A Birthday Reckoning

What I've Learned About Being Human (Again)

Note: Typically I release We Can Stay Human on Sunday morning. But since this week the post flows from reflections surrounding my birthday, I figured I’d release it a day early on my actual birthday.

What if the things that undo us are not setbacks but invitations? What if the moments we fear will break us are actually the ones carving space for something more honest, more whole, more human?

In this birthday reflection, I don’t offer the lessons of someone who’s arrived. I share what it means to keep becoming. To stay human through grief, loss, joy, healing, rebuilding, and the maddeningly beautiful mess of it all. This is the year I buried my father, watched my son graduate, planted fruit trees, and tried (again) to build a life with presence at the center.

I wrote this piece not just to mark another trip around the sun, but to hold space for you. For the questions you carry. For the undoings that are quietly remaking you. This is my descent, my reckoning, and my ongoing return to what matters most.

Let’s stay human. Together.

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The Whole Story

It begins, as it often does, with a threshold. This time it’s my birthday. 51 years. 51 completed trips around the sun. A liminal space between what has been and what may become. A place to pause, to notice, to wonder. Although, when I do pause, if feels like most of the year has been in that space, and all of it has me thinking about how we stay human.

I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s been a year of upheaval. And I’m not talking about the genocides, tariffs, assassinations, or ICE raids that, in one way or another, affect us all. For me it’s been a year of thresholds within thresholds. My father died and I found myself sitting in the stunned in the space between pain and paperwork. Soon after I became a steward of money I didn’t earn and decisions I can’t undo. Before I could catch my breath I lost my job from a company I loved, and it felt like the girl I was crazy about telling me, “It’s not you, it’s me.” I tore my skin across asphalt and almost 6 months later, parts of my arm aren’t fully healed. My child graduated and I wept with pride and ache. I moved back into the house that held my adolescence and found myself standing barefoot in dead soil, asking what else in me needed to be revived. And through it all, I’ve been trying to turn sacred side work into sustainable vocation, wondering if the holy can also hold the bills. It’s been a year of unraveling. A year of remaking. A year that keeps asking, “What does it mean to stay human when everything tries to unmake you?”

How Do We Respond to Upheaval?

So what do you do with all of that? Most of us try to outrun it. Numb it. Wrap it in productivity or platitude. We spiritualize it, sterilize it, or spin it into something more palatable. We default to fixing instead of feeling. To framing it as a season to survive rather than a threshold to be transformed. We shrink it down to something we can manage, because staying with the full weight of it feels like it might undo us.

But maybe that undoing is the point. Because there is another way. A deeper naming of how each of those moments invites what we’ve made to be unmade and remade. These are the lessons, not learned in classrooms, but etched into skin and soul, whispered through breath and brokenness.

In other words, these happenings aren’t just events or stories. They’re sacred ruptures. They’re the places where staying human stopped being a concept and started becoming a practice. And I don’t share them because I’ve figured it all out. I share them because I’m still in it. Still becoming. Still stumbling my way through the sacred middle.

But maybe, as I explore my own descent, this baptism of grief and growth, rupture and renewal, you might feel invited to explore your own path. To pause at your own thresholds. To listen for what’s breaking open beneath the noise. To ask how you might approach the transitions in your life not as problems to fix, but as invitations to become. Sometimes, you might even rejoice in who you’ve become. So with that in mind, here’s what I’ve been learning about being human.

Death and Desire

It was just after my last birthday that my father entered hospice. As he entered hospice, we asked him what was on his bucket list. What did he want to do with the time he had left? But he didn’t have an answer. Not because he had done it all. But because, for the first time in his life, the question changed. He wasn’t being asked what was required of him, what he had to do, what others expected. He was being asked what he wanted. And that question landed like a foreign language. After a lifetime of duty, of performance, of living by what was demanded, desire felt unfamiliar. He had spent so long in the space of obligation, he didn’t know how to inhabit freedom.

My dad always embodied what Robert Bly described as “the Fifties male:”

He got to work early, labored responsibly, supported his wife and children, and admired discipline. Reagan is a sort of mummified version of this dogged type. This sort of man didn’t see women’s souls well, but he appreciated their bodies; and his view of culture and America’s part in it was boyish and optimistic. Many of his qualities were strong and positive, but underneath the charm and bluff there was, and there remains, much isolation, deprivation, and passivity.

That last line hints that my dad not knowing what he wanted came from more than just a lifetime spent in obligation. It’s what happens when we lose attunement to ourselves. When duty drowns desire. When survival becomes so consuming that longing goes quiet. He didn’t just lack a bucket list. He lacked the inner compass that points toward soul.

But there are other ways to find ourselves pulled off course. To draw us away from the deep joy that isn’t about distraction or escape, but embodiment. What we often call, “what we want to do,” is really just pleasurable and consumptive ways of passing time. But soul doesn’t want to pass time. It wants to inhabit it. To root into it. To become something within it. And without that encounter, without that inward descent, we mistake freedom for emptiness. Or worse, we fill the silence with noise and call it life.

In the midst of this, how could I not ask, “What do I want?” Not what should I do. Not what’s required. And not how do I distract myself. But what makes me come alive? What stirs my soul?

And the truth is, I don’t always know. Desire still feels like unfamiliar terrain some days. But I’m learning to listen. To notice what stirs delight. What draws me in with a quiet yes. Sometimes it’s something as simple as the bunnies that scamper through my backyard and I find myself wondering how I can create a space that enhances their safety so their playfulness can inspire my own.

At another level, it’s the creative act that gives me life. Not just writing but the weaving together of concepts, ideas, and stories into sometime more. But it’s not just creation, it’s the casting of a vision for a different way of being in the world. And flowing from that, speaking truth in places that are already seen as sacred as well as those that are more mundane. Those are the passions behind these posts from, We Can Stay Human.

It’s also why I officiate funerals, not just for income, but for the fierce beauty of holding memory and mystery in the same breath. Not because I want to be in the death business, but because I’m in the life after loss business, helping people move forward well.

Letting my body lead has also drawn me back into the dirt. Into the ache and thrill of cultivating something living. That curiosity has driven my summer of permaculture books and AI rabbit holes. It has me wondering how to take a piece of land and nurture it the way I have my own soul, so my physical world, at least this one corner of it, mirrors my inner one.

It’s all connected. All part of the thread I’m learning to follow. The thread of becoming. Of delight. Of desire rediscovered. In other words, taking time to ask, “What makes my soul come alive?” is something we can do to help us stay human.

Gratitude for Growth

As the chemo cleared my dad’s system, he slept less, moved more, and enjoyed time with family and friends. But as the chemo dissipated, the cancer it was holding back grew, his pain expanded, and his body began to break down. As the calendar turned to February and we celebrated his 78th birthday, there was no doubt it would be his last. But as death stood at his doorstep, the way he talked about it puzzled me. A man who had spent a lifetime evading his emotions suddenly had the face the pending reality of death, but as he did he seemed to narrate the end of his life as if it were happening to someone else. As if dying were an academic exercise, a puzzle to solve, rather than an experience to feel.

There was a dissonance in our conversations. The way he clinically described symptoms. The way he avoided the language of sorrow or fear. It was as if he had become a spectator in his own body, watching the curtain fall with a stoicism that felt hollow.

This was another manifestation of him embodying Robert Bly’s “fifties male,” but watching him speak of his own death as if it belonged to someone else, I saw the shadow of who I used to be. Detached. Composed. Controlled. I’d spent years preaching resurrection with a severed heart. But no more. His distance reminded me why I left that self behind. I want to feel the ache. I want to hold the loss. I want to stay in my body when the tremors come. Because being human is not about survival. It’s about presence.

Now presence isn’t just about feeling the pain. It’s also about letting yourself notice how far you’ve come. It’s about gratitude. Not the forced kind that skips over sorrow, but the quiet kind that settles in your bones when you realize you’re not who you used to be. Staying human means pausing to witness your own becoming. To name the growth. To let yourself enjoy the fruit of all that unseen labor. And maybe even to love the person you’re still in the process of becoming. That is another aspect of how we stay human.

Stewards of Each Other (and the Earth)

With my dad’s death came another weight I hadn’t anticipated. I found myself not only grieving a father, but suddenly helping to steward what he left behind. Mountains of paperwork, the closing of accounts, and making sure my mom’s finances were in order.

Part of that includes managing my mother’s financial portfolio. Not just crunching numbers, but holding the ache and the agency of inheritance. It stirred questions I hadn’t fully thought through, questions about responsibility, ethics, and future-building. How do you invest without feeding the very systems that dehumanize? How do you grow something that doesn’t exploit the soil or the soul? It wasn’t just a matter of financial planning. I was stewarding futures. It was soul stewardship. And in a world of scarcity games and profit-first models, I found myself trying to root abundance in something far more sacred.

Some days, the gravity of that feels holy. Other days, it’s just heavy because, in the end, I believe the answer to that ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is a profound yes. Moreover, my brother is not just my flesh and blood sibling, nor is it limited to humanity. It is all things. As Chief Seattle once said, “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.” Understanding ourselves as interconnected, not just with each other, but with all of creation is another key to staying human.

Sacred Survival

Then, five weeks after my father died, I lost my job. Not because of a failure to perform, but because my work was no longer seen as central to the company’s future. I was was the one in the field. Passing on a vision of movement and health to medicine and fitness professionals. My work wasn’t polished. It wasn’t flashy. It was grassroots. Gritty. Underfunded. I was helping others find themselves inside something bigger. Helping them belong. Helping them believe they could become part of a movement that transcends brands, budgets, and bottom lines. Giving them something that could change their clients lives.

But the company was becoming more corporate. More top-down. They wanted polish, not presence. Strategies, not stories. A seamless structure, not sacred mess. A few months earlier a friend had warned me, “They’re becoming more corporate. You’re too much of a face for them now. Corporations don’t like faces. They like logos.” And he was right. I didn’t fit the model. I wasn’t a cog. I was too human. Too much of a face. Too much of a reminder that the heart of what we do doesn’t always scale.

They said all the right corporate speak as they let me go. I wasn’t fired I was, well, whatever term it is they use so they can feel good about themselves as they fire you. In their mind, the organization had outgrown its grassroots. Given that their first attempt to do an event without me misunderstood the audience so profoundly it could be used as a case study in missing the point, maybe it would be more accurate to say it had forgotten its roots entirely. Either way, I was pruned, not to promote growth, but to feed private equities’ bottom line.

And in that moment, what I’d long suspected became painfully clear. We live in a world where profit is prioritized over people, where presence is sacrificed at the altar of, well, not performance, but performativity … that facade and corporate conformity that seeks to justify your existence while doing, well, I’m not really sure what.

And it’s not that the founders lost their way. It’s that they lost their power. They took on a private equity partner and soon found themselves without a voice in the company they built. And when that happened, the soul of the work was no longer theirs to steward. The vision was no longer theirs to cast. It was no longer about changing people lives, but putting lines about changing lives on billboards and catalogues because that gives the appearance of genuine care.

Because that’s how these systems work. Even sacred things get bought. And when the numbers don’t favor nuance, they trim the edges, sanitize the story, move from authenticity to performance, and cut loose whatever can’t be measured in quarterly returns.

So what do you do when a system tells you your humanity no longer fits? The easy response is to harden. To shut down. To settle for self-preservation. You put on your corporate facade and learn their jargon, hoping you do it well enough to sustain yourself and your family. But that only feeds the very thing that’s breaking us.

The other option? You stay human. Fiercely, tenderly, imperfectly human. You let presence be your protest. You let soul be your metric. And when you’re no longer welcome at the table, you build your own. Not to win. But to become.

So I leaned in. Not to the old system, but to the sacred work I’d been tending on the side. Funeral work that made room for memory and mystery. That paid no dividends, but gave something deeper. It had always been sacred work. Raw and real. The kind of work that lets you hold grief in one hand and mystery in the other. There is nothing polished about standing beside grief. Nothing scalable about holding a widow’s hand or helping a son name what he never said aloud or grieving with parents who just lost a child. But it’s real. And real was all I had.

Still, I was haunted by the question, can this sacred work also sustain? I stepped into the unknown, trying to grow something meaningful from the margins. There were no guarantees. Just the quiet ache of precarity. The tension of living in the gap between what is and what might be.

So can I serve and also survive? There are some weeks it works and others where I look at my phone and ache for it to ring. So I’m looking to expand my offerings. Holistic life coaching as a means of helping others step into a new normal. A weekly grief circle where people come together to find themselves on the other side of loss. I’ve begun contracting too. Back into the world of foot health. Still helping people move well in the world. But now I walk my own path. Not to scale. But to stay rooted. Not to chase growth. But to choose presence. Which makes me wonder, what are you doing to both survive and stay human?

Community in Precarity

I was beginning to find my footing in this new space. Not in certainty, but in trust. In the possibility that sacred work could hold me. And then the pavement reminded me just how fragile that trust really was. Flesh against asphalt. The sharp reminder that this life I’m crafting is tender and terrifying and stitched together by a grace I can’t always see. In a world that demands independence, I found myself desperately interdependent. Shaken. Bleeding. Not just from skin, but from the quiet certainty I thought I’d built. No full-time job. No insurance. No official structure designed to hold me. Just pain. Just questions. Just the ache of vulnerability.

And yet, there were things that held me. Not a policy number or a hotline. But people. A friend who practices traditional Chinese medicine opened her doors and placed needles where pain had gathered. Another lent me infrared equipment to coax healing back into my tissues. A chiropractor I’ve known for years reset what the crash had knocked out of place, charging less than a copay. A doctor friend, who also happens to be a physician for Team USA, tried cutting-edge treatments, not for profit, but to learn. To give. To heal. My body began to mend not because I held a card in my wallet, but because I was held by a web of care. Friends showed up. Neighbors carried my load. Community became the hospital. Presence became the medicine.

And while it wasn’t all about physical healing, the web of support I’ve experienced this year didn’t stop there, because I’ve been weaving my larger network over months and years, often in a place that seems unlikely, a place where care for my body, heart, and mind intersect. Friends from the gym weren’t just workout buddies. They were laughter in the weight room. Texts of support through all of life’s ebbs and flows. Meals shared. Jokes that cut through the heaviness. Encouragement when I questioned whether this sacred-but-precarious life could actually hold me. We’ve spotted each other through more than just sets. We’ve carried each other through grief, uncertainty, transition. They’ve seen me sore, sweaty, and searching. And they stayed. And that kind of presence is rare. It’s the kind that doesn’t demand polish, only honesty.

And part of that honestly includes this being a year of emotional complexity with relationships as well. It’s been the navigation of more layers than I can name. Connection and absence. Hope and heartbreak. Everything compounded by distance and exhaustion. But even in the midst of that complexity, one thing stood out: she came the weekend of my dad’s funeral. No invitation. No grand gesture. Just presence. And there’s something about that kind of quiet arrival, when everything else is unraveling, that marks the soul. Whatever else we’ve faced or will face, I won’t forget that. She showed up in a moment where it felt like the whole world was on my shoulders and gave me one to cry on.

In other words, presence came in many forms this year. Some tender. Some complicated. And some as simple as a door held open. Because when the job fell away and the future was foggy, another door opened, literally. My mom invited us to move into the house I grew up in. The house that held my adolescence now holds my midlife. It wasn’t just available, it was offered. Empty since I’d moved my parents out shortly before my dad entered hospice, it was there for me to dwell in. Not with strings, but with love. With welcome. With the understanding that sometimes stability looks like shelter, and shelter makes transformation possible. We didn’t land here because we failed. We landed here because love made room.

That makes it a year that’s reminded me over and over again how important it is to be connected. Not just to soul, but to your community.

Soul and Soil

So we moved. Back into the house I first entered on the last day of seventh grade. But this is more than a house, it’s a piece of land. 1.1 acres. Any attempt to manicure that land was long abandoned. Some soil too dead to grow anything. Other patches cultivate what we’d call weeds but are really nature’s attempt to revitalize nutrients stripped from the soil. And as I walked the perimeter, something in me began to stir. And here’s where the external journey met the internal one. Where all the soul work I’d been doing found soil to root in.

For years, I’ve been tending the soul. The practice of soulcraft, a model created by Jungian eco depth-psychologist Bill Plotkin. It’s like permaculture for the psyche. The work that’s been done within is happening beyond my body. And I’ve realized they are the same work. Cultivation. Observation. Trust. Nothing forced. Everything invited. I listen. I read the land like I read my own spirit: slowly, prayerfully. Permaculture is not just a method. It’s not a hobby. But a practice. It’s a metaphor. It’s a life. A way of being and becoming. You learn to live by death. To compost what no longer serves. To trust that decay is holy. That rest is not the absence of growth, but the root of it.

And just this week, I heard something that stopped me cold. A guest on a podcast pointed out that the first time sin is mentioned in the Bible isn’t in the garden, but in Genesis 4. It’s when Cain kills Abel. The hunter kills the farmer. The one who takes from the land ends the life of the one who tends it. And then, Cain leaves and builds the first city. It’s not just the origin of violence, but the start of a story: humanity turning from partnership to possession, from care to control. From this act, we begin our long exile. Not from Eden, but from intimacy with the earth. The land becomes something to dominate, to extract from, rather than something we are bound to in mutual becoming. But maybe that’s what this return to soil is about. Maybe tending this one small plot is not just a lifestyle choice, but a sacred invitation. A reweaving of what was torn. A remembering of what it means to live in covenant with creation. Whether we start in Genesis 1 with “subdue the earth” or in Genesis 2 with “till and keep it,” the original call was always about relationship, not rule. Not conquest, but care. The land is not a resource. It is a relative. A teacher. A mirror. A home.

So take a pause this week in a natural place. Be it somewhere truly wild, a park, or your backyard. Cozy up next to a tree or find yourself next to a body of water and listen. What is the world around you saying? Beneath the noise, beneath the pace, beneath the pressure to perform or produce. What is the soil beneath your feet whispering?

The world around us is not mute. It speaks. And it speaks not only to comfort us in the in-between, but to call us forward. Because staying human is never just for us. It’s for those who come next.

For the Next Generation

Which brings me to the last major events of this past year where my only child both earned Eagle Scout and graduated high school. And in the swirl of all the ceremonies and celebrations, I felt both proud and undone. Because seeing your child step into their future invites us to realize how much of staying human is about letting go.

And also how much is about showing that growth doesn’t stop when we hit adulthood. That we don’t have to be fully formed to be deeply human. In fact, part of how we stay human is by modeling, in public and imperfect ways, what it looks like to continue becoming. We teach not by having figured it out, but by showing the way we walk through uncertainty with curiosity, through failure with grace, through unraveling with deeper integrity. That the best gift we can give the next generation is not certainty, but presence. A life that says: I’m still becoming. I’m still listening. I’m still learning how to live well with others, with the earth, with myself. If they can see that in us, then maybe they’ll believe it’s possible in them too. And that might be the most human thing we can offer: not answers, but honest company on the path.

Staying Human for Another Year

So here I am. Twelve months later. No father. No corporate badge. No safety net. But more held than I’ve ever been. Held by soil and soul. By friends who show up with needles and meals. By a child who’s becoming. By land that’s teaching me to trust the slow work of transformation.

I started this year asking if I could stay human in a world designed to strip that from me. The answer isn’t simple. But it’s becoming clear: staying human isn’t about refusing the fall. It’s about who catches you. It’s about what you tend while you’re down there in the dirt. It’s about whether you let the breaking become compost for what comes next.

The systems that broke me are still breaking others. Private equity still devours soul. Corporations still demand we trade humanity for security. But I’m learning there’s another way. Slower. Smaller. Wilder. More tender. More connected. More alive.

And maybe that’s the real work: not to win against the machine, but to remember we were never meant to be machines at all. We were meant to be human. Gloriously, vulnerably, imperfectly human. Rooted in earth. Woven into community. Held by something larger than quarterly returns. Because it’s only when we look beyond the bottom line that we will find what we need to stay human.

Practices To Reflect

While the practices I produce typically sit behind the paywall, this week, as my birthday gift to you, I’m skipping the paywall and inviting you to step into one of three levels of reflection. Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, I have something for you.

If you like what you see, you can have access to practices every week for just $5 a month or $50 a year.

60-Second Reclamation Reflection

Close your eyes. Picture the cross-section of a tree … your life in rings.

Ask yourself:

What ring am I living from today?

Am I operating from the ring of survival or presence? From rupture or renewal? From obligation or desire?

Breathe. Touch the ring you’re in. Name it. Let it be enough for now.

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One-Hour Resistance Ritual

Pick one of the events or layers from your year (or from the essay):

• The death of a parent

• The job that ended

• The injury that changed pace

• The home that held you

• The community that showed up

• The child who grew and walked forward

Now, for 60 minutes, sit with it. Journal or speak out loud:

• What was unmade in me through this?

• What might be trying to remake me?

• What would it mean to stop resisting and begin listening to what this moment is asking of me?

If it helps, go outside. Put your hands in the dirt. Let your body remember that even decay becomes soil.

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Step Into A Life-Changing Rebellion

What are the significant events from your past year? Commit to walking through each event/layer you named. Not to fix or resolve, but to name:

• What cracked me open?

• Where did I find unexpected support?

• What did I learn about what it means to stay human in a system that does not want me whole?

Design practices that make this inquiry ongoing:

• Create a ritual garden or altar that reflects these layers

• Build or modify your calendar to include one hour a week for descent-based journaling

• Initiate a conversation with someone close to you where you name what you’ve been carrying and what you’re trying to become

• Let your body lead sometimes—through breath, movement, stillness, or silence

Let the rings keep growing. Let them hold the ache, the soil, the memory, and the possibility.