The Playbook Turns One, and the Year That Tested It

One year ago today, I published The Resilient Living Systems Playbook.

I remember what it felt like to let it go: a little terrifying, mostly hopeful. I had spent years asking how living systems repair themselves, and the Playbook was my best attempt to bring those answers home to the body. Forests that recover through fire. Mussels that hold fast in moving water. Rest as part of the design, not a reward for finishing it.

I still believe in that book. What I didn't know then was how deeply I'd be asked to live inside it.

What This Year Held

In the Playbook, I shared a case study of my own body as I prepared for endometriosis surgery in February. I mapped constraints, noticed patterns, looked to living systems for strategies, and started designing around the conditions I understood at the time.

Then the case study stopped, because a new season began.

Surgery was followed by recovery, then infection, then neurological and sensory strain, new limits, and forms of care I couldn't have designed neatly in advance. Each layer of my health revealed another. Some weeks, the whole plan was eating before I was depleted, walking for five minutes instead of twenty, and letting tomorrow hold what today could not. For much of this year, my health was my whole job.

I didn't meet all of it gracefully. I pushed when I should have paused. I measured my worth by what I could produce long after my body had asked me to stop. Some of what I'd written about with confidence, I had to learn again from much closer to the ground.

What Held

I want to be just as honest about what held.

My sister. My parents. Friends who showed up with encouraging messages, patience, and no need for me to explain. Care that met me where I actually was. Animals who stayed close on the hardest days. And many of you, who wrote to say the Playbook found you at the right time. Those messages often arrived on days I needed them more than you knew. Thank you.

What Grew From It

Through all of it, I kept writing: in journals that followed me into hospital rooms and waiting rooms, and in therapy, where I was invited to notice the parts of myself that kept showing up and give them names.

Over time, those parts became a valley. It has a creek, a ridge, and weather that arrives within and from far away. And it has a pack living inside it: a bear who never needs to know why you came to her den, a small lookout on the high rocks with a lantern and a whistle, whose whole job is to notice trouble first, and others there trying to remain.

That valley became Another Way Through: A Living-Systems Story of the Body, Protection, Love, and Choosing Life. It publishes on November 8, which also happens to be my birthday.

In a way, it holds the rest of the Playbook's story. The last part of the book picks up the case study where it stopped and follows it into a real, unfinished recovery, ending with results so far rather than a finish line. I thought about going back and finishing it in the Playbook instead. But it didn't feel right to revise the past to look like what I know now. That earlier version holds the questions I could ask before I lived the next part.

What I'm Carrying Forward

The Playbook asked what it might look like to live and heal like nature: to treat rest, repair, and relationship as part of the design rather than afterthoughts, and to ask not what’s broken? but how does life already do this well? This year asked me to bring that question somewhere closer and harder, into my own body on days it had very little to give: what is this system asking for now? Not how much more it can hold. Not how fast I can get back to who I was. Just what would help life take part here, today, honestly.

I don't have a tidy lesson to offer. But one thought kept returning, quietly at first and then more easily: there has to be another way through. It was never a promise that the way would be easy, or even visible. It was a reminder that the first path a frightened mind can see isn't automatically the only one.

If You'd Like a First Look

A gentle note: this book moves honestly through medical trauma and a season when I did not want to be alive. If those topics feel close right now, please go gently. It will be here whenever you're ready.

The paperback arrives on Amazon on November 8. The digital edition and the audiobook, read in my own voice, are already open on my site on a sliding scale, along with a few sample pages if you'd like to step into the valley first. If this isn't a season for spending, there's a reciprocity path there, too.

To everyone who read the Playbook, worked through Rooting & Rising, or simply stayed close this year: thank you. I'm still finding my way through, and I'm so grateful I haven't had to find it alone.