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April has arrived and I'm finally cooking again. Writing again. Using my voice in ways I'd stopped trusting myself to use it. It's easy to doubt. It's so easy to let fear talk us out of showing up, to convince ourselves that our voice doesn't matter, that there's already too much noise, that we should stay small and invisible. I've been walking that path. But somewhere in the last few months, something is shifting. I'm stopping waiting for proof that I matter before I show up. I'm starting to show up anyway, doubt and all.

The truth is, I don't have it all figured out. There are still pieces I'm working through, still ways I'm struggling. But recently a friend said to me, everything you have in your life, I want that someday. She meant the cosiness of it. The kids, the home, a life oriented around love rather than achievement. And when she said it, I had to stop. Because I'd been so focused on what I hadn't figured out yet that I'd forgotten to actually look at what's here. The sourdough on the counter. The backyard fires and the beach trips in the summer. The paint nights and the fun we find our way into together. More animals than people under this roof. A husband who indulges every wild creative idea I have. A chaotic, noisy, sometimes extremely messy home that I wouldn't trade for anything. My Two boys, who are my whole world, and the fact that I get to be here when they need me. And it stopped me completely. Because that's where the aliveness is. Not in fixing what's broken, but in showing up more deeply for what's already here.

I believe the same thing is true for you. That somewhere inside there are things calling to you. Ways you want to show up, people you want to be present with, things you're afraid to try because you're not sure who you are to do them. And maybe right now you're in that space of doubt too. Here's what I'm slowly figuring out. Your presence matters. Not because you've earned it through someone else's approval. But because you're here. Because how you choose to show up in relation to everything around you is the only thing that ever changes anything.

This snail mail is part of my own returning too. It's one of the things I keep coming back to, keep believing in even when the doubt is loud. I don't know yet what it will become. But I hope it becomes something that matters to you. I hope it arrives in your mailbox every month and gives you a moment to slow down, to sit with something real, to feel a little less alone in whatever you're moving through. I want this to feel like someone is here with you. Offering you a little softness, a little reflection, maybe a perspective that stays with you long after you've set it down.

This is the first month I'm writing to you and I'm so grateful you're here. I'm figuring this out as I go, still doubting myself, still scared sometimes, but still choosing anyway. I'd love to know what's alive for you right now. If you feel moved to share there's a space on my website where you can write back to me. No pressure at all but I'd be honoured to hear from you.

We've just passed the spring equinox. The light is returning. Things are waking up. Tulip shoots are starting to push through the soil. The earth is revealing itself as the snow melts. Beltane arrives at the start of May, marking the return of warmth, of fertility, of the year's first real fire. We're in the emergence. Stepping into what's becoming visible.

This emergence is happening all around us. And maybe you're feeling something emerging inside you too? Something new stirring. Something that has been dying to come through.

Winter is the season of death. The earth goes cold and quiet for months. Seeds sleep in the darkness. And now the cycle is turning.

We die many times in a single lifetime. We die into new beliefs. We die out of old versions of ourselves. We move through seasons of becoming, over and over. Sometimes we choose it. Sometimes it chooses us.

And in our relationships, these cycles move through us together. Two people, both constantly changing, both constantly becoming. Both reaching toward something new.

But here's the tender part: we grip. We hold each other in the versions we know. We do this without even realising it sometimes. When you start to change, to become more yourself, the people closest to you can feel the shift. And something in them resists. They reach back. They say you've changed, as if it's an accusation. They pull at the thread of who you used to be, as if they could bring that version back if they just held on tightly enough.

What they're really saying is: stay familiar. Stay safe. Stay the version of you that I know how to love.

In relationship, there is a way that time freezes around certain moments. A conversation where you weren't heard. A choice they made that cost you something. A wound that crystallises and becomes the whole story. The present gets filtered through what's already been decided. Everything you do becomes proof of an old narrative. You can feel it. The way nothing you offer quite lands. The way they're seeing you through a version of yourself that has already died.

But here's what I know. Even when people reach back, even when they try to hold you in place, something in you keeps moving toward what's calling. The emergence doesn't stop just because they're gripping. It slows maybe. It goes quieter. But it's still there. Still pushing. Still becoming.

Maybe it shows up as a whisper. A project you keep thinking about. A shift in your work that's been calling to you for months. A conversation you know you need to have but have been afraid to start. A creative idea that won't leave you alone. A way of being that feels more true than the one you've been performing. Maybe it's small. Maybe it's quiet. But you feel it. A stirring. A knowing. A desire for something different, something more honest, something that belongs to you.

We're moving toward Beltane. The fire is returning. The earth is fertile again. And so are you. Not in the way you might think. But in the way desire moves through your body. In the way something is asking to be born through you. In the way a part of you knows it's time to shed what no longer fits so that something new can emerge.

This is the cycle of death and rebirth. Some relationships won't survive this becoming. Some versions of yourself won't survive it. This is the bargain of emergence. It costs something. It always does. But what it offers is aliveness. It offers you back to yourself.

As we move toward Beltane and the fire returns, notice what is returning in you too. What is stirring. What is asking to be born. What has been waiting quietly in the dark for exactly this moment.

I've been sitting with how to say that, and I think the most honest way is just to say it plainly. My husband and I made the decision, and it's the right one. But right doesn't mean easy. Right doesn't mean there isn't grief folded inside of it, arriving in waves I can't always predict or prepare for. This is the home my youngest has only ever known. Letting go of it has asked something of me I wasn't entirely expecting. There is so much to hold right now. Two businesses, two kids, so much pressure to get everything done while keeping some version of myself intact through all of it.

We don't entirely know what's next. There is uncertainty ahead, and I won't dress it up as purely exciting when some days it just feels like standing in the middle of something large and unresolved.

But then there was last week.

There was shaving cream everywhere.

On the back deck. In the pouring rain. My youngest is standing in front of me holding a can he'd found at the back of a drawer, grinning with the particular confidence of a child who has already decided what's about to happen. He'd been asking all day. I want to have a shaving cream fight, he said. Something fun, he said. And all day I had been moving through something heavy. The kind of heavy that sits in your chest and makes even the simple things feel like they require more than you have.

He brought out four cans. I said okay.

I'm not sure how it happened exactly, but we were on the deck in the rain and there was white foam on everything, and somewhere in the middle of it my husband and I dragged my oldest outside mid-dinner. Almost eighteen, resistant in the way that almost-eighteen is resistant to anything that might accidentally be fun. And then all four of us were out there, slipping, laughing, the smell of it sharp and clean and slightly ridiculous, like the inside of a barbershop mixed with rain.

I stood back and watched them.

There are moments in a life that feel like a film frame. Where something in you goes very still and you watch your own life happening in front of you, slow and luminous, like a montage you didn't know you were inside of. I remember standing there watching the three of them. All trying to get each other with blobs of foam, all trying to dodge the rain, all laughing so hard they couldn't catch themselves.

I thought: I will remember this. Not the before or the after. Not the heavy thing sitting in my chest or the mess we'd have to clean up when it was over. Just this. Just the three of them, white-streaked and soaked, completely unable to stop.

All I wanted in that moment was for them to remember two parents who could still find their way to silliness. Who could show up for twenty minutes of chaos even when the day had been heavy. Who loved them in a way that got wet and smelled like shaving cream.

When it was over I cleaned up the mess, and I want to tell you something about that. About standing on a soaked deck scrubbing foam off the railing while the rain was still coming down. There was so much gratitude in it. The kind that sits in your chest and makes your eyes sting a little. Or maybe that was just the shaving cream. Gratitude that I still get to clean this particular mess. That I was there for it. That my oldest, almost eighteen, who will not be draggable outside for much longer, was laughing so hard he couldn't find his feet. That for twenty minutes on a heavy day, the four of us were the same age.

We don't know exactly what's next. We don't know which walls we'll be living inside of by the end of the year. But I keep coming back to that deck. To the foam and the rain and the four of us completely unable to stop laughing. And I think what I'm slowly learning is that we have always been home. We just forget sometimes, when the walls around us feel like the thing that's holding us together.

I know it's an adventure, even when it doesn't feel like one. I know that grief and hope can live in the same body at the same time, sometimes in the same hour, and that doesn't mean anything has gone wrong. It just means you're paying attention.

I'll keep sharing as we move through this. Thank you for being here for it.

I'm sitting outside next to Willow's grave as I write this.

The field beside us has been cut right down to the ground, just before planting season. The first baby buds are coming through on the trees. I can hear the birds. My kids are in the distance. The sun is warm on my back even though I needed a sweater.

My dog passed away recently. She was here for 4,127 days.

And I want to be honest with you, there was a part of me that hesitated to write about this. Something in me wanted to hold it close, to keep this particular grief private, to show up here with something more finished than what I actually have right now. I noticed that pull. The part that wanted to tuck this away and bring you something tidier. But the more I sat with it, the more I kept coming back to how much space grief takes up in our lives. How universal it is. How few places we are actually given to be with it honestly, without rushing through it or dressing it up. And I thought: this is exactly what this space is for. So here we are.

Grief is a strange and faithful thing.

It came in waves. Without warning. In the middle of the ordinary things like making coffee, driving, mid-sentence with someone. That particular quality of grief that finds you when you're not bracing for it. When your body knows before your mind does. Something in your chest drops and squeezes, and there it is again.

Grief is not always loud. Sometimes it's a silence you walk into without realizing. A moment where the absence is so present it takes up more room than anything else.

And sometimes it arrives on a date. A birthday. A holiday. Mother's Day. The anniversary of something that changed everything. The calendar carries its own kind of memory, and the body holds it long before the mind catches up. I think most of us know this. Not only in death, where grief is most visible, but in all the forms it takes. The relationship that ended and took a version of yourself with it. The hope you had been carrying for years that finally, gently, closed. The life that shifted without asking your permission. The version of the future you were building that no longer exists in the way you imagined.

And there is the grief of the relationship you had to leave. The one that was costing you too much.

There is also the grief that lives inside relationships that are still here. The ache of reaching toward someone and finding them just slightly out of reach. The longing to be truly received, and the pain when that doesn't happen. This grief often goes unnamed, because the person is still there. But it is grief all the same.

And then there are the unnamed griefs. The childhood we wish we'd had. The parent who was there but never quite present. The friendship that slowly dissolved until one day you realized it was already gone. The version of yourself you were supposed to become and somehow didn't. These losses are real. They live in us the same way, often without the ceremony or the recognition that tells us we are allowed to mourn them.

Grief is what happens when love meets loss. In any form. At any size. And it does not wait for a perfect time.

What I keep returning to is the relationship we each have with our grief. Most of us were never taught to be with it. We were taught to get through it. To be strong, to keep moving, to let time do its thing. And so we do. We put grief in a drawer. And then the drawer gets full, and somewhere along the way we just stop opening it.

Some of us hold it at a careful distance, because somewhere along the way we learned that if we really let ourselves feel it, we might not come back. And some of us have never actually felt grief move through our bodies at all. We've thought it. We've cried at the right moments. But the felt thing, the one that lives in your chest and your throat and your stomach, that's different. And if you've never felt it move through you and come out the other side, you don't know that it does. You don't know it has an exit. So the distance you keep makes a certain kind of sense.

And the guilt. The way it flickers up alongside the grief, persistent and low. All the things left unsaid. The times you were distracted, or busy, or somewhere else entirely. Grief and guilt have a way of arriving together, usually in the early hours, when there is nothing left to do but feel them.

Grief, I'm learning, has its own intelligence. Its own timing. It doesn't ask whether you're ready. Life keeps moving all around you, and grief moves through it anyway, patient and persistent, arriving in the middle of ordinary things, in its own time and entirely on its own terms.

Is there something you haven't let yourself grieve?

But it's never too late to give something the ceremony it deserved. To pull it out of the drawer. To say: this was real. I lost something. And I'm allowed to feel it now, even now, even here, even all these years later.

And in its moving through us, it opens something. A tenderness we didn't know we had access to. A clarity about what actually matters and what has only ever been noise. Sometimes an unexpected gratitude for the things still here. The warmth on your back. The birds. Your people in the distance, alive and completely themselves.

Grief has its own ceremony, if we let it. It asks to be marked, witnessed, given space. And when we give it that, when we stop moving long enough to actually be inside it, something shifts. Not a resolution. Not an ending. But a kind of opening. Grief doesn't let us stay at a distance from our own lives. What's real becomes visible again.

And it asks something of us. To be in it and to trust it. To trust that it knows what it's doing, even when it doesn't feel that way. To let the people who love us come close enough to actually reach us. To say yes when everything in us wants to say no, I'm fine, I'll manage. For so many of us, this is where it gets harder than the grief itself. The letting in. The trusting. The staying.

Grief deserves more than a quick passage through. I'll keep coming back to it here, with you.

This month I'm enclosing a poem that was sent to me in the middle of all of it. It's by John O'Donohue, from To Bless the Space Between Us. He names it more beautifully than I can. I hope it finds you where you are.

In the weeks before it was listed, we painted, repaired, replaced, decluttered. Did everything you do when you're preparing a home to be seen by people who aren't you. And then the stager came. She moved through each room with this quiet authority, sorting what belonged from what didn't. Some of my things made the cut. Others did not. About fifty percent of my life is currently in boxes in the garage, stacked beside the things she set aside without ceremony. I walk down there sometimes and just look at it all. Everything that makes up a life, now tucked away in cardboard, taped, and waiting.

For years, almost every meal happened at the peninsula. The barstools were just where we landed — every morning, every night. They went. It was time. I think I'd already known it was time, and the stager just said it out loud.

In their place, a glass table set in the middle of what would have been open space — centerpiece, napkins, dishes, cutlery. The kind of table you'd photograph. My kids came home and asked if we could eat dinner at it. We couldn't. So the four of us ate on the floor beside it, plates balanced on our laps, that pristine table sitting in the background like something from a showroom.

Every morning we layer the staged bedding over our own. Every night we peel it back. There's the version of this home that exists for everyone else, and then there's the one we actually live inside.

Because here is what we actually live inside.

At various points, this home has functioned as an unofficial wildlife rescue centre. Ethan once came home from fishing with a duck he'd freed from barbed wire, because of course he did. He asked if he could keep it, and I said: under one condition — you must name it Richard. Because having a duck named Richard was, to me, just hilarious. But the injustice of only one child having a duck became very clear, very quickly. My youngest needed one too, and honestly, if we were getting ducks, I needed a duck too. I named mine after my dad. Roy. Mike built the duck pen in the backyard last minute, because that's what we do. Within a couple of days we were the proud owners of Richard, Spike, and Roy. Sadly, Spike passed away not long after. He was ill. Richard and Roy eventually moved to a farm, where they are still alive and thriving.

There have been chickens, hamsters, bunnies, lizards, cats, dogs. Last-minute projects of every kind — fire pits, gardens, kitchen renovations, basement renovations, businesses started, walls going up and the same wall coming down a few years later. I repainted this house almost every year, actually. If I'm being honest, Mike does the painting. I just picked the colour.

And alongside all of it: water fights and game nights that ran too late. Meals and get-togethers and birthdays. Dance parties in the kitchen. Sourdough rising on the counter. Jam being made on the stove.

This is the longest I've ever lived anywhere. I spent most of my life moving every few years, a different house, a different chapter. Somehow, this one held me.

Our home was clean and cared for. Just in a living way.

And now I sit very carefully on a creamy grey couch that no one is allowed to touch, and I hold my breath.

This is a stranger's house. A beautiful one. But I don't recognize myself in it.

We're not selling to buy something bigger. We're selling to release a version of our lives that's been out of alignment for a long time. To unencumber. My oldest graduates high school at the end of June. My youngest just got accepted to a new school. Everything is in motion for all of us, all at once.

Right now, there is a deep sense of suspension. The house is listed and I still don't know where we are going. I mentioned this last month, and the not-knowing is still very much present. My brain, given any chance, will run every worst-case scenario without being asked. Left to its own devices, it can turn into a full dumpster fire. It has always been talented in that direction.

In this home, I have found my spaces and my rooms. Especially my bedroom.

When we first moved in, my youngest was about to turn one. I was deep in postpartum anxiety, OCD, and depression. And in the middle of that same year, our family went through a major business transition — one that forever changed the direction of my path. I spent a lot of nights on the floor. Hiding in the closet. Riddled with panic attacks.

And in this house, all of that slowly started to shift. I found meditation. I found yoga. I became a yoga teacher, a facial stretch therapist, a somatic practitioner. The OCD doesn't take up as much space as it used to.

So when I say this feels like letting go of a safety net — I mean it literally. I just didn't realize how firmly it was in place. These walls held me while I was still becoming steady enough to hold myself. And the question sitting underneath all the not-knowing is this: Can I trust that I carry that foundation with me now? That I built it inside me, and not just inside these walls?

And through all of it, watching Mike. Watching us move through this together has been its own thing entirely. I'm grateful for that in a way that's hard to put into words.

I haven't done any of this alone. My parents, all four of them — my mom, my stepfather, my dad, and my stepmother, a blended family that somehow became genuinely friends with one another — have shown up in ways I still don't quite have words for. And if any of you are reading this, I want you to know how much appreciation and gratitude I have. Friends too, the ones who have shown up just as steadily.

There have been hands, literally, on my back.

My heart is connected to a space. I won't name it yet. But I'm holding it close — closer than I probably should — and hoping. It's the kind of space that feels made for a life like ours — enough room for our chaos, and for gathering people. Maybe even room for more chickens. And possibly, a return of Richard and Roy.

The glass shattered into a thousand pieces. I stood there with the glass strewn across the floor, trying to find a clear path to step, trying to avoid stepping on the sharp shards of glass. As I slowly made my way over to the broom, I couldn't help but laugh at myself and think how the broken glass somehow felt like it mirrored my life at that moment. In pieces across the floor. Not really sure where to step next. Some of the glass were big chunks. Others, small tiny shards. And some, invisible ones. The path to the broom and my shoes felt unknown. Just as so much of my life does. The small shards. The invisible ones. The things you don't know are there until you're already standing on them.

Life is ultimately completely unknown to us. And it shows up in so many forms.

It's sitting in a waiting room after a diagnosis, or living inside one day after day without a clear answer. It's building a business or a creative project from nothing and not knowing if it will work. It's being in a relationship and not knowing if it's going to make it. A fertility journey. The call you've been waiting on that changes everything. Not knowing if your child is going to be okay. Starting a new job and not knowing if it's the right one, or walking into a new school and not knowing if you'll find your people. Recovery, and not knowing who you'll be on the other side of it. Putting something you made out into the world and waiting to find out if it lands.

The Unknown wears a thousand faces. But it always has this same familiar feeling. Like emotional soup left simmering too long.

Hope mixed with fear. The wanting so badly sitting right next to the terror of not getting it. Excitement and dread arriving together, so tangled you can't tell them apart. The longing pulling you forward and the what if anchoring you to the floor. Trust and doubt sharing the same breath, the same moment, sometimes the same thought. The urge to just know anything, mixed with the slow, uncomfortable realization that knowing isn't available right now.

What I'm beginning to understand is that the Unknown asks for movement and surrender at the same time. And those two things feel like opposites, but I don't think they are.

We still have to make decisions. We still have to take steps, even barefoot, even when the floor is covered in glass and we can't see where all the pieces land. But underneath the movement there has to be something that isn't gripping. Something that isn't white-knuckling every outcome. Something that can hold the dream, the hope, the direction, and still say, I don't know how this unfolds, and I'm okay with that. Something that trusts, even imperfectly, even on the hard days, that something is holding this. Whether that's God, spirit, the universe, or something you feel but haven't found a name for yet.

Someone once said: don't try to answer the questions. Don't try to solve them. Live them.

He talked about loving the questions like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Not forcing your way in. Just living with them with curiosity. Carrying them in wonder. Trusting that one day you'll find yourself inside the answer without even knowing how you got there.

And I think about the questions that live inside the Unknown. The ones that don't have answers yet. What if this doesn't work out? What if I made the wrong choice? What if I'm too late? What if I'm not enough? What if I never find what I'm looking for? What if I trust the wrong thing?

Those questions have a way of taking up a lot of room. The brain wants to answer them, resolve them, find the exit. I'm learning to have patience with everything unresolved in my heart. To not search for the answers that can't be given yet.

Let me ask you this. What are the unknowns sitting alongside you right now? What are you carrying that doesn't have answers yet? And what would it feel like to sit inside those questions, not to solve them, but to carry them with curiosity?

If I'm being honest, the last few months have felt like equal parts heartbreak, chaos, milestones, and absurdity. Like being the main character in a story where the writer can't decide if it's a tragedy or a comedy, so they just went with both.

We lost Willow in April. The day after, Cyprus had multiple seizures and has since been diagnosed with epilepsy. We got the house ready to sell, listed it, had our hearts set on a space that didn't work out, and then discovered a roof issue that took the house back off the market. Mike, who does this kind of work for a living, is currently on the roof. We're hoping to relist mid-July.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we had to say goodbye to our cat, Big Papa. He was eighteen years old. We got him from the Humane Society when he was about four, which made him roughly the same age as Ethan. He wasn't a narcissistic asshole like some cats are. He was sweet and loving and affectionate and loved attention, and he was always somewhere close. He had been winding down for months — stopped grooming, lost most of his teeth, taking about ten minutes to get up the stairs. We knew.

The Friday it happened, Mike was on the roof and we had an off-market showing scheduled. I had spent the day cleaning and preparing, doing everything you do. With fifteen minutes left before we all had to be out the door, my youngest discovered a really terrible smell coming from Big Papa. We checked on him and found he had been in a pretty severe fight, likely with a neighbourhood cat. Given his age and the state he was already in, the decision came quickly. It wasn't planned. It was just suddenly, clearly, time.

At some point over the last few months, after everything we had been navigating, something in me just switched off. Not in a broken way. More like the body makes a decision without you — there is no more room for emotion right now, so we are going to move. We are going to do what needs to be done.

We loaded the two dogs and the cat into the car and drove to the emergency vet. Mike stayed in the parking lot. I took the boys inside and we said goodbye together.

Something I didn't know before Willow: you are allowed to make your own burial arrangements for a pet if you have the space. A lot of people don't realize that — the assumption is that the vet handles everything. When we said goodbye to Willow, we had arranged for her passing to happen at home, surrounded by all of us, and then took her to my in-laws for burial. With Big Papa, we had fifteen minutes before a last-minute showing and no time to make arrangements in advance. So we brought him to the emergency vet, with every intention of bringing him home to be laid to rest beside her.

And then came the drive to my in-laws to bury him. Dead cat in my lap. Fast food between my legs. On the way, I called my sister — she had lived with us for several years and was a big fan of Big Papa — to let her know he had received his wings. We were just pulling into the driveway when Cyprus slipped out the door behind me. So there I was — phone, dead cat in a blanket, pee on my leg, loose Siberian Husky. I'm yelling for Ethan. I finally get the dog back. I am absolutely starving.

We carried Big Papa up to where Willow is buried. I had planned to sit for a moment. To let it feel like something. And then the mosquitoes came. I lasted maybe forty-five seconds before I had to run. I let the boys complete the ceremony. And they did, quietly, without me — which might have been exactly right.

Sometimes that is just what life looks like.

Ethan graduated high school this month. His graduation was held in a theater at the center of the square. We walked in expecting the usual procession, graduates filing in from the back. But instead the curtain lifted and the entire graduating class was already on stage. Facing us. All of them, just there.

Something moved in me in that moment.

I thought about the walk to the park when he was two or three. The way one block could take forever. His hand in mine. You live inside those days without knowing you're living inside them. And then the curtain goes up and they're standing there, taller than you, on a stage they walked to themselves. His plan is to head north in September.

We get eighteen summers, if we're lucky.

I keep coming back to an old parable. A farmer's horse ran away. His neighbors said, how terrible. He said: maybe yes, maybe no. The horse came back with a herd of wild horses. His neighbors said, how wonderful. He said: maybe yes, maybe no. His son broke his leg trying to tame one. His neighbors said, how terrible. He said: maybe yes, maybe no. Army recruiters came. The son couldn't go. His neighbors said, how fortunate. The farmer said: maybe yes, maybe no.

I think about that a lot lately. The space that didn't work out. The roof that needed fixing. Big Papa not having to move in his final weeks. The timing that looked like loss, maybe being something else entirely. I can't say for certain. But maybe yes, maybe no.

This community has been an anchor through all of it. A landing place. I find I'm more honest here than almost anywhere else.

Last week I went to an all-women's dance party. Because sometimes you just need to be in a room full of women, moving. Sometimes that's the whole medicine.

I'm still here. A little more stripped down than I was. But still here.

The rain came down hard. Not the soft kind that breaks apart at the canopy before it reaches you. This was full rain. A summer afternoon forest rain, the kind that finds every gap in the leaves and comes through. You could watch it move if you stood still long enough, hitting the highest points of the branches first, running to the edges, falling to the next branch down. And then the next. Some of it was caught by the leaves, pooling in their centres before the weight of it tipped them over and let it fall, arriving at the ground in one long, fast chain. Some of it landed softly, disappearing into the moss and the soil without a sound. Other drops hit the rocks and the roots, the hard packed trail, ricocheting back up, throwing themselves sideways. Every surface had its own sound. The forest was full of it.

And underneath all of it, I could smell the cold, wet earth.

I stood there for a moment longer, wondering if I would ever feel whole again. Piece by piece, my world has been breaking apart and changing faster than I can count. The rain soaked my hair, and the drops running down my face made my tears impossible to distinguish from the rain itself. If any strangers had walked by, they would never have known.

The scent was stronger now. Wet stone. Dark earth. Moss. Cedar. Something green I couldn't quite name. The air felt fuller than it had only moments before, carrying something that hadn't been there until the rain reached the ground. I could smell the petrichor. It means stone essence. It's what gets released from the ground when the earth and the rain finally collide.

How could something remain hidden for so long, then become unmistakable in a single breath? The earth hadn't become something different that afternoon. It simply revealed something that had been held quietly beneath the surface, waiting for the right conditions to rise.

I wondered how much of our lives are like that.

The landscape of our lives shifts before we've had time to understand the last shift. And somewhere in all of that movement, you reach for yourself the way you always have, and something feels different. Like trying to hold water in your hands. Like sand that keeps slipping through, no matter how tightly you close your fingers.

We find ways to move through this world by introducing ourselves through the roles we play. The wife. The mother. The friend. The business owner. The caregiver. All of those are true. But none of them answer the question. Who are we at our core? Beneath the reshaping, beneath the redefining seasons that keep reconfiguring everything we thought we knew. And what if everything that is moving through us isn't taking something away?

What if it's what brings our essence to the surface?

The earth and the rain don't meet gently. They collide. And from that collision, something rises that has been held so long it became part of the earth itself. I wonder if that's what these seasons are. Not the things that take something from us. But the conditions that bring what has always been there all the way to the surface.

It's been held. Quietly. Waiting for the rain.

I know that is not a particularly long time, especially in this market. I was hoping that by the time I wrote this letter, I would have an actual update for you. That the house had sold, that we knew where we were going, that everything had already begun to move forward.

But I can't. At least not yet. For now, we are still here.

When I first imagined writing these life updates for The Conscious Post, I thought I would be telling you more stories about our adventures. The places we were exploring. The things we were doing as a family. The funny, strange, beautiful moments that make up a life.

But this summer has looked different for our family. There have not been many big adventures or new places. Much of our energy has gone toward just trying to move through this season and understand what the next chapter is.

When I started writing to you, I did not expect to become this open with people I had never met before. For years, I have held space for women. Women's circles, sacred spaces, one-to-one sessions. I have walked with women as they move through big transitions. I know how to listen. I know how to create safety. I know how to be the steady one when someone else is moving through something difficult.

There is so much I want to tell you. This last month alone could fill pages. There are deeper parts of myself I am still getting to know.

I will come back and write about this season one day. I feel like some experiences need to be lived before they can be understood. Sometimes we need a little distance before we know what belongs to us, or how to put any of it into words.

But in the meantime, this season is teaching me something about letting people show up for me. About saying I am not okay before I have figured out how to make it sound okay. About asking for support without immediately minimizing what I need. About letting someone sit beside me.

Sometimes we have to let ourselves be seen before we are composed. Before we have answers. Before we know how the story ends.

When life gets so big, so loud, and it is hard to know how to hold it all, how do you stay connected to yourself?

For me, it keeps coming back to practice. To rootedness. To the smallest, steadiest moments. The slivers of hope hiding inside of a heavy season or a life transition. A friend of mine calls them glimmers of gratitude.

They are not big. Most of them are easy to overlook.

Sometimes it is just funnel cake at ten o'clock at night, the kids piled into our bed, sugar dust everywhere, nobody minding the mess.

Sometimes it is sitting outside for a few quiet minutes with a coffee, listening to the birds.

I am including the recipe for the funnel cake. We have made it a few times this month now, and it has become a small moment of connection and joy for us.

For me, it has been one of those small moments. A glimmer of gratitude, a chance to find connection amid everything else.

Maybe that is what these small moments actually are. Not answers. Not fixes. A quiet refusal to let the biggest unresolved thing be the only thing that gets to define the day.

It sounds almost too simple. But I keep coming back to it anyway. This practice of noticing. Letting the smallest things be enough.

I don't know what's gonna happen next. But I'm learning to let the glimmers count too.