Venture Beyond

Last February I had what I can only describe as the wedding rush of my life. My two oldest kids got married twenty days apart. Twenty days! Both were destination weddings, and both were in Mexico (don't ask why, it's a long story). So I packed, flew, danced (a lot), and cried (also a lot). Then I flew home, came down with COVID and bronchitis, pumped my body with every medicine available so I'd be ready for the second wedding, miraculously recovered, and did the whole thing again. The energy in our family that month was through the roof. I ran on deep, deep joy and very little sleep, and I wouldn't trade a single minute of it.

The whole time we were planning, and all through the celebrating, I knew deep in my heart what my real gift to them was. It wasn't the wedding, and it wasn't anything…

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…