How a gloriously janky garden archway became my 2026 blueprint for shattering the noise, finding the pause, and building life on our own terms.

In the spring of 2020, early in the global lockdown, I hit a level of rage and entrapment that threatened to break me. Overnight, I went from flapping large, global wings through two growing businesses to being clipped, stuck at home, and thrust into 24/7 unsought motherhood while the world ground to a terrifying halt. My five-year-old and I were ping-ponging irritation off each other until we were drowning in a waterfall of tears.

Locked inside that claustrophobic space, I wrote a desperate manifesto to my own soul: “I am bottled up–frozen–barren–rigid. With the full ferocity of frustration, I kick. Fresh, cold, sweet air comes rushing in... My caterpillar mind has dissolved... I’ve kicked my way out.”

I am reading those words today at my table on the cool northern porch of the home I designed and built in the forest of Vermont. It is early July of 2026. And yesterday afternoon, I finally answered that 2020 prayer—not with a neat, sanitized spiritual concept, but with sweat, dirt, and a rusted wheelbarrow.

Behind my woodshed, a pile of gifted lilac sticks had been waiting for a year next to a pair of gigantic tree stumps. Instead of waiting for a polished blueprint, I channeled the raw, ferocious energy of that 2020 butterfly, grabbed a drill, and went to work. I spent the heat of the afternoon in the gritty, sweaty labor of heaving those massive tree stumps across the yard and fastening those curving sticks screw by screw.

My new arching entrance to my garden is gloriously janky. It is completely asymmetrical. And that exact imperfection is why it is so evocatively primordial and so undeniably alive. It stands there right now, surrounded by lusciously beautiful flowering weeds and the summer vegetables the woodchucks haven’t managed to pilfer yet.

This archway is an invitation to step onto the path of the pause.

It is a deliberate threshold away from the hectic, frenetic, anxiety-ridden whirlwind of information overload on the socials, the horrific never-ending cycles of news stories, and the assumptive burdens of caretaking that trap us from pursuing a moment of ease.

The cocoon doesn’t just shatter so you can float away into the ether. It shatters so you can drop your feet onto the real, gritty dirt and build a threshold of your own design. The invitation is to set everything aside for a moment, feel what you feel, make friends with that, and let a cooling breeze of delight light you up with a spark of insight that ripples into your next moment.

We don’t need a perfect blueprint. We just need the ferocity to kick our way out, laugh at the crooked lines, and build an archway that lets the wind blow right through.

P.S. Want to walk a little deeper on this path? ?

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I’ve made my latest deep-dive on Patreon completely free so you can cross the threshold and see what it feels like. Come step through the archway, drop your feet onto the gritty dirt, and let’s create what we need in each and every moment, together.

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