A week or so ago, I welcomed two dear friends to the farm.

As we wandered through the lavender fields, shared meals around the table, and watched the sun slowly disappear, I found myself quietly watching them.

They have shared over thirty years of life together. One’s family roots are in Italy, the other’s in Greece, and their lives stretch across continents, lifelong friendships, ageing family, family traditions, and communities they return to year after year. Over the past decade they have navigated significant career changes, health challenges, and all of the uncertainties that eventually find every one of us.

Their lives are not untouched by hardship. Yet somehow, hardship has never become the defining feature of their lives. Instead, they have made something else their centre: love, joy, gratitude, connection.

I met them several years ago, in a way that still feels destined. For months, former colleagues kept telling me that we needed to meet. At the time, my world had become very quiet. I had withdrawn inward, and kept putting it off. Then one evening, at a birthday gathering, there happened to be two empty chairs beside me. They walked in. They sat beside me. Within moments we were deep in conversation.

A couple of weeks later, I reached out and shared that I was beginning to step back into the world. I described the kinds of people I hoped to welcome into my life. Within a couple of weeks, he introduced me to someone who would become a soul-level best friend, someone who would walk beside me through some of the most profound years of heartache, change, awakening and renewal in my life.

He jokingly calls himself a matchmaker. Perhaps he is. Or perhaps he has a remarkable gift for recognising the people who belong in one another’s lives, the same gift, I think, that has quietly shaped his own life for over thirty years.

And still, something else stayed with me this week: watching the two of them together, two people who have chosen each other for more than thirty years.

There were no grand gestures, no elaborate declarations of love, only the quiet ease that only time seems capable of creating: a glance across the room, a hand resting gently on a shoulder, a loving comment of admiration for one another, for each other’s uniqueness. One would finish a story while the other smiled, having heard it dozens of times before. Laughter arrived easily, and silence never needed to be filled.

They have not become the same person. If anything, each seems more fully themselves because of the space the other has created.

We often speak about falling in love. Perhaps we don’t spend enough time talking about building a life, cultivating love, gratitude and joy. A shared life is not only a house or a calendar. It is sharing mornings and meals, friends and family; sharing loss, and wonder, and travel, and illness; dreams that change, and versions of ourselves that continue to unfold over decades. It is growing older beside someone who has quietly witnessed the person you have become, not beside a stranger.

As I watched them, I realised I was admiring something deeply human and beautiful at the same time: devotion. Not devotion in the religious sense, nor in the sense of sacrifice. Devotion to a way of living, to making time for the people they love, to beauty, to laughter, to showing up, again and again, for one another.

It reminded me that love is not sustained by extraordinary moments. It is sustained by thousands of ordinary moments that we choose to receive with gratitude, and in doing so, discover the extraordinary within them.

I often write that becoming who we truly are is life’s great journey and gift. Perhaps there is another journey and gift that sits quietly beside it: finding another human being who is committed to becoming who they truly are, while walking beside you as you become who you are. Not completing one another. Not rescuing one another. Not losing yourselves inside the relationship. Creating enough safety, enough freedom, and enough love that each person becomes even more fully themselves.

There is something profoundly beautiful about that.

As they drove away in the morning, I found myself sitting quietly on the porch for a while, thinking about what had moved me so deeply. It wasn’t only that they had found one another. It was that, over three decades, they have continued choosing one another, day after day, year after year, sincerely.

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.

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.”