I've spent a lot of my life settling for almost. I got very good at justifying less.

Yes. I'd make the excerpts shorter and more inviting than the SEO descriptions, because their job is to make someone want to enter the Reflection. The Real Thing I've spent a lot of my life settling for almost. I got very good at justifying less. Come Closer and See What I See I've known since childhood that I see the world differently. What I hadn't recognized until now was how much that seeing has been underneath everything I've made and shared.

For a long time, I measured success by whether someone else thought what I was doing mattered. Over the years, that definition changed completely. Now I’m much more interested in whether I actually want to give my life to what I’m doing.

For much of my life, I didn’t really know what it felt like to be held. Over time, I came to understand that being held was not only physical. It was the experience of knowing I didn’t have to carry everything alone.

Re-membering was never about finding someone new. It was about gathering the scattered pieces of myself and bringing them home. What I didn’t expect was how much would change once I had to live with all of me here.

Some of the most important things I’ve ever known came before I had language for them. Painting, writing, cloth, ceremony, and the body each reached a different part of me. There was never only one way back.

For most of my life, I knew how to recognize accomplishment because it gave me something visible to point to. I’m learning something different now: the life itself may be the most important thing I’m making.

Some places don’t simply welcome us. They recognize us. The desert was one of those places for me.

A prophecy about surrender, mystery, and the life beyond struggle became a thread I would carry for years.

When grief stripped away everything familiar, painting became the thread that carried me through loss and back toward myself.

An excerpt adapted from Remembering Myself: A Journey Through the Threads of Time I saw a woman once that I will never forget. She wore a red dress that blew in the wind as the boat we were on sailed into the sunset. She was older, like me, and larger than most women would call acceptable. Her dress was made of gauze, barely covering her form underneath. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I felt the sense of freedom she relished as the wind lifted her dress and revealed her ful

In my twenties, I wrote that my life would be my greatest work of art. More than fifty years later, I began to understand that the masterpiece might not be something I made at all.

I entered ceremony asking for my body to heal. What followed brought me face to face with the way I had spent my life force, pushed past my limits, and mistaken survival for strength.

I had spent years creating things meant to offer other people warmth, safety, and the feeling of being held. It took a night in the hospital for me to understand what it meant to let that same care reach me.

For years, I tried to close the distance between who I knew myself to be and who others believed I was. One conversation with my son brought me to the point where preserving the connection mattered less than speaking the truth of who I am.

Sometimes an opportunity looks aligned on the surface, but the body knows when the container is no longer right. This reflection is about choosing discernment over visibility and protecting the deeper work still forming.

Dignity is not pretending nothing has changed. It is acknowledging the reality of the body and life we have now without shame, apology, or hiding — and meeting that truth with care.

There is a difference between being seen and being known. People may know the facts of our lives and still not meet the hidden places in us that learned long ago not to come forward.

Writing, painting, stitching, and making are not separate from how I live. They are some of the primary ways I return to myself when life pulls me away.

There are moments when the world around you looks exactly the same, yet you know you are no longer standing inside it in the sa