A Letter: Daring to Dream New Dreams

What it means to grow beside our children, not away from them.

“Let my gardens speak of me when I am gone.

Let them speak in coloured whispers of all the beauty I have seen and felt and lived.

Let them speak of how much death had to find me and how many hard seasons it took to make me a living, breathing thing.

Let them speak of my seasons of growth and abundance, but let them also tell of my seasons of loss and decay.

Let the soft, wet earth be a reminder of hardness that didn’t win, or the sadness that didn’t calcify, or the surrender that triumphed over resistance—and let the glorious, fragrant blooms speak of my life and its greatest lesson: that the beauty we make never dies.

Come sit by my garden.”

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Dear Rach,

Have you ever heard this song, my love? It is truly so moving.

It made me think of you. Of us. Of the gardens we’ve been quietly tending all these years, not the kind traditionally recognised with rows of roses or manicured hedges or those perfect cottage gardens you scroll by on Pinterest, but a garden built on the soft repetition of our care. A garden planted in devotion-dense soil, that holds memory and muscle and the sound of your own breath in the early morning dark. A garden with a root system as deep as the ocean, stretching beneath the surface, holding everything in place.

A bountiful garden of our mothering.

And for the longest time, I have happily and peacefully lived in the bounty of that garden. I lived in its rhythms, rooted in its soil, a native of its making. My days were shaped by proximity and presence, and by the countless invisible gestures that made up the architecture of my garden, of early motherhood. And it has felt enough—my gosh, more than enough—to be the one he reached for, the one who held the rhythm, the one who applied honey to his ribs, the one who offered stillness in a world that moved too fast.

To grow flowers in the garden of motherhood has been an offering unlike any other, my most favourite by far—tender, consuming, elemental. Every so often, I catch a glimpse of the soil still gathered beneath my nails, evidence of all the days spent tending, and sowing, and loving. I will always be the one who turns this particular soil, our soil. No one else could know its texture the way I do, the way it shifts with the seasons, the way it moves in the light. The roots that have grown here are not something I will someday pull up and carry elsewhere.

They are embedded.
Alive.
Permanent.

The bountiful garden of my mothering, and my life.

But babe, I’ve been daydreaming of sales funnels.

Somehow, nestled right there beside the dahlias, are sales funnels! And new ideas arriving unannounced, slipping in while I’m folding laundry, chopping carrots, or walking back from school drop-off with the sun on my face.

One of the things I’ve cherished most about our friendship is the way our lives seem to echo one another, like we’ve been walking different paths through the same season. And because of that, your mothering has always felt familiar to me, like a shared language spoken in fragments. Most of it passed back and forth through moment-by-moment voice notes. “Just in the car.” “Just ducking out for some groceries.” Or, most often, “Just on my morning walk.” These little windows into one another’s lives, stitched together in between everything else, that somehow allow us to feel known by one another in the seemingly ordinary and everyday moments of our lives.

So when I say I can feel something starting to shift and stretch, I know you feel it too. It’s a change that hasn’t come all at once, but rather in these subtle, almost imperceptible ways. I can sense a kind of spaciousness beginning to form around my mothering, a lightness at the edges of the day that simply didn’t exist before.

In those early years, I never felt that space was missing, at least not the kind that made room for ambition. It was as though it was never meant to exist in that season, and for the most part, I didn’t crave it. I wasn’t looking beyond the moment. I didn’t reach for anything outside the small, sacred world we were building. The closeness of that season was a whole-hearted response to the choice to devote, and I devoted willingly. I chose to be in it completely, connected to the daily rhythms and fully immersed in the sacred, exhausting, exquisite work of raising a small child.

But now, I can sense that the texture of my life is changing. And with that, space is beginning to arrive, not empty space, or space that pulls me away, but space that has been quietly asking what else might be possible now. And for the first time in a long while, I feel ready to ask the same.

You mentioned the other day that adage—show, don’t tell—and how, for so many years, it never really felt like it applied to this season. You didn’t feel the need to show your children anything beyond your presence. You were there. You were theirs, and that was the whole point. I remember feeling exactly the same. I wasn’t trying to inspire River through my action or achievement. Instead, I was building the entire shape of his world through my love, my constancy, and through being right there at the centre of it all.

But now, as his world begins to stretch beyond my arms, as his gaze starts to reach past me and into the wider world, I find myself wanting to live in a way that River can witness. I am not interested in impressing him or modelling ‘success’ as a metric the world defines, but more so to show him what it looks like to keep listening to your life. To show him what it means to be connected to your aliveness as a vocation.

To dream.

And yet, even as these dreams begin to stir, these ideas that feel true and real and fully mine, there is something inside me that hesitates. Something that folds its arms and whispers, but what if this costs you everything you love?

Because, my gosh, I love my life. I love our spaciousness, and how the boys play table tennis before school, and how both Jase and I can do school pick-up together, just for the extra family time in the car. I love the cosiness we’ve built into our everyday, the hum of our home, and the safety in the way it moves. I love being the one who knows exactly where the missing sock is, the one who remembers his favourite treats when I am doing the groceries, and the one whose presence informs the heartbeat of our home. And I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to trade the beauty I have now for some imagined version of what could be.

There’s a fear that if I let these dreams grow too tall, they’ll cast a shadow over everything that matters most. That if I move too far into what’s next, I’ll somehow unravel what already feels whole. It’s a delicate dance, this wanting more while still loving what is. And sometimes, I catch myself wondering if it’s even possible to hold both without something giving way.

But then I remind myself that seasons don’t ask us to let go all at once. They change slowly, almost imperceptibly at first. The light shifts. The air turns crisp. And before you even realise it, you’re standing in a different moment, though nothing has been torn away. It wasn’t revealed through force, only through the graciousness of time. And I can’t help but wonder if this unfolding is the same way. That it can all grow together, intertwined, and nourished by the same roots.

Our dreaming no longer pulls us away. Instead, it wraps itself around the life we’ve created, bringing a richer colour to the everyday. And in doing so, it becomes essential—part of the design that holds the whole family vision in bloom.

And suddenly, we are dreaming again, my love.

And it feels light.
Electric.
A magic returning to the soil.
Full bloom.

Love,
Jody x