Roots & Branches

Rooted in Earth, Rising Toward Sky

I come from quiet beginnings—

from the gentle hands of women who healed

with herbs steeped in memory

and faith passed down like soft cloth,

folded carefully for the next daughter to hold.

My earliest lessons were not written in books

but breathed into me through example:

service is sacred,

kindness is a form of shelter,

strength grows underground before anyone sees it.

These became my roots.

Deep, dark, nourishing.

The kind that hold even when seasons change,

the kind that whisper me back to myself

when the world grows loud.

My roots stretch through years of learning,

through textbooks opened under dim lamps,

through hospital corridors where I first learned

how a single act of care

can steady a frightened heart.

They wind through my ND training,

my osteopathy practice,

my phlebotomy hands that learned precision,

my yoga teacher’s breath that learned softness,

my current steps in pharmacy studies

that teach me how science and compassion

can walk the same road.

All of it has become soil—

rich with effort,

layered with purpose,

alive with the people and places

that shaped the healer I am becoming.

Yet no tree is made of roots alone.

Something in me—

restless, luminous, unafraid—

kept reaching upward.

Growth does not ask permission;

it simply unfurls.

My branches are long and wandering,

growing with every dream I dare to name:

offering care to patients across provinces,

bringing diabetic education to those who need it,

building a virtual practice stitched from trust,

tending to communities in PEI and Newfoundland

like gardens waiting for morning light.

These branches listen to wind and possibility.

They sway with ambition,

they stretch toward futures

I once thought belonged to someone braver.

But I have learned that courage sometimes appears

not in leaps,

but in the small daily reaching—

the willingness to grow one inch more

than yesterday allowed.

Nature teaches me again and again:

the tallest trees rise because they are rooted deeply.

Balance is not a conflict

but a quiet partnership—

soil holding steady

while branches test the sky.

So I honor both parts of myself:

the grounding and the reaching,

the history and the horizon,

the healer shaped by past hands

and the woman shaping her own tomorrow.

In the pull between earth and sky,

I find the truth of my becoming:

I am not meant to stay still.

I am meant to rise,

rooted firmly in where I come from,

and carried forward by everything I’ve yet to become.

And so I grow—

season after season,

leaf after trembling leaf—

a living testament

to the strength of my roots

and the courage of my branches.