The Breadcrumb Trail
I’ve finally decided to listen to the nagging voice that’s been pressing against my ribs for months now — the one insisting I start writing about all of the magic unfolding in my life.
I mean, I do write. Incessantly. Obsessively. I fill journals and notebooks faster than I can buy them now, making up for the decade they sat untouched on my shelves collecting dust.
It was something I talked about often in therapy over the last few years — the guilt I carried about abandoning journaling altogether. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I had become so disconnected from my own authenticity that I could no longer be honest even in the one place that was meant to hold honesty safely.
Now it feels like the floodgates have opened. Words arrive faster than I can catch them. Ideas, memories, synchronicities, visions, connections — all demanding to be documented before they dissolve back into the ether they came from.
While I am quietly working on several larger projects with the eventual hope of shaping them into books, film concepts, and creative works, I’m feeling an intuitive pull to share this journey as it unfolds — in real time, messy and alive. Partially because it has become impossible to keep everyone in my life caught up with the sheer magnitude of what’s been happening. Even I can barely track it anymore.
But mostly because I feel compelled to map the constellation while I’m still standing beneath it.
Maybe sharing my story will ignite something dormant in someone else.
Maybe it will remind people that magic is not reserved for the chosen few.
Maybe it will remind someone of their own ability to tune into The Frequency.
Last week, I completed an artist residency on Toronto Island — sixteen years after completing my first residency at the Toronto School of Art in the summer of 2010, when I was twenty-two years old.
That summer changed my life. In hindsight, I can see it planted seeds that only now, all these years later, are beginning to bloom.
Recently, I’ve been giving people the condensed version of everything unfolding in my life lately and almost everyone responds the same way:
“Wow. You really are living your Eat, Pray, Love era.” I smile every time.
Big Magic has long felt like scripture to me. Elizabeth Gilbert — who also wrote Eat, Pray, Love — has occupied a sort of spiritual-creative mentor role in my life for years now. I’ve gifted more copies of Big Magic than I can count, carefully inscribing each one before handing it to a fellow creative I’ve stumbled across in the wild.
It feels like part of my purpose somehow:
to nurture kindred seeds wherever I find them.
But it’s impossible to know where to begin telling this story, so I suppose I should start with the synchronicity that solidified everything for me — the moment that transformed quiet intuition into undeniable knowing. Because the truth is, I’ve always known.
Ever since I was a little girl, I carried this unwavering feeling that I was meant for something larger. Something creative. Something connected to art, storytelling, and human connection.
For most of my life, I followed that thread against the grain, often without understanding where it was leading me. Only recently have I become deeply curious about this phenomenon itself: why some people seem to possess this innate knowing from childhood while others don’t.
What nurtures it?
What silences it?
Does trauma disconnect us from our purpose?
Or does it become the very thing that eventually forces us back toward it?
—
15 April 2026
I found myself at The Pink Piano Cafe & Lounge sipping an Americano Misto and catching up with my friend Kyle — one of several deeply synchronistic creative connections who had entered my life over the previous few months.
Kyle and his beautiful little sidekick, Ellie, at The Pink Piano
Kyle and I never seem to plan our meetings. Instead, the cosmos appears to reroute our days until we somehow end up in the same room at the same time, always collapsing into conversations that stretch for hours. The kind of exchanges that surge electricity through your body and fuel you for days afterward. He was one of those rare connections where our souls recognized each other before our minds did.
Those connections have been happening a lot lately.
Almost as though I’m slowly finding my soul tribe… or maybe we’re finding each other.
Kyle had just returned from Arizona where he’d unfortunately been discharged from a skydiving course after an injury. As he spoke, I noticed the embroidered moose stitched into his sweater and smiled, immediately thinking of my best friend Kyle — nicknamed Moose — who died unexpectedly in 2012.
The grief surrounding Moose’s death had quietly shaped the entire architecture of my adulthood. Only recently had I begun excavating that grief properly.
That summer in 2012, Moose and I had finally both been living in Halifax at the same time after years apart during university. We made ambitious plans for ourselves — a summer dedicated to pushing each other beyond our comfort zones.
A Halifax rec soccer team.
Rock climbing.
Swimming laps again.
Yoga.
Skydiving.
We worked together as lifeguards at the community pool during high school, teaching swimming lessons on Saturdays and Tuesdays. Water had once been sacred to me. After he died, I couldn’t return to it. Even the idea of stepping back into a pool felt like drowning inside unresolved guilt.
But over the last few months, something shifted.
I finally returned to swimming.
I also found a yoga guru to work one-on-one with me and began learning intentionally — not just the movements, but the philosophy behind them. The breath. The stillness. The surrender. For the first time, I wasn’t simply performing the poses; I was beginning to understand what it meant to actually inhabit myself
Yoga? Check.
Return to the pool? Check.
I did go skydiving exactly one month after Moose’s death, but connecting with my new friend Kyle — whose passion is skydiving — felt strangely symbolic, as though life was gently nudging me toward reclaiming the experience in a completely different way.
Not through grief this time. Not through shock or survival. But through presence.
The way certain films reveal entirely new meanings when you revisit them years later after life has reshaped you. The same story, the same scenes… but an entirely different understanding
Back at the café, Kyle casually mentioned that one of the instructors in Arizona had a peculiar name.
“What was it?” I asked.
“Brockton.”
Something about the name lodged itself into my brain. Strange, I thought. I’ve never heard that before.
Moments later, my old university roommate, France — someone I hadn’t seen in years — unexpectedly walked into the café. As we caught up, she casually mentioned she was in the process of relocating to Lunenburg.
There it was again.
Lunenburg.
At this point, the signs pointing me toward that town had become so relentless they felt almost comical. The day before, I had told my therapist that the synchronicities surrounding Lunenburg had become impossible to ignore — like a child tugging repeatedly at my sleeve demanding attention.
***
Later that evening after catching up with Kyle and France at The Pink Piano, I found myself cleaning my studio while music poured through my headphones.
Purging.
Rearranging.
Alchemizing stagnant energy.
I began staging one of my bookshelves and suddenly became curious about a box of vintage books I had purchased years earlier at an estate auction for five dollars.
I had never actually looked through them properly. I simply loved the aesthetic of them:
beautiful hardcovers from the early 1900s. So I opened the box. One by one, each spine seemed to hold a mirror to something quietly unfolding within me.
The Clue of the Twisted Candle by Edgar Wallace — mystery, illusion, hidden truth.
Etiquette by Emily Post — performance, social conditioning, structure.
The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain — faith, sacred objects, meaning.
And then:
a worn copy of The Creative Process.
Beneath it sat a 1952 Reader’s Digest stuffed with old newspaper clippings and handwritten notes that fluttered onto the floor as I opened it. Inside the book was a small leather mitten ornament attached to a piece of yarn, marking pages 150 and 151.
Stamped into the leather were the words:
“Brockton Archers 1946.”
I froze. Brockton. Full-body chills. I turned to the inside cover searching for anything else. Handwritten, staring back at me:
Lunenburg.
I closed the book.
Then finally booked the solo trip to Lunenburg I’d been resisting for months. I didn’t realize I was going to be walking straight into the next chapter of my hero’s journey — and directly into the path of someone standing at the edge of theirs, too. Somewhere between getting intentionally lost, following invisible threads, and saying yes to curiosity, I stumbled into the kind of creative connection that altars the trajectory of a life. Maybe even several.
Looking back now, it almost feels like the opening sequence of a film — the part where the audience doesn’t yet realize everything is about to change.
But that’s a story for another entry.
