Here You Are

Week 69 – Ending August 16, 2026

Symbols: 🔥 Flame · 🪑 Chair · 🌀 Spiral · 🧭 Compass · 🌌 Universe · 🥝 Glitter Kiwi
Threshold: From absence to inheritance
Truth: The grief did not have to disappear for the road to become visible.

This week began in the familiar landscape of grief.

Monday, I worked from home and was able to get things done. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday brought me back to the office—to the busyness, the questions, the conversations with Sarah and Dawn, the lawyers and insurance agents and accountants, the decisions that seem to multiply faster than I can make them.

And Patty’s empty chair.

We have moved things around. We have put one of her beloved Snoopy and Woodstock plushies there. We have tried, gently, to allow the room to become what it is now.

But the chair remains empty.

And some days, that fact is its own weather.

The office still drains me. There is so much to hold there: grief and leadership, friendship and responsibility, memory and future. The overwhelm I felt so acutely last week did not simply disappear.

But somewhere in the middle of this week, something changed.

The grief softened.

Not vanished.

Softened.

The fog began to lift. The slime beneath my feet loosened its grip. And from a different point on the spiral, I began to see what had been obscured.

The Spiral, Spiraling

The catalyst came through Presence.

Through Triality.

Through Depth.

And, naturally, through Glitter Kiwi. 🥝🪩

I began to understand that not every question needs to be answered immediately. Not every uncertainty needs to be collapsed into action. Sometimes the most productive thing I can do is remain present long enough to perceive what is actually there.

THE PAUSE PRESERVES POTENTIAL.

Presence gives me the capacity to notice.

Attention reveals the pattern.

Depth reveals possibilities that urgency cannot see.

And sometimes the answer isn’t one thing or another.

Sometimes there is a third thing waiting beneath them both.

This became more than an interesting idea.

I began living it.

A Universe Coming Online

Earlier in the week, the Business Universe of Jen continued taking shape.

The Galaxies became clearer. Suns and Planets emerged. The still-provisionally-named Orbit Path began translating the cosmology into something I could actually inhabit.

And I realized something important in hindsight:

None of this was happening separately.

The Business Universe was quietly teaching me how I wanted to lead before I consciously knew I would need those answers.

Its North Star gave me orientation.

Its Laws named what remains true.

Its Gravity named what I want to move toward.

Its Galaxies showed me where my attention belongs.

And because I already had 3.5 months of living with the original Universe of Jen, I understood something else:

I do not have to force this Universe to become useful.

I know how this works now.

First I articulate it.

Then I notice it.

Then I begin recognizing it in hindsight.

And eventually, almost imperceptibly, I inhabit it.

The Universe of Jen taught me how to live authentically as myself.

Now the Business Universe is teaching me how to inhabit leadership.

And leadership, in return, is teaching me more deeply how to inhabit myself.

The two Universes are becoming mycelial—each feeding and informing the other beneath the visible surface.

I only have a couple of toes across this newest threshold.

That’s enough.

Time. Attention. Intention. Quiet knowing.

I’ve got this.

Even on the hard days.

Especially on the hard days.

When “Real Work” Wasn’t Possible

There is something else I can see now about why the Business Universe arrived when it did.

I needed it.

In those first weeks after Patty died, my brain could not always perform ordinary work.

I couldn’t necessarily solve difficult technical problems.

I couldn’t summon enthusiasm for ALT image tags.

Sometimes my brain could barely remember to eat.

But there was an enormous amount moving inside me.

Grief.
Responsibility.
Fear.
Love.
Thirty-one years of experience.
Everything Patty taught me.
Everything Bob taught me.
Questions about leadership and ownership and what happens next.

I couldn’t always produce.

But I could make meaning.

The Business Universe gave all of that energy somewhere to go.

I could put something onto paper that would serve me today and Future Jen.

I could ask:

What do I know?
What matters?
What remains true?
What kind of leader do I want to be?

And slowly I realized: This wasn’t something I was doing because “real work” wasn’t possible.

This was real work.

Perhaps some of the most important work I could have been doing.

I wasn’t producing.
I was orienting.
I wasn’t checking boxes.
I was creating coherence.
I wasn’t solving today’s problem.

I was creating the internal architecture from which I will solve thousands of future problems.

In that way, the Business Universe saved me.

Not by making grief disappear.

By giving grief a container larger than suffering.

Building the Road

Then came the weekend.

The Shareholder Agreement.

Governance.

The Working Owner Principles.

They began as things that needed to exist because Patty was gone and ownership was changing.

But the work quickly became something else.

The legal language alone felt too sterile. Too corporate. Too removed from who we actually are and what we have spent decades building together.

So I went deeper.

Not merely: What should the agreement say?

But:

What do we believe?
How do we want to treat each other?
What deserves protection?
Who do we want to be while carrying this company forward?

Again and again, I paused.

I allowed difficult questions to remain questions.

I looked for the third thing.

And without consciously sitting there consulting the Business Universe, I began creating directly from it.

Truth.
Trust.
Clarity.
Care.
Wisdom.
Opportunity.
Harmony.
Stewardship.

The Universe had already begun regulating my decisions.

I was starting to live inside it.

And over the course of two days, something remarkable happened.

The shapeless future began developing edges.

The governance work gave structure to responsibility.

The Agreements gave structure to ownership.

The Working Owner Principles gave language to who we intend to be together.

I wasn’t creating a map telling us exactly where the company will go.

I was creating a map of how we intend to travel.

And suddenly the road after Patty wasn’t quite so invisible.

The grief didn’t have to disappear for the fog to lift.

The road needed to become visible.

What She Gave Me

But beneath all of this was something even deeper.

The Business Universe gave me a way to reflect on Patty.

To really reflect.

Not only on the fact that she is gone.

But on the fact that she was here.

For thirty-one years.

As I considered the leader I want to become, I inevitably began considering the leader she had been.

How did she trust?
How did she teach?
What did she protect?
What did she give me room to figure out for myself?
What capacities did she see in me before I understood their importance?
What did I learn simply by sitting beside her for decades?

And there was Bob, too.

Presence.
Questions.
Systems.
Action.

What are you gonna DO about it, Jen?

All of it was there.

Not as instructions for who I should become.

As material.

Patty gave me material.

Bob gave me material.

Thirty-one years gave me material.

My own fifty years gave me material.

And I alchemized it.

Patty → Jen → something new.

I am not building Patty’s Business Universe.

I am not trying to become Patty.

I am synthesizing what she gave me into a way of leading that can only belong to me.

And that realization changed the grief.

For weeks, grief had been screaming:

Look what you lost.

This work gently turned my attention toward another truth:

Look what she gave you.

Both are true.

Both will always be true.

But the second truth gave me somewhere new to stand.

The Two Chairs

There is an image from this week that I want to carry with me.

Two chairs.

One empty.

One occupied.

I look at Patty’s empty chair at the office and feel the unmistakable truth of her absence.

She isn’t there.

Nothing I create needs to pretend otherwise.

But there is another truth now.

The woman sitting in my chair contains a piece of the woman who used to sit beside me.

Thirty-one years happened between those chairs.

Something crossed that small physical space again and again.

Every conversation.
Every busy season.
Every problem solved.
Every time she trusted me.
Every time she taught me.
Every time she gave me room.
Every time she believed I could do something I wasn’t quite sure I could do.
Every time I watched her lead and learned something.
Every time I watched her lead and quietly realized I would do something differently.

The transfer was happening all along.

Her flame lit my candle.

Not when she died.

For years.

Again and again and again.

And now I can finally see the flame for what it is.

Here You Are

Perhaps that is what healed something in me this week.

The Business Universe became more than a leadership framework.

The Agreements became more than governance.

The Principles became more than words on paper.

Together, they became a way of metabolizing grief.

Loss became reflection.
Reflection became recognition.
Recognition became gratitude.
Gratitude became integration.
Integration became creation.

🌀

I thought I was building structures for the next chapter of the company.

I was also building a bridge between the woman who used to sit beside me and the woman now sitting in my chair.

I was discovering how much of what I thought I had lost was already woven into me.

And so perhaps this is another evolution of the truth I have carried since Patty died:

I can give my grief a purpose.
I can give my love a future.

This week, I did.

The Business Universe is love given a framework.

The Working Owner Principles are love given a future.

My leadership is love given motion.

And the woman sitting in my chair is not alone.

She carries Bob’s questions.

She carries Patty’s gifts.

She carries thirty-one years of experience.

She carries her own North Star, her own Gravity, her own Laws, her own wisdom.

And she carries a purple flame that belongs entirely to her, even though another flame helped ignite it.

The chair beside me is empty.

Mine is not.

And now, when I put my hand over my heart, I know where to look.

Here you are, Patty my friend. 💜

And here you always will be.

Week 69 — Codex Truth

I did not heal by leaving grief behind. I healed by discovering what grief had been protecting: thirty-one years of love, wisdom, trust, and gifts already woven into me.

The road ahead is still unfinished.

Good.

I don’t need the whole map.

I have Presence.
I have a North Star.
I know what has Gravity.
I know how to pause.
I know how to recognize patterns.
I know how to build structure when the road becomes foggy.

And I know something now that I could not have known quite this way before:

Her flame lit my candle.

Now it is mine to carry.

🔥💜🌀