Recently, I stood before a sculpture at the beautiful Oeno Gallery in Prince Edward County.

The sculpture is called Immigrant by Galina Stetco. A woman kneels. Her body is fractured, torn open, as though life itself has carved its story into bronze. Yet at the centre of her chest, where her heart would be, a single purple rose quietly blooms.

The sculpture was created to honour immigrants.

As I stood before it, my thoughts immediately turned to my parents. They were immigrants. But before they were immigrants, they were children whose lives had been forever altered by war.

My mother was a child refugee. She lost her father during the Second World War and, like millions of children across Europe, was forced to leave behind the only world she had ever known. The landscape of her childhood disappeared long before she ever arrived in Canada.

My father also lost his father during the war. As a young man, my father survived years as a prisoner in a Soviet war camp before eventually finding his way to Canada. His journey was marked not only by distance, but by unimaginable hardship.

Together, they arrived in a country whose language they did not speak. A country whose customs they did not know. A country where everything familiar had been left behind. Imagine that for a moment.

Leaving your homeland. Your language. Your family. Your history. Your memories. Walking into a place where even the simplest conversation reminds you that you no longer belong.

And yet, somehow, finding the courage to begin again. To build a home. To raise children. To plant gardens. To contribute. To hope.

There is a quiet heroism in the immigrant that is rarely celebrated. Not the heroism of headlines. The heroism of ordinary people who carry extraordinary burdens with remarkable grace.

As a child, I couldn’t fully appreciate what my parents had lived through. Children rarely can. I simply knew the life we were building in Canada. Only later did I begin to understand that my parents weren’t just building a new life. They were rebuilding themselves. The sculpture honoured that truth beautifully.

And then, as I continued to stand before it, something unexpected happened. The meaning began to expand. I realised I was no longer looking only at immigrants.

I was looking at all of us.

I began to wonder if immigration is one of life’s greatest metaphors. As human beings, we become immigrants many times throughout a lifetime. Not always across borders. But always across becoming.

We leave childhood before we know what adulthood will ask of us. We leave careers that once defined us before a deeper purpose has taken shape. We leave marriages. We leave healthy bodies. Sometimes we leave dreams we held for decades. Sometimes we leave versions of ourselves that no longer fit the person quietly emerging within us.

Life asks us to do something profoundly difficult. To leave before we have arrived. To release one identity before another has been fully formed. To walk through uncertainty carrying little more than hope.

Every profound transformation begins this way. Every awakening. Every healing. Every reinvention. Every act of forgiveness. Every journey toward authenticity. We become immigrants.

No wonder these seasons can feel so disorienting. Like my parents arriving in Canada, we often don’t yet know the language of the life we are entering. We don’t recognise the customs. We don’t know where we belong. We wonder whether we ever will.

And then my eyes returned to the rose.

Small. Purple. Radiant. Resting exactly where the heart is, and where our soul lives.

Everything else in the sculpture has been fractured. The rose has not.

For me, that rose is the soul. It is the heart. It is love itself.

Life can change almost everything about us. It can take away our country. Our work. Our relationships. Our certainty. Our health. Even the identity we’ve spent years constructing. But there is something it cannot take.

It cannot take the quiet essence within us. The love and light that existed before the labels. The love that exists beneath every role we have ever played.

Perhaps that is why the rose is purple. Purple has long been associated with the sacred, with mystery, with spiritual transformation. It reminds us that our deepest journey is not simply psychological or emotional. It is a journey of the soul.

The soul is not searching for itself.

The soul is already whole. It does not journey from one place to another. It quietly accompanies us through every crossing, expressing itself through our intuition, through our heart, and ultimately through love. Our lives change. Our identities change. Our circumstances change.

The soul does not. It is our compass. Our heart is our guide. Love is the force that carries us through every border life asks us to cross.

Perhaps that is why we honour immigrants so deeply. It’s not the oceans they cross that captures us. They remind us of something profoundly human. That courage is not the absence of fear. It is the willingness to leave behind what no longer can contain us, trusting that life is calling us toward something more whole. More authentic. More complete.

My parents gave me many gifts. The greatest may not have been the life they built. It may have been the example they lived.

They taught me that we can survive unimaginable loss without allowing loss to define us. They taught me that hope and courage are stronger than fear. They taught me that love can build a home where none existed before.

And perhaps that is the invitation this sculpture quietly offers every one of us. To trust the crossing. To honour what we have left behind. To carry forward the wisdom it gave us.

Home is a feeling, not a place. Over time, I have come to believe that home is not ultimately geography. It is not Germany. It is not Canada. It is not a house or even a destination.

Home is the quiet feeling that arises when our lives become aligned with the deepest truth of who we are. Places can awaken that feeling. People can remind us of it. Nature can awaken it again. But they do not create it. Our essence expresses itself through our intuition, through our heart, and through love. When we have the courage to live from that place, we discover that what we have been searching for was never somewhere else.

The rose still blooms. The heart still knows. And home was within us all along.