Let me tell you how a woman who calls her webmaster when a link turns funny colors ended up building a tool for collective grief. And nineteen other things. In a lab coat.
I know. Stay with me.
Yes, that’s really me. No, I won’t be explaining the cauldron.
Here’s the thing I’ve been carrying for a decade: we are all holding an enormous amount of grief we never signed up for — the witnessed kind. The news that drops you into a chair. The tragedy that wasn’t yours, exactly, but moved in anyway and never left. As a culture, we’ve mostly agreed not to mention it.
And when something that big asks to be felt, we don’t refuse it — we avoid it, brilliantly. It’s the same reason the closet gets cleaned when there’s a hard conversation to have. I wrote a whole book on writer’s block, and writer’s block is just this: a blank page asks you to sit down, and instantly the baseboards need scrubbing.
Collective grief is the blank page the size of the world. And we have gotten so good at the baseboards.
I’ve lost sleep over this for years. And then the door showed up.
While I was wearing safety goggles.
A friend handed me a tool and said, essentially, “go play.” I went in skeptical. What happened next surprised me more than anything has in years — and out of it came the very thing I’d been circling for a decade, plus nineteen more I never planned on.
I told the whole story — the grief, the goggles, and why the timing still gives me chills — over on my Substack, Soul Mastery Dispatch.
(Fair warning: there’s a cauldron. I won’t be explaining the cauldron.)