This coming-of-age instinct - this primal ache to step out on one’s own - is something we don’t honour nearly enough in our youth anymore. We shield them, smother their edges, pad their risks, soften the world around them. We forget that the wild calls to them for a reason. For years, I was the one warding off dangers, seen and unseen. I was the buffer between them and the world. I was the shield. But a mother's shield is not meant to be held forever...

I hold space for the warriors who enter my life, not as a place for them to stay, but as a place for them to remember. A place where the wandering Ronin can rest, recalibrate, and find his way back to the truth of his heart. Back to the fire he thought he lost. Back to the strength he feared had been fractured beyond repair.

Perhaps true peace begins not in the world, but in the individual willing to stop fighting - even for just one breath - and see the other not as an enemy, but as a mirror.

There comes a point in life - usually somewhere after we’ve lived enough, lost enough, and learned enough - where we finally look back and see our paths with clearer eyes. The paths we chose. The ones we avoided. The people we held on to - and the ones we let go. The things we did. The things we didn’t do.

To want someone or something is beautiful. It’s human. It’s desire, creation, love. But to need it for your self-worth, identity, or belonging - that is where we falter... When we can discern our wants from our needs, we stop projecting our emptiness onto others. We stop blaming them for not being enough. We start becoming enough for ourselves.

To let go is to embrace all that comes from loving deeply. And in that surrender - in that movement through evolution - there is strength, there is hope, and there is the unending rhythm of life itself, always calling us to keep moving forward.