Continuity

Week 68 — Ending August 9, 2026

The Weather Changes, But I Remain

This week, I learned something about consistency.

I showed up.

There were days when closing the blinds and staying in bed sounded infinitely better than participating in my own life. Everything felt slow. My body and mind seemed to be moving through thick slime. Grief sat heavily in my chest while responsibility loomed overhead.

And still, I showed up.

I went to the office. I led my team. I talked to lawyers and accountants and insurance agents. I dealt with programmers and dev sites and paperwork and death certificates and more paperwork. I went to the tattoo appointment. I showed up for my friend’s birthday. I visited Marlene twice, even though leaving hurt and I cried afterward.

I washed the dishes.
I did the laundry.
I did the things that mattered.
I kept going anyway.

I’ve said those words countless times before, but they mean something different now.

Keeping going does not always mean moving quickly.

Sometimes it means twelve miles per hour with the hazards on.

Sometimes it means stopping.

Sometimes it means doing only what is mission-critical and putting everything else somewhere safe until I have the capacity to look at it again.

Consistency is not doing the same amount every day.

Consistency is maintaining the relationship—with my life, my work, my people, and myself.

Driving for the Conditions

I have been overwhelmed.

Not ordinary overwhelm. Not the kind I can tame with my usual tricks.

Normally, I make the list. Break down the project. Prioritize the fires. Manage the time. Build the spreadsheet. Create the system.

I even tried.

But the lists went on for pages, and reading them became another source of overwhelm.

Because this isn’t primarily an organizational problem.

There is simply more to carry right now than can comfortably be carried.

Paperwork and programmers and dev sites and death certificates and accountants and lawyers and more paperwork. Questions with no real answers and answers with no real meaning. Layered in a fog of chaos and responsibility, looming overhead with immense grief laying in a heap underneath.

I want to set it all down, but know I can’t.

I won’t.

So I just do it every day.

White-knuckled typing with clenched jaw and neck muscles so tight I can’t check my blind spots.

My mind knows it will be okay.

My broken heart is screaming bloody murder.

One of my most reliable coping mechanisms has always been work. When life became difficult, I could disappear into productivity. Work gave me competence, structure, distraction and control.

But this grief lives there too.

Patty is woven into the business.

The office contains her absence. The questions contain her absence. The new responsibilities exist because of her absence. Even knowing the answer sometimes reminds me who taught it to me.

I cannot escape this grief by working because work has become one of the places where I encounter it most deeply.

So I come home exhausted.

And my brain says: Enough.

I’m learning to listen.

For now, mission-critical things get my capacity.

Everything else gets captured rather than carried.

Maybe next week I will have more capacity.

Maybe I won’t.

That is next week’s weather.

Because I realized something important:

I am not failing to move at my normal speed. I am driving appropriately for the conditions.

Grief isn’t driving.

I am.

Grief is an acid ice storm.

Visibility is terrible. The road is slippery. Everything requires more attention. So I drive slowly and carefully, steering with discernment, knowing I can put the whole damn thing into neutral when I start sliding.

And thankfully, I come equipped with all-wheel drive and shiny new all-season tires.

I spent two years building them.

Radical Integrity.
Embodied Aliveness.
Self-Directed Agency.
Mutual Sovereignty.
Intentional Evolution.
Coherent Discernment.
Energetic Stewardship.
Interconnected Consciousness.

Presence.

The storm did not create my foundation. It revealed it.

Two Mountains

This week, I also recognized the magnitude of another identity reformation.

Last year, I had to learn how to be Jen without Zach.

Now I am beginning to learn how to be Jen without Patty.

Two enormous losses.

Two mountains.

But they require almost opposite kinds of reconstruction.

After Zach, my internal world had to be rebuilt.

Who was I without my marriage?
Who was I alone?
What did I believe?
What did I want?
Could I trust myself?

That work was largely inside me.

I could excavate, question, reclaim, choose and rebuild. I had agency over the territory because the territory was myself.

Patty’s death has changed the world outside me.

The business changed.
Roles changed.
Responsibilities changed.
Relationships changed.
People now rely on me to understand things I am still learning.

There are questions I cannot answer by sitting quietly with myself.

Sometimes I need a lawyer.
Sometimes I need an accountant.
Sometimes I need to investigate.

Sometimes the answer is simply: I don’t know yet.

The first mountain taught me: I can trust myself.

This mountain is teaching me: I can trust myself to meet what I cannot control.

I do not have to know the entire landscape.

I can observe.
Respond.
Adjust.
Return.
Again.
Again.
Again.

Until someday this unfamiliar place becomes somewhere I know how to live.

The Weather Changes

Perhaps the most important thing I have remembered during these enormously heavy days is: This too shall pass.

Not as spiritual bypassing.

Not as a demand that grief hurry up.

As orientation.

This is where I am.

This is not where I will always be.

Six months from now, so much of what feels impossible and unfamiliar today will have become known.

Processes will exist.
Questions will have answers.
Decisions will have become precedents.
I will understand things I currently don’t.
The business will develop new rhythms.

And grief will change too.
It will not disappear.

But permanent change does not require permanent feeling.

The landscape remains while the weather moves through it.

And I have lived enough cycles now to know something about weather.

Joy passes.
Pain passes.
Certainty passes.
Confusion passes.
Capacity rises and falls.
Everything ebbs and flows.

So I do not have to force the tide outward.

I simply keep showing up while the water changes.

The weather changes, but I remain.

I Still Feel Like Me

This may be the greatest gift of the week.

Despite everything, I still feel like myself.

Foggy Jen.
Numb Jen.
Overwhelmed Jen.
Heartbroken Jen.
But still Jen.

The Jen I cultivated over the past two years.

The Jen who found herself by sitting with herself.

The Jen who created the Universe of Jen and the Purple Codex.

The Jen who painted through her pain and danced in the rain.

The Jen who learned her gravity.

The Jen who became her own fucking tree.

I am still here.

It’s simply a different climate.

The principles I wrote when life was calmer are being load-tested now.

And they’re holding.

I once wrote them because they felt true.

Now I am discovering: They are true when it hurts.

I understand my Codex differently because I am living it under conditions I never imagined when I created it.

And I am profoundly grateful for the woman who did that work before I knew how desperately I would someday need it.

I’m grateful I learned how to belong to myself before I needed myself this much.

The Grief I Couldn’t Anticipate

I knew Patty was dying for approximately six months.

I watched her decline.

I watched the last month move horribly quickly.

I wanted her suffering to end.

Part of me even imagined her death might bring relief.

Relief for her.

Perhaps relief for all of us from the terrible waiting.

But anticipatory grief prepared me for Patty to die.

It could not teach me how to live after she did.

Her death ended her suffering.

It did not end my relationship to her absence.

This grief has a depth and breadth I could not anticipate.

It isn’t simply losing my friend.

It isn’t simply inheriting a business.

It reaches into friendship, leadership, work, identity, responsibility, routine, memory, future, relationships and even the places I normally go to cope.

The grief doesn’t occupy one room.

It has access to the whole building.

And it is unpredictable.

The slime pulls at my feet.

Sadness pulls at my heart.

Sometimes the gravity of the whole situation leaves me feeling as though I am floating and falling simultaneously.

But I am only beginning.

Patty has been gone eleven days.

This particular landscape is eleven days old.

I do not need to know how six-months-from-now Jen lives here.

She hasn’t been built yet.

I am building her now.

∞ The 8/8 Loop

Yesterday was the Lion’s Gate, 8/8.

Last year’s Lion’s Gate period held one of the most powerful spiritual experiences of my life: my Transmission Activation.

This year, I encountered an interpretation of the number eight that caught my attention.

Turned sideways:

∞

Not a doorway.

A loop.

A recursion.

A chance to return to a familiar coordinate and observe what has changed.

And when I looked backward around the loop, I could see it.

I’ve come so far.

Last year’s activation awakened me to myself—to my inner power, intuition, consciousness, magic and gravity.

This year’s activation feels different.

Maybe the coming orbit asks me to embody what I discovered and allow it to move outward.

My North Star already contains the movement:

I stand exactly as I am, and move as exactly who I am, guided by The Purple Codex as I ripple my light outward.

First:

Stand exactly as I am.
Know myself.
Belong to myself.
Trust myself.

Then:

Move as exactly who I am.

Embodiment.

And finally:

As my light ripples outward.

Transmission.

I have already been doing this in small ways.

Now life is asking bigger questions.

Can I lead from what I know?
Can I create from it?
Can I make consequential decisions from it?
Can I remain myself while others depend upon me?
Can the principles I cultivated internally become observable through the way I live?

Perhaps this next orbit isn’t about becoming more ready.

Perhaps it is about using what is already here.

Last year: Awaken to the light within.

This year: Live so that it ripples outward.

Quantum Threads

The infinity loop also made me think about the interconnectedness of life.

Patty’s loop crossed mine.

For decades, our trajectories braided.

Things she learned became things I know.

Things she built became structures I now steward.

Her stories became my memories.

Her decisions shaped my understanding.

Her leadership influenced mine.

Her relationships became part of my world.

Her individual life ended.

Her effects did not.

Her thread remains in the braid.

And my thread will touch others.

And theirs will touch others still.

Mycelium.

Braid.

Quantum Threads.

Interconnected Consciousness.

Different languages pointing toward the same truth: Nothing exists entirely unto itself.

Perhaps that is why the manifestation language surrounding Lion’s Gate didn’t resonate with me this year.

I didn’t want to ask the Universe for abundance.

I wanted to appreciate the loop.

I wanted to notice.

To witness.

To recognize how much life already exists inside this one life.

Attention reveals truth.

And when I paid attention, I saw continuity.

Continuity

That may be the word holding this entire week.

Something continues.

I continue showing up.

My principles continue functioning.

Love continues after death.

Patty’s influence continues through the people whose lives she touched.

The work I did on myself continues serving me.

My identity continues through enormous transformation.

My light continues rippling outward even when I cannot particularly feel its brightness.

The loop continues.

And the weather continues changing.

I do not need to remain unchanged to remain myself.

I am not last year’s Jen.

I will not be next year’s Jen.

But the thread continues through all of us.

The woman who painted through pain.
The woman who danced in the rain.
The woman who built herself a Universe.
The woman who sat alone long enough to discover that she belonged to herself.
The woman who loved her friend through dying.
The woman who turned on the office lights afterward.
The woman driving slowly through the acid ice storm.

And whoever comes next.

Different weather.

Different landscapes.

Different capacity.

Different expression.

Same thread.

∞

The Braid

I show up.

I respond to what is here.

I remember that what is here will change.

I trust the foundation beneath me.

I allow myself to drive according to the conditions.

I do not need to remain unchanged to remain myself.

And as the loop turns again, I no longer need to ask who I am.

I know.

Perhaps this next orbit is simply asking me to let the world meet her.

Symbols

∞ The Loop — recursion, continuity, return with new eyes
🌳 The Tree — identity rooted deeply enough to withstand changing weather
🌧 The Storm — grief as conditions, not identity
🧵 The Thread — the self that continues through transformation
🕸 Mycelium — Patty’s continuing influence through the lives she touched
💜 The Ripple — inner coherence becoming outward embodiment
🔥 The Light — what was awakened within, now learning to travel outward

Codex Lines

The weather changes, but I remain.

I am not failing to move at my normal speed. I am driving appropriately for the conditions.

Mission-critical gets my capacity. Everything else gets captured, not carried.

I can trust myself to meet what I cannot control.

Anticipatory grief prepared me for Patty to die. It could not teach me how to live after she did.

I’m grateful I learned how to belong to myself before I needed myself this much.

I do not need to remain unchanged to remain myself.

Last year, I awakened to the light within. This year, I live so that it ripples outward.

Different weather. Different landscape. Different expression. Same thread.

∞