Venture Beyond

If I look back at my life honestly, the path that eventually led me to service did not begin with service at all.

It began with some (or a lot) of pain, and a genuinely embarrassing amount of searching.

Since I was very young, I've been searching for clarity and emotional regulation, though I didn't have those words for it then. I just remember a deep curiosity about why we feel what we feel, why we suffer, and how we find our way through hard moments. Something in me always wanted to understand life more.

For a long time, that search lived mostly in my head. I read. I studied. I went down many, many deep rabbit holes with teachers, gurus, shamans, you name it, gathering perspectives, making sense of the world.

But life has a way of asking us to go beyond understanding, and my soul is actually quite persistent,…

The earthquake hit on a Wednesday afternoon. I found out the way most people find out about something this large — messages arriving from everywhere, all at once, overlapping. I read them standing still. I was already in my day, already fully awake, and then suddenly I was in something else entirely, something not real, not possible.

I want to be honest about what the days that followed looked like, because I think honesty is the point. Wednesday night I collapsed into it — into Instagram, into X, into the relentless scroll. I was in shock, still I cried hard, but not in a straight line. That's what I want to share, because I think it matters more than the grief itself: none of this moved in a straight line.

In the days that followed — really, within the same minutes — I could be watching footage of government teams blocking…

There’s something I’ve been sitting with for many years now — something that began to take shape after my divorce, and deepened through the loss of another very meaningful relationship.

No one really teaches us how to be in a relationship. We’re taught how to succeed, how to perform, how to navigate the external world. But when it comes to love, intimacy, and building a life with another person — most of us are left to figure it out as we go.

That was certainly true for me. I got married completely in love. We built a family, shared twenty-five years, and there was so much goodness between us. But if I’m honest, a lot of what worked was also luck. We didn’t have the language. We didn’t have the tools. We were improvising with something that deserved to be built with intention. It wasn’t a lack of love. It…