Only Held

A love letter and a reckoning

If you’ve been here for a while, you know I usually write about brand, authority, and the work of building something meaningful in the world.

This isn’t that.

Or at least—not in the way I normally approach it.

Every so often, something shifts beneath the strategy. A realization that doesn’t belong in frameworks or formulas, but in something quieter. More honest. This week, it was the recognition that I’ve spent much of my life moving through the world as if it were a backdrop—something constant, something separate.

This poem is what came from seeing that differently.

It’s a small departure. And, in its own way, not a departure at all. I hope you enjoy it.

I was a little girl, sun-warmed,
barefoot in summer grass,
swinging in the shade of old trees,
writing about you on the rock by Tinkers Creek,
the world stretching wider than I could comprehend.

I was a woman learning breath
through the sharp edge of pain,
finding quiet corners to come back to myself,
standing at the fault line,
waiting to see if I would split.

I was a mother, mist in my hair,
shoreline beneath my feet,
two daughters in tow—
our laughter pulling in and out with the tide.

You were in every story.
In the cool of stone beneath me,
in the trees that sheltered me,
in the salt that clung to my skin,
in the air I kept reaching for.

I moved through you as if you were endless,
as if you were certain,
as if you were mine to forget.
And still—you gave.

Now I walk more slowly.
I notice what I once passed over—
the thinness of soil between root and ruin,
the tide’s quiet taking,
the breath that does not belong to me.

For every time I took without seeing,
I speak your name with care.
For the ground that holds,
for the water that remembers,
for the turning I cannot stop.

You are not just where I have been—
you are what has carried me.

And so I return,
not as the girl who ran,
nor the woman who endured,
but as one who knows
she was never standing alone—

only held.