May Trail Check-In: Coming Home

Some places don't just welcome you back. They hold you.

After two months away from the trail, first recovering from a car accident, then navigating one of the hardest seasons our family has faced, I finally laced my boots back up this month. Alone. On a familiar path. And the moment my feet found the trail again, something in me exhaled.

Not relief exactly. Something quieter than that. Peace.

The trail has always been my place for thinking, reflecting, and recalibrating. But stepping back onto it this month I realized it has become something more than that. It has become a sanctuary. A place that holds whatever I bring to it without asking me to explain myself. I didn't know how much I needed that until I felt it again beneath my feet.

What this season taught me about presence

I spent two months writing and thinking about presence, practicing it in vinyl listening sessions and also tracing it back to my dad teaching me how to be still on fishing trips. And then April handed me a crash course in what presence looks like when there's no time to practice it. When it just has to show up.

My mom was hospitalized twice. The second time she ended up in the ICU. My dad carried things that month that I don't have words for.

He wasn't well either. He ended up at urgent care while my mom was still in the hospital. My sister and I didn't discuss what to do. She stayed with mom. I went with dad. No conversation needed. No assigned roles. We just knew.

That instinct didn't come from a leadership book. It came from watching two people, my parents, spend a lifetime showing up for each other and for us, so completely and so consistently that it became the only thing we knew how to do.

That's presence in its most unscripted form.

The Original Trail

During one of those long hospital days a doctor came in to run a cognitive test on my mom. Standard procedure. He asked her a series of questions. Then he asked her who I was.

She didn't hesitate.

She said my name. And then she said: "She's the family boss." I laughed. And then I had to look away for a second.

Because in that room, with everything uncertain and heavy around us, she saw me clearly. Not just who I was, but who I am. The role I carry. The way she has always seen me.

My sister calls me the Family Manager. My dad would agree. I used to think that was just a function, the one who organizes, coordinates, keeps things moving. But sitting in that hospital room I understood it differently. It isn't about managing. It's about showing up so fully and so consistently that the people you love never have to wonder if you'll be there.

My mom taught me that. Long before the trail ever did.

She's home now. On oxygen, getting stronger, and already back to herself, so much so that we have to tell her to sit down. But seeing her smile and laugh again is everything.

And on May 8th, she turned 81.

81 years. After the ICU. After all of it, she made it home in time for her birthday. With Mother's Day that same weekend, I couldn't help but sit with what she has handed me over a lifetime. Not in grand gestures but in the quiet, consistent, unremarkable ways that turn out to be the most remarkable things of all.

The instinct to show up. The ability to be still in chaos. The understanding that strength doesn't always announce itself, sometimes it just keeps going quietly, showing others the way without ever needing to say a word.

She called me the family boss. She's always been mine.

Leadership and presence get talked about a lot in professional spaces. But the truest version of both lives in the people who shaped us before we ever stepped into a boardroom or onto a trail. The ones who modeled it quietly, daily, without calling it anything at all.

The trail reminded me of that this month. It always does, if I show up and let it.

My boots are back on. And I'm walking differently now. Not faster. Not harder. Just more aware of what I'm carrying and more grateful for the path beneath my feet.

Here's to the women who handed us more than they know.

Who shaped your understanding of presence before you had a name for it? I'd love to know.