In 2024, I quit my job as a speech therapist. I love my students and the work I was doing, but I wanted to lean into a part of myself that I had buried–my love for writing and poetry. At the time, I was recording poems for them in a top secret google drive to be accessed only when I died…Then I had to ask myself why as I imagined they might ask themselves one day. The answer: because I was embarrassed of my voice and hadn’t learned to love it. 

I wanted my children to learn to love who they are, their unique voices. And yet, I was asking them to walk a road I hadn’t dared to travel on myself. Then I considered the whole next generation, will they have spaces where they are told “Your voice matters. Even if no one sees, comments, likes, you are enough. Write. Dream. Hope.” Will they have places to think, to slow, to connect with mind, body, and soul?

That was the spark for Evermore. It was when I realized there’s power in slowness. There’s strength in taking time to consider who we want to be, the narratives we want to live in to. What a gift to be able to create a space where others feel invited to rest and reflect, contemplate and connect. I was excited, but I was not prepared for the journey ahead. 

I thought I was quitting my job to do something worthwhile, not to work on my inner self. There was so much restlessness in the first year as I grieved the difficulty (and duration!) of the process. The demolition was easy, but rebuilding, that was a lesson I was hoping to save for another day. 

Month after month, as I looked at the torn open walls, the dry rot, the termite-bitten wood, the outdated electrical wires, and rusted pipes, I began to see myself.

I began to see all the parts of my inner world that had been laid to waste, the rusted pipes of my soul, the broken ways of thinking, the worn down body ridden with chronic pain. There was some much needed maintenance and repair that I had been too busy to notice.

Now, without my career as a paint job to cover it all up, everything was laid bare in the stillness. Just as the contractors continually discovered new problems, I too, continued to make new discoveries of once overlooked damage. There was a faulty foundation, that in hindsight, I know of only because of the pace of Evermore. There is always purpose in the pace. If Evermore had opened according to my naive, ambitious 6-month plan, instead of this 2+year journey, I would have rushed past the structural damage of my soul. 

Open a dream space where the community can gather, create, and converse?

Sign me up.

Recognize the pride in my heart towards my parents…

Recognize the ways I’ve neglected my marriage…

Go to therapy to heal from past trauma…

Sit with all my insecurities and self-doubt…?

Pass. 

I would have passed, but the faith that inspired Evermore, was the faith that carried me through the journey that I’d make to get to Evermore. For the first year and a half, I grieved the waiting as the loss of time. It wasn’t until year two that I began to see it as the gift of time. The gift of time to get things right with the people I love. The gift of time to reimagine what Evermore could be. The gift of time to be home with my son after his surgery. The gift of time to check in on friends, and coach basketball for my daughter’s kindergarten class. The gift of time to cook meals for my parents and help clean their house. 

Building contemplative rhythms into my life helped me to remember what matters to me and to choose it. Sue Monk Kidd wrote in her book “The Secret Life of Bees,”

"I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters, but they don't choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”

I hope Evermore will be a space where people feel invited to remember and choose what matters to them.