At the end of the day, it's all about you.

A card with the word “Beauty” sticking up in front of some felt flowers.

Sometimes at night, when I’m all tight and rushed from the momentum of the day, I sit in the backyard and wait.

I wait for the motion sensor light to click off, for the first stars to show between the tree branches. I wait for my small forest of overgrown tomato plants to start to look mysterious. I wait for the stillness under the rush to resurface. I wait for something I can’t quite name, but need.

And you know what I think about? You.

I think about the people who read this newsletter. I wonder what they hope for when they click it, and what they get. I think about the people who walked through our door that day, I feel their stories in my bones, I wonder how I could serve those stories better. I think about the people who didn’t, and about how we can be more open, more available.

I think about the scholarships I want to find the money to offer. I think about my team, how I can care for them, how I can create a workplace that doesn’t labour under preconceptions of what work is supposed to be.

I am so incredibly blessed that I’ve been able to build something here. I think about that, about all the things that could have gone wrong and then did or didn’t, all the luck and kindness and generosity that made this, as well as the hard work and patience and grit.

In my last newsletter I wrote about how maybe, at its heart, Firefly is all about attention, but tonight I think it’s about you.

About community. About belonging. Lately I’ve been organizing our photo archive, clicking 15 years of photos into folders and sub folders. It’s the people that I paused on every time. Those faces.

I still get completely overwhelmed and terrified by this on a regular basis. Overwhelmed that people I’ve never met know me. Overwhelmed that I can’t see every piece of it anymore, and actually never could. Overwhelmed by the thousand ways a day I could mess this up. Like — I lose my house keys at least 3 times a year, how can I possibly be trusted with all this?

Then I remind myself that while it may look like my job is to lead this community, my real job is to listen to it.

My real job is to get really quiet, over and over, and to lift the day to my ear like a shell. To ask — what do I need to learn next? What does the community want to become? How can I build those next steps with all the integrity and honesty I have?

So, a question. What do you want in all this?

I want to know what you need, what you’re reaching for, how we can use our space & our resources to meet those needs. I want to know what you were looking for when you clicked open this newsletter. The beauty of a business is that it can be anything, and I’m constantly negotiating the chaos of that. Jump in with me — what would make you gaspy and excited? Talk to us.

Drop us a line, today or any day.

That’s all for now.

Except to say, as I always do, thank you for reading, for being part of all this, as it grows and breathes and becomes more of itself every day.

Ear to the shell,