Hello!

My father gave me the gift of telling a story, holding a room, and teaching. I watched him do it my whole life, and I got to work beside him in our family business, which is its own kind of education. My mother gave me the gift of blind faith, of believing in what we cannot sense with the body. She does not argue for it. She simply lives as though it is obvious. I spent the first half of my life leaning on the first and almost forgetting the second.

I have two beautiful younger sisters. We had wonderful childhoods, each of us with our own quirks and our own stories about each other. One of them looked so much like me growing up that people thought we were twins. With one of them I perfected the art of the slammed door. One I traveled the world with. One I shared many pregnancy months with (along with the ice cream and the shopping days). When I was 20, our only brother, Eric, drowned. He was my middle sister's twin. The three of us became close for a while after that, the way people do when something unthinkable happens, and then life pulled us in different directions again. I do not think I ever fully appreciated that we chose each other. I am only now beginning to explore what that means.

I did not wake up all at once. Eric's sudden death was unimaginable. One day he was alive and the next day he was gone. I remember thinking, this is why our family is special. I know that is a strange thing to think, but now I understand it better. He was in our family for a reason and his death was a great teacher. I spent the next five years in a state of self-destruction. Then life continued. Between my two children I had two miscarriages. My first marriage ended. People I loved became strangers. Persistent vertigo kept me incapacitated for a decade. My career burned me to the ground. My beloved daughter was in a near-fatal car accident. Out of pure fear, I removed alcohol from my life. Then, as that woman who deeply feared my own body, I was given the thing I feared most. I was guided all the way into the center of it, to sit beside a beautiful friend through cancer. This cracked my soul wide open. Each of those rock bottoms entered a different room of my life and left a lesson behind. I thought I was being ripped apart. But now I see I was being given a foundation.

There has been the greatest happiness too. Don't get me wrong. Many months of world travel, the hippie years following the Grateful Dead, great friendships, art school, getting to build a business and work with my dad and entire family, having my daughter and my son, and a million tiny joys in between. Then life moved me somewhere new, and everything started to change.

Let me tell you what I actually believe, because I hid it for a long time. Ten years ago I found a framed print with a line from Lewis Carroll. Sometimes I have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. It still hangs on my wall in the same place, and I still smile whenever I see it. I am only now beginning to understand why the universe put it there. Enter my beautiful gift of blind faith. Some would call these beliefs nonsense, literally, the things you cannot reach with the five dense human senses. Not so blind to me, though. God. Creator. Source. The universe. The field. Science and mysticism both. My higher self. Eternity, and the life between lives. Astrology. The new earth. The whispers from our passed loved ones. Angel signs. Synchronicities and serendipity. Mother Nature. Gaia. My ancestors, and the DNA they carried down through our bodies. The default genotype settings built into this body I chose. Meditation, spontaneous remission, placebo, and how we can heal our own bodies in ways conventional medicine cannot explain. I want a life that allows me to live with all of these beliefs, with intention, without fear, and to speak my truth in the spirit of serving others.

For me, slowing down was how I finally came to sense all of this, outside the standard ways, deep in my soul. I was stuck before that. Slow living was always a personal aspiration. The movement began in Italy in the 1980s as a response to fast food and mass production, and it is what originally inspired our marketplace. Quality over speed. Craft over convenience. Intention over impulse. But slowness is not just a lifestyle to me anymore. It is the way we create enough quietness to learn, evolve, and grow. Most of us are living from the outside in. Slowness is how you get quiet enough to hear yourself, and what comes after can be as big and as wild as you want.

Slowness makes the space for awakening into an intentional, purpose-driven, soul-led life. At The Ever Good, we do this through self, home, and journey. Self is your body and mind. Tending your nervous system, your energy, your health, so you have the capacity to hear yourself at all. Home is your environment and your people. What surrounds you, what you hold and use every day, and the ones placed in your path. Journey is your soul and your purpose. Who you actually are, what you came here for, and the life you build around the answer.