Home is a feeling, not a place.

There are certain places that become woven into the fabric of our lives. Places where children learn to swim, where friendships deepen over long summer evenings and extraordinary adventures, and where traditions quietly emerge without anyone ever deciding they should. They become places that hold laughter, grief, celebration, solitude, and the countless ordinary moments that eventually become the story of a life.

For twenty-seven years, a cottage was one of those places for me.

Over recent weeks, I found myself sitting quietly with a question: How is it possible to love a place so deeply and still know it is time to move on?

For much of my life, I believed home was something we found, a house, a neighbourhood, a city, a country. Somewhere we arrived and finally belonged.

Perhaps that’s why we spend so much of our lives trying to hold on to the places that have shaped us. We fear that if we leave them, we somehow lose ourselves or leave part of ourselves behind. But life has a curious way of teaching us otherwise.

My parents lost the country they once called home and began again in another. I’ve lived in different cities. I’ve built a career that, for many years, felt like home, and eventually knew it was time to move on. To grow. I’ve built another life and discovered a farm that somehow felt as though it had been waiting for me all along.

Again and again, life has quietly dismantled my definition of home. Not because home was lost, but because my understanding of it was changing.

As I looked across the lake, I realised something I hadn’t fully understood before. Moving on doesn’t mean we’ve stopped loving. Sometimes we move on because we have received what a season of life came to offer. Because it’s time to grow. There is a profound difference between abandonment and completion and expansion.

The cottage had not become less beautiful. If anything, it had become more beautiful than ever. The loons still sang across the water at dusk. The forests remained wild. The shoreline still invited silence. The friendships endured. What had changed was me.

When I first arrived, I was eager to build. There were projects to complete, trees to clear, things to improve, weekends to fill, and a family to raise.

Today, I find myself longing for something entirely different: to sit, to listen, to notice, to be curious and explore, to contemplate, and to belong, not to a place, but within my own heart.

The lake hadn’t changed. My relationship with it had.

Perhaps that is what the second half of life offers us. Not simply new places to steward, but a new way of exploring, finding and inhabiting places we come to love. Perhaps that is why home slowly begins to reveal itself as something much deeper than an address.

Home is wherever our soul is free to breathe. Where curiosity returns. Where love expands. Where creativity awakens. Where awe and wonder interrupt us. Where we become more fully ourselves.

Once we understand this, something extraordinary happens. We discover we can leave a house without leaving home. We can leave a career without losing ourselves. We can leave a marriage, a country, a neighbourhood, or a beloved cottage and still carry home with us.

Because home was never the place. It was always the life unfolding within us.

I still love this place, and I always will. I love the lake. I love the people who became and are part of my story. I love the friendships. I love the countless memories gathered over twenty-seven years.

None of that leaves when we move. None of it is for sale. It lives within me, within us.

A few years ago, while travelling through Germany, I had just shared a beautiful lunch with cousins I hadn’t seen in years. We lingered around the table, sharing stories, laughter, and generations of family history before I wandered through a small gift shop attached to the restaurant.

Behind the counter stood a radiant woman. There was something unmistakable about her presence. My intuition told me her radiance had been earned, and my cousin quietly confirmed it. As we spoke, I found myself wondering what life she had lived to become so peaceful, so open, and so full of light.

Then I looked to my left.

On a small display of greeting cards were six simple words:
Home is a feeling, not a place.

I stood there in silence as tears filled my eyes.

At the time, I was travelling through ten countries. Solo. Everywhere I went, I experienced extraordinary kindness, beauty, and humanity. For perhaps the first time in my life, I realised I didn’t simply feel at home in one place.

I felt at home within myself. Within the beauty of humanity and our shared world.

Only now, standing at the close of this twenty-seven-year chapter, do I truly understand what those words were trying to teach me.

Home is a feeling, not a place.

This week I found myself sitting at the fire pit, looking out over the lake.

There was no fire. Just a quiet summer afternoon.

I was sitting in one of the cedar Muskoka chairs that surround the fire pit. They’re the familiar wooden chairs found throughout cottage country, built for slowing down, lingering conversations and simply watching the world go by.

More than twenty-five years ago, my father built them.

As I sat there, I found myself running my hand across the weathered cedar. Decades of sun, rain and snow had softened the wood, yet the chair remained as solid as the day he made it.

And I began thinking about my father.

Growing up, I knew him as a hardworking farmer. The farm demanded almost everything he had to give. There were animals to care for, machinery to repair, cages to mend and another day waiting before the one before it had truly ended.

Like many men of his generation, my father didn’t speak easily about his feelings. Before he came to Canada, he had already lived through more hurt than most of us could imagine, three and a half years in Russian prison camps as a young man.

As a child, I often wondered whether my father loved me.

Not because he wasn’t there.

Not because he didn’t provide.

But because I was listening for words that never came.

To help me, a dear family friend would often tell me that my father was proud of me and that he loved me.

As the demands of the farm eased later in his life, my father spent countless hours in his workshop. He built Muskoka chairs like the one I was sitting in, doll cradles for my daughters and rocking horses for his grandchildren.

At the time, I simply saw beautiful woodworking.

Today, I don’t just see beautiful woodworking.

I see my father’s love.

I’ve come to believe that every one of us has a language through which we naturally express love.

Some people speak it.

Some write it.

Some cook it.

Some plant gardens.

Some invite you into their home lives and family.

My father built it.

He built chairs that still gather our family together.

He built little cradles where my daughters lovingly tucked in their dolls.

He built rocking horses that carried his grandchildren into worlds only children can imagine.

Looking back, I also see another gift those later years gave him.

Time.

Space.

Inner peace.

My four children came to know a grandfather I had rarely experienced as a child myself.

He laughed more easily.

He teased them.

He was more of a trickster.

Watching him with my children, I often wondered where that man had been when I was growing up.

Today, I don’t believe he became someone different.

I believe life finally gave him the time, the space and the inner peace to express more of who he had always been.

When my twins were growing up, I taught them to tell their grandfather they loved him every time they saw him.

They did.

Faithfully.

A day or two before my father died, they told him once again that they loved him.

This time, he answered.

“I love you too.”

Those are the only words of love I ever remember hearing my father speak.

As he said them to my children, I found myself crying.

Somehow, as I listened, it felt as though those words had been given to me too.

For years, I thought those words were the beginning.

Sitting in one of his cedar chairs this week, I realised they weren’t.

They were simply the first spoken aloud.

He had been saying I love you all along.

He said it through the life he built for his family.

Through the chairs.

Through the doll cradles.

Through the rocking horses.

Through the laughter he shared with his grandchildren.

Through the precious gift of his time.

I simply hadn’t yet learned to understand the language my father spoke.

Every time I sit in one of my father’s cedar chairs, I can still hear him.

“I love you too.”

“I love you too, Dad.”

This week I found myself walking through the lavender carrying three pottery bowls in my arms.

The first blossoms had begun to open, and each morning the field seemed to awaken a little more. The bees had returned now, moving patiently from flower to flower, asking nothing of the day except to participate in it.

The bowls were waiting to be wrapped as a birthday gift for someone I care about and for her two daughters.

It should have felt like a simple moment.

Instead, I stopped. A thought arrived so quietly that I almost missed it. I don’t think I have created art as a gift for someone I care about in a very long time.

I stood there in the lavender, holding those bowls and reflecting on how beautiful it felt to create for those we love.

Giving has always been one of the deepest joys of my life. I love preparing meals for people I care about. I have tried to give through leadership, through raising four beautiful children, and through friendship and kindness by creating spaces and places where other people could flourish.

Somewhere in my teenage years I stopped making art.

As a child, I loved sketching, woodworking, and drawing. Creating came naturally. Somehow, without ever deciding to, that part of me slowly disappeared beneath adulthood. Beneath a life of performance. A life of doing.

Now I find myself living a life where I am able to simply be. To feel. To respond to inspiration and dreams.

Looking back, I don’t think I lost the artist or creative within me. I simply stopped giving her space to speak.

The bowls themselves began with a dream.

One night I dreamed I was arriving at a birthday celebration carrying pottery I had made as a gift. The dream was so vivid that it stayed with me long after I woke up. There was only one problem.

I had never touched a pottery wheel.

The dream wasn’t symbolic. It was an invitation. A calling of sorts.

A dear friend and I booked a pottery lesson together. I was, quite honestly, a disaster on the wheel.

Then one morning I woke up with a simple thought.

I learn by doing.

So I began.

The clay didn’t care that I had never done this before. It wasn’t asking me to be talented. It asked only that I be present, to my hands, to my breath, to the gentle pressure of my fingertips, to my heart. Slowly the first bowl began to emerge. Then another. Then another.

Those first three bowls became the gift from my dream.

A few days later I shared the story with a dear friend, a former research scientist whose other great passion has always been wine making. For more than twenty-five years he has tended vines here in Prince Edward County, creating award-winning wines with extraordinary care, patience and love. He understands that true craft is never simply about technique. It is about love. About devotion. About offering something of yourself through your work.

When I told him about the bowls, he smiled.

He said that in many ancient cultures, and among many Indigenous peoples, love and appreciation were often expressed through art, through the things people created with the fullness of their heart and soul.

Something inside me became still.

I wasn’t learning something new.

I was remembering.

Something old.

Something true.

Something forgotten, but never gone.

As I continued walking through the lavender, I realised something else.

I wasn’t wondering whether they would like the bowls. I felt joy in having created something from love, for someone whose presence and way of being inspires me.

The gift had already been given.

It had been given in the quiet mornings at the pottery wheel. It had been given each time I centred the clay. Each time I began again. Each time I imagined the hands that would one day hold those bowls.

The bowls were simply what remained.

I have carried that thought with me ever since.

Perhaps we have forgotten something. Not how to make art, but how deeply beautiful it is to create art for another human being, for humanity and for our world.

A lovingly prepared meal. A handwritten letter. A knitted blanket. A quilt. A song. A painting. A bowl.

None of them begin as masterpieces. They begin as inspiration. As love.

As I have sat with this over the past week, I have begun to wonder if art was never really about mastery at all.

Perhaps, like the flower, love simply longs to express itself.

For me, art is what love looks like when it is allowed to express itself.

When we create from the truest place within us, our soul quietly finds its way into expression.

This week my dear friend Richard passed away.

Richard and his partner Linda became dear friends after I moved to Prince Edward County. Richard was one of those rare people whose presence immediately put others at ease. Gentle. Joyful. Kind. Deeply loving.

He never seemed to be trying to become someone. He was simply himself.

As I’ve reflected on Richard’s life these past few days, I’ve found myself returning again and again to a conversation I had with someone I respect, admire and care deeply about because of who they are and the way they live in this world.

When I shared the news of Richard’s passing, they simply said, “I hope he had a good, contented life.”

Contented?

I sat with the word for a long time. I wasn’t sure I knew what it actually meant.

The more I sat with it, the more I realised how rarely we speak about contentment. We speak about success. Achievement. Influence. Recognition. Growth. We celebrate ambition. We admire accomplishment.

And almost never do we ask whether someone lived a contented life.

Not a perfect life. Not an easy life. A contented one.

Richard’s death has left me grieving. Grieving the loss of someone who made me feel so at home in Prince Edward County. Someone I always loved to see. Richard embodied a life lived sincerely.

I was not missing or grieving his accomplishments. I was missing who he was and how he lived. How he made people feel. So kind, loving, joyful and peaceful. He found his way to a good, contented life.

For much of my own life, I measured life by different questions. Was I contributing? Was I growing? Was I making a difference?

While those questions still matter, this week I’ve wondered if another question belongs beyond them all.

Am I living in a way that allows contentment to quietly take root?

Today.

Contentment doesn’t seem to mean having everything. It doesn’t mean life unfolds exactly as we hoped. It doesn’t mean the absence of grief, uncertainty or loss. Richard’s passing reminds me of that.

Instead, I’m beginning to wonder whether contentment has more to do with how we meet life than what life gives us. Whether we love generously. Whether we remain open. Whether we notice beauty. Whether the people around us feel welcomed by our presence.

Whether, at the end of an ordinary day, there is a quiet sense that this moment, just as it is, is enough. That it is enough to exist from love.

In many ways, I feel as though I’m only just beginning to understand the question. I’m grateful Richard’s life asked it. I’m grateful someone I deeply admire offered me that word without knowing what it would do.

It’s one I think I’ll be living with for a long time.

Richard did that.

A life, lived sincerely.