You discover that people leave traces of themselves everywhere.
I’ve found money on the ground before.
Coins. A few dollars. Once in a while, something that made me look around and wonder who had dropped it.
But none of those are the best thing I’ve ever found on the street.
The best things have been much harder to pick up.
I’ve found evidence of people.
A grocery list lying in a parking lot, written in someone’s hurried handwriting.
A child’s mitten sitting by itself on a sidewalk.
A flower growing through a crack in concrete where, by every reasonable measure, a flower had no business growing.
Little pieces of ordinary lives that somebody left behind without ever knowing another person would stop and notice them.
I think that’s what I like about walking through the world with my eyes open.
A chalk drawing slowly disappearing after the rain.
A penny someone decided wasn’t worth bending down for.
A receipt from a dinner you know nothing about.
A feather resting somewhere it wasn’t yesterday.
None of it belongs to me.
Most of it isn’t valuable.
And still, sometimes I stop.
Because somewhere along the way, I started believing that noticing things is its own kind of gratitude.
The world doesn’t always hand us grand revelations.
Sometimes it leaves something small beside the road and waits to see whether we’re moving too quickly to notice.Maybe the best thing I’ve ever randomly found on the street isn’t one particular thing at all.
Maybe it’s the reminder that ordinary doesn’t mean insignificant.
There are little stories scattered everywhere.
Most people walk right past them.
I like knowing that sometimes, I don’t.
One Quiet Question
What have you passed a hundred times that might look different if you stopped long enough to really see it?
— Casey Edwards
Voice With a Purpose
Category: Uncategorized
When 11:11 Keeps Finding Me
What’s the weirdest coincidencel you’ve ever experienced?
The weirdest coincidence I have ever experienced is repeatedly seeing 11:11.
Of course, noticing it on a clock once or twice would not be unusual. But it did not remain confined to clocks. The number began appearing on receipts, posters, and in other unexpected places—as though it had learned how to find me beyond the boundaries of time.
I would glance at the clock without intending to, and there it would be.
11:11.
Then I would encounter it somewhere else, in a place where I had no reason to expect it. Each appearance felt like a small tap on the shoulder—just enough to make me pause and wonder whether I was noticing the number, or whether the number was somehow noticing me.
I cannot prove that it carries a message. Perhaps once my mind recognized the pattern, it simply became more alert to it. That is the sensible explanation.
But I have never believed that everything meaningful must be proven before we are allowed to feel it.
Maybe 11:11 is only a coincidence. Maybe it is my mind searching for order in an unpredictable world. Or maybe it is a quiet invitation to stop, become present, and pay attention to the life unfolding around me.
Whatever the explanation, whenever 11:11 finds me, I pause.
For one small moment, the noise settles. I take a breath. I listen.
And sometimes I wonder whether the strangest coincidences are not answers at all—but gentle reminders that there may still be more happening around us than we can see.
I Would Go Back to Bear Witness
Today’s prompt asks:
If you could go back and witness any historical event, which one would you pick?
My answer is the Wounded Knee Massacre.
But I need to explain what I mean by that.
I would not choose Wounded Knee because I would want to watch something horrific happen.
I would choose it because I would want to bear witness.
On December 29, 1890, U.S. soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry killed Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota.
I know how history records what happened there.
But if I could go back, I would want something a history book cannot give me.
I would want to know the people.
Before they became a number.
Before their names were followed by the word massacre.
Before history turned human lives into something we summarize in paragraphs.
I would want to sit among them.
I would want to hear their voices.
I would want to see the children being children. I would want to notice the relationships between people—the small gestures of affection and familiarity that nobody could have known would someday matter to someone looking backward through more than a century of history.
And more than anything, I would want the opportunity to sit with Spotted Elk.
I don’t think I would arrive with a list of questions.
That surprised me when I first thought about it.
Surely, if I could sit across from someone who stood inside a moment of history that I have only been able to learn about generations later, I should have a thousand things to ask.
But I don’t think I would.
I think I would sit down.
And listen.
I wouldn’t presume that my questions were more important than whatever he might choose to say.
I would be honored simply to listen to whatever wisdom he wanted to share.
Maybe he would tell me something profound.
Maybe he wouldn’t.
Maybe he would speak about his people, his family, the land, fear, hope, responsibility, or something I could never predict from where I sit today.
Or maybe we would simply sit together.
I think I would be honored by that, too.
Because if I were given the impossible privilege of returning to that time, I wouldn’t want to go there believing I had come to collect something from him.
I would want to be present.
To listen.
To remember.
And there is another reason this particular place lives so heavily in me.
A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Wounded Knee.
I stood in the cemetery.
I saw the old school and church.
And I looked across that vast stretch of land knowing what had happened there.
There is something difficult to explain about physically standing in a place you have previously known only through history.
The land is still there.
The sky is still above it.
Life has continued around it.
And yet you know.
You know what happened beneath that same sky.
You know people once stood where you are standing.
I remember looking across that land and trying to comprehend the enormity of what happened there.
Maybe that is part of why I chose Wounded Knee for this prompt.
I have already made the journey there through distance.
If I were given the impossible opportunity, I would make the journey in the other direction—
through time.
I have stood at Wounded Knee more than a century afterward and looked backward.
If I could go back, I wouldn’t want to see those people simply at the moment history took their lives.
I would want the privilege of knowing something about how they lived.
I would want to know them before history turned them into the dead.
And eventually, I know the moment would come that I would desperately wish I could stop.
That’s the unbearable part of this question.
If I could truly go back only as a witness, I would know what was coming.
I would know that families around me were about to be torn apart.
I would know that people whose voices I had just heard would soon become names, photographs, estimates, arguments, and passages in history books.
And I could do nothing.
I don’t know how anyone could stand there knowing that.
But I would not turn away.
I would witness.
Not because their suffering should be watched.
Because it should never be forgotten.
I would remember the people who existed before the world reduced them to the manner of their deaths.
Their voices.
Their faces.
Their relationships.
Their humanity.
Their lives.
And perhaps there is a responsibility that comes with witnessing.
If you have truly seen someone, you cannot return and speak of them only as a statistic.
If you have heard someone’s voice, you cannot pretend there was silence.
And if you have been entrusted with a story, you have a responsibility to carry it carefully.
A couple of years ago, I stood on that land and looked backward through history.
If I could return there through time, I would sit.
I would listen.
I would learn whatever Spotted Elk chose to teach me.
And when the terrible moment came, as much as every part of me would want to close my eyes—
I would keep them open.
Then I would come home carrying more than the story of a massacre.
I would carry the memory of voices.
Of families.
Of ordinary moments.
Of people.
Because I would not want to remember them only for what was done to them.
I would want to remember that they lived.
Maybe that’s what Wounded Knee taught me when I stood there all those years later.
Places remember.
People remember.
And sometimes bearing witness means refusing to look away.
But sometimes it means something more.
Sometimes it means listening closely enough that when you return, you can say:
I saw you.
I heard you.
You were here.
And I will remember.
A Dad’s Love For His Daughter
If you had to get a tattoo right now,
I wouldn’t have to think about it.
I already know.
I would have my daddy’s handwriting tattooed on me.
And I know exactly what it would say:
“I love you, my daughter. Stay safe. It’s a cruel, cruel world.”
Those were his words.
Every time I would leave, my daddy would tell me he loved me, and then he would tell me to stay safe.
It’s a cruel, cruel world.
He always said cruel twice.
I can still hear him saying it.
It wasn’t pessimism. At least, that’s not how I understood it.
It was a father’s worry tucked inside a warning.
He knew he couldn’t follow me everywhere.
He couldn’t protect me from everything.
So when I walked out the door, he sent what he could with me:
His love.
His warning.
His hope that his daughter would make it home safely.
And now I have those exact words in his handwriting.
Not a font made to look like it.
Not my memory of how he wrote.
His handwriting.
There is something about handwriting that feels different after you lose someone.
Those lines were made by their hand.
The way a letter curves. The space between words. The places where the pen pressed harder against the paper.
They are tiny physical remnants of a person who was here.
So if someone told me I had to sit down today and choose a tattoo, there would be no searching through designs.
No scrolling through ideas.
No wondering what symbol best represented my daddy.
I’d already have it.
I’d give the tattoo artist his words and ask them not to change a thing.
Because I wouldn’t really be getting a tattoo.
I’d be carrying forward something my daddy gave me over and over again while he was here.
Every time I walked out the door:
I love you, my daughter.
Love first.
Always love first.
And then:
Stay safe. It’s a cruel, cruel world.
Daddy, I can’t hear you say it when I walk out the door anymore.
So I’d put your words in your handwriting on my skin.
And wherever this life takes me, you’d still get to send your daughter out into the world the way you always did—
with your love,
your warning,
and a little piece of you coming with me.
I’ll be careful, Daddy.
I love you, too.?
This is it
The daily prompt asked:
How did you meet your significant other?
Technically, I met mine long before he ever became my significant other.
Bridger had been my best friend for eleven years.
Eleven years.
We knew each other before there was an us. Before marriage. Before holding hands. Before that first kiss. Before either of us was willing to say out loud that maybe what existed between us had quietly become something more.
And for a long time, friendship was where it stayed.
He was married. I was in a relationship.
There had been moments, though.
Looking back, I suppose you could say I played a little cat and mouse with him. Bridger would ask me to go somewhere with him, and I’d say, “Yeah, that sounds fun.”
And I meant it.
I wanted to go.
But there was always that thought waiting in the back of my mind:
He’s married.
So I wouldn’t go.
There are lines you know are there even when nobody draws them on the ground.
And then came a Tool concert.
My brother had bought me a ticket, and Bridger kept dropping not-so-subtle hints that he wanted to go.
Around that same time, something happened that I still don’t know how to explain neatly.
I was meditating when I kept hearing the same words:
This is it.
Again:
This is it.
And somehow, I knew.
It was Bridger.
He was it.
So I invited him to the concert.
I met him, got into his car, and we headed out.
And I was nervous.
Lord, was I nervous.
Apparently my body’s chosen response to realizing I might be sitting beside the person who was about to change my life was to talk incessantly.
I talked and talked and talked.
I’m sure I covered enough material during that drive to qualify for my own podcast.
But underneath all those words was something I wasn’t quite ready to say.
This feels different.
Then we arrived.
We got out of the car and started walking toward the concert hall.
And Bridger locked his arm through mine.
That’s it.
That’s the moment I remember.
Not some grand declaration.
Not a movie scene.
Not a kiss beneath the stars.
His arm locked with mine.
We were just walking together, two people who had already known each other for eleven years.
But suddenly, I knew him differently.
Our arms were locked.
And I was hooked.
As romantic fate would have it, after all of that, we didn’t even have seats next to each other.
Apparently the universe has a sense of humor.
But separate seats weren’t going to stop us.
We texted each other throughout the concert.
Somewhere inside all that noise and music, something between us had become impossible to pretend we didn’t feel.
But it was afterward, back inside the quiet of his car, that the night really changed.
Bridger began talking to me.
Really talking.
This was my best friend of eleven years, and yet that night he opened himself to me in a way he never had before. He told me intimate things I hadn’t known. I saw pieces of him that had somehow remained hidden even after more than a decade of friendship.
There is a particular kind of intimacy in discovering that there are still rooms inside someone you thought you already knew.
On the drive back to my car, we held hands.
The whole way.
I don’t remember needing some big conversation about what it meant.
I think we both knew.
Eventually we reached my car.
The night was ending, but something else had already begun.
Before I got out, Bridger looked at me and asked:
“Can I kiss you?”
I said yes.
And then he kissed me.
I wish I could adequately describe what I felt in that moment.
I had been kissed before.
I had loved before.
I had lived an entire life before that night.
But I had never felt that.
The kiss didn’t create what was between us.
It confirmed it.
Everything I had been questioning.
Everything I had been trying not to name.
Everything inside me that had whispered this is it.
There it was.
And this is where our story becomes complicated, because life usually is.
We weren’t two unattached people who happened to discover love at a concert. Bridger was married, and I was in a relationship. Recognizing what was happening between us meant there were decisions to make, conversations to have, and consequences that belonged to real people.
I don’t want to rewrite that part of our story simply because the ending became beautiful.
Bridger told his wife he wanted a divorce.
I ended the relationship I was in.
And we decided that if this was what we believed it was, we were going to choose it.
We were going to choose each other.
Four years later, I married him.
Now we’re working our way through our second year of marriage and our sixth year of being partners instead of simply friends.
But maybe instead of isn’t quite right.
Because he never stopped being my friend.
After the concert, the confession, the decisions, the years, the wedding, the ordinary days, the difficult ones, the laughter, the worry, and all the life we’ve lived since—
Bridger is still my best friend.
Maybe that’s my favorite part of our story.
Love didn’t erase the eleven years that came before it.
It built upon them.
The man whose arm slipped through mine while we walked toward a Tool concert was already someone I trusted, someone I laughed with, someone I knew.
I just didn’t know yet what it would feel like to love him this way.
Or maybe some part of me did.
Maybe that’s why, before his arm ever linked with mine, before we ever held hands, before he ever asked if he could kiss me, something inside the quiet kept telling me:
This is it.
All these years later, I can finally answer back.
Yes.
It was.
You Were Here While the Porch Was Still Being Built
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May the people who cross my path leave believing there is still kindness in the world.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of person I want to become.
Not more successful.
Not more accomplished.
Not more admired.
Just… someone who leaves people a little lighter than I found them.
I hope the people who cross my path feel safe enough to exhale.
I hope they leave knowing someone truly listened.
I hope they remember they didn’t have to pretend to be okay for a little while.
The world gives us enough reasons to feel unseen.
I don’t want to add to that.
I’d rather offer a kind word than the perfect answer.
I’d rather make room for someone than make a point.
I’d rather leave the porch light on than close the door.
Life has taught me that we rarely know what another person is carrying.
The cashier who smiles through exhaustion.
The friend who says, “I’m fine.”
The stranger who sits quietly by themselves.
Every person we meet is living a story we cannot see.
Maybe that’s why kindness matters so much.
Not because it’s extraordinary.
But because it’s often unexpected.
If someone remembers me years from now, I don’t hope it’s because I had all the right words.
I hope it’s because, for a little while, they felt less alone.
Someone asked me recently what quote best describes my outlook on life.
After thinking about it, I realized…
Maybe it isn’t a quote at all.
Maybe it’s simply this:
Leave people feeling more loved than you found them.
Places That Call to My Soul
My Top 10 Travel Destinations
I’ve realized something over the years…
I don’t dream about traveling to the busiest places in the world.
I dream about places that make me feel more alive, more connected, and more at peace.
If I could go anywhere, these would be my top ten:
1. Scotland – For the Highlands, ancient castles, and the feeling that every stone has a story.
2. Ireland – To wander quiet villages, listen to traditional music, and sit beside the sea with a warm cup of tea.
3. Montana – Endless mountains, open skies, and the kind of silence that lets your soul finally exhale.
4. The Great Smoky Mountains – Cozy cabins, winding trails, morning fog, and front porches made for reflection.
5. Alaska – To stand beneath the Northern Lights and remember how beautifully small we are.
6. Peru – Not just for Machu Picchu, but for its breathtaking wildlife and landscapes that feel untouched by time.
7. Japan – For peaceful gardens, quiet temples, and a culture that finds beauty in simplicity.
8. The Canadian Rockies – Crystal-blue lakes, towering peaks, and wildlife around every corner.
9. A small coastal village anywhere – Somewhere with weathered docks, bookstores, fresh seafood, and sunsets that invite you to stay a little longer.
10. Home… wherever my favorite people are. Because I’ve learned the most beautiful destination isn’t always a place—it’s the feeling of belonging.
The older I get, the less I want to collect passport stamps.
I want to collect sunrises, conversations, quiet moments, unexpected kindness, and memories that remind me how wonderfully big—and beautifully connected—this world really is.
The Quote I Grew Into
“Don’t wait to become someone else before you start loving the person you’ve survived becoming.”
Before You Become Someone Else
If I could give one life-changing tip, it would be this:
Don’t wait until you’re completely healed to start living.
For a long time, I believed I had to become a different version of myself before I deserved joy, peace, or love. I thought I had to finish healing before I could truly begin.
But healing isn’t a destination. It’s something we carry with us while we keep living.
Some of the most beautiful moments of my life happened while I was still hurting. Some of my deepest love arrived long before all my scars disappeared.
So don’t wait to become someone else before you start loving the person you’ve survived becoming. 🌿