I grew up on my parents’ farm outside St. Marys, Ontario, Canada.

My sister Sandra died shortly after birth. My older sister, Mona, was four years ahead of me, and my younger sister, Becky, four years behind. I had one good friend who lived a short walk from our farm, but much of my childhood was spent alone.

And I loved it.

My mother called me Snoopy because I was endlessly curious. Apparently, even as a very young child, I managed to climb out of my crib and begin exploring every corner of the house. One day, I climbed onto a chair, then onto the kitchen table, reached high up to a shelf and took down our transistor radio. I carefully took it apart because I wanted to find the man inside.

As you can imagine, I was deeply disappointed when he wasn’t there.

As I grew older, my world expanded beyond the farmhouse. I explored the trees and hedgerows surrounding the farm and every corner of the big old red hip-roof barn. I wondered about what had happened there before me and imagined the lives it had held.

Eventually, I ventured farther, across the fields to the forest about five hundred yards behind our farm. There was a creek where I caught tadpoles, frogs and minnows. Nearby were the ruins of an old fieldstone farmhouse, where I searched among broken pieces of glass and dishes and wondered who had once lived there.

When I was ten, after travelling to Germany with my father, I would take my sleigh into that forest in winter. I had bought a pair of binoculars in Germany and somehow lost them on one of those adventures. For years afterward, I kept searching for them, convinced that perhaps I had hidden them somewhere in the rafters or between the joists of the basement in my parents’ farmhouse.

I built things, too.

In the upper level of the barn, I created my own farm. Dried corn cobs became fences, while my toy tractors and trucks travelled through the fields, laneways and pathways I constructed in my imagination.

Over time, I built three or four clubhouses among the tree lines, using pieces of old barns and whatever materials remained from sheds my father had built. I made clothes for Barbie dolls out of Kleenex, imagining and creating with whatever happened to be around me.

Looking back now, I realise how much that imaginary world resembled the life I would eventually create.

Those clubhouses became, in some way, the family cottage where my children and I would spend almost thirty years. The little farm I built from corn cobs became the farm where I live today. The fields, pathways, gardens and places I created in my imagination somehow found their way into the life I would build decades later.

The child wandering through those fields, tending an imaginary world and wondering what might be around the next corner is still here. I recognise her when I walk through my gardens and the lavender, watch the bees or make something with my hands. I recognise her, too, when I find myself imagining what might yet become possible.

The forms have changed, but something essential has remained: curiosity, reflection, imagination, dreaming and the desire to create.

Perhaps Sincerely is another expression of exactly the same thing.

It makes me wonder sometimes: What is the next incarnation of this lifetime?

A life seems to contain many lives. We create worlds, inhabit them, love them and sometimes leave them behind. Yet something essential travels with us from one into the next. The clubhouse disappears, but the builder remains. The cottage eventually becomes a memory, but the love that filled it remains. A corporate life ends, yet the curiosity about people, leadership, humanity and what allows us to flourish continues.

The child is still here.

At an early age, my earliest spiritual questions emerged during those long periods of wandering and wondering. I remember thinking about humanity. I wondered about Jesus and the Second Coming. I tried to imagine God. Was God actually a being somewhere, a man looking down upon us? Was God the creator? Or was God perhaps an energy, a force, something moving through everything?

In some ways, I was doing exactly what I had done with the transistor radio. I wanted to know what was inside. I wanted to understand where the voice came from, what animated things and what was behind what I could see.

I didn’t have the language or maturity then to understand what I was reaching toward. I simply knew there was something to wonder about.

Today, I experience this creative force that some call God as something profoundly loving, beautiful and alive. I experience it within us and around us, moving through nature, relationship, imagination and creation itself. Perhaps the mystery was never something hidden somewhere inside life waiting to be found. Perhaps it was life itself.

Perhaps the curiosity, imagination, desire to create, impulse to love and longing to understand are themselves expressions of that creative force.

And perhaps that is why these childhood memories have returned to me now.

As we grow older, we learn many things about separation. We learn belonging and exclusion, approval and rejection, success and failure. We learn to judge difference and sometimes to fear it. Through absence, hurt, disappointment and the ordinary imperfections of human relationships, we can also begin to associate being alone with being unloved.

Our parents, doing the best they know how, leave and return. They become tired or anxious. They carry responsibilities, frustrations and hurts of their own. We experience these things as children before we have the language to understand them. Somewhere within us, a fear can begin to form that love may leave.

Over time, being alone can begin to feel very different from the spaciousness we once knew. It can become loneliness. Beneath that loneliness can be an even deeper fear of separation, the fear that perhaps we are not loved, or that somehow we are not loveable.

Yet when I return in memory to that little child wandering around an eight-acre farm outside St. Marys, I don’t remember being lonely. I remember being alive, curious, wondering, creating and dreaming.

Perhaps the child knew something I would spend much of my adult life forgetting, and am only now remembering.

There were periods of my adult life when I lost touch with that knowing. Through divorce, as my children grew and began building lives of their own, and eventually as I stepped away from a corporate world that had surrounded me with people, purpose and responsibility for almost four decades, I experienced loneliness. There were times when I feared being alone.

When so many of the structures through which I had experienced relationship and belonging changed, the quiet could feel like absence. Beneath the loneliness was a fear of separation. A fear of failing or being rejected. Beneath that was something even more vulnerable: the fear that perhaps, without all of those relationships surrounding me, I might somehow be less loveable.

Curiously, it was time alone that began to change this.

With more space, I began spending time with myself differently. I became curious about my feelings and emotions rather than trying to move through them or beyond them. I began listening to what they were telling me, understanding where they came from and allowing myself to experience them.

Time with self became a relationship too.

Gradually, I began to experience something I had spent much of my life seeking and receiving through relationship with others: love within myself. It did not diminish my desire for companionship, intimacy, friendship or family. It allowed me to experience those relationships without needing them to prove that I was worthy of love.

And as my relationship with myself changed, I began to see and feel connection everywhere around me.

Perhaps what I am experiencing now is a return to something the child already knew.

My children are grown and building lives of their own. There is more quiet in my days now, more time for curiosity, creativity, contemplation and expression. Increasingly, I find myself at peace in my own company.

There is something beautiful about rediscovering the parts of ourselves that existed before the world told us who and how we were supposed to be.

I see that child in myself again when I wander around the farm without needing to be anywhere. I see her when I lose track of time in the garden, imagine what might grow somewhere or make something with my hands. And I see her when a question enters my mind and I follow it simply because I want to know where it might lead.

I see her in Sincerely too. The questions are larger now, but perhaps the impulse is exactly the same. What does it mean to be human? What allows us to flourish? What is love? What is consciousness? What happens when we stop trying to become who the world tells us to be and begin remembering who we already are?

The little child dismantling the radio to find the man inside has simply moved on to different questions.

When I walk outside today, apparently alone, I notice how quickly the idea of aloneness begins to dissolve.

I spend time with Joey and Maggie, two extraordinary and magnificent old oak trees whose lives began long before mine and whose presence I experience in different but equally profound ways. I walk through the lavender and hear thousands of bees moving from flower to flower. Butterflies drift through the gardens and birds call from the trees. Beyond them, Lake Ontario, the inland sea, stretches toward the horizon, infinity and beyond.

Life is everywhere.

My friends and neighbours are just down the road. I see them when I walk and on Friday evenings when I find myself at Decanter sharing a glass of wine and conversation. My children may no longer live with me, but they remain deeply woven into my life.

And those who have left this physical life are still with us. My parents, my ancestors, and friends like Ben and Richard who have passed remain present in another way. Their souls are with us. Their love remains. Physical presence changes, but love and relationship do not simply disappear.

The more present and attentive I become, the more deeply I feel my connection to the life around me. I feel it in the land and the water, in Joey and Maggie, and in the bees, butterflies and birds. I feel it in my children, family, friends and neighbours, and in those whose souls remain with us. And I feel it in the creative and loving force I spent so much of my childhood trying to understand.

Perhaps this is what time alone has given me: not an escape from relationship, but a deeper understanding of it. In the quiet, I have learned to listen to myself, to understand my emotions and to love myself more deeply. From that place, I have come to recognise how profoundly connected I have always been.

The child wandering those fields understood something before she had words for it. She belonged to the land she wandered through, to the worlds she imagined, to the questions she carried, to the people she loved and to the creative force moving through her.

And so do I.

The creative force that moved through that little child building farms from corn cobs and making clothes for Barbie dolls is still moving through me today. The loving force I once searched for somewhere outside myself is within me and around me.

The forms change. Our children grow. The worlds we build evolve. The people and places we love may no longer be part of our everyday lives, and some we love leave this physical life. Yet their souls remain with us. Love remains.

Through all of it, we remain in relationship with one another, with the natural world, with those who came before us and with the loving and creative force that moves through all of life.

Perhaps this is what I am remembering.

We were never separate.

I have never been alone.