Audio version:
This summer taught me something I thought I already knew. There is a difference between living your life and truly tapping into the truest part of who you are.
What does that even mean?
I used to ask myself that all the time. Aren’t I the truest part of who I am every day? I walk around in this body. I live, I laugh, I cry, I feel things deeply, simply by being a human being having a human life. Surely that counts.
But somewhere along the way, through the ups and downs of my own life, I realized something harder to sit with. You can move through an entire life and never once access the tender, raw part of yourself where all the magic actually happens. I have spent most of my years trying to find my way back to that place, because that is where the healing lives. That is where the happiness lives too.
Here is the part nobody tells you. The bliss does not arrive alone. Sadness comes with it. Grief comes with it. Confusion comes with it. As I see it, the light and the heavy do not live in separate cabins. They are bunkmates. And if there is one thing, one single thing, that carries us back to our truest self, it is feeling. Actually feeling your feelings. Letting them live and move through you instead of pushing them down, and then responding to them instead of reacting to them. I spent a whole podcast series unpacking this reckoning, called Stay Close, if you want to go deeper with me there.
I think of this past season as the summer I went back to camp. Not a real one, no lanyards or mess hall bell, but that same feeling underneath it. That particular freedom of being somewhere new, a little unsure of the schedule, and open to whatever the day decided to hand you. Instead of overthinking every opportunity that came my way, running it through years of habit and hesitation, I listened. The guidance usually arrived early, in that quiet space right after waking, the way a counselor’s voice might carry across a still lake before anyone else was up. And once it spoke, I knew that was where I was headed that day.
One of those mornings, the voice pointed me toward a cottage in the National Seashore of Cape Cod. At first I understood it simply as a favor, tending to a place for a dear friend who had recently bought it in early spring. That was the whole story, or so I thought. It felt like being handed a bunk assignment without knowing yet who you would become in it. But now, at the end of the summer, looking back at those months of cleaning and caring for that small space by the water, I can see it clearly for what it was. A door quietly opening onto a new chapter of my life’s work. After almost thirty-five years spent guiding people through the work of sorting out their inner lives, of finding their way to peace, I have realized I am being called to build the actual spaces where that peace can happen. Not just the inner work anymore, but the outer cabin too, the physical place you can walk into and finally exhale.
That is the thing about camp. It asks you to try on a version of yourself you do not get to be at home. Stepping outside the comfort of what I already know how to do, saying yes to something I have never built before, curating a physical space where people can come to my beloved Cape Cod to rest and to heal, in a little cottage by the sea. It has felt like the free periods of childhood summers, the ones with no agenda except showing up and seeing what happens.
Cottages and the sea keep finding their way into my story. It is not the first time, and I doubt it will be the last. Each time I find the courage to trust that inner voice, the one that speaks for the truest part of who I am, something shifts into alignment, the way a whole cabin of strangers becomes something like family by the last night around the fire. Not a loud, dramatic kind of alignment. A quiet one. The kind that settles into your bones and tells you, gently, that this is where your peace actually lives.
With love, from my corner by the sea, Sarah.
