04/21/2026
Okay this isn't a meme. Grab a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, maybe a cold beer ...sit down and enjoy this. It's a free chapter from the book I'm writing.. I hope you like it!
Holding Hands with Gravity
I was sitting on my leather couch, looking into the kitchen I had waited my whole life for.
Late afternoon light slid across the black-and-gold granite, catching the veins of gold until they shimmered like light trapped in dark stone. The wide-plank wood floors, warm and unbroken from the living room through the dining room, still carried the faint, clean scent of fresh sealant. Six-burner gas stove. Restaurant-sized refrigerator. New sinks. Everything finished exactly as I had pictured it for twenty years.
This was supposed to be where the rest of my days happened. This was the house I would die in. That had always been the plan.
And then something shifted.
It wasn't a revelation. No sun breaking through clouds. No voice from above. No bird at the window, no dream, no diagnosis. Just a quiet knowing that it was time to go. Now.
I was surprised myself at how undramatic it felt. Not a great big tumultuous wave. Just a soft shift inside me—an awareness gentle and easy, like a spring rain or a slight breeze. Small. Almost imperceptible. Yet it carried the full power of gravity behind it.
There was no grief in it. Not one flicker of regret as I sat there looking at the finished version of the life I had built.
When I looked at the granite, the fencing outside, the buildings I had put up one by one, I didn't see money. I saw hours. Hours and hours spent sitting across from people in pain, and long before that, raising four children on that farm. Raising those kids had been the most meaningful work of my life—pouring myself into providing for them, nurturing them, holding everything and everyone up. The therapy practice came second, but it too had been about carrying others through their darkest moments. I remain deeply grateful for every one of those hours.
Still, both roles had asked me to carry so much for so long. Now, at last, I felt permission to step back and let everybody else stand on their own.
There had been a loud voice in my head for years—the reasonable one everyone agreed with. Develop the real estate. Make it beautiful. Turn it into an asset so you can retire here. People came to the house and told me how stunning it was. They were right.
But I could no longer look at any of it without feeling the crushing weight of what it had cost me to build and what it would cost to keep. It pressed on my chest until breathing felt hard. Oppressive. A strange thing to say about a beautiful home.
Underneath that loud voice lived a quieter one. It felt like the four-year-old version of me standing at the screen door, antsy, ready to run outside and simply play. The finished kitchen was the permission slip I had been waiting for. Okay. That's done. You can go now.
I didn't know where I was going. I only knew it was time.
I started looking casually at pre-retirement spots. Portugal. The Mediterranean. Somewhere in Europe—because that's where people like me are supposed to go. But every time I sat down at the computer, Panama came up. Again and again. I wasn't looking for Panama. Panama kept looking for me.
It wasn't just the algorithm. One afternoon a jungle property listing appeared on my screen, and something in my chest loosened—just a little. Then I remembered her: a former patient who had also been a colleague. Years earlier she had married a Panamanian man and moved there. She used to tell me, with that same quiet certainty I now recognize in myself, that Panama was a deeply spiritual place and that I would do really well there. I hadn't thought about her in a long time.
On impulse I texted her. Just a simple "Hi, how are you?"
She answered within minutes.
"Are you ready to move here yet?"
It was as if she had been waiting for my call all those years.
That was the moment the quiet knowing stopped being background noise and became impossible to ignore. No lightning bolt. No tears. Just a soft, steady pull—like gravity—telling me it was time.
I listened. I went.
Here in the jungle, I don't have to build the beauty. It already exists. I fix what needs fixing in the house, of course, but nothing outside waits on me to finish it. Nothing presses down on my chest. When I look out I see green stretching forever, light filtering through the canopy in soft shifting patterns, and I hear the distant guttural roar of howler monkeys at dawn—raw and alive, calling the day into being.
For the first time in decades, what my eyes fall on does not make me feel heavy.
It makes me feel like I can breathe.
I have never been happier.
From the book in progress, White Woman in the Jungle.
