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.

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.

This week I planted wisteria.

It is an odd thing to mention in a letter. The world is full of larger events. Markets move. Governments rise and fall. Technologies appear that promise to change and improve everything. And yet there I was, standing beside an old wrought iron trellis, holding a climbing vine in the afternoon sun, thinking about nothing more urgent than where its first branches might reach.

There was no strategy in it. No measurable outcome. No one would know if I planted it today or next week.

I simply love wisteria and wanted something beautiful to grow.

That realisation stayed with me long after my hands were out of the soil.

For most of my life, I understood myself through a purpose outside of myself. I was raising children. Leading organisations. Solving problems. Carrying responsibility that mattered deeply to other people’s well-being. My days were shaped by calendars scheduled to the minute, difficult decisions, expectations, and the quiet satisfaction of helping build something larger than myself.

Then, almost without noticing, those definitions began to loosen.

The children became adults.

The boardrooms grew quieter.

The calendar found unexpected spaces.

At first, I thought those spaces needed to be filled.

Now I’m beginning to wonder whether they were always meant to be lived. Through presence. Through inspiration. Through intuition.

The farm has become an unexpected teacher.

Several weeks ago, after a harsh winter had beaten the lavender back, I cut the entire field down to just a few inches. I decided to surrender it to the meadow. As the grasses grew taller, the lavender disappeared beneath them, and I felt an unexpected sense of loss. It seemed as though I had erased something that had taken years to establish.

Then, almost overnight, tiny green shoots began to appear.

Then another.

Then hundreds.

Soon the entire field was alive again.

The lavender wasn’t asking whether it still had purpose.

It simply returned to life.

I have found myself doing something similar.

Not striving.

Not searching.

Not waiting for the next chapter to begin.

Simply learning what it feels like to inhabit this one. This moment.

The quiet inside me feels different now. Less like emptiness and more like space. Space to notice. Space to listen. Space to reflect. Space to wonder. Space to plant wisteria on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon simply because beauty has always been reason enough.

Perhaps purpose is not something we manufacture.

Perhaps it is something that quietly reveals itself once we stop trying so hard to define who we are.

I only know that, for the first time in a very long time, I am content to let the answer arrive in its own season.