Welcome to Hope Sparks. I write for people standing at thresholds—the uncomfortable edges where who you’ve been meets who you’re becoming.
If you’re here, you’re probably navigating a transition you didn’t choose, or finally choosing one you’ve been avoiding. Either way: I see you. And I’m glad you’re here.
It’s March. The snow is still deep in the Eastern Townships and the greying banks along the roads are dissolving. There is something different in the light. If you live somewhere with real winters, you know what I mean. That shift. Not spring yet. Not even close. But the quality of the cold has changed. Like the land is taking a breath before it decides what to do next.
That’s where I’ve been.
Not gone. Not stuck. In a long, strange, necessary pause. Partly on purpose, partly because my nervous system made the decision before my mind caught up, and I was wise enough to listen.
January and February were quiet. Deliberately, stubbornly quiet.
I pulled back from writing. I went deep into the kind of work that doesn’t look like anything from the outside but rearranges everything on the inside. I practiced what I’ve always told my clients: when you’re at a real threshold, you don’t push through it. You pause. You let the old structure dissolve enough that the new one has room to form. You trust the gap.
The gap is terrible, by the way. Not peaceful. Not zen. Uncomfortable and sometimes boring and occasionally terrifying. But necessary. Every time.
My father died last year. I’m still moving through the weather systems of grief. Some days it’s distant and manageable. Some days it rolls through and flattens everything. Both are true, sometimes in the same afternoon.
My kids are both away at school now. My husband has launched a new travel business, and this winter I had the gift of supporting him by traveling with him on a boondoggle. Morocco. Portugal. England. And in between, I booked Austria for myself, just for me, with one of my closest friends. Skiing. Climbing. A ceremony I’m still sitting inside of, still absorbing what it gave me.
Travel has always cracked me open when I’ve gotten too comfortable in one shape. This winter it did its work. I sat in places that reminded me who I was before I built all the structures around that person. That matters. I needed it.
In the middle of all of this, I’ve been building.
A year ago I decided to stop dabbling with AI and really go for it. I love learning. I love tools and systems. And AI is not going anywhere. So these winter months, I went deep.
What I expected was to learn technology. Skills and capabilities. What I actually found was self-knowledge, and a stretch in my capacity I didn’t see coming. To build anything genuinely useful, you have to articulate things you’ve been carrying wordlessly for years. How you actually make decisions. What I know to be true about myself when the clever answers run out. The values underneath your values. I found myself trying to train a system on my own coaching methodology and realizing: I don’t actually know how I know what I know. I could feel the discernment. I just couldn’t explain it yet.
That gap, between knowing something in your body and finding language for it, is where I lived for two months.
And what surprised me most was watching the same thing happen with the leaders I work with. When I sit with someone who has spent decades building real expertise and help them build something that holds their wisdom rather than replaces it, something shifts. They stop defending their complexity. They start being curious about it. They needed someone to say: your depth is the point. Build from there.
That’s the work. My coaching, my love of systems, and this deep dive into AI have been braiding together into something I couldn’t have designed on purpose. It’s part of my work now, part of who I’m becoming. More on this soon. And if it’s been sitting in the back of your mind, reply to this letter.
One more thing before I let you go.
I’ve been thinking about ventilation.
My brother James, a coder and a meditation teacher, said something recently I haven’t stopped turning over. We talked about what it costs us to move at the speed AI makes possible. The way our internal tokens get used up. How we aren’t built for this kind of expansion, and how the productivity can mask the depletion until it’s too late.
We talked about what it means to come back. To values. To the body. To morning practice, physical books, movement, music, actual human beings in the room with you.
Ventilation. Letting the air back in.
I’ve been slowing my mornings with this fresh air. Meditation. Reading. Walking. Less screen before I’m ready for it. I notice the difference now in a way I couldn’t before, because I’d been saturated so long I’d forgotten what clear felt like.
I’ll write more about this next week. It deserves its own full space.
What’s been inspiring me this week
The FT’s visual guide to how AI language models and Generative AI actually work. The best explanation I’ve found. Fascinating and clarifying.
Reed Hastings on building culture at Netflix. This book prompted not only insights for business culture but also echoes of how I parent. The parallels surprised me and made me think about what we’re really building when we build anything.
This, from a poem I’ve returned to again and again since November: “I am listening to the sacrament of non-doing. I am trusting that winter will nurture spring.” From The Circle of Life by Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr.
If you’re still here after my winter quiet, thank you. That means something to me.
And if you’re new here, hello. You’ve arrived at a good time. Something is beginning.
Hit reply and tell me where you are. I read every one.
With tenderness, Hope
P.S. If you want to know where you’re standing right now, I made something for you. It’s called the Threshold Diagnostic. It takes 15 minutes and may bring the fuzzy into focus.
