On a recent Friday evening at Decanter, my friend Karen Palmer was sitting at her typewriter, writing poems for the people gathered there. It was one of the final weeks of this special place as we know it. MJ and Angie have fostered and nurtured such a loving community here in Prince Edward County, and these Friday gatherings have become a cherished part of our lives.

Karen calls her typewriter Olive. She’s an Olivetti, and Decanter was the first place Olive made her debut. And here they were again, Karen and Olive, in one of the final weeks of Decanter as we know it.

There is something magical about watching them together. You give Karen a word, and she sits down at Olive and begins, spontaneous and in flow, channelling her poetic gifts from somewhere deep within, from an emptiness beyond what we can imagine or see. A short while later, she brings you your poem. Then she reads it to you, and the tears flow.

The word I gave her was sincerely.

Is this me? Such a small question, with so much within it. I love that our sense of self can whisper on some days and roar on others, and that the practice is to listen. With so much around us trying to shape who we are, I wonder how often we pause long enough to hear ourselves. And how often we recognise something of our soul in what we feel drawn to create and share.

Karen has given so much of herself to promoting Prince Edward County and shining a light on the people who make it what it is: the artisans, the winemakers, the painters, the antique shop owners, the people behind our bed-and-breakfasts, our shops and businesses. Bringing them to the world, and bringing the world to them. She is also the author of Spellbound: Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps. And here she is, at her typewriter, sharing another of her gifts.

MJ and Angie have brought their gifts into our lives through Decanter, through the warmth and hospitality they offer and the friendships they have nurtured. MJ shares her gifts through yoga too, and I am so touched that she has offered to bring her practice to Maison Millefleurs. We will miss Decanter as we know it, and we are looking forward to the new ways they will share their gifts with the County and beyond.

We are such multilayered, multifaceted human beings. How beautiful it is when we slow down enough to observe, to witness, to be curious about all the facets of another person. And of ourselves. We may know someone through their work, through one part of their life, and there is still so much more to discover.

I think again of Karen and Olive, in this gathering that MJ and Angie have brought into being. A poem about listening to the soul, offered in a place where so many people have shared something of their own.

Thank you, Karen, for the gift of this sincerely poem and for your friendship. And thank you, MJ and Angie, for all the love you have brought into our lives.

This week, I had the honour of joining my friend Susan’s book club at her cottage north of Toronto. What a beautiful group of women. Susan had invited me to also join them for a sleepover too, at a place my family and I once called home.Her cottage is our old cottage, where my former partner and I raised our four children and shared more than twenty years of family life.

The lake, the road, the neighbours and the cottage were all part of a place of safety, of love, of belonging. Returning brought back so many memories. The games and the dance parties, the movie nights, the meals, the gatherings with friends, the time on the lake and the countless adventures we shared. There were no tears, only warmth. Such a beautiful chapter in my life and in the lives of my family.

Susan and I have become good friends, and it means so much to see the love she and her family have for this cottage and this lake. To witness how a place that brought our family together is now doing the same for theirs. They also hold such care and respect for our history here, for the years when we were the stewards of this beautiful place. There is something deeply moving about being welcomed back into a home where you have shared so much love, and being able to experience the love that another family is bringing to it.

We sat in the gazebo, exploring the many questions that had emerged as the women read Sincerely, Katherine. We talked about my life, the love and patience of my family and friends, and the fear and courage that can accompany following our hearts. That deeper calling that seems to come from our soul, from our essence, towards the fullness of who we are. What inspires us? What ignites our heart and soul? And what happens in our lives and our relationships when we begin to listen?

We spoke about the anxieties and hurts that can come with facing our fears, and about the different ways people accompany us through life. Some relationships are brief, yet leave us with an experience or a lesson that stays. Others last for a season, helping us learn and grow. And some last a lifetime, moving through their own seasons, their own periods of change and renewal.

After the gazebo and sunset over the lake, we returned to the cottage for a beautiful meal at the dining room table, where my family and friends once sat. More memories came flooding back, including a sing-along with my brother-in-law George, my friend Dawn and my dear friend Al, may he rest in peace. How much we had shared around that table. And here I was, gathered around it again, sharing a meal and creating new memories with friends.

Later, we moved into the living room by the fire, and Patricia started the dance party. Just like old times. The kind of dance party where the group slowly thins out as the evening carries on. Some make an Irish exit, while others give everyone a hug before leaving. And then there are those who carry on into the wee hours of the morning, moving from dancing to a hypercompetitive ping-pong tournament in the garage.

Over breakfast the following morning, we continued the conversations we had begun in the gazebo and replayed the antics of the night before. The deeper questions and the fun of being together, carrying on into another day.

Beyond beautiful.

It is such an honour to experience how Sincerely, Katherine. speaks to women and men, to people from so many walks of life, well beyond the LGBT community. This was my hope in sharing my story, and it is my hope in sharing the stories of the guests on The Sincerely Show. That in spending time with another person’s life, we might feel seen in our own. That we might feel less alone, find hope, and discover something that brings meaning or possibility to our journey.

There is so much we can explore when we give one another the space, the care and the curiosity to do so. A question about someone else’s life can bring us closer to something within ourselves. Something we long for, something that inspires us, something we have been afraid to follow. And perhaps, in hearing how another person found their way, we begin to find a little more courage for our own.

Fear is not the place to stop. Fear is the place to be curious. To observe what is happening within us, to listen for that deeper calling, and to explore the possibility of growing towards a fuller expression of ourselves. I hope these conversations offer some of that possibility, some sense of the love and freedom that can come as we find our own way.

I look forward to seeing this group again, and to the next opportunity to gather with people who want to explore these deeper questions. There is such a gift in being curious about one another, in receiving another person’s story and allowing it to touch our own.

And there was so much of that gift in this visit. The love Susan and her family have for the cottage and for one another. Their respect for our family’s history, and my joy in witnessing theirs unfold. The questions in the gazebo, the memories around the table, the dancing and the morning after. This exchange of love, of care, of curiosity, this feeling of being seen by one another, is one of the most special gifts I think we can receive.

Thank you, Susan, for the gift of your friendship, and for welcoming me home to your home, the place my family and I once called ours.

So much love and so much respect.

A tribute to Cindy Clark of team Sincerely and her son, the late Corey Clark, September 26th, 1992 – December 29th, 2007.

Earlier this spring, Cindy Clark reached out to me. She had heard about my book and Sincerely and wondered if there was a way she could help. She was drawn to the mission of Sincerely.

Cindy and I had worked for RBC, Canada’s largest bank, for several decades, our careers crossing paths many times. Whenever I held a round table or a town hall and Cindy was there, I felt her warmth. There was a kindness in her presence, an optimism and curiosity that she brought into the room. I always felt her desire to bring something good to the lives of others. To help unlock the gifts, the talents in others.

Like me, Cindy had left RBC to create another chapter in her life. We had both lived and worked in different places across this part of Canada, and here we were, our paths crossing again in Prince Edward County.

When we reconnected over coffee, I felt that same loving, passionate energy. A call to serve, a desire to care and to give. As we talked, Cindy shared with me the story of her son, Corey.

September 26th marks the day Corey would have turned 36 years old. Unfortunately he passed away at the age of 17. He had lived with osteosarcoma, an aggressive form of bone cancer, for four years. It was the same incredibly painful cancer that Terry Fox battled.

Cindy told me about the work she and Corey had done with healers to help him endure his pain and rise above it, quite literally. She also told me that, while still a teenager, he had written his own eulogy. So young, and so thoughtful, thinking so deeply about life and what he wanted to leave with and for others.

In a piece she wrote about Corey, Cindy describes his wish to inspire or help at least one person in his lifetime. At seventeen, he had begun journalling about what he was learning, hoping others might learn from it, too. She shares his own words about those four years:

“There’s a whole bunch of details I could get in to but I don’t feel like writing it. Just to give you an idea about what I’ve been through, I have a lot of metal in me, I have six really long scars, and I know for sure I hate hospital food. Over the past 4 years I’ve had some of the worst days of my life and I’ve had some of the best days in my life. I’ve also learned a lot about life!”

It’s special and inspiring to be able to hear his humour in those words. And his honesty about the life he was living, with its worst days and its best days. Cindy speaks of his belief in a positive attitude, in treating people with kindness and respect, and in learning someone’s story before judging them. Her memories let us see how he lived those beliefs.

She remembers a woman who approached the family at a fundraiser and told them that Corey used to buy her pizza when she was hungry. An intern at the hospital shared how they had learned to cast because Corey let them put casts on all his fingers as he lay in bed after surgery.

Cindy also shares the story of the boat he chose as his Children’s Wish Foundation gift, so that he could share good times with his friends. A bridge he used to take them to now honours his memory. There was such generosity in the way he wanted others to experience life with him.

And then there is this memory from his best friend’s wedding, on August 22nd, 2025, eighteen years after Corey had made his request. In Cindy’s own words:

“I was honoured to dance with his best friend at his wedding, a request Corey had made years earlier because he wanted me to have that experience as the mother of the groom.”

I find myself sitting in tears with this dance. Corey had imagined something for his mother, and years later she stepped into it. His best friend had held that wish and made it part of his own wedding. There is such tenderness in the way love can reach forward into a life, and be there to meet us.

Cindy shares that he “wanted to ensure that his legacy was not one of sickness but one of his amazing life.” Through these stories, I am getting to know something of that life, and of the extraordinary mother and family who love him.

When we met for coffee, Cindy also told me about an encounter she had after Corey’s passing. She was driving north of home when an eagle or a hawk came alongside her car, flying at window height. It stayed beside her for what felt like an eternity. In the depth of her being, Cindy knew this was Corey coming to see her, letting her know he would always be with her.

She has experienced many other remarkable moments like this, each reminding her of Corey’s spirit and his presence in her life. As she shares:

“His spirit is all around of us all of the time and we are so truly blessed to have him in our lives and incredibly proud.”

I find myself sitting with what it means to remain with one another. Cindy and Corey’s relationship continues to unfold. And now, through Cindy, I am coming to know him, too. His words are finding me. His wish to help someone is finding another expression through this letter.

Perhaps this is what I am beginning to feel in the words we love and live on. Through the love Cindy shares, Corey’s life becomes part of another life. There is still something being given and received.

It is an honour to have Cindy as part of team Sincerely, bringing the warmth and care I have felt in her presence for so many years. I welcome Corey’s spirit and presence as part of our team and mission, too, with the lessons and energy he shares directly and through his mother.

Cindy, thank you for sharing your beautiful son with us, and for all that you bring of yourself.

We love and live on.

Corey, a life lived sincerely.

The hibiscus flowers are blooming in the garden, and the roses are beginning to flower again too.

They are so beautiful. The depth of colour, the detail within each flower. I find myself pausing to witness them and appreciate the creativity and care that have made this beautiful garden.

And when I walk through the meadows, I experience a beauty that moves me deeply, in a different way. Every few weeks, something new is flowering. There are purple asters and goldenrod now, and countless other flowers whose names I am still learning. They arrive as a surprise, a gift, each with an elegance of their own, each offering something to the meadow, and beyond.

Tall purple thistles have emerged in the meadow this year. A lot of them. Their flowers are now giving way to soft white seed heads. I am seeing many more monarch butterflies here this year than last. Sometimes there are a dozen at a time around the patches of thistles, feeding on their flowers. So beautiful. Awe. Watching them together, I feel a harmony and a love between these lives that is hard to put into words. A love song.

Prince Edward County is an important stopping place on their migration to Mexico. At Prince Edward Point, thousands of monarchs feed and rest in late summer and early autumn before continuing south. Thistle flowers provide nectar for that journey. Watching the butterflies in my own meadow, I feel a deeper appreciation for what this land and these flowers are offering.

I watch the bees through the many seasons of flowers, moving from the lavender to the Russian sage, and on and on. As one flowering gives way to another, life continues to find its way to what is opening. Day by day, week by week, month by month, there is an ongoing melody of beauty and creativity playing out around me. It is magic to watch these lives dance, each in its own way and together, in their profound beauty.

As a child on the farm, I was taught to dislike the thistles and burdock bushes. We were taught to cut the thistles down. And at the same time, my parents, with their deep Eastern European roots, also carried an appreciation for what nature gifts us. There was wild mint. My father made cream from calendula flowers. He collected stinging nettles and made nettle tea. My parents also made and drank Swedish bitters from German wild herbs as part of their health routine. Alongside what we were taught to remove, there was a knowing about what nature offered and how to receive its beauty.

Now I am standing among the thistles I was taught to cut down, feeling awe. I see their colour and form, and the life moving between them. I find myself wondering how much beauty I have walked past, perhaps because I had already decided what I was looking at or where I needed to go.

I still feel a profound appreciation for human creativity and talent. I love making things with my own hands, and a garden can be a beautiful expression of that creativity and love. Yet I also see how much we shape life around an image we carry of what it should look like and what it should be. We choose what belongs and what we will remove. I wonder where the pleasure of creating becomes a need to control, and how much our ego influences what we are willing to call beautiful.

In the meadow, I feel a different relationship with creation. I am witnessing a beauty that has emerged through nature and the divine, with a life and a rhythm of its own. Each flower expresses what it is, and each life is part of a melody larger than itself. As I slow down, I feel part of that melody too.

There is a line in A Course in Miracles that speaks to what I am experiencing: “The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder.”

I have been thinking about unconditional love, and witnessing and reflecting on what feels like unconditional beauty. A beauty that belongs to life before I decide what to make of it. The thistle is already fully itself. Its beauty does not begin with my appreciation, or with what it offers the monarch. Something changes in me when I give myself space to receive it.

Through The Sincerely Show, and through the people I meet in daily life, I experience something similar. As I slow down, listen to someone’s story and feel something of their essence and soul, I am moved by their authentic beauty. Their story opens a way for me to see them more fully. I feel such an honour in being allowed to witness another human being in this way.

I wonder how much of life I have seen through ideas I inherited about what was beautiful, what was desirable, what belonged. And how much those same ideas have shaped the way I have seen other people and myself.

What becomes visible when I give another person room to reveal themselves, and give myself room to see?

I feel a new appreciation for what we discover when we offer ourselves that same space, that same curiosity and love. Space to hear what is true within us, beneath the expectations we have carried and the ways we have learned to measure life and ourselves.

As I have come to understand and love more of my own essence, I seem more able to recognise and appreciate the beauty in others, throughout creation.

This is what I am beginning to understand as unconditional beauty. The beauty that lies within each of us and throughout creation, becoming visible as we loosen our expectations and allow ourselves to see. When I walk the meadow now, I feel a profound honour in being here, in witnessing this life and feeling myself part of it. The melody continues, and I get to sing and dance with it.

I’m amazed by how music speaks to us.

For so long, I thought I had some unique challenge in hearing the words of a song. I’ve since learned that many people experience music this way, through feeling and emotion, without fully comprehending the words… that’s my experience. I’m always amazed by people who can hear a song for the first time and then sing along. For me, the feeling and sense of meaning often arrive long before I understand what the actual words are saying.

A group of us are preparing a float for the annual Pumpkinfest parade in Wellington, here in Prince Edward County. I’ve been asked to drive my orange tractor, pulling the hay wagon my friend Jo gifted to me and the farm. Our theme song is The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead.

I’ve always loved Crash Test Dummies… their voices and folk-like lyrics. P.S. I can sing the low and high parts, lol. When the song came up, I started listening to it again and again. It kept speaking to me. Finally, I said to myself, I have to understand the meaning of this song. And then, as often happens, its words and its meaning spoke to me so deeply.

The song was written by Andy Partridge and first released by XTC in 1992. In describing its beginnings, Partridge wondered what would happen to someone whose way of living encouraged people to be more humane, generous and loving, and why that person might threaten those in power.

I picture Peter as this quirky, redheaded, kind and humble person. Someone who loves openly and gives what he can. His generosity and honesty draw people to him, while some of those in power feel challenged and turn against him.

There is also Peter’s acceptance of love, something so simple and generous, even as others try to disgrace him.

Peter Pumpkinhead put to shame

Governments who would slur his name

Plots and sex scandals failed outright

Peter merely said

Any kind of love is alright

Yet the refrain keeps returning to the enemies he makes.

But he made too many enemies

Of the people who would keep us on our knees

Hooray for Peter Pumpkin

Who’ll pray for Peter Pumpkinhead?

Understanding the story brought me into a deeper reflection on the world we’ve created, the world we live in, and on my own life.

Peter’s humility, generosity and love are so beautiful. I find myself wondering how someone comes to live so authentically from that place. What allows us to remain open to one another, to share what we have, and to see another person’s dignity even when their life is different from our own? And why can that way of being, which holds so much possibility and truth for us, also be met with fear?

I think about our desire to care for one another, and the ways fear can keep us protecting what we know or believe to be true. I wonder how often we recognise that tension within ourselves. The moments when we feel moved to reach towards someone, yet hesitate or don’t. The times when something unfamiliar asks us to look again at what we believe. How much of our free will is impaired by fear and bias and power? Peter’s story leaves me thinking about what we might discover if we could stay kind and curious a little longer, present and open a little longer.

I think, too, about the people who have so generously shared their life stories with me through The Sincerely Show and beyond. People who have dedicated their lives to service and contribution. Most have experienced profoundly shaking, life-altering periods or moments. As I listen, I find myself wondering about the love that sustained them, the people who helped them, and how their experiences have shaped what they now offer the world. So many have shared with me how they would not wish their journey on another, how they feel spared, and how they have emerged more open, present, loving, kind and curious. More like Peter.

Over the past several days, I’ve been bringing this research together into frameworks for my advisory, speaking and teaching work. Spending time with these stories, I continue to discover things I hadn’t understood when I first heard them. I’m grateful for the space to listen, to allow my understanding to develop, and to consider how I might share what I’m learning.

Then comes the final verse.

Peter Pumpkinhead was too good

Had him nailed to a chunk of wood

He died grinning on live TV

Hanging there he looked a lot like you

And an awful lot like me!

I keep returning to this verse. The cruelty of what happens to Peter, and then the recognition of ourselves in him. It brings me back to the Peters in our lives, the people whose way of being reminds us of what is possible and deeply true within us. People we can honour and learn from, whose kindness, humility, courage and contribution stay with us.

Perhaps honouring them includes bringing more of ourselves to one another. Sharing what we have learned, what we can offer, and the love we carry.

As we prepare for the parade and the pumpkins continue to grow, I’m still listening. I’m amazed that a song chosen for our float has brought me deeper into all of this, and grateful that I have the space to be.

Grateful for all of you!!

Thank you, Peter Pumpkinhead!

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.

A whole lot can change in nine years. And deep down, very little has changed. And yet, deep down, a light has been shone on what feels like everything and all that seems true.

Nine years ago, on August 25, 2017, I had a lunch that changed the course of my life. I asked one question about gender: “Who the heck is Caitlyn Jenner?” One question, yet it was the deepest question I had been sitting with for more than fifty years.

We were about two-thirds of the way through lunch when my colleague looked at me and said it plainly. Gender is who you go to sleep as, our core essence. Sexual orientation is who you go to sleep with, attraction. In that instant, I felt clarity and shock at the exact same time. You could have pushed me over with a feather.

My journey to self began in that moment. In that second of clarity.

I did not go into that lunch knowing what I wanted to do, or with some vision of another life I was trying to create. What I had was a feeling that had been intensifying within me for a very long time. A quiet longing to know myself, to understand myself, to express myself, and to somehow make sense of parts of me that I had felt since childhood and could never explain.

Today, I think about the word entelechy, an ancient Greek word. The idea that there is something within a living being that somehow knows what it is and what it is becoming before the conscious mind can name it. Something deep within us calling and quietly moving us toward fuller expression.

There were parts of myself I had judged and denied because I did not understand them, or because parents or teachers had scolded me for them. There were feelings I had learned to push away. There were parts of me that did not seem to fit easily within the life I had built or the person I had learned to be in the world. Yet beneath all of that, something remained. Something persistent. Something that would not go away. Entelechy.

That lunch became a threshold. A doorway.

Walking through that doorway opened a path to understand my gender, reconcile my gender, and ultimately affirm my gender. That was an extraordinary journey in itself. Yet the nine years since have helped me understand that August 25 was never only about gender. It opened a much larger path into myself.

I began to understand my mind differently and what I now think of as neuro-uniqueness. The intensity of my curiosity, the way I connect ideas and experiences, the way I make sense of things. The way I can feel a pattern or possibility before I can fully explain it. My need for quiet and reflection, and my love of learning, wandering, creating and discovering.

I began to see these things with more curiosity and more love, rather than constantly measuring them against some idea of how I was supposed to think or be, an idea that was taught and impressed upon me by those around me, by rules, by society.

The doorway also took me deeper into my family and lineage. Into the lives of my parents and ancestors, and into the hurt that travelled through our family through war, displacement, loss and survival. I began to understand that so much of what forms us physically and genetically begins long before we are born. Patterns travel through families. Fear travels. Silence travels. Ways of protecting ourselves travel. And so do resilience, courage and hope.

Understanding this history helped me understand myself differently. It also gave me more compassion for the people who came before me. They too were human beings trying to find their way through lives shaped by experiences and conditioning I can only partly imagine.

There was a great deal of grief in those first years of my journey.

About a year after that lunch, I experienced depression, and there were times when I was ready for life to be over. An angel saw my pain, named it and shared the truth of the intergenerational pain I would create. In that moment, I found hope in choosing to live for my children. They gave me a reason to continue.

There were other moments, too, in those early years when I collapsed under the grief. There was so much that I had held for so long and so much that I was finally allowing myself to feel. Somewhere within that grief, I surrendered. I released, curiously explored and healed.

I began to stop fighting myself. I began to stop judging parts of myself that I had denied or tried to explain away. I began to accept and embrace more of who I was.

And through that journey, I discovered something extraordinarily beautiful about human beings.

The doorway led to a hallway that showed me a deeply compassionate, caring and loving side of humanity. I experienced the love that becomes available within each of us when life, or sometimes we ourselves, create enough space to grieve, to heal, to grow and to find that love within us.

I experienced people meeting me with kindness, curiosity and compassion. And as I received those things, I began to discover more of them within myself.

It changed the way I understood leadership too.

I had spent decades leading people and organisations. I knew the systems, structures and processes of leadership. I knew what we were taught leadership should look like. Yet my own journey began to show me something different.

When we have travelled deeply within ourselves, when we have faced our own fear and grief, when we have learned to be more compassionate with ourselves, something can change in the way we meet other people. We can become kinder and more curious. We can hold more empathy. We can become more courageous because we have already walked through things within ourselves that frightened us. We can become more able to sit beside another human being without immediately judging them or trying to fix them.

The journey within humbled me. And through that humility, I found a greater capacity to hold space for others.

Over time, I began to see how kindness, curiosity, compassion, courage, purpose and a desire for a more harmonious world could become an evolved form of leadership. The power- and fear-based forms of leadership we so often learn through schools, systems and processes began to give way to something more human, the kind of leadership that can emerge naturally when we have journeyed deeply enough within ourselves to become fully ourselves.

A whole lot has changed in my life since that lunch. I experienced divorce. My children grew up and were launched into lives of their own. I moved on from roles and jobs where I had been successful and into new directions that gave more room for my curiosity, my love, my sense-making and the things that have always mattered deeply to me.

Today, I steward a home and land in the kind of place I was drawn to as a child. I walk through the gardens and lavender. I watch the bees. I make things with my hands. I learn. I wonder. I follow my curiosity. I meet beautiful people, beautiful souls.

And I experience the beauty of a human lifetime in a way I could have never understood before.

The beauty of nature. The beauty of curiosity, wonder and learning. The beauty of loving and being loved. The beauty of friendship and connection. The beauty of sitting quietly beside the water. The beauty of making something with our hands. The beauty of discovering something we did not know yesterday. The beauty of being here long enough to experience what life continues to reveal.

There was a time when I found enough hope to live for my children. Today, I have found enough love within me to live for myself and the beauty of this lifetime.

I want to be here for this life. I want to experience it. I want to love. I want to keep learning. I want to remain curious. I want to keep becoming.

Today, I feel peace. I feel joy. I feel love. I feel faith.

And the more I live from my essence, the more I notice that some things no longer carry the same weight. People, places and things that once seemed so important can fall away, while other people, places and experiences seem to draw closer because something in them resonates more deeply with who I am.

Perhaps the more we live from our essence, the more we recognise what feels true.

When I look back across these nine years, the outward change is enormous. Yet when I look deeper, I recognise so much of what has always been there. The curious child is still here. The part of me that wanted to wander, imagine, create and understand is still here. The part that sensed things deeply before having words for them is still here. The longing to know myself, to love and be loved, and to understand this strange and beautiful human experience is still here.

Deep down, very little has changed.

And yet, deep down, a light has been shone on what feels like everything.

Perhaps entelechy is not about becoming someone new at all. Perhaps it is about allowing what has always been within us to become visible, to be understood, to be loved, and finally to have a life.

I find myself wondering what doorway might be quietly waiting for you.

Nine years ago, I asked one question.

I had no idea I was opening a doorway into my whole life.

There was a phrase I often repeated when my children were growing up, usually around the dinner table after one of the inevitable disagreements or difficult conversations that come with being an imperfect parent and raising four children.

I would look at them and say,

“Kids, all you own is your name.”

I don’t remember where the words came from. I never consciously created them; they seemed to arrive from somewhere deeper within me, and over the years they became part of our family.

At the time, I believed I understood exactly what they meant. I thought I was teaching my children that their reputation mattered, that honesty mattered, that integrity mattered, that trust, once broken, is difficult to rebuild. I wanted them to understand that while life may give us many things, our character is ours to shape.

It was a lesson worth teaching.

What I couldn’t have known then was that those same words had come to teach me.

What I didn’t yet see was the fear that lived quietly beneath my own teaching, a fear of not fitting in, of being judged, of not being liked or respected. It was a fear rooted in others, in how I was seen, more than in who I actually was.

Life has a curious way of doing that.

Sometimes the deepest truths arrive long before we understand them. We speak them. We live beside them. We repeat them to others. Then, years or even decades later, life quietly reveals what they were really asking of us.

Looking back, I can see that this has happened more than once in my own life.

Years ago, I chose the name Katherine.

Some time later, I was given a spirit name: Ahna.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand the deeper significance of either. The names came first; their meaning emerged later.

When I eventually became curious enough to explore their meanings, I was surprised by what I found.

Katherine means to act and live in a way that is pure and clean.

Ahna means favour and grace, to be of service and to live gracefully.

Whether one sees that as providence, synchronicity, or mere coincidence doesn’t really matter to me.

What matters is that those words have followed me quietly ever since.

They do not describe who I am.

They describe who I hope to become, fully.

I find myself returning to them often: grace, favour, pure, clean.

Not as measures of perfection, but as gentle reminders of the life I aspire to live.

Several years ago, I was attending a leadership programme at Harvard. On the first evening, I found myself in conversation with another woman in the programme. As strangers sometimes do, we skipped past the small talk and found ourselves speaking honestly about our lives.

I told her I was writing a book called Sincerely, Katherine.

She gasped and paused.

Then she said something I have never forgotten:

“If I were writing a book called Sincerely, Suzanne… would I be proud of it? Would I be proud of the life I’ve lived? Of how I’ve lived it? Of who I’ve become?”

In that moment, Suzanne’s question was no longer about her.

It became about all of us.

Every one of us is, in some way, writing the story attached to our own name.

Carl Jung is often credited with saying that “the privilege of a lifetime is to become who we truly are.”

I have come to believe that becoming is an act of profound humility.

It asks us to keep learning, to keep letting go of what is false, and to remain teachable to what is true.

When I was younger, I thought “all you own is your name” was about protecting something.

Today, I hear those words differently.

Our name is not something to protect as much as it is something to honour.

Not through status.

Not through achievement.

Not through the opinions of others.

Through the quiet, daily work of becoming.

Everything else is temporary: our titles, our possessions, our accomplishments. They aren’t really ours.

Even the roles we play will eventually pass.

For years, that fear ran quietly beneath everything I taught, and everything I tried to become. Somewhere along the way, without my quite noticing, it began to loosen.

What has replaced it isn’t certainty.

It is release, letting go of attachment, including the material kind, and a growing understanding of what actually endures.

What endures is something much quieter: the love we give, the love we receive, and the degree to which we allow the unique essence within us, our soul, to find expression in the world.

To live from that essence as fully as possible.

From love.

For years, I said, “All we own is our name.”

Today, I understand those words differently.

What is truly ours is our essence, our soul.

The journey and gift of a lifetime is to become who we truly are.

It’s all that is truly ours…the meaning of our name.

 

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.