This week, Soul Echoes: Poems on Being and Belonging becomes a book.
For a long time, these poems lived quietly in notebooks, in moments of noticing, and in the spaces between ordinary life and the deeper questions that call to us. Now they have gathered themselves into pages. Soon, they will leave my hands and arrive in the lives of readers.
The title Soul Echoes grew from an experience I had in a small mountain village in Mexico.
I was standing outside a coffee shop. The scent of freshly ground coffee lingered in the air. Heat pulsed from apricot-colored adobe walls. Beneath my feet, a cracked sidewalk shifted, uneven and treacherous. Dogs wandered freely and unhurriedly through the streets.
Voices rose and fell in the distance, mingling with barking dogs, laughter, and music. Horse hooves tapped their castanet rhythm on cobblestones as cars crept patiently behind them.
Everything was unfamiliar, yet something in me felt deeply at home.
I did not speak the language. I did not know the customs. And still, peace settled within me. I wondered why.
A simple truth rose: what lives within matters most.
I come from places where much appears polished and carefully arranged. Smooth streets curve around manicured lawns. Dogs are kept behind fences. Our lives are often shaped with care and held to expectations of order, beauty, and success.
Yet appearance alone does not nourish the soul.
Souls rest more easily where both the broken and the beautiful are welcome.
That is where poetry lives for me.
Poetry makes room for the ordinary and the sacred: grief and gratitude, disappointment and delight, loneliness, and connection. It does not require us to be polished before we enter. It asks only that we pay attention. It invites us beneath the pull of daily demands and into a quieter place where something true can be heard.
When struggle fills our days, the soul does not reach for perfection. It reaches for nourishment.
Poetry can be that nourishment.
The poems in Soul Echoes are offered as small echoes of belonging and as a celebration of being. They were written from the places where life asks us to pause, listen, remember, grieve, laugh, notice, and begin again.
My poems are offered to readers as they move toward the sacred center of their own lives — the place where listening begins and truth lives.
Here is a poem from Soul Echoes as a small invitation to pause, listen, and remember the path home.
Leaving Crumbs
Sometimes we must leave
to remember the sweetness of coming home.
We will always leave and come back.
The question is:
will we remember to leave some crumbs
along our path—
markers of what is truly important,
what our glistening self
knows at its center.
May these words meet you wherever you are, and remind you to honor path.