They arrived all at once, stacked at my front door, sometime this past Saturday. No doorbell. No knock. I opened the door to water my plants and nearly went straight over them. Four boxes in varying sizes and one paper-wrapped package I am fairly sure, just by the feel of it, holds a couple of journals or my mandala colouring books.

I carefully lifted them, one by one, and brought them just inside the doorway.

And there they have been ever since.

I haven’t opened them.

Not yet. I just keep walking past them.

I know exactly what’s inside. I wrote every word. And still, I catch myself avoiding the pile the way you avoid a mirror after a long night, not because I dislike what I will see, but because I am not sure I am ready to look at why I’ve done.

On September 13th, the content of these boxes will be revealed in a public setting. The seven books will be perched on a tiered acrylic shelf on a table at a local fair, and for the first time in a long while, I will be standing behind them, in person, waiting to see what happens when strangers pick one up.

That is a different kind of exposure than publishing online ever was. A screen has a way of softening things. You post, you wait, you see a number of likes or none at all, and either way you are already three tasks into your day by the time the data lands. A table at a fair does not offer that buffer. Someone can lift a book, read the back, flip through the pages, glance at me, and put it back down, all in the same five seconds, with my face right there to witness it.

The story behind these boxes actually began ten years ago. In 2016, vertigo pushed me into early retirement after decades in university administration. I remember thinking, in one form or another, that perhaps this was it. That my working life was over and my contribution to the world, at least in the way I had always understood it, was finished. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. We earn the right to sit back and enjoy a few sunrises and sunsets, tend to a garden, have lunch with friends and simply let life be.

That just wasn’t my vibe.

About thirteen months after retiring and still learning to manage the symptoms, I began the journey that became Healing Song Meditation. A few years later, in May 2019 to be specific, came a rush to write on a very early morning that would eventually lead me somewhere else entirely. Weeks after that moment of hurried writing, a gentle entrepreneurial guidance business – I call Illuminate the Page – began to take shape, and in 2023 I wrote my first book from the material that had come through that journey. More books followed. Then journals, thoughtful mandala colouring books, meditations, reflections and all the other pieces that have gradually found their way into what I now call The Soulful Well.

I didn’t set out to build an ecosystem. I certainly didn’t sit down in 2016 with a business plan for the next ten years. I followed one thing, then another, often without knowing where it was leading. And somehow, here I am, ten years after leaving the work force, looking at boxes filled with a body of work I never imagined when I walked away.

When I stop and take that in, it still stuns me a little.

But pride and fear are apparently allowed to sit in the same room, because both showed up when those boxes did.

I come from a family of people who build things, who cannot sit still, who need their hands and minds occupied, who keep going whether or not the world claps for it – the eptitome of the entrepreneur archetype. That instinct got me through years of solitude that were, by my own choosing, more peaceful than lonely. I didn’t know where that instinct would take me. I only knew I wasn’t finished.

But it also means I haven’t had to stand this close to the reaction since my group sessions of Healing Song Meditation before Covid. I built quietly, but I am about to share loudly – or at least as loudly as a folding table and a stack of paperbacks allow.

So here is what I know, looking at that stack by the door: perhaps the fear is simply the sheer size of what I have done – all the times I listened to the nudges – becoming very real to me. Ten years of careful, sometimes uncertain work does not fit easily into a doorway. Of course it feels like a lot to take out into the world.

I am going to carry it outside anyway.

Literally, in this case.

I had already planned how. A few months ago, while looking for something unrelated in the garage, I found the upright duffle bag I’d bought years ago when I was a Partylite Consultant doing home shows. It had a large square bottom, four wheels, a long zipper that allowed it to grow taller when I needed the extra space, and best of all, I could simply drop the boxes into it. It was exactly what I needed.

It had been hiding in a large Rubbermaid container along with two sports bags and two pairs of white dancing boots from my days as an Alouettes Cheerleader.

That was a moment.

I took the bag out and put it somewhere I knew I would easily find it when I needed it.

Apparently, I was overly confident about that. When I went looking for it on the weekend, it had simply disappeared.

I searched my two-storey house, the basement and the garage. Twice. For two hours.

Nothing.

At that point, I decided some gremlin-spirit-goblin thing had perhaps moved it out of sight only to have it appear when I no longer need it.

So I turned to my late mom’s luggage, tucked away in the corner of my closet. And that is how the suitcase I had never planned to use became the one coming with me to the fair.

My mom bought it in 1993 on a trip we took together to Florida, back when she’d decided, mid-trip, that she planned on doing some shopping. It was one of the first models with four wheels and a long metal handle tucked inside the back that pulled up so you could move it along easily. It was a real departure from earlier designs with little one-inch wheels applied to soft-sided luggage and a rubber leash used to pull them. I received a set for my birthday in 1981 – which I own to this day, and they still topple over the moment you overpack them. Those were fun times rushing through airports!

There were actually three of us on that trip, though I didn’t know it at the time – my son happened to be “on board”. So in a strange and lovely way, that suitcase was there for an early chapter in the story of both my mom and my son, long before I knew, that one day, it would carry something of mine into a new chapter.

It feels right that my mom gets to carry this with me too, keeping me steady as she always did in life, and in whatever form she can manage now in spirit.

The boxes will come down off that stack one by one, and the books inside them will finally get to do the only thing a book is for – to be picked up, opened, and, if I am lucky, taken home by someone who needed it.

I am ready to find out.

Perhaps You’re Not Finished Either

Maybe that’s what these boxes have been reminding me.

We can become very attached to the idea that life has a particular shape. We work. We build a career. We raise families. We reach retirement. And then, according to the picture we’ve been given, we’re supposed to slow down, enjoy the view and finally stop needing to make anything happen.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. But what if you’re not finished?

What if there’s still something tugging at you, like a little idea you keep returning to, a skill you haven’t used in years, something you’ve always wanted to make, or simply a feeling that there is another way you’d like to spend your time?

You don’t have to know what it will become.

I certainly didn’t.

I followed one nudge, then another. Sometimes the path was obvious. Sometimes I had to make room for it by letting go of what no longer fit. And sometimes I simply kept going because something in me wasn’t ready to stop.

So if you’re standing at your own version of a doorway right now: retired, starting over, changing direction, or simply wondering what’s next, perhaps you don’t need a five-year plan.

Perhaps you only need to notice the next nudge.

– What keeps asking for your attention?

– What have you been telling yourself is “too late”?

– What might happen if you cleared a little space for it?

You don’t have to open every box today.

You just have to be willing to find out what’s inside.

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Between Insight & Intuition
Sunday, September 13, 2026 • 10 AM–4 PM
The Agora, John Abbott College Campus in Ste Anne de Bellevue, Quebec
Free admission