with no agenda other than noticing what is blooming.

Available to follow curiosity wherever it leads.

Available to discover who I am beyond being needed.

Perhaps this is what every season has been preparing me for.

For years, I believed I was the one tending the garden. I never imagined the garden was quietly tending me, teaching me patience, discernment, and that love doesn’t always look like holding on. Sometimes it looks like stepping back, trusting the roots, trusting the seasons, and trusting what has already taken hold beneath the surface.

Perhaps the greatest lesson the garden has given me isn’t how to help something else bloom.

It’s how to recognize when it’s finally my turn.

Maybe this isn’t the end of motherhood. Maybe it’s simply the beginning of a quieter season, one where I no longer measure love by how many people gather around my table, but by the roots we’ve grown together.

I used to think I was tending the garden.

Now I wonder if the garden has been tending me all along, preparing me for the season when it would finally be my turn to bloom.

We're all tending something, and eventually, every one of us reaches a new season. If this essay resonated with you, I'd love to hear what season you're in. And if someone you love is standing at their own quiet threshold, I hope you'll pass this along.

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To be completely honest, I can’t even remember the last time I ordered a physical copy of a book. I’m usually an audiobook person. I love listening while I’m walking, gardening, or driving.

But for some reason, I ordered The Fire We Never Offered by without giving it much thought.

A few days later, I found myself recovering from a medical procedure, with several quiet days ahead of me.

Instead of reaching for my headphones, I picked up the book and raced through it. Not because I wanted to finish it quickly, but because I couldn’t seem to put it down.

What I didn’t expect was everything that happened around the book.

As I finished each chapter, I found myself writing a reflection and sharing it on . Without even realizing it, I had created my own little book club.

What began as a way to capture what was on my mind during a season of stillness became something much bigger. Conversations unfolded with the author and with readers from around the world. People saw different things in the same chapter. They challenged one another’s perspectives. Sometimes a comment would send me back to reread an entire section through a completely different lens.

It reminded me that we never really read a book alone.

We bring our own lives, our own questions, our own timing to every page. And when we share those perspectives with one another, the book continues long after we’ve closed the cover.

Looking back, I think that's what I'll remember most.

Not simply reading a beautiful book, but discovering the unexpected community that formed around it.

If you’re curious, I’ve linked my chapter-by-chapter reflections below. I originally shared them as Substack Notes while I was reading, capturing my thoughts in real time as the conversations unfolded. As I was gathering them for this essay, I realized I somehow skipped Chapters 1 and 12, but every other chapter is there.

Thank you, , for writing a book that sparked so many thoughtful conversations. And thank you to everyone who joined me along the way. You made this reading experience something I’ll remember long after I turned the final page.

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

People often talk about “finding your voice” as if it’s hiding somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

I don’t think that’s what happened to me.

I don’t think I found my voice. I think I learned to listen.

For years, I thought writing was how I figured out what I thought. Now I think it’s something else entirely. Writing has rarely been about thinking. It’s been about listening long enough for something deeper to become clear.

Curiosity was my first teacher.

Instead of rushing toward answers, I learned to stay with questions. I followed whatever quietly tugged at my attention, whether it was mythology, gardening, relationships, meditation, dreams, or the ordinary moments of everyday life. None of those interests seemed connected at the time.

Looking back, I can see they were all teaching me the same thing.

Pay attention.

Meditation deepened that lesson. People sometimes ask if meditation gave me answers. Not exactly. It helped me notice how much noise I had mistaken for my own voice. The fears. The expectations. The stories about who I thought I should be.

As those voices softened, something else became easier to hear. Not louder, just truer.

The mantras came next.

At first, I repeated them because I hoped they would change me. Over time, I realized they weren’t giving me new beliefs. They were reminding me of truths I already recognized somewhere beneath the surface.

Equanimity.

Freedom Mindset.

Peaceful Well-Being.

Sovereign Discernment.

Each one marked a different season of my life. At first I thought I was choosing the words. Looking back, I think the words were choosing me.

Then life slowed me down in a way I never would have chosen.

An injury took far longer to heal than I ever imagined. The life I loved suddenly became much smaller. I couldn’t explore the world the way I normally would, and I could feel myself becoming emotionally depleted.

Curiosity has always needed somewhere to roam. When my body could no longer wander, my imagination did.

So I wrote.

Not because I was trying to become an author. Because I needed somewhere for my imagination to wander while my body healed.

Around that same season, I completed a nonfiction manuscript called Soft Power. It held many of the same truths I write about today, but when I finished it, I realized it felt too raw to share.

I never felt like I abandoned Soft Power. It simply wasn’t the right form for those truths.

So instead of forcing it into the world before I was ready, I let it become something else.

That something else became The Map Maker.

Soft Power and The Map Maker weren’t different stories. They were the same story told in two different languages.

Looking back, I don’t think I was moving away from the truth. I was moving toward a different language for telling it.

The novel gave those truths another language. Through symbols, imagination, and a character named Solenne, I found myself writing what I couldn’t yet say directly. Not because the truth had changed, but because its language had.

I wasn’t escaping my story.

I was listening to it in a different language.

Only later did I realize I hadn’t written a different story at all. I’d been listening to the same one all along.

Now, when I sit down to write, I rarely know exactly what I want to say. Usually it begins with a curiosity. A sentence. An observation. A question I can’t quite shake.

Then I follow it.

Paragraph by paragraph, something begins to emerge that surprises even me.

People occasionally tell me that I have a gift for putting things into words. I appreciate that. But the experience from the inside feels different. It often feels as though the knowing arrived long before the language did.

The writing isn’t creating the truth.

It’s revealing it.

I’ve begun to wonder if this is true for all of us.

Maybe wisdom doesn’t always arrive as something new. Maybe much of our lives is spent remembering what we already know beneath the noise.

Perhaps finding our voice has never been about speaking louder.

Perhaps it has always been about listening more deeply.

Looking back, I don’t think I’ve spent the last decade becoming a writer. I think I’ve spent the last decade becoming a better listener.

Meditation became listening without words.

Curiosity became listening with my attention.

Writing became listening with language.

Different forms. The same conversation.

Looking back, I don’t think curiosity was ever about collecting answers. It was how I learned to listen.

Every book. Every meditation. Every conversation. Every garden bed. Every essay. Every question I couldn’t let go.

They weren’t leading me somewhere else. They were leading me back to myself.

And perhaps that’s what people mean when they say I’ve found my voice.

Not that I discovered something new.

But that I finally learned to trust what had been quietly speaking within me all along.

If you’ve been following my essays for a while, you’ve probably noticed that curiosity has been the thread connecting them all. It has also been the thread connecting my creative life.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more about The Map Maker, my debut novel, and the unexpected journey that led me to write it. If these reflections resonate with you, I’d love to have you along as the story continues. There’s so much more I can’t wait to share.

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Every so often, I come across something that meets me exactly where I am.

Sometimes it’s a book. Sometimes it’s a conversation. Sometimes it’s a walk through my garden or a quiet moment that changes the way I see the world.

And sometimes, it’s a song.

I often share the things that capture my curiosity because they’ve usually taught me something about myself. Fire and Tide by AkramUg is one of those discoveries.

I’ve listened to it more than a hundred times over the past few weeks. Not because I can’t get the melody out of my head, but because it has become an anthem for this season of my life. It gave words to experiences I’d been carrying quietly and reminded me that sometimes the things that make us feel most seen arrive in the most unexpected ways.

As I listened, I realized I wasn’t just hearing someone else’s story. I was recognizing pieces of my own.

At its heart, this song is about transformation.

It uses water and fire as symbols of two forces that shape us. Water teaches us to surrender, to adapt, and to keep moving. Fire transforms us. It burns away what no longer belongs so something stronger can emerge.

One lyric stopped me the first time I heard it:

“The woman in the water wasn’t who I was meant to find. She was only who I needed to be brave enough to leave behind.”

For so much of my life, I thought healing meant getting back to who I used to be. Now I see it differently. Every difficult season has changed me, and I no longer want to return to an earlier version of myself. I want to honor the woman those experiences have shaped.

Another line says:

“The ones who’ve known the darkness know the value of the light.”

That feels true to my own life. The hardest seasons I’ve walked through have also made me more compassionate, more curious, and more appreciative of ordinary moments. They taught me to notice beauty that I might have overlooked before. They taught me that our deepest wounds can also become the places from which we offer the most hope to others.

Perhaps the lyric that resonates most is:

“I stopped dimming down my fire just to make them feel their best.”

That doesn’t feel like rebellion to me. It feels like freedom.

There was a time when I looked outside myself for approval, belonging, or reassurance that I was enough. Over the years, I’ve learned to carry my own light. Not because life has become easier, but because I trust myself to find my way, even when the path is uncertain.

I’ve stopped waiting for other people to tell me who I am. I’ve stopped trying to become smaller so others feel more comfortable. Instead, I’m learning to stand fully in my own life with curiosity, compassion, and a quiet confidence that wasn’t there before.

I also love the imagery of the ocean.

The song reminds us that the ocean doesn’t cling to what has crossed its surface. It keeps moving with elemental grace. There is something deeply comforting about that. Life leaves its marks on all of us, but we don’t have to stay anchored to every storm we’ve survived. We can honor what shaped us without allowing it to define where we’re going.

Maybe that’s why this song has become such a companion for me.

It isn’t encouraging me to become someone new.

It’s reminding me that I’ve been shaped by both the tide and the fire.

The tide taught me to soften without losing myself.

The fire taught me to let go of the versions of me that were built from fear instead of truth.

Together, they’ve taught me to carry my own light.

Not because I’ve escaped the storms, but because I’ve discovered that the light was never waiting for me on the other side of them.

It was growing within me the whole time.

Thank you for reading. If these reflections resonate with you, I hope you'll stay awhile. I write about the intersections of story, healing, and the quiet wisdom we gather along the way. In the coming weeks, I'll also be sharing the release of my debut novel, The Map Maker, a story born from many of the same questions explored here. If you'd like to follow the journey, I'd love to have you join me.

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People often say, “It’s just a season.”

I’ve said those words too. For a long time, they brought me comfort. Seasons change. They come and go. They remind us that what feels permanent often isn’t.

But lately, I’ve been sitting with a different question.

What happens when a season begins to feel like a way of life?

Over the past five years, our lives have revolved around surgeries, recoveries, physical therapy, MRIs, specialist appointments, and waiting. Just as one thing begins to heal, something else seems to ask for our attention. Today, Chris came home from an orthopedic appointment with the possibility of another MRI and maybe even another surgery.

I was surprised by how angry I felt. At first, I thought I was angry about the timing, the insurance, the deductible, and the thought of starting over again. But as I sat with it, I realized my anger might be pointing to something deeper.

I think I’m grieving the uncertainty. I’m grieving how much space all of this has taken up in our lives. I’m grieving the realization that I no longer make plans without wondering what our bodies might have in store next.

I don’t know if this is a season anymore. I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m saying I honestly don’t know because I’m still in the middle of it.

Maybe that’s why I’m writing before I’ve found the lesson. I have a feeling I’m not the only person asking this question.

If you’re living with chronic pain, caring for someone whose body keeps asking for more, or carrying something that has lasted far longer than you expected, maybe you’ve wondered this too.

I don’t have an answer. Today, I just have the question. And for today, that feels honest enough.

There are some tables where you spend years trying to become someone people will welcome. You explain yourself more carefully, share only the stories that feel safe, laugh a little louder, help a little more, hoping that eventually something will click and you’ll finally feel like you belong.

For years, I believed that if people truly understood me, they would accept me. Looking back, I wasn’t searching for approval as much as I was searching for evidence that I belonged.

One day, I found myself asking a question I had been carrying for years.

“Do I really have to keep going there anymore?”

I called a friend. As we talked, I noticed something behind her and asked her to turn her phone around.

There, written across the sky, was a single word.

NO.

A complete sentence.

Whether you call it coincidence, a sign, or perfect timing doesn’t really matter. What mattered was what happened inside me. For the first time, I considered that I didn’t have to keep returning to places where I continually felt unseen.

That single word didn’t make the decision for me. It simply gave me permission to trust what I already knew.

From that moment on, something slowly began to change. I stopped trying to earn belonging. I stopped measuring my worth by the warmth or coldness of the room. Most importantly, I stopped asking people with little curiosity about me to become the judges of my value.

Instead, I quietly turned down the volume. Not out of resentment, but out of discernment.

The boundary wasn’t the end of the work. It was the beginning.

For a while, I could still feel the old parts of me wanting to be seen, understood, and accepted. Each time those familiar feelings surfaced, I had a choice. I could tighten, or I could soften.

Over time, I learned that every time I softened instead of tightened, I became a little more free. Not because anyone had changed. Not because the past had been repaired. But because I no longer wanted resentment to occupy space inside me.

Love, I’ve discovered, isn’t the absence of boundaries. Sometimes love is the boundary.

Now, when our paths cross, I don’t carry the friction with me. I don’t need anything from them. I simply meet them with kindness and continue living my life.

The freedom wasn’t that anyone finally accepted me. The freedom was realizing I no longer needed them to.

Belonging had never been theirs to give.

It had always been mine to claim.

That word in the sky disappeared within minutes.

The answer never did.

I’m curious... Have you ever stopped seeking someone’s approval? What helped you realize you already belonged? I’d love to hear your story.

And if these reflections resonate with you, I hope you’ll follow along as I prepare to release The Map Maker. While the novel is fiction, many of its emotional landscapes are rooted in lived experience. This story is one of them.

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Some books arrive at just the right time. Others wait patiently until we’re ready to hear them differently.

Chris and I recently listened to The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho for the second time while driving back and forth from Vancouver Island, BC.

The first time I listened, I admired the story.

The second time, I recognized myself within it.

Some books don’t change.

We do.

As Santiago followed omens and searched for his Personal Legend, I found myself reflecting on my own journey. Not because our stories are the same, but because the questions are.

What if our deepest calling isn’t something we have to invent, but something we slowly remember?

The book speaks of omens. Not as magic, but as attention.

The older I get, the more I wonder if life has always been speaking. Perhaps I just wasn’t listening.

Now I notice a feather resting quietly along the trail, light dancing across the water, fog lifting through ancient evergreens, and a heart shaped stone waiting beneath my feet. None of these moments prove anything. Yet each one invites me to pause, to look a little longer, and to remember that life is far more alive than I once believed.

Maybe the omens were never the point.

Maybe the transformation happens in the one who learns to notice them.

One phrase stopped me in my tracks.

I smiled when I heard it, not because it was a new idea, but because someone else had finally wrapped words around something I had been trying to describe for years.

Some of the deepest conversations of my life have happened without speaking at all. Standing beside Chris beneath towering trees. Watching sunlight shimmer across the water. Working in my garden. Sitting quietly enough that life begins to reveal itself.

Not everything important can be explained.

Some things can only be experienced.

But the moment that stirred me most came near the end.

As Santiago learns to become the wind, he discovers that what he has been searching for is not separate from him. In that moment, I wasn’t simply following his story.

I was recognizing my own.

For years, I have been growing into a belief that the Divine is not somewhere far away, waiting to be found. The same Presence that lives throughout creation also lives within me.

Not separate from me.

Within me.

As we talked about the book afterward, Chris shared something that stayed with me. He wasn’t just thinking about Santiago. He was thinking about Paulo Coelho.

Imagine knowing, from the very first page, that the treasure was buried beneath the sycamore tree where the story began. Imagine patiently crafting an entire journey that reveals what was true from the very beginning.

I smiled when he said it because it felt like another layer of the book’s wisdom. The treasure wasn’t created by the journey. The journey simply revealed what had been there all along.

That realization settled deep within me.

My Personal Legend has never been about becoming someone new. It has always been about remembering who I have always been beneath the fear, the conditioning, and the stories that taught me to forget.

As I sat with all of this, I realized the book had also changed the way I think about alchemy.

I’ve come to believe that alchemy is not the process of becoming someone else. It is the sacred remembering of who we have always been.

The soul has never needed to become anything. It has only needed to remember what it has always been.

What obscures it is the fear, the conditioning, and the stories that taught us to forget. The work of an alchemist is not to create the gold. It is to uncover what has been there all along.

When I closed The Alchemist, I realized it hadn’t given me a new philosophy. It had given me language for the life I was already living.

Perhaps that’s what I’ve been hearing all along.

The language without words.

A Personal Invitation

If this way of seeing the world resonates with you, I hope you’ll stay.

I write about my lived experience, the quiet wisdom of nature, meaningful relationships, curiosity, and the moments that invite us to remember who we are.

I’ll also be sharing the journey toward the release of my debut novel, The Map Maker, a story that grew from many of these same questions.

I’d be honored to have you along for the journey.

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Yesterday, I spent the afternoon taking graduation photos of my daughter Jessa.

As photographers, we’re always chasing the perfect light.

But somewhere between adjusting my camera settings and asking her to turn just a little toward the sun, I realized I wasn’t really photographing a graduate.

I was witnessing time.

There she stood in her cap and gown, smiling in a way that was both familiar and entirely new. I could still see the little girl who once filled journals with crooked hearts and “I love you, Mommy.” The teenager finding her footing. The college student discovering who she was.

And now...

This woman standing before me.

After the photos, we drove to a little secondhand bridal boutique.

Two years ago, while working there, she found the wedding dress she hoped she would one day wear. The women who owned the shop quietly held onto it, believing she’d come back when the time was right.

Yesterday she did.

The moment she slipped it on, her face said everything.

Some dreams don’t fade with time.

Sometimes they simply wait for it.

Watching her see herself in that dress was one of those moments every mother quietly stores away.

The kind you know you’ll revisit for years.

But if I’m honest, that’s not the memory that has stayed with me most.

It happened somewhere on the drive between two small Oregon towns.

Jessa was behind the wheel.

Charley was in the backseat wearing her big sister’s graduation cap. The three of us were singing I’m Yours by Jason Mraz at the top of our lungs. There is a three-minute video of that drive. It has become one of my favorite pieces of the entire day.

When I got home, I asked Jessa if she would be okay with me sharing it here.

She smiled and said,

“Is it actually okay if we keep that special moment between us and not share it to social media?”

My answer was immediate.

Of course.

Because the more I sat with her words, the more I realized she had given me something far more valuable than permission to post. She reminded me that not every beautiful moment is meant to be shared. Some memories become sacred because they belong only to the people who lived them.

So instead, I’ll simply tell you about it.

Maybe you have a memory like that too.

A long drive. A familiar song. A conversation you didn’t realize would stay with you forever.

The kind of moment that felt completely ordinary while it was happening...

Until time revealed that it wasn’t.

When I got home that evening, the house grew quiet.

I sat down to look through the photographs. Somewhere between those images and the memory of that drive, tears began rolling down my face. Not because I was sad. Because my heart had finally caught up with what the day had been asking it to hold.

It wasn’t just graduation. Or a wedding dress. It was the realization that time had quietly done what it always does. It had carried my little girl into womanhood.

Motherhood has surprised me in so many ways.

When my children were young, I thought my role was to teach, protect, and guide them.

Those things mattered. They still do. But somewhere along the way, my role gently changed.

Less directing. More witnessing. Less holding on. More paying attention.

Time never announces itself.

It doesn’t whisper, “You’ll want to remember this someday.” Instead, it slips quietly into ordinary afternoons.

Into long drives between small Oregon towns. Into songs you’ve heard a hundred times before. Into the way one daughter confidently reaches for the steering wheel while another proudly wears her graduation cap.

The milestones are beautiful.

Graduations. Wedding dresses. New beginnings. But I’ve come to believe they aren’t what stay with us the longest.

It’s the drive between destinations. The conversations that wander. The laughter that can’t be recreated. The songs that become part of a family’s history. The ordinary moments we almost overlook because we don’t yet realize they are becoming memories.

Maybe that’s one of the quiet gifts of growing older.

Not that time slows down. But that we become more willing to notice it.

To witness the people we love becoming themselves.

To let our hearts expand instead of trying to hold everything still.

Yesterday, I thought I was taking graduation photos.

Instead...

I spent the day witnessing time.

If stories like this speak to something in your own heart, I hope you’ll continue the journey with me.

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I’m currently preparing to release my first novel, The Map Maker, a story born from many of the same questions that inspire these reflections: How do we notice what truly matters? What shapes a life? And what quiet moments change us forever?

Thank you for being here.

I’m so grateful we get to witness this journey together.