Where the Soul Touches Both Shores

The Ache of Having Almost Everything

Portugal, One Year Later

The cliffs are exactly as I left them—wind-whipped, ancient. The Atlantic still hurls itself against the rocks like it’s trying to remember something it forgot.

And me? I’m standing here again, one year later. Same view, not the same woman.

Last year I left Portugal with my heart cracked open. I had tried—really tried—to make it work. The beauty was unbearable in the best way. The rhythm of life felt closer to my natural pulse. But the ground beneath it was shaky: the schools failed my son, my daughter was an ocean away, the math refused to add up. So, I packed the ache and flew home.

I thought time would dull it.
It didn’t.

---

For most of my life I’ve chased freedom—places to live, businesses to build, schedules that let me mother on my own terms. Yet I’ve always craved grounding too: a sturdy home, people who show up in the flesh, a sense of permanence that doesn’t evaporate when I close my laptop.

For years I treated those longings—the free one and the rooted one—as rivals. If I could just choose the right city, school, business, partner, maybe the tug-of-war would end.

But this was never a puzzle to solve.
It’s a paradox to inhabit.

---

What the paradox taught me

For years, I thought I had to choose.

Choose between freedom and responsibility.
Between belonging to a place and belonging to myself.
Between beauty and stability, flight and foundation.

But the truth is:
My soul doesn’t want to pick. It never did.
It wants to hold both.

It needs a place to land and a place to leap.
Rhythms that ground me and spaces that stretch me open.
Structure—yes—but only the kind that supports, not suffocates.

This isn’t about balance.
It’s not about some perfect 50/50 split.
It’s about integration.
It’s about weaving a life that can hold multitudes—without tearing at the seams.

This isn’t about balance; it’s about integration—
weaving a life that can hold multitudes without tearing at the seams.

To embody that paradox is to live with a holy kind of heartbreak:
a heartbreak with no solution
for when I’m in Portugal, my heart aches for my daughter, the wild orcas and the deep-green firs of the Pacific Northwest;
when I’m in America, I miss the friends who mirror my soul, the cliff hikes, the history and the old-world magic.

The real work isn’t deciding where I belong.
It’s learning how to belong to myself in the spaces in-between—
even when I’m stretched across continents, even when no one else quite understands.

There is no final arrival.
But there can be wholeness.
And wholeness lives here—
where the soul touches both shores.

---

A note on the times we live in

I’m half Irish, and whenever the ballad “Kilkelly, Ireland” plays I dissolve— (trigger warning it will pull at the most stoic of heart strings) letters from a father to the son who sailed to America, knowing they’d never meet again. For centuries, the price of a more soul-aligned life was a permanent goodbye to everything familiar.

We live in different, extraordinary times.
Yesterday, my son melted back into his multicultural “boy tribe” as if the year apart was a weekend. WhatsApp pings across oceans. Group chats spanning time zones. Family and friendship can now defy distance—and I’m quietly modeling that truth for him: you can honor your roots and roam.

---

So, the gift of this trip?
I stopped asking Portugal to be my answer.
I stopped asking America to be my anchor.
And I started asking a new question:

How do I become the woman who can hold both?

Here’s the quiet truth I rarely say aloud:

I carry contradictions that most people aren’t comfortable holding.

Living a “yes, and” life is gorgeous—but lonely.
You don’t fit neatly into boxes.
Your story won’t compress into dinner-party small talk.
Those who you left on both shores may not understand all you’re trying to hold
You belong to many places and, at times, to none.
You carry tensions that make others squirm.

That doesn’t make the life wrong.
It makes it yours—hard-won, soul-built, fiercely true.

---

Your turn

Where in your life are you being invited to live a paradox?
To stop problem-solving and start listening?
To hold both the ache and the aliveness of a path that won’t fit the mold?

What would it look like to stop choosing—and start weaving?
To stop explaining—and start embodying?

---

The cliffs didn’t change.
But I did.

I’m no longer chasing a place to make me whole.
I’m practicing wholeness from the inside out.

Rooted and rising.
Grounded and free.
And still—still—becoming.

---

(Feel free to share your contradiction in the comments. I’d love to hear how you’re weaving your paradox.)