Sunday from the Porch

Eat. Pray. Love. Or, something like that.

I’ve been circling something lately.

Not avoiding it exactly—just walking around it. Slowly. Like you do when you’re not sure whether you’re ready to name a thing out loud.

I’m gearing up to share more about my travel experience. Not the where-to-go lists or the postcard moments, but the interior shifts. The way movement rearranged me. And if I’m honest, that feels both necessary and terrifying.

None of this was planned. I didn’t set out to “find myself.” I didn’t declare a grand experiment. I just left Philadelphia one day and kept saying yes from there. Sometimes that makes me feel like I don’t quite deserve the depth of awakening that followed. As if intention should have preceded transformation. As if the universe needs a proposal before it offers a gift.

But here we are.

At a dinner party this week (new friends, new city) we laughed about it. About how people always want to know the story. How I want to write it. How I’m scared to write it. We jokingly called it Eat. Pray. Love. and passed around other one-word titles like wine glasses. Nothing stuck. But the conversation did.

It found me again on the trail this morning.

What surprised me was how simple it became when I stopped trying to make it impressive. That first year of travel wasn’t one story. It was three movements.

Ireland grounded me. Italy taught me how (if not outright forced me) to marvel. And losing Gran cracked me open into grief. Grief that could only naturally be rooted back in Ireland, not home, not America, but the place that held me when I needed somewhere to fall apart.

Ground.

Marvel.

Grieve.

It occurred to me that those aren’t just chapters. They’re acts of devotion. Nourishment. Prayer. Love. Whether I intended them to be or not.

So maybe that’s where this begins. Not with expertise or authority or a perfectly packaged narrative—but with honesty. With trust. With the quiet belief that if I tell the truth about what moved me, it might move someone else too.

For now, that feels like enough.