It’s been a quite few weeks here on the channel, largely because life has been anything but quiet.
Most of what I share here grows from my work with grief, funerals, and the slow practice of staying human after loss. That work continues. But lately, life has also been inviting me into a wider landscape of projects, experiments, and adventures.
There is a common thread running through all of them. I am interested in what helps people become more embodied, more connected, and more alive. Sometimes that looks like sitting with a grieving family. Sometimes it looks like reimagining an event, learning how feet move, caring for old trees, or even jumping out of an airplane.
Here is a quick update on what I have been building, learning, tending, and preparing to leap into.
The Barefoot Shoe Expo
I have joined the team planning the 2027 Barefoot Shoe Expo, happening May 15-16 in Chicago. We are working to make it more than a place to buy shoes. We want it to become a gathering where people can learn about natural movement, connect with educators, discover products that help their bodies, and find a more human relationship with their feet.
Much of my current work is focused on sponsorships, vendor communication, educational programming, and creating a stronger experience for people who are curious about barefoot shoes but do not yet know where to begin. We are developing a buyer’s guide, building partnerships with educators, and imagining Sunday as a beginner-friendly day when existing attendees can bring a curious friend.
It is event strategy, but it is also a form of community building. Feet are where our bodies meet the earth. Helping people reconnect with them feels like one small way of returning from abstraction to embodiment, which is one of the central movements beneath everything I do.
Gait Happens
I am also getting ready to become a Gait Happens certified trainer.
This feels like a natural next step. I have spent years in the barefoot footwear world, but footwear is only part of the story. Shoes matter, yet so do strength, mobility, gait, nervous-system patterns, injury history, and the ways our bodies have adapted to carry us through life.
I want to understand those patterns more deeply and help people build a healthier relationship with movement. Not by treating bodies as broken machines, but by approaching them as intelligent, adaptive systems. What looks like dysfunction often began as compensation. The question is not only, “What is wrong?” It is also, “What has this body been trying to do, and what new capacity can we help it develop?”
That approach reflects a conviction I return to often: we are adaptive, not defective. Grace does not shame the survival system. It helps us create enough safety, awareness, and practice for something new to become possible.
Landscaping
Closer to home, I have been doing a tremendous amount of landscaping. And when I say landscaping, I mostly mean moving an absurd quantity of mulch.
I have been spreading mulch around the property, especially beneath the silver maples, to protect the soil and help it retain moisture. I am also working on diverting water from the downspouts away from the foundation and toward the areas where tree roots can actually receive it.
I keep finding something spiritually grounding in this work. Water that was once treated as a problem becomes nourishment when it is redirected. Fallen branches become mulch. Mulch becomes protection. What looks like waste becomes part of the conditions for future life.
There is no promise of instant transformation. Trees work slowly. Soil works quietly. Roots grow beyond our view. This kind of tending reminds me that not everything meaningful announces itself with visible progress. Sometimes participation in new life looks like moving one more wheelbarrow of wood chips and trusting what the earth knows how to do.
Skydiving
Finally, I went skydiving to celebrate my kid turning twenty.
There are easier ways to celebrate a birthday. There are certainly options that involve less paperwork about the possibility of death. But twenty is a threshold, and sometimes a threshold deserves something that allows the body to feel it.
A Wider Life
These projects might look unrelated from the outside: an expo, a movement certification, a mountain of mulch, and an airplane jump. But each one is teaching me something about participation.
We do not become fully human by standing at a safe distance from life. We become human by entering it through our bodies, relationships, work, wonder, fear, and care. We build gatherings. We learn new skills. We tend roots we may never see. We celebrate the people we love while they are here.
My funeral and grief-coaching work remains at the heart of what I do. If you need someone to help you create a meaningful ceremony or find your way through life after loss, you can reply to this email and tell me what is happening.
For now, I am grateful for a season that includes grief and growth, soil and sky, roots and feet, careful planning and unreasonable leaps. It is all part of the same work: becoming more present to this fragile, unfinished, astonishing life.