The writing prompt said: draw a giraffe with your eyes closed.

At first I was incredulous. Surely there were more important things to do with my hands. Then, from somewhere just behind my left ear, a small voice I hadn't heard in ages cleared its throat…

I'm wiping the counter after popping a bottle earlier, and I can never get the bloody thing properly shiny, there's always a streak somewhere. I grab the cork. My fingers trace its curve, its smoothness, and then, before I've decided anything, my hand cradles it, all fingers in, the way you'd close your hand around a fallen acorn, a feather off a branch, some small thing needing to be caught. A sudden inhale stretches my solar plexus, a small oh escapes me before I've caught up to why…

I was singing “9 to 5” in my kitchen years before I’d worked a single day for anyone. My own little cassette player on the counter, a tea towel in my hand, drying dishes. I didn’t know I was memorizing a feminist anthem. I didn’t know it was a protest — a song about being underpaid, overlooked, and quietly furious…

I feel it first in my solar plexus. A quickening. The ground going unstable beneath me before I understand why. That's the moment every playoff game turns, when hope becomes the underdog.

My brother turned to me and asked, "Do you mind if we stay?"

He sat beside me, wholly present. When he asked, something in me — some five-year-old girl who was always rushed out of the theatre before the credits — smiled.

Of course. This is the most important part of the game…

I am walking through Kilkenny, feeling how uneven the cobblestone rises up beneath my shoes. It’s not what I expected. Nothing ever is. And then the church doors open and the wedding party bursts onto the street all at once. The energy is electric. The colours are everywhere — fuchsia, turquoise, tangerine, lavender. Kisses, hugs, laughter, photographers, toddlers, teenagers — and before I know it, my body is doing the thing it always does in the presence of joy: reaching out, wanting to hug someone, anyone…

The Manitoba March wind doesn’t just cut — it enters. Through the gap between your hat and your collar, down your ear canal, into the soft tissue of your nostrils. Cold enough to singe. Cold enough to make you understand, on a cellular level, why the settlers who came here were either extraordinarily brave or extraordinarily lost…

He came around the corner at speed, tail operating independently of the rest of him, and I knew before I fully understood why — the colouring, the ears, something in the angle of the head — that this small creature was a twin of one who had recently left my heart. What followed was not dignified. Tears and laughter arrived simultaneously…

There is a particular kind of grief. The ground disappearing mid-step. No last conversation. Just silence where a person used to be. Disoriented. Betrayed. Ghosted by them or by life. I had been carrying that for days, turning it over, finding no place to set it down. The gripping pain pinching my lungs.

Move it or it stays. That's all I knew when I walked in…

Precisely at noon, Provence stops.

Not winds down. Not slows. Stops. Shutters click shut mid-sentence. Stores pull their doors closed with quiet authority. Schools release their children into the streets, backpacks bouncing, and then — stillness. A whole town pivoting, simultaneously and without apology, toward what actually matters.

There is a particular kind of grief that arrives before the loss itself — quiet, patient, standing just outside the door. It comes when someone we love begins to disappear not all at once, but slowly, the way a star dims before you notice it's gone.

I know this grief. I lived inside it for a long time. And now, the star has gone out…

I have a strange travel ritual. Before I research restaurants or museums, I search for races.

A 5K through medieval streets. A half-marathon along a harbor. A charity walk past monuments I can't pronounce. Doesn't matter. If there's one, I'm going. Not to run—God no—but to stand on some random corner in the final quarter of the route and scream my head off for strangers.

Specifically, I scream for Megan…

I know I'm staring, but I can't look away. This Frenchman is falling in love with a tomato, and it's the most romantic thing I've seen in years.

I came to Provence the week after my birthday—another one—with the unsettling realization that I'd forgotten how to taste my own life. My marriage had ended amicably (we uncoupled, stayed friends, all very evolved), but it still stung in ways I wasn't ready to name. Mostly, it opened up a question I didn't have an answer for: What now?…

I pick up a stone. It's cold and heavy in my palm, worn smooth by water and time.And suddenly I'm aware of a tightness in my chest, a familiar knot in my jaw. Fifty-odd years of intentions and resolutions are sitting on this stone with me. All those abandoned diets, failed promises to be a better daughter, the goals to release my creative side set with such hope and somehow... forgot…

I am not a runner. I saw a t-shirt once that summed it up for me...

"I don't run. And if you see me running, you should run too because something is probably chasing me."

And yet, I burst into tears for the sheer joy of running…

Some mornings, I wake up and the weight of the world settles on my chest before my feet even touch the floor. The news. The rhetoric. The way scarcity and fear seem to be winning, inspiring people toward selfishness and harm rather than toward each other.

I know you feel it too—this heaviness we're all carrying. The exhaustion of trying to stay open-hearted when the world seems intent on closing us down.

My alarm went off this morning, and I am sitting here, waiting for the sun to rise.

I'm sitting in the cold, the wind blows my hair around, and I wonder how, despite sitting this way yesterday, I forgot to tie my hair back again. No matter. I try and nestle into the experience, but my head is already trying to make meaning of the day, of the questions, of the expectations that are formed without me even giving them any thought. And then the first ray of light gently puts her hand on me. I can feel it as warm as a grandmother's hand. And in that moment, as the sky suddenly turns golden and a great big red orb rises I not only feel that the moment is sacred. But that I am sacred too…

I am soaking in the sun in the garden where the flowers tumble from their trellis, one over the other, with little effort and great glory. They flirt with me, confident in their radiance and their right of place.

There is one bloom that seems to be reaching for me, and I am struck by how bold it is. Not just in its colour and form but in conviction; to bloom and to be…

Picture this: I'm sitting across from a pair of eyes that stare at me with the intensity of a coach in Bisbee, Arizona - this wild little town that refuses to apologize for anything about itself. The street art doesn't just decorate walls; it tells raw, honest stories that make you stop and stare. Cafes spill their aromatic promises onto sidewalks where the scent of freshly ground coffee mingles with the desert air…

I can’t fully explain the experience.

Which, by some standards, might make it a poor choice for a blog. But here I am writing about it anyway — because it left me with something rare: a quiet, lasting sense of being a small part of a much greater design…

There are lists for everything — books to read, places to travel, quotes that moved me, retreats to imagine, and questions to ask. Even joy has been organized. My weekly walk with Sue and her dogs. A night at the theatre. Gardening. Journaling. Slow yoga flows.

Each beautiful thing, slotted into place. I thought it was peace.

Then the lights went out.

Literally…