Conversion: From the Garden of Every Day Life

What ticking a to-do item off my list showed me about healing

Hello Readers!

I’m excited to share (along with my co-hosts Christie Purifoy and Kyle Campbell) that the sign-up page for our 2025 Retreat into Rest in the Cotswolds is live! We’ve already filled a few spots, but we have space for more friends to join us next June.

Could one spot be yours?

Click here to learn more about our seven-day retreat to the English Countryside, where we’ll focus on coming away in a beautiful setting and finding rest for body and soul.

Have questions? Just hit reply or leave a comment below.

I also wanted to share my latest essay—one of my very favorites to write. Unfortunately, the title is not the one I chose, but alas, sometimes editors choose for you. Read about the serious business of savoring goodness (in tulle! with tea!) here.

On to our reflection!

I pulled out a plain manila folder of photos with a flourish and waved it at Michael. “Have a look at little Kimberly” I said and handed him the folder containing a few yellowed photos from my childhood. He smiled as he held each one up individually for me to see. Me petting a Scottish terrier in a puddle of sunlight (“She liked dogs!” I said). Me pouting for a preschool photo (“She refused to smile on command for the photographer.” M smirked. He knows her alright.). Me with a rooster’s comb of bangs hairsprayed to heaven in sixth grade (someone please explain the 80’s). Me in an eighth-grade school photo with a fading summer tan and frosted lipstick (“She was confident!” My words surprised me.)

“I remember” he said with a smile. When I say we’ve shared a life together, I mean an entire life—I’ve known this man since I was eight years old.

This weekend, Michael and I pored over stacks and stacks of papers accumulated throughout the decades we’ve been married. We found his grandfather’s record of entering the US through Ellis Island, receipts from our first trip to London when morning sickness left me in a haze of 24-7 nausea, our National Health Service cards from when we lived in London years later, a tiny coupon card addressed to Michael in our daughter’s handwriting offering “1 hour of time together for movies, games, etc.” which M plans to cash in immediately, two expired Registered Nurse licenses, every school photo of our three kids, and an entire filing cabinet filled with my writing and teaching work.

We reminisced for hours as we made piles to refile the important papers and recycle the rest. I felt cocooned by the silky thread of memory. For the first time in years, I was able to feel the good of the past first, to feel gratitude rise like a flame without anxiety trying to stamp it out. It was as if those old felt cutout storyboards we used in Sunday School was re-aligning and telling the story of creation in reverse. Instead of the beautiful garden of Eden morphing into a place dripping with fear and thorns and death (images I remember so clearly from my childhood), with each memory resurfaced and recovered, the fears of the past transformed into a beautiful garden.

Deep gladness washed over me as we held up mementos to one another without the usual prick of sadness over past losses, or strained relationships, or the years lost to the fog of PTSD. It wasn’t until I opened the files related to my work that sadness arrived and planted his foot down. One manila folder held all my former book proposals (five in total), the great desire of my heart for many, many years that went absolutely nowhere. That one folder threatened to take me out of the goodness of every good seed I’ve planted—a thriving garden of a life with Michael and our three kids, seven years of living abroad, eight years of teaching, and a decade of writing articles, teaching workshops, and creating resources for writers.

This one folder of work that felt stunted from the start had the potential to take me out for the rest of the weekend. But, I’ve learned to disentangle the weeds of grief, allowing them to have their rightful place without taking over. I let myself feel the sadness of a desire deferred, then and only then, could I rightly see all of the other good work that flourished around me. A myopic view focused on the negative is slowly being uprooted in my life, making way for gratitude. Joy. Healing. I can’t express what a conversion this is for my body, mind, and spirit.

It's rare to have a tangible glimpse of one’s healing when the process is often slow and subtle, but this weekend I saw the fruit of my conversion. This realignment of reality was so needed, and so unexpected. I thought I was ticking a to-do off my Autumn clean up list. Instead, I walked into a garden, and I stayed there.