This week I recorded a voice memo style podcast about a gas leak, a serviceberry tree, and what spring keeps trying to show us — you can listen or read the whole thing below. A gas leak, the serviceberry and the work no one sees So I’m coming to you with something a little different this week, and I’m committed to communicating more in a way that feels authentic to me. The one way I know how to do that is via voice. Someone said to me, what is one thing you could do no matter what, no matter how you’re feeling? And it was this — show up in a voice memo. So this is what I’m doing, and I’m going to transcribe it into my email for the week so you can listen to it as a live transmission, if you will, or read it if that’s more your thing. I wanted to tell you about a few things I noticed this week and just see if you could relate. So let’s start here — astrologically, this week was a lot. We had some volatile energy and if you’ve been tuning into the news, this is the week of April 6th I’m speaking of, recording this on the 12th, and even if you weren’t fully tapped into the news machine, you could probably feel it. As an astrologer I knew this week would feel like a collective WTF for a lot of people, and I was pretty consciously trying not to get too pulled in. Even my own teacher sent an email saying, hey, listen, we all know what this week looks like astrologically, it’s volatile, so touch grass, be in nature, do your thing. And my life was no different from anyone else’s who was just trying to live while the surprises kept coming. And one of those surprises for me was that on Friday, we had a gas leak. So the backstory is we’d been drying our clothes and they kept coming out kind of damp, and I googled it and everything pointed to the lint trap being clogged. We clean it every single time we do a load, but I had ordered a new lint catcher because the old one looked kind of gross — and it turned out it was a little too short for our dryer. So all that time, the lint that wasn’t being caught was going straight into the exhaust hose. Marc cleaned it all out, fixed it, we put the original lint trap back in so it wouldn’t happen again, but when he was pushing the dryer back into place he must have loosened the gas line just slightly. So the clothes are finally drying, we’re like, amazing, finally, and if you have kids you know how much laundry there is. But I’d gone to physical therapy, I came back, we were outside in the garden for a bit, and when I came back inside about two hours later I just immediately smelled it — that undeniable smell of gas. So what did I do? I called our HVAC people and very casually said, hey, how are you doing, I’m just curious, do you guys repair gas lines? And the woman goes, it depends, tell me more. And I said, yeah, I smell gas. And she goes, girl, you are in danger. And I was like, what? And she said, you need to call the utility company and you need to call 911 and you need to leave the house. So immediately I’m like — Marc, make the bottles, put the dogs in their crates, let’s go. I called the utility company and they walked me through this very serious series of questions, asking them multiple times, and I remember thinking, oh my gosh, this is really serious. I knew a gas leak could be dangerous but because it felt so localized I didn’t quite register the scale of it. Big deal. Really big deal, it turns out. The utility company apparently alerted the fire department because they showed up within minutes. Marc’s outside holding the baby, we’ve got the dogs in the car in their crates, we’ve got the diaper bag and my handbag, and we’re just waiting. Fire truck pulls up, full garb into the garage, just the nicest people. We live in a township with paid fire and thank goodness, they were there so fast and they were so kind — not dismissive at all, just really kind. They had these big pliers and were able to turn off the gas right at the source, showed us exactly where the leak was, and then the utility company came within about a half hour and fixed everything. All was well on our street. But here’s what I noticed about how I moved through the whole thing. I have always been the person in my life that people come to in a crisis, in an emergency, when something goes wrong. I have always somehow known what to do and been able to handle things in the moment — one of my clients actually told me I’m like a mix of ChatGPT and Pinterest because I just have an answer for everything, which made me laugh because honestly, that tracks. But historically, handling things like this would take a lot out of me. It would wreck my system. I’d go into full hypervigilant fixer mode, handle everything to completion, and then completely bottom out afterward — just needing to rest because I’d poured everything I had into the situation. And this time, we just carried on with our life. I don’t know if it’s the resilience that comes with becoming a mom, where you kind of have to roll with the punches and do what must be done, or if it’s been the accumulation of all the inner work, or honestly probably both — but I was genuinely surprised by how my body and my whole system just moved through it and kept going. Marc texted me afterward and said, thanks for saving our family. And I kind of shrugged it off in the moment, but then I sat with it for a second and I thought, no — I actually did spring into action, I made things happen, and I got it sorted before anything became a disaster. And I almost didn’t even clock that as growth because it felt so natural. And that’s my invitation to you this week. Can you think of a time recently where you handled something differently than you would have before? It doesn’t have to be dramatic like a gas leak — maybe it was an interaction at work, something that came up in your business, a moment with a friend or a family member where you noticed you responded from a different place, more aligned with your values, more like the person you’ve been becoming. And maybe you didn’t even clock it in the moment. Maybe you only notice it when you sit still for a second and reflect. We don’t always give ourselves credit for how far we’ve come. That is this week’s invitation — take a moment, find that thing, and give yourself what you deserve for it. Now, in addition to the gas leak, spring is on full display around here and it is happening fast and furiously. I was looking at my autumn brilliance serviceberry in the garden the other day — it’s in its third season here — and I just thought, okay, this is going to be a great year for this tree. Because in gardening, when you’re talking about perennial plantings and trees and shrubs, there’s this saying: the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, and the third year it leaps. What that means is that in the first year, a plant’s entire focus is on building its root system in its new home — finding nutrients, accessing water, establishing itself on a solid foundation. It’s not putting on any exterior visible growth because everything is happening underground, getting rooted in. Second year, you might notice a little bit of external growth — it’s just creeping along, still focused on the roots but starting to show itself just slightly above the soil. And then the third year — the leap year — that’s when you start to notice things. You’re like, my gosh, it’s gotten so big, or the blooms look incredible, or look how much longer the branches are. And the root growth below the surface is still absolutely happening, but now the above-ground growth is finally visible to everyone watching. What I love about this rhythmic, predictable nature of how plants grow in a new place is that if a plant is happy and tended and taken care of, you can almost always count on this cycle. First year, very slow, very minimal. Second year, a little. Third year, you watch it take off. And depending on how you acquire plants — meaning you can absolutely pay for a larger, more established shrub where you’re essentially paying for the years of growth someone else tended — sometimes I do that because I want the immediate impact. But sometimes I’ll buy something really small and I’m willing to wait. It just depends on what I’m going for in that moment. But when I look at that pattern in the garden, I think about how much of a mirror it is for what’s happening in our lives. We too have this rhythmic growth. And so often, people will notice the bloom — they’ll notice the growth, the big visible thing — but they won’t see the time you spent putting in the work, which is essentially the rooting in period. They’ll think, wow, you just popped off and grew, and it’s like — actually, no. You didn’t see the stabilization, you didn’t see the pattern disrupting, you didn’t see the rewiring of how she feels about herself, all of those things that were happening under the soil the whole time. And that can feel hard when you’re in it, because you’re like, when is my bloom moment going to come? When are people going to notice? And I’m not saying it has to take three years in a season the way it does for a plant — we have our own rhythms and they don’t always map perfectly onto nature’s calendar. But nature is showing us something about cyclical growth, and the invitation is to ask: have I given myself the time I needed to sleep, to creep, and then to leap? And am I in my bloom right now, or am I still in my rooting in period, and can I honor that? Because here’s the thing — we’re not changing and pivoting and evaluating how we feel in our lives or learning new skills or literally relocating or creating new careers or doing deep inner work because we want the recognition for it. I mean, obviously if you have a business like me, you’re hoping that growth results in more aligned clients fi
