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I have been thinking a lot about compassion lately. Not the word itself. We have plenty of that. People talk about compassion constantly. They talk about empathy, kindness, understanding, giving people grace, putting themselves in someone else's shoes. They describe themselves as compassionate people. They will tell you that they understand trauma, that mental health matters, that everyone is fighting battles we cannot see. And then somebody's trauma becomes inconvenient. Som

There are some things we spend years trying to understand because we believe understanding them will finally allow us to put them down. We gather the pieces. We revisit old conversations. We search through records we haven't looked at in years and compare dates against memories, policies against actions, what should have happened against what actually did. We find people who were there and ask what they remember. We reconstruct rooms, conversations, sequences of events. We be

There comes a moment, often so quietly that we almost miss it, when we realize we have spent years asking ourselves the wrong question. We ask how to become stronger, more resilient, more capable of carrying heavier burdens, believing that endurance is the highest form of wisdom. We celebrate the people who never stop moving, who continue despite exhaustion, who wear their scars like proof of accomplishment. We convince ourselves that surviving is the same thing as living. An

How losing everything led me back to the sacred. There was no white-light awakening. No sage-filled ceremony that fixed me. My descent into spirituality wasn’t gentle — it was survival. When I left the zoo, I didn’t rise. I fell. At first, it looked like collapse. I couldn’t sleep. My body shook at random. The world felt unsafe, even in silence. But somewhere inside the wreckage, something ancient began whispering: if they won’t believe you, start listening to what does. Tha

When a book stops being a story and starts being a mirror. John Vaillant’s The Tiger is a narrative non-fiction account of a man-eating tiger in Russia’s Far East — an animal driven to vengeance after being wounded by a hunter, Vladimir Markov. Game warden Yuri Trush leads the pursuit, and what follows is both a literal and spiritual hunt: a meditation on the fragile boundaries between humans and the wild. Vaillant intertwines the suspense of the chase with history, ecology,

The story I buried for fourteen years. It has been hard for me to talk about this. It ’s something I’ve carried inside for years — a place in my soul I’ve kept covered up for reasons that once felt like protection. Was it real? Would I get in trouble? Would people question me? Would I end up under a microscope? None of that matters anymore. 2000 — The Beginning I was seventeen when I began volunteering at the Calgary Zoo. Bright-eyed, naive, and completely in love with the wo

There’s a point in every healing journey where language starts to break. You can explain the facts, cite the reports, show the footage, list the dates — but none of it captures what it feels like inside the body. The nervous system doesn’t understand bureaucracy. It only knows danger, injustice, and the impossible effort of trying to stay alive while being told to stay polite. This process — the appeals, the retellings, the re-traumatization — has been like living in an emoti