Love

When we swim upstream against the natural rhythms and cycles of the Universe - against what is asking to move, die, or transform - we create unnecessary chaos. Resistance doesn’t stop change...It only makes it harsher.

Honouring purpose, connection, and tradition gives us the trunk of our tree. Without it, we sway wildly, constantly reaching outward for meaning, identity, and belonging. When we are untethered from our own lineage, we can begin to crave what feels lacking in our lives - a deep, quiet void that cannot be filled with consumption, trends, or borrowed identities.

But what does it say about us when we continuously accept the scraps of life, love, and energy?

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...

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.

But somewhere along the way, the world decides it needs to shape us - to make sense of us, to fit us neatly into boxes so it can teach, manage, and explain what it doesn’t understand.

Life wasn’t meant to be this way. Parenting wasn’t meant to be done alone. Families were never meant to fracture this much.

We will not always agree. Nor should we. Diversity of thought and being is part of the beauty - and the ache - of being human. But what we can do is make space within our quiet mornings to feel the weight of our shared humanity. To allow collective grief, regret, guilt, and sorrow to flow through us rather than calcify within us.

Over the past decades, we’ve villainized men - devalued their role in the family, labeled them broken or unnecessary, even dangerous. And in doing so, we’ve pushed them further out of the homes where they are needed most. But fathers are not optional. They are essential - just as mothers are. Children need both roots and wings, and it takes the balance of mother and father, masculine and feminine, to give them that.

We often imagine the warrior’s journey as one of blood, sweat, and sacrifice—clashing swords, broken shields, relentless battles. But the truest battles rarely take place on battlefields. They happen inside our hearts. And perhaps the greatest fight any of us will ever face is the fight to be unconditionally loved.