Putting down the chisel, trusting the wind, and rebuilding life around ease.

A reflection from the archives, bridging an emergency dispatch from an icy ER parking lot five years ago with the warm, intentional architecture of living today.

Five years ago, right at the one-year mark of the pandemic, I hit a wall of exhaustion that felt completely immovable. Life wasn’t getting any easier. If anything, it felt more complex, more lonely, and deeply heavy.

I found myself writing from a place of survival, desperate to find a way to breathe through the tightening vice of caregiving and global anxiety.

In my journal back then, I captured a night that many of us lived through in one variation or another:

“Forty minutes behind an ambulance at night will scar your nervous system if you let it. The wait in the ER parking lot, cold, no blankets... pandemic limiting the allowance of entrance. No way to help but wait, wait, wait. So, you wait. You can’t close your eyes because you are too cold, too anxious. So you knit. You watch the snow turn to ice. You think about your daughter... You wonder if this is your fault.”

When I finally crawled into a spare bed at 3:30 AM that night, bleary-eyed and shaking with fatigue, a realization hit me like a splash of cold water: It was entirely up to me whether I allowed myself to be re-wounded by the worry and fear, or if I simply chose to let it go.

Letting go wasn’t a grandiose gesture of forgiveness. It was just a simple, radical kindness to myself.

Back then, that single choice unlocked a floodgate. The moment I stopped fighting the reality of my exhaustion, a sweeping sensation of joyful energy burbled through my veins. I dropped the marital arguments for vocal reassurance and just accepted the warm hug. I woke up early not to hustle, but to ground myself in core exercises so I had the emotional bandwidth to hold my flailing daughter with inspiration instead of anger.

And then, the ultimate mirror held up by the universe: the moment I admitted to a friend that I was suffocating under the weight of managing my business details, she shocked me by saying, “I was calling to tell you that I am available and deeply interested in project managing this for you.”

I burst into tears. I realized then that when we unburden our shoulders, we finally create the empty space required to magnetize exactly what we need.

I called that post Raven Takes Flight, and I closed it with a vision of a raven leaping off the tallest branch of a mother-tree, spreading her wings into the cold sky. I wrote: “All you need to do to let go, is just blink your eyes, and you set yourself free.”

Standing here in June of 2026, looking out at a warm, foggy Vermont morning, I smile at that fierce, tired version of myself. Five years ago, letting go was a desperate, emergency triage tactic to keep my mind intact. Today, it is the very architecture of my life.

This morning, I woke up after a week of intense bureaurocratic and personal output. My old conditioning screamed at me to get outside, grab the mower, and push through the fatigue. But the raven doesn’t fly when her wings are heavy.

Instead, I chose the 2026 version of letting go. I let the mower sit in the shed. I spent an hour in deep dharma practice on my meditation cushion. I drank sun-drenched herbal tea harvested from my own garden. I painted a portrait of a janky, beautiful garden archway on the porch with my daughter.

The inner sovereignty I caught a fleeting glimpse of in that frozen ER parking lot wasn’t a temporary state of mind—it was an inheritance.

We are all building our lighthouses, stone by heavy stone. But never forget that the most powerful tool you hold in your hands isn’t the hammer or the chisel. It is the willingness to put them down, shake out your tired hands, blink your eyes, and trust the wind to catch you.

A question for your heart this week: Where in your life are you holding the hammer or chisel out of habit rather than necessity? What small thing might you choose to put down today to create room for what you actually need?