My Sweet Little Girl,
I want you to know that I cherish you and hold you safely in my heart. You are a perfect expression of love, exactly as God created you to be.
For so many years, I kept you tucked away because I was afraid of others’ criticism and judgment. I thought I was protecting you, but I understand now that hiding you only made life harder for us both. You were never the problem. Your light was simply too honest for people who had forgotten their own.
I am sorry for the times I neglected your need for safety, softness, and love. I’m sorry for the moments when I silenced your voice or made you feel you had to shrink in order to belong.
But look at us now.
These years have tested, stretched, and reshaped us, yet somehow you have remained faithful. Hopeful. Still reaching toward beauty.
You are unique. So unique that many people tried to quiet your spirit and dim your sensitivity. But I know now that God placed something extraordinary within you from the very beginning. You came into this world carrying a special gift.
I am so happy to hold your hand and protect your heart with a new promise: you are free to be. Free to laugh loudly. Free to create. Free to rest. Free to play and experience all the joy a child should know.
You no longer have to carry the weight of survival alone.
I can care for you now by showing you that we are safe, blessed, and deeply loved. You only need to show up fully as yourself and enjoy this beautiful life we’ve been given.
You are extraordinary.
And I am so sorry you did not hear that nearly enough.
But you will hear it now.
Always.
Love,
​Me
​
**This photo was AI generated from a current photo of me at 56 and a photo of me at age 6.**

I am so grateful that God guided me to these words this morning…
I’ve been reading A Year with Thomas Merton. Honestly, it’s not an easy read. Thomas Merton doesn’t offer quick inspiration or easy comfort. His words make you sit longer than you might want to. Sometimes I have to read them multiple times to “get the drift.”
But today, something settled in.
He writes about being carried along by “an alien movement,” a current in the world that is not his own. And I felt that.
Lately, I’ve been feeling it more and more.
The noise.
The constant motion.
The pull toward consumption, distraction, and surface-level conversation.
Even something as simple as traffic can feel overwhelming, as if I’m caught in a current I didn’t choose.
And I notice something in myself:
a desire to step away from it all.
Not dramatically, in a run-away-from-my-life kind of way.
But a quiet pull toward stillness. Toward something more grounded and true.
And yet…
I know I’m not meant to disappear.
I’m not meant to live isolated from the world.
I’m meant to be in community. To connect. To serve. To share this journey as I’m living it.
So where is the balance?
That’s the question that keeps rising.
Because part of me wonders if I lean too far into stillness, do I lose my place in the world?
But if I stay too engaged in the world, do I lose myself?
Maybe the answer isn’t choosing one or the other.
Maybe it’s learning a rhythm.
A rhythm of returning.
Returning to stillness as a way to remember who I am.
Returning to the world, not to be carried by it, but to move through it with intention.
Maybe stillness is not separate from my calling.
Maybe it is my calling.
And from that place, I go out. I connect. I write. I listen. I serve.
And when I feel myself drifting, when I notice the noise getting louder than my own inner knowing, I return again.
Not to hide.
But to realign.
I’m beginning to see that I don’t have to participate in everything to belong.
I don’t have to match the pace of the world to live fully within it.
I can keep my distance where I need to.
I can protect my peace.
I can choose what is mine to carry and what is not.
And maybe that’s how I serve best.
Not by merging with the current…
but by staying rooted enough to move differently within it.
Still learning. Still practicing. Still returning. 

​There are tensions we carry for so long that they begin to feel like personality traits.
The tightness in the chest.
The clenched jaw.
The ache between the shoulder blades.
The heaviness we learn to work around rather than toward.
Lately, I’ve been wondering how many years I’ve spent trying to spiritually transcend things my body was simply asking me to feel. To dig deeper into places I’m realizing became part of my identity, when really, they were messages all along.
For decades, I thought healing meant becoming calmer, kinder, more forgiving, more productive, and more evolved.
But now I wonder if healing sometimes begins much closer to the ground.
Closer to the trembling truth beneath the polished response of, “I’m fine.”
Over the past few weeks, I’ve become increasingly aware of a heaviness in my chest that I’ve carried for most of my life. Not sharp. Just… there. Like an invisible weight pressing against my heart.
And behind it, tension in my upper back, as if my body has been bracing for something for years — as if I’ve been holding the reins of myself for far too long.
I’ve started asking myself:
What if my body has been speaking to me all along?
Messages that don’t require a diagnosis so much as they require listening.
Maybe the body remembers what the mind learned to minimize.
Maybe it remembers the years spent trying to be agreeable.
The years spent over-functioning.
The years spent swallowing words.
The years spent trying not to disappoint.
The years spent staying emotionally vigilant.
I think many of us become experts at carrying invisible weight while appearing fully capable on the outside.
But what happens when you reach the point where you can’t explain it away anymore? When you can no longer force meaning onto the heaviness?
Eventually the soul says:
Enough.
I can no longer carry this heaviness and pretend it’s simply “who I am,” because living Untucked has finally allowed me to experience who I truly am.
I don’t need to over-spiritualize this feeling because, truthfully, it feels quite simple:
My nervous system is healing, and that feels foreign in the body.
I can’t fully explain it other than to say that when this begins to happen, the messages become clear, direct, and impossible to ignore.
I used to ignore them.
I got very good at it.
But now I cannot.
That’s Untucked.
It’s an invitation to slow down.
To stop abandoning ourselves.
To stop calling survival “normal.”
It’s less about self-improvement and more about self-return.
That feels different.
Softer.
Holier.
Not becoming someone new.
But untucking the parts of ourselves that learned to hide to belong.
I don’t think healing always arrives as a breakthrough.
Sometimes it arrives as finally noticing.
Noticing the tension.
Noticing what the body is asking for.
Gentleness instead of performance.
And maybe that noticing is sacred.
Maybe the body whispers before it screams because it hopes we’ll listen sooner.
This week, I’m trying to listen.
Not just with my mind.
But with my whole life.