The last week of August holds deeply rooted memories in my body.

It’s some strange balance, if not tension, between picking up next year’s school uniforms and ordering the large popcorn at a matinee because summer rules were still technically in effect.

There’s a longing for the summer already lived, alongside an almost cellular readiness for school to begin again. New teachers. New classes. New possibilities for who you might become this year. And, most importantly, a trip to Staples.

God, I love(d) Staples.

A fresh notebook. New highlighters. Pens that still had all their ink. Perhaps a three-ring binder with some completely unnecessary organizational system I would abandon by mid-October.

September has always felt more like New Year’s to me than January 1st. January arrives exhausted, slightly hungover, wearing sequins from the night before and demanding that you reinvent your entire life immediately. September has freshly sharpened pencils.

I trust September.

And yet, here we are in the last week of August, and summer is still very much summering.

Here in London, the heat wave has finally cracked and a new wind is winding its way through. The city is comparatively empty. Most of Europe seems to have put up an Out of Office and disappeared somewhere near a body of water. It’s easy to get a restaurant reservation, which in London is perhaps the clearest evidence that something supernatural is occurring.

There is still light late into the evening. Still bare shoulders and tables outside and the possibility of ordering another chilled glass because, well, summer’s summering.

And yet.

You can feel the turn.

And I’m noticing one happening in me.

I told my friend Serinda yesterday that just underneath my surface identity, the one keeping up with life’s responsibilities and answering emails and making decisions and remembering to buy toilet paper, I can feel a deeper tremor.

The muscles that hold up my personality are starting to tire and quake.

I know that may sound dramatic.
I remain perfectly capable of going to the grocery store.

In fact, Surface Natalie is doing quite well. She can run a meeting. She can respond to a WhatsApp while walking to the Tube. She remembers the birthday, makes the reservation, checks in on the friend, pays the bill, sends the document, takes the call, buys the spinach. She can be relied upon to keep the trains running, metaphorically speaking, which is fortunate because here in the United Kingdom the actual trains seem less committed to this goal.

And I like her.

She has built a life I am deeply grateful to be living.

But underneath her, lately, I can feel something moving.

I called it a tremor.

Serinda listened and then pointed out that the nature of a tremor is to move side to side. Too true. Side to side - like two neighboring keys on a piano being played back and forth so quickly that the sound itself begins to tremble.

And somewhere in me,
I’m waiting for a third note to arrive and turn the tremor into a chord.

I have had the peculiar feeling lately that the next thing in my life cannot be reached by becoming more efficient at the current thing.

Which is inconvenient.

And so it is.

There are periods of life when we are asked to build. There are deadlines and commitments and people depending on us. Life requires participation. The surface personality has an important job.

But I wonder what happens when we become so competent at maintaining the life we have that we can no longer hear whether some part of us wants to inhabit it differently.

Because I don’t feel particularly interested in blowing anything up. I’m not standing in the kitchen holding a passport and announcing that I am moving to an monastery (though, frankly, don’t tempt me with a good time). I love so much of my life.

The sensation is subtler than that.

Two notes.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

And somewhere underneath them, the suspicion of a melody I haven’t heard yet.

I keep wanting to reach for it, which is, of course, the problem.

I want to understand it. Name it. Put it on a Post-it. Preferably assign it a timeline and three measurable outcomes.

Instead, on Friday, I’m going away.

My dear friend Nicola has generously offered me her sweet flat while she is gone, in a seaside town at the edge of the UK. I’m going by myself for a solo-vacation, a few days with very little planned.

This is harder for me than it sounds.

Because even rest can become an assignment if you are sufficiently committed to achievement. I can absolutely imagine myself arriving at the sea with a notebook and immediately writing:

OBJECTIVE: HEAR SOUL

followed by a three-day agenda.

Friday: Drop beneath personality.
Saturday: Receive revelation.
Sunday: Integrate revelation.
Monday: 9:00 a.m. - return transformed.

So I am trying to resist giving this trip a job.

I want to walk. Read. Sleep. Eat something good. Stare at the sea for longer than my habituated sense of schedule wants. Leave stretches of time unclaimed and see what fills them.

I don’t have an agenda for what I want the deeper voice to reveal, because I suspect that would defeat the purpose. I simply want to find out what becomes audible when the part of me responsible for keeping everything moving gets a few days off.

And perhaps that’s what I’ve always felt in these final days of August.

The year hasn’t turned yet.
Summer is still here.
September is waiting with her freshly sharpened pencils.

For this brief stretch, we belong entirely to neither rhythm.

There’s something spacious about that.

A few days when the old timetable has loosened and the new one hasn’t yet taken hold.

A little unclaimed time.

And so, before I go to the sea, I wanted to offer you something for this threshold. A blessing of sorts. More accurately, a benediction - for the season between seasons.

I hope you savor these last days of August, Friend.

I’m going to take next Sunday off from writing to you. It feels strangely appropriate to leave that little square on the calendar empty too.

I’ll meet you back here in September.
Pencils sharpened.

With love always and in all ways,
Nat

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My two business partners and I were on a call Wednesday morning, when, out of the corner of my eye, something on the floor beside me moved.

I glanced down.

A MOUSE.

A BIG ONE. Okay, I mean, not big like a rat - but definitely not small-small like a mouse-mouse. This was a full adult mouse with responsibilities, and more importantly, she and my adult bare feet were approximately twelve inches apart.

(on a gasping inhale) “OhmygodohmygodohmygodYOUGUYSITSAMOUSE”

One sentence strung as one word.

“What! Show us.”

I jump onto my chair, grab the laptop, and tipped the screen toward the floor so my brothers-from-another-mother could assess the emergency.

Seeing my absolute horror, border lining on terror which, for some of us, is NOT an overreaction, I hear Mark say through Google Meets: “Get a long handled dustpan.”

I had already blacked out. I couldn’t even compute what a dustpan was, let alone begin taking requests regarding handle length.

“Do you have a broom?”

A broom. Yes. Broom I know.

I ran out to the deck, grabbed the broom, and came back.

The mouse was still there.

This seemed concerning. Aren’t mice supposed to scurry? Isn’t scurrying their whole thing?

Also, now that I had the broom, what exactly was I supposed to do with it?

“Get something to cover it.”

According to Joe, by this point all they could hear in the background was me repeating: “Okay, okay, okay. I can do this. Okay. Okay okay okay.”

I found a colander.

Good enough.

I dropped it over the mouse.

The guys are having a Field Day with this AND very calmly giving me clear instructions as if I was locked in an escape room that they had a map to.

To be fair, one of these men is an ex-sniper and the other is a father of many-a-kiddo, so I had somehow found myself with perhaps the most overqualified mouse-removal task force in London.

And I… was I was holding a colander, sweating through my clothes.

“Get something to slide underneath the colander” Mark said.

Right, right. Okay okay okay.

I bring over a cutting board. “Like this?”

“Yes! Don’t give it an a centimeter, it’ll squeeze through” they both call out.

GOOD LORD, I am not meant for creatures of any kind. I love animals mostly conceptually. I am an indoor person. I like my nature arranged in a vase.

“Okay okay okay, I got this” I continue to repeat aloud.

I began sliding the colander onto the cutting board while praying to every God I studied at seminary. All of them. No time for denominational preferences.

Please don’t let me trip. Please don’t let the mouse launch herself through one of these tiny colander holes, attach herself to my face, cause me to fall backward through the deck door, become Patient Zero for some previously undiscovered rodent-borne disease, force the evacuation of West London, and have this make international news.

I carried my mouse-trapping contraption onto the deck, put it down, lifted the colander and immediately ran inside.

I closed the door.

And LOCKED IT.

Obviously.

I went back to the call, beads of sweat rolling down my face, while the two of them laughed so hard they could barely speak and congratulated me on my bravery.

I thanked them for successfully guiding me through the crucible of my hero’s journey.

I’m sure we managed to do some very serious, very important work after that.

I just don’t remember what it was.

After the call, I went to check on Mouse.

And there she was. Eyes closed. Limp.

Oh gosh.

Suddenly, The-Very-Big-Not-Quite-A-Rat-Mouse looked really quite small.

Tiny, actually.

And, dare I say it, kind of cute.

Oh no.

Now I loved her.

This little creature had somehow made her way into my home, ended up right beside where I was sitting, and died.

My fear immediately gave way to tenderness.

Oh, Mouse.

Obviously, this was a sign.

So I did what any newly ordained interfaith minister with a mild tendency toward magical thinking would do…

I consulted my animal-spiritual-shaman, Guru-Chatty-Ji.

“What is the spiritual significance of a mouse coming into my house to die right beside me?”

Strong prompt.

Bless my business partners, they wanted the readout too. “Go on, tell us,” Joe and Mark said. I read aloud:

“Symbolically, mice are often associated with smallness, vigilance, survival, hidden things, and the details we overlook. If I were treating the moment as symbolic, I might read it as: Something that has survived by being hyper-alert may no longer need to survive that way.”

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Allow me to tell you about my two-hour rollercoaster ride.

Sadly, not Six Flags. Just a massive journey down into the internal plumbing of my psyche and back up again.

Thursday morning actually started out quite well. I was all proud of myself. Got in a strong workout, a nourishing breakfast, even a shower. Put on a lip and I was ready to start the workday.

WHAT, Thursday!? You ain’t got NOTHING on this self-cared-up-boss-babe.

I opened my laptop, sipping on my freshly made Flat White.

Just as I saw a new email populate in my work inbox from my colleague, he called.

Oh! Hi!

He gave me a heads up about the email he had just sent and, honestly, that’s really where I blacked out. I could feel a bit of tension and urgency in his voice, and I felt it well up through my own spine.

Ah, right, yes, I’ll check the email right now.

Off the call, I read it slowly.

The email itself was supportive yet direct, encouraging a group of us toward a direction, with a good amount of healthy urgency, framed explicitly as a collective effort.

Somehow, the email read one way and I received it in a completely different language. I could actually feel my nervous system translating it.

The words could have been something like, “We need to get on this...” And quick-like-cheetah, my nervous system translated: “You haven’t been doing this.”

Within seconds, I was emotionally thrashing somewhere between defensiveness and shame. My brain had opened a legal practice and was rapidly building a defense case.

Don’t you see that I’ve already...
Do you have any idea how much I’ve done for...

I stopped myself… Nat, what are you defending?

The answer came immediately.

That I haven’t done enough. That I don’t know how.

Ah.

There you are.

The old so you’re saying I’m not enough.

Here’s the maddening part. I had enough wherewithal to know there was a massive chasm between what the email actually said and what I had heard.

I could see the chasm.
I just couldn’t seem to get myself across it.

The momentum was already there. Part of me wanted to hide under a rock forever and ever amen. Another part of me wanted to prepare a lengthy exhibit of everything I had already contributed. Judge-Jury-Defendant-and-Prosecution-Nat had convened court and, apparently, we were hoping to reach a verdict before lunch.

I had thirty minutes before my next call, where I would need to be Strategic-Leader-Natalie. So I chose my highest form of spiritual practice for moments such as these:

Phone a friend. ;)

Thankfully, Janie picked up.

“Girl, I am activated and it’s all my stuff. I’m reading this email for the third time and it’s as kind and collaborative as it can be. But it went straight to my nervous system’s central vein.”

A consummate professional in both spiritual and work realms, she got straight to the point. “What’s it hitting upon?”

“My two core-of-the-core-of-the-center-of-my-wounds: I’ve done something wrong. - AND - I’m not smart.”

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Jon is standing just to my left.

The music is playing. The parents have walked. And then there she is.

One of my dearest friends, Katie, looking impossibly beautiful, walking beneath an arch of flowers and down the aisle into the middle of the most abundant garden.

She joins us at the altar, just to my right.

They take each other’s hands.

They’re a tad nervous, absolutely glowing, completely present.

Then they both turn and look at me. Eighty people fall silent.

I think to myself, God, I hope I do this justice.

I take a deep breath, and:

“We are gathered here today...”

I ask the same first question of every couple I am lucky enough to officiate for:

“Why get married?”

These days anything goes. You can love each other without getting married. You can get married without having a wedding. You can build a partnership and a family in a hundred different ways. Why are you choosing this form?

This is usually met with a long pause.

By the time we have our first session, the wedding has taken on a life of its own. They’re six spreadsheets deep. Someone’s aunt has opinions about the venue. Version 3 of the seating chart has some family members strategically separated. And at least one text thread has spiraled into an unnecessary discussion about napkins.

For four sessions, we get to slow all of that down. And we remember that before there were thematic colors and tasting appointments, there were simply two people who wanted to spend their lives together. That’s the part we get to come back to. They get a break from budgets and vendors. I get to ask the questions that possibly no one else has asked. Together, we build a ceremony that sounds like them, instead of a generic idea of love. It might just be my most favorite “job” of all.

And that first question… well it’s a funny one coming from me.

I’ve been married and divorced. Engaged again. And then, in a way, divorced from the marriage that never was. I’ve studied marriage and wedding ceremonies as part of seminary. Officiated 10 weddings, with lucky number 11 coming up in September. And today I find myself living in London, single, watching roughly half my friends walk toward marriage while the other half wonder whether the institution itself still makes sense.

Back in 2013, this was me:

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On any given day, you might hear me talking passionately about one of three things:

• Croissants.

• Work.

• Croissants again.

Never - in the top 2,000 things you would ever hear me passionately orating about - would “my visit to the doctor” make the list.

Until now.

Because after I left my first Neko Health experience, I haven’t shut up about it.

But let’s back up for a second.

If you think about the doctor’s offices you’ve visited over your lifetime, I imagine your memories aren’t all that different from mine: the faint smell of antiseptic lingering in the waiting room, outdated magazines no one actually wants to read, fluorescent lighting that somehow makes everyone look slightly unwell, and that crinkly paper on the exam table that announces your every move like you’re opening a bag of potato chips.

And then, of course, comes the grand finale: the eye-watering bill, the inevitable wrestling match with the insurance company, the test results that take a nauseatingly long time to arrive, and a voicemail from the doctor’s office saying, “Can you give us a call back?” - a sentence that somehow manages to sound equally terrifying whether everything is perfectly fine or not.

And then, when you’re really up against it, the stakes become something altogether different.

My former partner Kevin spent 2023 and 2024 undergoing treatment for Stage 4 cancer, and hospitals became a second home. Suddenly you’re no longer thinking about the bad magazines or the weird lighting. You’re wondering whether the nurse will find the vein on the first try. Whether today’s blood work is good enough for treatment. Whether the scan will show the tumors have shrunk, stayed the same, or grown while you’ve been trying to carry on with ordinary life.

You become strangely fluent in waiting.
Waiting for blood work.
Waiting for scans.
Waiting for the doctor to walk through the door.
Waiting for the phone to ring.

I’ve also had the privilege of seeing medicine at its very best. My dad was a physician. “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” meant following him into the ICU where, in one particularly unforgettable parenting decision, he had me peer through a scope while he intubated a patient with lung cancer so I could see what a “black lung” actually looked like. (Strong anti-smoking campaign, Dad.)

I should have the healthiest relationship with preventative healthcare imaginable.

And still...

I avoid going to the doctor.

Even though I know “I feel fine” isn’t a diagnosis.

Even though I’m now in my forties and bodies begin negotiating with us differently than they did in our twenties.

Even though more and more friends my age are navigating diagnoses none of us imagined we’d be discussing over dinner.

I still put it off.

And I think it’s because somewhere along the way, many of us learned to associate healthcare with bureaucracy, uncertainty, distrust, expense, and bad news. The doctor becomes the place you go when something has already gone wrong and from soup to nuts, its going to be a painful experience.

So of course we avoid it.

Which is why Friday surprised me so much.

I tried Neko Health for the first time.

And I am shook-eth.

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Yesterday, my phone rang just as I was about to make coffee.

It was two of my closest friends calling from California. He was standing in their kitchen, reheating leftovers after a party, she was off camera in earshot. I was standing in mine in London, just about to heat up milk in my milk frother. They were ending their day. Mine was just beginning.

It started innocently enough.

He’s peeling back the lids of Tupperware containers, reheating leftover chicken for late-night tacos with the phone propped against the kitchen counter.

“Hun, do you want one?” he asks his wife.

Before she can answer, I chime in.

“Hi, girl! Late-night tacos? How pumped are you?”

She steps into the frame.

“They’re alright,” she says, “it’s just that they’re a little runny. He didn’t drain the liquid when he cooked the chicken.”

In the background, almost too quickly to notice, something familiar pass over his face. A controlled exhale. A flicker of deflation, before he goes back to assembling dinner.

Then, as effortlessly as conversations between old friends often do, we moved on.

They started telling me about the party they’d just come from.

And then she does, “I was talking to our neighbor, and he came over and interrupted us. He goes, ‘Um... your family is over here. Can you come talk to us?’”

He jumped in.

“Well, she was talking to the most annoying neighbor of the entire neighborhood. She doesn’t even like her. Why was she over there talking to her in the first place?”

For the next few minutes, we dissected the neighbor. Her personality. His interruption. Who was right. Who was rude.

Standing in my kitchen, still holding the milk, I blurted out, “but this isn’t really about the tacos or the neighbor.”

Silence.

We’ve got that kind of friendship. Neither of them looked offended. They mostly looked unsure who should speak next.

“Go on,” he said.

I looked at him, “When you walked over to interrupt their conversation at the party... what were you feeling?”

He didn’t answer straight away.

“I just wanted her to come hang out with us.”

“Right, right. But what were you feeling?”

Another pause.

“I didn’t really know anyone there.”

“Mmhmmm?”

“I guess...” He shrugged. “Lonely.”

“Lonely.”

He nodded.

I turned to her. “And when he interrupted you... what were you feeling?”

She answered immediately.

“I just thought it was so rude.”

“Okay, right. But what did you feel?”

She looked away for a moment.

“It was just that everyone turned and looked at us.”

“So... embarrassed?”

She nodded.

We hung in the silence.

“So now what” he said.

Still in my pre-coffee bluntness, I said, “Brother, instead of saying, ‘I’m lonely. I want to be with you,’ you busted into their conversation.”

He smiled.

“And, girl... instead of saying, ‘I felt embarrassed,’ you’ve spent the last ten minutes critiquing the tacos, the neighbor, and how he drove home...”

Silence.

The two of them standing by their stove, him with a wooden spoon full of minced chicken, her holding a half eaten taco, only the sound of my milk frother whirling.

And we all recognized that thing. That thing that we all do. Myself definitely included.

That thing that happens when our protective strategies express in the exact opposite behavior of our deepest desire.

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And you might be reading this and saying, oh yes - that old hat - the old ‘Course in Miracles’ adage of “we’re never upset for the reasons we think.”

BUT… I’d venture to say that if we suffer, this very dynamic is still alive in us. And it can be found in literally any relationships - from parents, to siblings, to kids, to friends, to coworkers, to the relationship we have with our Selves.

We don’t want to feel what’s underneath. And we certainly don’t want to admit that we’re feeling it. So we protect.

I repeatedly locked horns like this in relationships past. I can just hear myself saying “you’re late and you didn’t even text.” The next twenty minutes would be spent discussing whether he’d seen the text, how bad traffic had been, or whether he’d simply lost track of time. We became experts on punctuality.

What I never actually said was the truest thing available to me.

I missed you.

He walked away feeling criticized. I walked away feeling uncared for. Neither of us received the tenderness we were reaching for.

He had his version too. I’d be wrapping up a hard day at work and before long, the diagnosing began: why I worked so much, where the pattern came from, and an inventory of the healing still left to be done. The next twenty minutes centered on my deficiencies. What he never actually said was the truest thing available to him.

I hate watching you suffer. I feel helpless.

I walked away feeling attacked. He walked away feeling unseen. Neither of us received the tenderness we were reaching for.

I remember telling our couples therapist that it felt like we were two porcupines asking for a hug.

It’s so much easier to witness in a different couple or in someone else. At a safe distance, it can be so obvious. Making my coffee that morning, it was like a blinking neon light: it’s not the tacos! But when you’re the one holding the taco, tacos are all there is.

So what do we do? How do the porcupine quills come back down?

No matter if I’m in the protective strategies with myself or tangled in it with another, I’ve begun to ask myself one question. One question, easiest enough to remember, efficient enough to defuse an emotional bomb:

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Yesterday should have been a simple day.

I was invited to celebrate the eldest son of one of my closest friends as he finished boarding school. About 90 min outside London, the school feels like something out of Harry Potter - old brick buildings, a woodworking studio, a library that rivals Hogwarts, and a choir rehearsing somewhere nearby, its music spilling through open windows as we explored the campus.

Lizzy and Robin’s family has become one of the greatest gifts of my first year in London. They more or less adopted me when I arrived. Sunday roasts, impromptu drinks at the local pub, their children saved in my phone as “lil sis” and “lil bros.” There are friendships that take years to feel like family. This one seemed to skip a few steps.

I travelled out with their 16 year old daughter, Calypso, nicknamed Clippy. We caught every connection with minutes to spare, congratulating ourselves as though we’d personally optimized the British rail network. Somewhere between comparing favorite TV shows, catching up on her end-of-term exams, debating nail colors, and trying to untangle the latest Kardashian relationship, 90 min slipped by. We arrived in high spirits.

The afternoon turned toward celebrating Jethro, the eldest, and the rest of “The Leavers,” the school's wonderfully understated name for students about to leave for gap years and university. (I maintain the term is only one small branding exercise away from The Hunger Games.)

Unfortunately, Friend, my immune system had other plans.

London had just endured a week of temperatures it isn’t really built for. 95 degrees, consistently, repeated day after day. This heat made international news and left an entire city deciding whether to brave the unwelcome sauna of the Underground or pay the eye-watering fare for a black cab. People wandered around looking vaguely betrayed. Every Tescos sold out of ice cream, which I can personally verify after conducting what felt like a citywide investigation.

We don’t really do air conditioning here. We do open windows, oscillating fans, and conversations about how “it’s the humidity,” whether or not that’s actually true.

But more than that, that kind of heat without despite, wares on the body, mind, and spirit. Cold showers at 2am in the hopes of falling asleep. 20min cat naps midday in hopes the brain will be reignite for the next string of meetings. I felt my spirit beginning to buckle under the combo platter of work stress, money stress, time stress, and heat exhaustion.

To boot, the heat had also conspired with the countryside to produce what felt like an Olympic-level pollen event.

By the time I arrived, I was already powered almost entirely by antihistamines and hopeful intentions.

The celebration itself was beautiful. Teenagers introducing themselves with eye contact and firm handshakes. Grandparents lingering over student artwork. Parents embracing in reunions, clinking pimms in plastic cups, passing around various homemade potato salads and “crips” dips. It was a reality so far from my own Los Angeles high school experience, I was just in awe. What a vision.

Friends scattered across picnic blankets in long grass… that my allergies immediately declared to be hostile territory.

After a few hours I admitted defeat. A mess of soaked kleenexes, I said dejectedly “I think I need to head back. I’m so sorry.”

She hugged me, completely understanding. “Clippy and her best friend are heading back too.” Oh good, I thought. Unexpected bonus. More time with Clippy and I get to know her bestie.

What we couldn’t have known is that our easeful journey there, would become a 4 hour Odyssey to get home.

Delayed train.
Cancelled train.
Transfer at this and that station.
Another train.
Another wait.

I genuinely lost count somewhere around the fifth mode of transport. I don’t know whether it’s the staff, the tracks, or the steel itself, but the British rail system seems to enter a Victorian fainting spell the moment the temperature climbs.

The heat piqued. The nasal sprays settled deeper into my system. Every platform seemed to promise that relief was only half an hour away.

By the time we climbed onto what I think was our sixth train, I could feel my mind beginning to build its case…

Across from us sat a couple with two small boys who had reached the entirely understandable conclusion that sitting still on a packed train in ninety-degree heat was an unreasonable request. The older one was bouncing on the seat, locked in an imaginary sword fight with his little brother. The younger narrated the whole adventure at a volume that felt considerably louder to my antihistamine-soaked brain than it probably was.

Without even realizing it, I’d begun collecting evidence:
These parents should do something.
Can’t they see everyone is exhausted?
Why today?
This is unbearable.
Can’t everyone just...

Then I caught Clippy looking across at the youngest little boy.
She smiled.
“Isn’t he so cute?”

It was such a simple sentence.

She wasn’t trying to correct me. She had no idea where my mind had wandered. It was what she saw and what she truly felt.

And in that moment, I saw in her the promise I had made only two weeks earlier.

As part of my interfaith ministry training, we had taken vows. Before we did, our teachers gently warned us that these vows would almost certainly be tested, almost immediately. And here it was. My penultimate vow was:

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Over the last few years, something exciting has happened.

What begins as a Sunday essay often turns into a conversation with you.

An email reply becomes a voice note. A voice note becomes a phone call. A quick check-in becomes an hour spent talking about work, relationships, purpose, leadership, grief, reinvention, or the strange and beautiful challenge of being human.

These conversations have become one of the most meaningful parts of my week.

Sometimes I’m helping someone navigating a career transition. Sometimes it’s a founder trying to build something ambitious without losing themselves in the process. Sometimes it’s a person standing at a crossroads, sensing that life is asking something of them but not yet knowing what. Sometimes it’s someone who, from the outside, appears to have everything together and yet can’t shake the feeling that something important is trying to get their attention.

Over the years, I’ve found myself in some wonderfully different rooms - dance studios, boardrooms, retreat centers, startup meetings, seminary classrooms, hospital rooms, and kitchen tables.

What fascinates me is that beneath the surface, people are often wrestling with the same questions:

• Who am I becoming?

• What matters most?

• And how do I move forward without abandoning myself in the process?

Over time, I’ve realized that much of my life has been preparing me for exactly these kinds of conversations.

Not because I have all the answers (spoiler alert: I don’t).

Mostly because I’ve spent years swirling in and living into these questions.

Through movement and teaching. Through entrepreneurship and leadership. Through heartbreak and reinvention. Through building communities. Through two years of interfaith seminary and, more recently, ordination as an interfaith minister.

What I do best is help people listen for their own wisdom beneath the noise.

To slow things down enough to hear what’s actually happening.
To distinguish between fear and intuition.
To find clarity when everything feels tangled.
To reconnect with the part of themselves that already knows.

In many ways, this feels like an extension of what we’ve been doing together here every Sunday.

Paying attention.
Asking better, more beautiful questions.
Listening for what feels true.

So, I’m opening a small number of spaces for one-on-one work with me.

Sometimes it looks like coaching. Sometimes strategy. Sometimes spiritual direction. Sometimes leadership development. Sometimes simply creating enough space for someone to hear themselves think.

Mostly, it looks like you and me sitting together, cutting through the noise, in service of what really truly matters.

I’m intentionally keeping it small because this kind of work only works when I can bring my full attention and presence to it. As I build this next chapter of my life and work, I only have space for a handful of people.

The container is simple: one virtual session a week for three months.

The intention isn't to create dependency, but momentum. To give a question, transition, challenge, or calling enough space and consistency that something real can emerge - and then enough room afterward for that growth to become your own.

If something in you is stirring as you read this, I’d love to hear from you. We can start with a conversation and see whether it feels like a good fit for both of us. If it does, I’ll share more about the structure and investment.

Just send me a message, not doing any fancy forms or intake-anything, just shoot from the hip and tell me what’s alive in your world right now.

Email Me & Let's Begin the Conversation

Let’s start there. I’m excited.

With love, always and in all ways,
Nat

Before I tell you this story, can we take a moment with this photo? This is my mother’s side of the family. Mom all the way to the left. My uncles. My aunts. For a period of time, all of them were nuns or priests, standing there with their proud parents, my Grandmama and Grandpapa.

The running joke in the family is that we’re all going to hell because everyone eventually “divorced” God and left their posts. Strong start for a lineage.

And then came me.

The youngest of three. The one who has spent much of her life zigging where others zagged. My sister became a therapist. My brother became a tech executive. Both brilliant. Both responsible. Both possessing a degree of stability that continues to elude me.

Meanwhile, I danced for rock bands. Helped build and taught The Class. Moved across an ocean. Started a new company. Nothing linear about it, no real 401k to hang my hat on.

And somehow, against all odds, appear to have followed directly in my mother’s footsteps.

In some ways, I think this story begins with her.

My mother, Isabel, died suddenly in 2014 in our childhood home. She had struggled with depression and with addiction since before I was born. The year after her death, I read through her journals and discovered how often she wrote about the monastery she had left decades earlier. She missed her ‘Sisters.’ She missed the sound of Gregorian chant. She missed the life she thought she might have lived.

For years, I thought my work at The Class was about fitness as embodiment, healing, and helping people come into relationship with themselves. Looking back now, I wonder if I was also trying to save my mother. Or at least trying to help other women do what she struggled to do - turn toward pain instead of anesthetizing it.

And when I eventually left The Class, the hardest part wasn’t leaving the work. It was leaving the community.

Almost immediately, I understood something I had only intellectually got before. I understood my mother’s longing. And her commitment to community that wanted to wrestle with a larger conversation.

In June of 2024, I found myself in Ireland on a walking tour with David Whyte. At one point we hiked several miles to a place called The Bowl, where he told us the story of the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue. It was there in that place, he explained, that O’Donohue felt called to become a priest.

I remember being in The Bowl and feeling something shift inside me. It wasn’t the desire to become a priest myself. It was the revelation of a thread running through my family, through my mother, through John O’Donohue, and somehow through me. A thread of people trying to find their way into relationship with the sacred and with service. A thread of people willing and wanting to wrestle with God.

It felt as though Life Itself lifted my chin and said: Pay attention. This belongs to you too.

And so, on that trip, at the Irish pub at the end of that hike, I texted my friends and said “I’m going to apply to interfaith seminary. Hold me to it!”

I didn’t then, and actually still don’t consider myself particularly religious. I applied because I wanted companions in the wrestling. And in the inquiry into mystery, meaning, and with the invisible architecture beneath a human life.

And last week, that chapter came to an end. And started a new beginning.

We gathered in upstate New York for a final intensive. There were private ceremonies and rituals, our vow taking and our ordination. And then Graduation happened on Saturday, witnessed by friends and family; it felt more like dessert than the main course.

In these last two years, whenever someone asked about seminary, I would explain that I wasn’t really there to become a minister. I was there to learn. To study service. To deepen my understanding. The title Reverend felt like something that belonged to other people. People with clearer plans than mine. People already serving congregations or preparing for chaplaincy or building ministries of their own.

But in that week of Ordination and Graduation, something became unexpectedly clear. This process had never really been about becoming anything. It had been about shedding. Shedding assumptions. Shedding identities. Shedding ideas about who I was supposed to be.

David Whyte wrote a poem called The Opening of Eyes, about Moses standing before the burning bush and hearing God ask him to “shed your shoes.”

We all come to this moment in our journey when everything that took us to that point is no longer needed for where we are going.

Where the shoes that brought you here will not be what keeps you on this path.

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I’m writing to you from Seat 54K, “Economy Delight.” And while I think we may have different definitions of delight, I do appreciate the optimism.

Outside the window, an expanse of white hangs suspended in blue, as if the sky and the ocean have inverted.

It feels like a fitting place to finally write my vows.

If you’re new here, I’ve spent the last two years in interfaith seminary, studying the world’s major religious and spiritual traditions on the path toward ordination. And somehow, after two years of classes, retreats, papers, practices, and prayers, ordination week has arrived.

I made my packing list last night and had to laugh.

Pajamas.
Travel shampoo.
Clergy stole.
Minister’s manual.
Peanut butter protein bars.

The essentials.

A couple of months ago, we were given an assignment: write your Personal Code of Ethics.

If you’ve been reading along, you’ll know I’ve spent the last several weeks wrestling with that question, eventually breaking it down into five smaller questions that felt a little more livable than “How should I live?” (You can read that piece here.)

From that code of ethics, we were then asked to write our Vows of Ministry. The promises we will speak during our ordination ceremony this Wednesday before our cohort, our teachers, ourselves, and the God of our understanding.

If the word “vow” makes your hair stand up, as it did for some of my cohort who carry experiences of religious trauma, my wonderful dean, Reverend Sarah, pointed out that the etymology of the word comes from the Latin ‘votum,’ meaning “solemn promise, dedication, or wish.” Feel free to substitute whichever word allows you to stay in the conversation.

For reasons I can’t quite explain, I’ve found it much easier to talk about ethics than vows.

Ethics feels like a conversation. While, this kind of vow feels like standing naked in front of life’s grandest mirror.

For weeks, I've been carrying them around with me - before sleep, just before waking, on long walks, on flights, in those strange in-between spaces where the deepest questions seem to emerge. An invisible companion.

And then, a few days ago, David Whyte posted one of his older poems. One from his 1997 collection, The House of Belonging.

And as tends to happen with his work, I felt less like I was reading a poem and more like I was being read by one.

It’s worth giving it a second read - and then a third. Every time I come back to it, a different line grabs me by the collar.

“All the true vows are secret vows.”

Right there is the critical difference between what we declare and what we live. Some promises are so deeply embedded within us that they rarely become language. Others are so intimate they are never shared with another. Still others remain hidden even from ourselves.

“Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body.”

In your own body. The body reveals where our time goes, what receives our attention, what we repeatedly choose, tolerate, avoid, and return to. The irony, as I aim to write my vows, is that our deepest truths aren’t in our declarations or aspirations, but in the patterns we create through our daily actions. It is actually a very uncomfortable and confronting idea because it asks us to look beyond what we say we believe and toward the life we are actually making. The body, after all, is where our vows become visible.

And then:

“I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these years

in my own voice”

Woof.

In my own voice. There is something both painful and liberating in that realization. Many of us spend years living according to promises we never consciously chose. Promises made to please, to belong, to stay safe, to avoid rejection, to become who we thought others needed us to be.

Reading that line, I found myself wondering: can we truly make new vows, while old allegiances still govern our lives?

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When I first started working with Joe and Mark, my co-founders at HALEN, I remember telling my friends, only half joking, that this project seemed to be guided by angels.

There has been something undeniably strange about the timing and synchronicities surrounding this company from the very beginning. These moments that are difficult to explain cleanly without sounding either deeply spiritual or mildly unwell.

Get this.

Two weeks ago, we were updating our pitch deck and landed on the slide about dream collaborators. The people we would involve in HALEN if we could wave a wand and choose anyone. Joe added a new image to the deck. Our absolute dream person.

The next week, he attended an event that he got a last minute invitation for, and no joke - that exact person walked into the room.

Now, this was not one of those giant conferences where A-list celebrities keynote and everyone in media, wellness, tech, and venture capital are packed into the same fluorescent ballroom eating tiny tuna tartare cones. It was relatively intimate. And somehow the two of them ended up in a real conversation. One with actual resonance. Enough resonance that we are now exploring ways to work together.

When Joe texted Mark and me the photo afterward, the three of us collectively lost our minds in the group chat.

Because this sort of thing keeps happening.

(Naturally, I immediately suggested we add Michelle Obama to the deck next and see what happens.)

At dinner last week, I was telling our friend and co-conspirator - I mean colleague - Janie about all of this. About the strange frequency of these moments, and how each of us seems to carry a very particular kind of conviction around HALEN.

About what happened at Joe’s event. About how we’ll have an idea on Tuesday and Mark will speak about it with a potential investor on Wednesday as though it already exists in the world and everyone else is simply catching up to it.

My version feels different. Less bold. More like this odd sense of steadiness I keep noticing in myself. Projects in the past have made me panic at the first real obstacle. This one doesn’t. Even when things become uncomfortably uncertain, I keep having the feeling that we’ll find a way forward. Or maybe that the way forward is already moving toward us long before we know exactly where to look for it.

Janie listened for a moment and then said, “In Kabbalah, this is what would be called: certainty beyond logic.”

And Friend, I practically lunged across the dinner table for my phone to write that down before the phrase disappeared back into the atmosphere from which it apparently arrived.

Because yes.

That was it.

That was the feeling I had been trying to articulate.

Joe didn’t put that image into the deck because he thought, “Wouldn’t that be nice?” He put it there from some deeper internal certainty that this person belonged in the orbit of the company before reality had offered any evidence to support the idea.

And somehow, reality responded.

That night, I pulled my notes app back up “Kabbalah: certainty beyond logic” and started to dig in.

Its teaching says that certainty itself has creative power.

Consequentially, this is not positive thinking or wishful hoping - it specifies that its actual certainty. The idea is that reality exists in a state of potential until certainty collapses it into actuality. Your certainty doesn’t just change your perception; it participates in what becomes real.

And this isn’t unique to Kabbalah. Christian scripture talks about ‘faith moving mountains’ - not as metaphor, but as mechanism. Buddhist traditions teach that ‘intention shapes reality,’ that the mind precedes all things. Islamic mysticism speaks of tawakkul - a trust so complete it borders on knowledge.

Different languages for something similar: certainty creates a channel. A pathway. An opening for something to move from possible to actual, depending on the quality of belief they bring to it.

Which is beautiful.

And also slightly concerning.

Because somewhere around hour three of contemplating “certainty beyond logic,” my brain very reasonably countered with:

“Okay, but isn’t this also how cult leaders think?”

Important question.

Because Elizabeth Holmes probably also felt pretty certain beyond logic. Every founder (or lover for that matter!) who drove their company (or relationship) off a cliff FELT guided. From the inside, conviction could feel identical whether you’re building something real or living in a la-la-land.

So where exactly is the line between deep knowing and self-deception?

Between vision and fantasy? Between faith and delusion?

…whether its in work,
intimate relationship,
with a future,
or sense of self.

I have been sitting with that distinction all week, and here’s what I’ve come to.

To truly be discerning, we must ask ourselves this one core question:

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Picture this.

You are in Munich to deliver a seminar called Overcoming Overwhelm, and the day before you give it, you become completely… overwhelmed.

This is what experts call “on brand.”

I was at Google Munich for Mental Health Awareness Month, teaching a few different workshops. Nervous system reset. Navigating change. Overcoming overwhelm. A real buffet of modern human suffering, served with slides.

And the day before my overwhelm talk, I met one of the senior leaders. He was warm, kind, gracious, and very German-engineering-adjacent in the sense that he seemed to be thinking seven thousand years into the future while I was mostly thinking, “I hope I packed the right bra for tomorrow’s keynote.”

He asked about the talk and said, “We all certainly need this one.”

And because I am a professional, I smiled and said something polished like, “I’m so honored to bring it to the team.”

Then I asked how the team was doing…

And that’s when the conversation went somewhere I did not expect.

He said that everywhere he turns, everyone has AI on their mind. Senior leaders. Managers. Teams. Assistants. Engineers. People trying to embrace it. People trying to resist it. People trying to use it faster than the person next to them, while also wondering if the thing they are using is currently training itself to make them irrelevant.

Which, you know, relaxing.

For some people, the overwhelm is practical. How do I learn this? How do I integrate it? How do I stay useful? For others, it is managerial. How do I lead people through a shift I barely understand myself? And for others, it is existential. What happens when intelligence itself is no longer the thing that makes us the most powerful species in the room?

Then he said something I have not stopped thinking about.

He said there will come a time, sooner than many of us expect, when we are the less intelligent species trying to have a relationship with a much higher intelligence.

Lovely.

Very casual.

Very “please pass the sparkling water.”

Then he said there is only one other relationship he could think of where the less intelligent species is able to control the more intelligent one.

I asked what that was.

He said, “Infants and their parents.”

And that, Friend, is when my nervous system gently packed a bag and left the premises.

Because here I was, about to teach a room full of people how to overcome overwhelm, and suddenly I was staring at a future in which humanity is, apparently, a screaming baby trying to negotiate bedtime with God’s… laptop?

Cool, cool.

I had arrived prepared to speak about overwhelm in the way I usually think about it. Too many tabs open. Too many emails. Too many demands competing for our attention all at once. The ordinary pace and pressure of modern life.

But this conversation seemed to point toward something underneath all of that. A deeper layer of overwhelm that felt less logistical and more existential. It was not simply that people had too much to do. It was that people were trying to adapt faster than their nervous systems could metabolize.

And honestly, once I started seeing it, I could feel traces of it everywhere.

The managers trying to lead teams through technological changes they themselves barely understood. The employees wondering whether the skills they had spent years building would remain relevant. The pressure to keep learning, adapting, integrating, optimizing. The sense that if you paused for even a moment, the world might reorganize itself without you in it.

There was a particular quality to the overwhelm I encountered there that felt different from ordinary stress. It carried this unspoken question beneath it:

Who will I become under this kind of pressure?

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My homework for seminary this month is to write my own personal code of ethics.

Casual. Light lift. No big deal.

If you’re new to Make The Sun, I’ve been in ‘school’ for the past two years, studying and practicing to become an interfaith minister. And now I’m 24 days away from ordination, which feels both deeply meaningful and slightly surreal, depending on the hour.

The beautiful and humbling thing about homework in ministry is that if you rush it or cheat it, you’re the one who has to live with the result. Which, as it turns out, is a much more effective accountability system than any grade ever was.

If you’re like me, “code of ethics” has a deep childhood imprint of something handed down in stone, slightly terrifying and not particularly open to discussion. Like there’s already a right answer, and you’re late to it. I’ve failed and barely begun.

Cool, cool.

Well, one way to subvert the inherited heaviness would be to just use AI and ask, “dearest robot-trained-on-the-average-of-all-human-wisdom, tell me what my personal code of ethics ought to be.” It would give me something coherent and polished. I could print it out, slide it into my Minister’s Manual (that’s a thing), and carry on toward ordination with a very convincing document in hand.

Could do, could do.
Except for that whole “cheating yourself” business…

The added layer to this is that from our personal code of ethics, each of us will write the vows we’ll take during ordination. Our Vow of Ministry.

And well, that lands.

If I think about it in the context of a promise - a promise to myself, to others, to the Divine - it helps open up a kind of creative thinking, or creative feeling. Where its not about smite and fury, but more about deeply wanting to see myself and reality clearly. Without editing or softening. Without skipping over the parts that are inconvenient or unfinished.

And when I take that vow, I want it to be true.

No pressure.

I’ve been sitting with this idea of ethics, my own personal code of ‘em, for weeks now. Writing. Crossing things out. Writing again. Pages of notes that feel, at times, both sincere and incomplete. I’m even dreaming about it! I kept circling the same ideas, trying to land on something that felt honest enough to stand on.

And somewhere in the middle of all that circling, came this guiding question:

How do I want to live this one life?

Whew.

Right. This one wild and precious life… how do I want to really live it? How do I want to promise myself that I will?

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It ain’t one of those questions you just sit down with a cuppa and boom, there it is. It follows you. It shows up in different moments, asks different things depending on who you’re with, how you’re feeling, oof - what’s at stake.

And on this path toward ordination, with twenty-four days left, I found myself trying to take that question seriously. Something I would actually have to stand inside of.

So I started pull the question itself apart, letting it touch different parts of my life. The big moments, the small ones, the ones I tend to move through quickly without noticing what’s actually happening. Because how we live shows up there. In how we speak. How we respond. How we make decisions. How or if we repair.

And boy oh boy, can I see where I fall short.

Which is part of what has made this process harder than I expected. We were given two months to work on this, and I now have twenty-four days left. Somewhere in the last few weeks, surrounded by drafts and half-formed sentences, I reached a point where I couldn’t tell if I was getting closer or just getting more articulate about the same plethora of ideas.

So instead of trying to land on a finished answer, I started asking myself better questions. And that’s where we’re gonna go today, Friend. I hope you’ll join me in digging in. Feel free to journal on, take a walk with, meditate into:

5 questions for Living This One Life:

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LA is a funny town.

I think of myself as a relatively healthy person. I move my body, I eat reasonably well, I care about my work, and I care about enjoying my life. I have a sense that I’m doing okay.

And then I come back to LA, and I am reminded that I am almost always almost well.

Because everyone here is HEALTHY AF.

As a native Angeleno, I give myself full permission to roll my eyes at the abundant sea moss section at Erewhon. And yet, this time, somewhere between the adaptogens and the aggressively glowing people, I found myself actually taking notes. Because tucked inside the LA-ness of it all, my people were living in ways that were… annoyingly effective.

So, as I write to you from the skies (thus no audio recording this week!), leaving LAX and headed back to Heathrow, I want to share eight lessons I’m taking with me. A mix of habit stacking, boundary setting, and advice that only my father, the legend that is Gil Kuhn, could deliver.

8 Annoyingly Effective Lessons from LA:

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On Tuesday, my bestie Brooke and I decided to just do the thing we’d be threatening to do for months - go live on Substack together. It was slightly unhinged in that kind of laugh-so-hard-its-virtually-inaudible kind of way. And somehow we made it all the way through. We called it “Bestie Hour,” and something tells me we’ll be back. Take a peek and have a laugh.

Then on Wednesday, I landed in LA from London for a week of work and play, which is a very glamorous way of saying I will be part-time emailing and part-time “Erewhon-ing.”

My friends have all texted, “how does it feel to be back in LA since you’ve moved?”

And the answer is immediate. There’s really no place like home. The same streets. The same light. The same deeply ingrained habits that appear to live in my body more reliably than my own willpower.

Every time I get off the plane, my dad, his girlfriend Kathleen, and I go to one of my favorite restaurants, and I order the same chicken sandwich. There is no menu consultation. There is no deviation. We are who we are.

So Wednesday night, we’ve just settled into the ritual, and at the table next to us, this woman is absolutely going off on the waiter. Sharp, dismissive, just fully committed to the experience of being terrible.

And I had that very familiar thought: you can tell everything you need to know about a person by how they treat a waiter. Case closed. Jury satisfied. Personal moral superiority fully intact.

I turned back to dinner with my family, feeling quite settled in my assessment of humanity, when my dad, almost as if summoned by the timing gods themselves, peppered in a dash of politics, “And on the Strait of Hormuz...”

And just like that, I could feel it.

That same tightening in my body. That same quick rise of heat. That same impulse to shut the whole thing down before it had a chance to go anywhere I didn’t want it to go. And there I was. No better than the woman with the waiter. Just in a different setting. With better branding.

Which got me thinking about that whole waiter thing. Turns out, it actually has a name: The Waiter Rule. It’s often used to describe the litmus test for someone’s character, based on how they treat people who don’t have power over them. It gets used all the time. First dates. Work events. Subtle evaluations of who someone really is when nothing is at stake.

And I do think there’s truth in it. It matters how we treat people. It matters if someone moves through the world with a sense of entitlement or basic respect. That does tell you something real.

But it’s also a very particular kind of situation.

You’re interacting with someone who doesn’t know your history, doesn’t press on your wounds, and doesn’t require anything ongoing from you. There’s no emotional charge. No real risk. The ego is relatively undisturbed.

In those moments, kindness can come easily. It doesn’t cost much. I can be warm, generous, patient, and feel good about it without having to confront anything in myself.

And that’s when I started to wonder if The Waiter Rule is well, the wrong litmus test.

Because if we’re really looking at character, not just behavior, the more revealing question might be how someone shows up where there IS something at stake. In the relationships that are ongoing. In the places where history lives. In the moments where something in you is actually activated.

That’s where things get interesting…

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Dear Friend,

Quick poll: who here arrived on earth via a woman’s body?

You? You, too? Oh, everyone?

Ah, right, right. Every - single - person. Alive or dead.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that this week. Walking down the street, taking the tube, sitting on Zoom looking at all the little squares and all the faces, and thinking, you came out of a woman. We all share that basic fact, and yet… here we are.

Here we are.

This week, “all women” and “some men” but definitely not “all men,” are horrified and collectively shaken by CNN’s investigation into a website - not even hidden, just out there - that teaches men how to drug and r^pe their wives in the most undetectable ways possible. Sixty-two million views in one month alone.

I highly recommend watching the interview my bestie Brooke Baldwin did this week with her former CNN colleague Saskya Vandoorne, who broke the story open.

The quotations are deliberate, because the response to this story from “some men” was immediate: correction, deflection, minimization. “It wasn’t 62 million men, it was 62 million visits.”

Mmmmm. Thank you. PHEW! Glad we’re focusing on that. I was about to be RAGEFUL that there was a global network of men who use this site, who visit it regularly, who know about it and say nothing. I was about to be horrified. But since it’s just 62 million visits in February - the shortest month - (80 million visits in March) I feel so much better now.

Wait. WHAT.

And that’s how it goes, right? Diminish. Deflect. Correct.

Growing up, my brother went to an all-boys school. I went to an all-girls school. For PE at his school, the boys were all trying to get onto the volleyball or basketball teams. At mine, there was a massive waitlist to get into the “women’s self-defense class.”

What a privilege that it was offered. What a statement that it was always waitlisted. My friends and I used to say the same thing: “not sure if I’ll ever use chemistry, but I will absolutely need self-defense.” And has it come in handy? Many, many times. And counting.

Now women aren’t just covering their drinks at the club. We should be worried about covering our coffee at home? WTF.

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I've been trying to get to the root of why this particular story, this particular revelation about the R^pe Academy, feels different from all the other horrors we've become numb to. Why it's landed in my body in a way that won't let go.

And then I remembered something Rev angel Kyodo williams said to me a few months ago, and suddenly the whole thing came into focus.

Rev came through London and we had dinner together. She’s my teacher, my mentor, and, what a blessing, also a friend. And she is absolutely one of the prime influences of why I’m in inter-faith seminary right now. Sitting with her is always a reminder of two things: you do the world no good if you are not ‘here,’ and you do the world no good if you forget that ‘here’ is connected to ‘there.’

Do your inner work, and apply it to outer work. It’s all one system.

That night, she said something that completely reframed the conversation about liberation for me. A true before-and-after moment, where everything I had understood up until then reorganized itself around this one idea.

Are you sitting down for this?

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In the last 10 days, I might as well have gotten an astrophysics degree, pledged emotional allegiance to NASA, and offered my hand in marriage to Captain Victor Glover. Along with the rest of the globe.

The four astronauts of Artemis II, who did not exist in my personal reality two weeks ago, and their trip around the moon, which has apparently been in the works for decades, have become my full-blown obsession. (You may recall last week’s substack on… the wisdom of Guru Glover.)

And I know I’m not alone in that. It’s a dominant topic on the group chat and, thank god, it has completely reformed my algorithm, cleansing it of all its previous sins. Voices from all corners of the earth fascinated, moved, and emotional about this phenomenon of science and soul.

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So at my dinner break from seminary training yesterday, I did what anyone else would do. I sat on the couch and read everything about how Artemis II splashed down back to Earth within minutes of their target and within a mile of what they predicted, completing a nearly 10-day journey that took them over 250,000 miles from home at their farthest distance.

Friend, throwing my dirty socks into the laundry basket is more of a liability.

And of COURSE, we are all so taken by the humanity of it, as it sits in the stark contrast to the unhinged greed we’re all subjected to at the moment. It feels like water in a desert. The humility. The way they speak about Earth as something shared instead of divided. The way the whole mission seems to pull people, even briefly, into a wider sense of belonging.

What I didn’t expect was that the science would hit me. That the mechanics would feel so spiritual. That the physics required to go further than any human has gone before, would become a soulful north star.

If you’ve ever felt “off-course” in work, love, or life, buckle up Buddy…

In order to understand the precision of that splashdown, we have to zoom out and look at how they navigate the entire mission:

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I did not expect NASA to emotionally take me out this week, and yet here we are.

It started innocently enough. One video. Then another. Then suddenly my entire algorithm decided I was a deeply committed space enthusiast, and now I know more about the Artemis II mission than I do about several people in my own life. I have watched so many astronaut interviews that if you asked me to suit up, I would at least feel spiritually prepared.

And somewhere along the way, I started crying.

Not a full-on breakdown. We are not in public meltdown territory. But a steady, surprising welling up.

There is something about this mission that feels different.

Yes, there are the obvious things. The scale of it. The fact that human beings are once again preparing to travel farther than we have ever gone, but this time, in our generation. The fact that there are still firsts unfolding in real time. Christina Koch becoming the first woman assigned to a mission to the Moon. Victor Glover becoming the first Black astronaut to travel there. Jeremy Hansen becoming the first non-American (he’s Canadian!) on a lunar mission.

So many kids (and adults) around the world getting to see themselves reflected in who gets to go, and feeling, maybe for the first time, that this kind of future could belong to them too.

All of it important.

But what has stayed with me is something else: the way they speak.

They are asked the same questions again and again. What does it mean to be the first. What do you hope your legacy will be. What are you most excited about. And each time, the answer moves outward.

No one centers themselves. No one claims the moment as their own. They speak about the mission, about the team, about humanity. About what it means to look back at Earth and understand, in a way most of us never will, that we are all sharing the same fragile place.

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There is a steadiness in them that feels almost disorienting. A kind of perspective that doesn’t shrink the moment, but holds it inside something even larger.

And perhaps that is why it is landing the way it is.

Because we are living through a time that feels completely unsteady, to say it kindly. The noise is constant. The fractures are violent. There are forces at work that overtly benefit from keeping us separate, suspicious, divided, and at war.

So to hear someone speak, without irony or defensiveness, about unity, about shared humanity, about this small pale blue planet we are all responsible for, it feels almost radical. It feels like remembering something we forgot we knew.

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In particular, Victor Glover is echoing in my chest.

Last night, far too late, I was doing that thing where you tell yourself “just-one-more-video” and then suddenly it is an hour later, and I came across a clip of him speaking from the spaceship.

And baby jesus buddah allah on high, time stopped.

From here (i.e. outer-friggin-space) “You are special, in all this emptiness. This is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.”

There was no performance in it, completely off the cuff and unprepared. No sense of trying to make it sound meaningful.

It was meaningful.

And then he spoke about the timing of the mission. That it would take place over a weekend that holds meaning across traditions. Easter. Passover. And Ramadan coming to a close. (I’ve included the clip at the end, do give it a watch.)

And to boot, this year, my birthday fell into the middle of all of it. Every few years, that happens, and when it does, I feel it more. A subtle awareness that something is being mirrored across different stories at once and I ought to pay deeper attention.

Passover tells the story of leaving what confines you. Of stepping out before you feel ready. Of trusting a path that has not yet revealed itself. Easter speaks to the reality that something must end before something new can begin. That transformation often looks like loss before it looks like growth. Ramadan calls for reflection. For attention. For a turning toward something beyond the self.

Different traditions. Different language. And yet they are circling the same experience.

Crossing a threshold you cannot fully prepare for.

Leaving what is familiar. Stepping into something you cannot yet see. And trusting that something will meet you there.

Which is what brought me back, again, to Captain Victor. And the five words he said that perfectly names what happens when we reach the edge of ourselves.

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It was a big ole week of… drum roll please… boundaries.

And I am celebrating my Self over here, because communicating my needs without collapsing is, for me, the emotional equivalent of becoming a decorated Olympic medalist. Basically, this week I became Eileen Gu. You may call me Mz. Gu henceforth.

Now, to be clear, I am not boundary-less across the board. I can hold a line with a stranger, most colleagues, some friends, a barista who spells my name wrong for the third time.

Where things get… fluid… is with the people I deeply love and care about. Total kryptonite.

With them, if I’m not paying attention, their feelings start to feel like my responsibility. Their disappointment becomes something I need to prevent. Their discomfort becomes something I need to manage. Full-time job. No benefits.

And if you’re wondering what that looks like in unpoetic psychological terms, the clinical definition is codependency. I’m fairly certain if you open Merriam-Webster, it’s just a picture of my face.

Or at least, it was.

Because baby’s growing up.

If I trace that pattern back, it’s not exactly mysterious. Baby Nat grew up in a home where difficult emotions weren’t just uncomfortable, they were destabilizing. If my mom slipped into a certain kind of pain, there was a real risk she would use. She was painfully addicted to pain medication. So somewhere in those early, single-digit years, I learned a very clear lesson: don’t rock the boat. More specifically, I learned that it was my responsibility not to rock it, and that if it did get rocked, that was somehow on me. A heavy job description for someone who still needed help tying her shoes.

And that pattern, as you might imagine, has had a long and wildly successful career across every intimate relationship I’ve ever had. Work, friendship, romance. All of it. A real overachiever in that department.

Until now.
(Shannon, I hear you.)

My friend Shannon is always reminding me to use that phrase. “That’s my pattern… until now.”

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Friend, if you can relate, or you’ve been in relationship with someone like this, you’ll recognize this moment.

It could be big and dramatic. It also could be in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation, when someone I care about says something that, on the surface, could be completely reasonable. A request. A preference. A shift in plan.

And still, I feel it.

A slight tightening. A pause that flickers through before I respond. The brief awareness that what is about to come out of my mouth is not exactly what is true.

And then, almost immediately, the familiar movement begins. “I can make this work.” “It’s not a big deal.” “This time they meant it.” “They didn’t mean anything by it.”

By the time they’ve finished speaking, I am already adjusting. Moving things around in my mind. Finding a version of “yes” that keeps everything smooth, that avoids the possibility of disappointment, that lets the moment pass without friction.

And from the outside, it looks like ease. It looks like care. It looks like someone who knows how to show up well in a relationship.

Turns out, there’s a big difference between showing up and disappearing.

So this week, I said some hard things.

To three different people I love, across the overlapping worlds of work and friendship, I communicated needs that I would have historically softened, postponed, or worked around entirely in the hope that maybe, magically, they would resolve themselves without anyone ever having to feel uncomfortable.

And y’all… it went well.
Like, suspiciously well.

Which tells me two things. One, I am learning. And two, I have done enough pruning in my life that the people closest to me now are capable of meeting me there.

Huzzah - I might throw my Self a party.

Because this has been so hard for me in the past, and is such a focus in the present, I’ve found myself returning to a simple three-part practice. Fair warning: it is not elegant, elevated, or especially cute. It is the down-and-dirty work of staying with discomfort, on purpose, in repetition.

But honestly? I would rather get down and dirty with discomfort inside a three-step practice than spend the next few years, or God forbid decades, in self-betrayal.

So. You ready? Welcome to:

Boundaries for the Boundary-less
A messy, effective, time-consuming, fully worth-it, 3-part practice

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Last Tuesday I lay on my kitchen floor eating peanut butter straight from the jar, refreshing my bank account and doomscrolling headlines, and thought: This is fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine. Everything is JUST FINE!

I wasn’t fine.

I was lost. Specifically, I was lost in the ‘Land of Financial Insecurity,’ where I’ve been wandering in circles for months now, squinting at spreadsheets like they might reveal some hidden exit. I was also lost in the ‘Land of Global Citizenry’ (you know, the one where everything’s collapsing and you’re supposed to just... what, exactly?), which, let’s be honest, is less of a land and more of a sinkhole. But the Land of Friendship? That one’s warm, solid, clear visibility to the horizon. Thank God for that.

Here in March of 2026, if you’re lost, I think it’s a sign you’re paying attention.

We’re always navigating multiple lands at once. Some earth feels solid underfoot: maybe its friendship, creative work, morning coffee rituals. Others feel like quicksand: maybe its money, purpose, the state of the world. And we’re supposed to move through all of them simultaneously, like we’re fine, like we ‘woke up like this,’ like we have a map.

And the thing about being lost? It migrates. One month it’s our finances. The next it's our relationships. Then it's our work, our purpose, our body, our health. Lost doesn't stay put. It moves through our lives like weather.

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But here’s what we don’t talk about: we treat “lost” like a diagnosis. Like something went wrong. Like we missed a turn somewhere and now we’re off course, and if we could just backtrack far enough, we’d find the place where we screwed up and fix it.

We lie awake replaying decisions, wondering if we should have taken that other job, said yes instead of no, stayed instead of left. We carry this low grade anxiety that we’re supposed to be further along by now, that there’s a “Correct Life” happening somewhere else to some other version of us who made better choices.

And the worst part? We think the solution is clarity. We think if we could just see the next ten steps, if we could just get some certainty, some solid ground, then we’d be okay.

Somewhere in the midst of my Financial Insecurity Spiral (trademark pending), my friend Alex texted me an old Alan Watts lecture. I almost didn’t listen. I was busy catastrophizing, running the numbers on how long I could stretch my savings if I only ate toast and gave up dignity entirely. But I hit play while doing dishes (read: the peanut butter spoon), and Maestro Watts said something that made me stop mid scrub. And it began turning this whole ship around.

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