A mosaic of grief and joy: on navigating crisis, the slow art of creative endurance, and finding sweetness on the other side.

A reflection from the archives, bridging an emergency dispatch from the spring of 2020 with the quiet, integrated thriving of the present day.

At the dawn of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, my personal dam broke, and I sat in my home and sobbed for over an hour.

Overnight, the world had fractured, and I was thrust into an acute, terrifying identity crisis. My two businesses had ground to a sudden halt. My partner at the time had to dive headfirst into a demanding new job from home, leaving me as the solo, 12-hour-a-day “on” parent to two fierce, energetic, creative little girls.

“The adjustment into this new role has been earth-shattering and devastating to me... I am having an identity crisis... The very fabric of our society has become disrupted... The only thing I can do is endeavor to relax. The only thing I can do is strive to #createjoyanyway and celebrate all of my good fortunes... Let’s finally harness this shared pain so that we can create the society we all long for.”

Back then, #createjoyanyway was an emergency battle cry. It was a fierce directive to find a flicker of light while staring at a rocketing cascade of global shutdowns and feeling the deep frustration of bare-minimum survival.

I am reading those words today from a quiet house in June of 2026. The sun is blazing outside, my daughters are older, and the thick fog that blanketed the Vermont fields this morning has given way to brilliant, wide-open clarity.

Looking back at that trembling, exhausted version of myself from six years ago, I realize that navigating a treacherous collective landscape is a lot like painting a mosaic. When you are right in the thick of the crisis, the tiles just look like jagged, broken shards of glass. They cut your fingers. They feel raw, mismatched, and deeply painful.

But the path of contemplative practice demands that we slow down. It demands the slow, earth-based time it takes to watch a garden bloom, or to observe a bee dancing on the tips of clover with intimate grace and convenient stickiness. The bee doesn’t panic about the size of the field; it just patiently dips into one tiny blossom at a time.

That slow, deliberate pollination is exactly how I have spent the last six years.

I learned how to dip my finest brush into the vibrant ink of my life, wiping off the excess, and placing each tiny mosaic piece with precision, honor, and respect for the step I was on. I stopped fighting the mess and began to trust it.

And today, I am finally tasting the honey of all that patient effort.

The joy I scrambled to manufacture in 2020 has grown into a sustainable, financial, and spiritual thriving. I see the tapestry fully formed. The broken businesses of the pandemic cleared the stage for me to build an online empire on my own terms. The exhausting years of intense motherhood have yielded a morning where my daughter and I sit peacefully on the porch, painting a portrait of a garden archway I built with my own hands. The global grief has distilled into a deep dharma practice I share with my sweetheart.

We were preparing for just this moment, it turns out.

If you are currently standing at the brink of your own personal catastrophe, or if you are navigating a quiet identity crisis of your own, take a breath. Do not be afraid of the broken pieces. Do not rush to sweep the shattered shards under the rug.

Hold them. Honor them. Take the slow time to watch the leaves unfurl. Trust that every ounce of your shared pain and patient longing is simply the sticky pollen required for future growth. Keep creating joy anyway, block by block, screw by screw, tile by tile. Because one day, you will stand on the other side of the treacherous journey, look back at the beautiful architecture of your life, and finally taste the sweetness of having survived it all.

Thank you for reading.

If this reflection gave you space to breathe today, consider sharing it with someone holding their own broken pieces, or subscribe to receive regular essays on somatic practice, presence, and creative sovereignty.