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.

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

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.

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 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.