I have loved words since before I understood why. As a child, I collected them the way some children collect stones, turning them over, feeling their weight, noticing how the same word could mean something different depending on the light it was held in.
“Some callings arrive loudly. Mine arrived as a whisper, and grew louder the wider the sky became.”
I did not know then that this love would become my life’s work. That one day I would sit with numbers the way I sit with words, tracing the frequency hidden inside a name, the vibration folded into a birth date, learning that numbers, like words, are never just symbols. They are doorways. Every name is a code. Every date is a story waiting to be read aloud. I have spent years now inside that fascination, and it has never once grown quiet.
But it was words themselves, plain and unadorned, that first taught me how healing actually moves.
As a grief and soul coach, I have sat with more sorrow than I could ever count. And what I have learned, again and again, is that grief does not heal through advice. It heals through witness. Through language that finally says the thing a person has been carrying without a name for it. I have watched a single sentence do what months of silence could not. I have watched someone exhale, fully, for the first time in years, simply because a stranger’s words finally matched the shape of what they had been feeling alone.
That’s how I know words are not decoration. They are medicine, when offered honestly.
For years I have shared that medicine quietly, through a small corner of the internet, a page built simply to inspire, to uplift, to remind whoever found it that they were not moving through their life unseen. It became my thing, long before I called it a calling. I would write a few lines before bed, almost like a prayer, and wake to messages from strangers telling me those few lines had carried them through a night they were not sure they would survive.
That is when words stopped being a hobby and became a responsibility I chose, gladly, to carry.
Then, in December 2025, my husband and I moved to the Karoo.
I was not prepared for what wide open sky does to a person. I had heard people speak of big sky country before, but I had not yet stood inside it, watched the horizon stretch further than seemed reasonable, felt how small and how free a person can feel at exactly the same moment. Something in me that had been folded for years began, slowly, to open.
I started writing what we were living. Not stories I invented, but stories the land itself seemed to be telling, if I was willing to slow down long enough to listen. The bending grass. The colour the sky turns before rain finally arrives after months of waiting. The particular hush that falls over the veld at dusk, as though the whole landscape is holding its breath together.
I believe, the way I believe very few things this certainly, that stories can heal the way music heals. Not by explaining pain, but by giving it rhythm. By offering a shape sturdy enough to hold what words alone sometimes cannot carry.
This is also why I paint. Large canvases, mostly, peonies most of all, because there is something about a peony that says everything I am often reaching for in a sentence. Abundance. Softness that is not weakness. A flower that opens itself completely, without apology, without holding back for fear of wilting sooner. I paint the same truths I write. I have simply found that some days call for paint, and other days call for words, and both are simply frequency, translated into a form someone else can finally feel.
This is why I write.
Not because I chose it, exactly, but because it chose me first, long before I had language sturdy enough to explain why. It found me again in numbers, and again in grief work, and again in this wide, holy, unrelenting sky that finally gave it room to breathe all the way out.
I write because someone, somewhere, is carrying something tonight that has no name yet.
And maybe, if I choose my words with enough care, one of them will finally fit.
May you always trust the words that find you, even the quiet ones. Especially those.
Your heart is a blessing to this world.
SharynAnn
I have loved words since before I understood why. As a child, I collected them the way some children collect stones, turning them over, feeling their weight, noticing how the same word could mean something different depending on the light it was held in.
“Some callings arrive loudly. Mine arrived as a whisper, and grew louder the wider the sky became.”
I did not know then that this love would become my life’s work. That one day I would sit with numbers the way I sit with words, tracing the frequency hidden inside a name, the vibration folded into a birth date, learning that numbers, like words, are never just symbols. They are doorways. Every name is a code. Every date is a story waiting to be read aloud. I have spent years now inside that fascination, and it has never once grown quiet.
But it was words themselves, plain and unadorned, that first taught me how healing actually moves.
As a grief and soul coach, I have sat with more sorrow than I could ever count. And what I have learned, again and again, is that grief does not heal through advice. It heals through witness. Through language that finally says the thing a person has been carrying without a name for it. I have watched a single sentence do what months of silence could not. I have watched someone exhale, fully, for the first time in years, simply because a stranger’s words finally matched the shape of what they had been feeling alone.
That’s how I know words are not decoration. They are medicine, when offered honestly.
For years I have shared that medicine quietly, through a small corner of the internet, a page built simply to inspire, to uplift, to remind whoever found it that they were not moving through their life unseen. It became my thing, long before I called it a calling. I would write a few lines before bed, almost like a prayer, and wake to messages from strangers telling me those few lines had carried them through a night they were not sure they would survive.
That is when words stopped being a hobby and became a responsibility I chose, gladly, to carry.
Then, in December 2025, my husband and I moved to the Karoo.
I was not prepared for what wide open sky does to a person. I had heard people speak of big sky country before, but I had not yet stood inside it, watched the horizon stretch further than seemed reasonable, felt how small and how free a person can feel at exactly the same moment. Something in me that had been folded for years began, slowly, to open.
I started writing what we were living. Not stories I invented, but stories the land itself seemed to be telling, if I was willing to slow down long enough to listen. The bending grass. The color the sky turns before rain finally arrives after months of waiting. The particular hush that falls over the veld at dusk, as though the whole landscape is holding its breath together.
I believe, the way I believe very few things this certainly, that stories can heal the way music heals. Not by explaining pain, but by giving it rhythm. By offering a shape sturdy enough to hold what words alone sometimes cannot carry.
This is also why I paint. Large canvases, mostly, peonies most of all, because there is something about a peony that says everything I am often reaching for in a sentence. Abundance. Softness that is not weakness. A flower that opens itself completely, without apology, without holding back for fear of wilting sooner. I paint the same truths I write. I have simply found that some days call for paint, and other days call for words, and both are simply frequency, translated into a form someone else can finally feel.
This is why I write.
Not because I chose it, exactly, but because it chose me first, long before I had language sturdy enough to explain why. It found me again in numbers, and again in grief work, and again in this wide, holy, unrelenting sky that finally gave it room to breathe all the way out.
I write because someone, somewhere, is carrying something tonight that has no name yet.
And maybe, if I choose my words with enough care, one of them will finally fit.
May you always trust the words that find you, even the quiet ones. Especially those.
Your heart is a blessing to this world.
SharynAnn
