Strength

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 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.

It is often difficult to define me. To place me neatly into a category that makes “normal” sense to this linear world. When people ask, “So, what do you do?”  I often chuckle, not out of confusion but out of good humor - because, truly, that is a good question. What do I “do”? When I think back to childhood, I remember how often adults asked that same question in a different form: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” My answer then, and still now, is honest - I don’t kn

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.

There are moments when life brings us to our knees in ways we never anticipated. For me, it came on an ordinary evening - one of those nights when nothing dramatic was happening, yet everything inside me felt like it was silently collapsing. I remember standing in my kitchen, staring at a cup of tea I had no appetite for, feeling utterly emptied out. The things that once lit my spirit had dimmed.

We need defenders and protectors. We need nurturers and healers. Just as much as we need shelter and structure. No more, no less than we need food and water.

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.